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Owen D. Young - Wikipedia

Owen D. Young (October 27, 1874 – July 11, 1962) was an American industrialist, businessman, lawyer and diplomat at the Second Reparations Conference (SRC) in 1929, as a member of the German Reparations International Commission. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_D._Y…

He is known for the plan to settle Germany's World War I reparations, known as the Young Plan and for the creation of the Radio Corporation of America. Young founded RCA as a subsdiary of General Electric in 1919; he became its first chairman and continued in that position until

1929.

Young represented Stone and Webster in a successful case against GE around 1911 and through that case came to the attention of Charles A. Coffin, the first president of General Electric.

In 1919, at the request of the government, he created the Radio Corporation of

America (RCA) to combat the threat of English control over the world's radio communications against America's struggling radio industry.

In 1928, he was appointed to the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation under a major reorganization of that institution, serving on

that board also up to 1939.

Young's participation in President Woodrow Wilson's Second Industrial Conference following World War I marked the beginning of his counseling of five U.S. presidents. In 1924, he coauthored the Dawes Plan, which provided for a reduction in the annual

amount of German reparations.

In 1929 a new international body met to consider a program for the final release of German obligations; Young acted as chairman. Germany's total reparations were reduced and spread over 59 annual payments. After establishing this "Young Plan",

Young was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1929.

New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey called upon him to head the state commission that laid the groundwork for the State University of New York system.

President Woodrow Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer, a political

ally and former Congressman, Alien Property Custodian in October 1917. Palmer held the position from October 22, 1917 until March 4, 1919. A wartime government official, the Custodian had responsibility for the seizure, administration, and sometimes the sale of enemy property in

the United States.

Late in 1918, Palmer reported he was managing almost 30,000 trusts with assets worth half a billion dollars. He estimated that another 9,000 trusts worth $300,000,000 awaited evaluation.

In September 1918, Palmer testified at hearings held by the U.S.

Senate's Overman Committee that the United States Brewers Association (USBA) and the rest of the overwhelmingly German liquor industry harbored pro-German sentiments. He stated that "German brewers of America, in association with the United States Brewers' Association" had

attempted "to buy a great newspaper" and "control the government of State and Nation", had generally been "unpatriotic",and had "pro-German sympathies". Palmer wanted to seize the estate of the late Adolphus Busch, whose wife was stranded in Europe during the war, and succeeded

in seizing the property of another brewer, George Ehret.

The assets of the Orenstein & Koppel Company, the Bosch Magneto Company, the Hamburg-American Shipping Line, the German-American Lumber Company, the New York Evening Mail, as well as twenty German insurance companies,

were seized. Among other significant seizures, the United States assets of the chemical company Bayer were auctioned off and it lost its U.S. patent for Aspirin. In April 1919, the president of the Chemical Foundation, Inc. and Palmer's successor Francis Patrick Garvan

transferred 4,500 German chemical patents valued at $8 million to the Chemical Foundation, paying only $250,000; the Chemical Foundation in its turn licensed patents to American companies.

Palmer said that the alien property custodian kept "the biggest general store in the

country." Altogether, the United States Government confiscated close to $500 million of foreign assets during WWI.

In 1921, the Congress while adopting the Joint Resolution Terminating the State of War Between the Imperial German Government and the United States of America and

Between the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Government and the United States of America specified that all seized property had remained in the United States ownership; also, the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 was not terminated. It stayed dormant until March 1933, when

Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked it to enforce a week-long Bank Holiday of 1933. In 1925, the Office of Alien Property Custodian still controlled $300 million worth of alien property, with half of that amount in cash.

On 11 March 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued

Executive Order 9095 establishing the Office of the Alien Property Custodian as an independent agency under his direct authority. He appointed Leo Crowley, a former banker and chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as APC. During the war the APC amassed a vast

portfolio of enemy property including real estate, business enterprises, ships and intellectual property in the form of trademarks, copyrights, patents and pending patent applications. Following Nikola Tesla's death at the New Yorker Hotel in 1943, the Custodian seized much of

Tesla's work from his hotel room even though Tesla was an American citizen.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Dallas Townsend Sr. Assistant United States Attorney General, heading the Justice Department's Alien Property Office, an office he held until 1960.

Townsend supervised the seizure of enemy property and assets that had been seized during World War II.

Townsend seized $329 million in proceeds of Interhandel, a Swiss holding company, saying that it was a front for the real owner, IG Farben, the German chemical cartel.

Interhandel's predecessor, I.G. Chemie, was established in 1928 by the German company I.G. Farben as a Swiss holding company, located in Basel, Switzerland, to hold the company's foreign investments. The company owned a group of financial and industrial businesses in Europe and

the U.S, including American IG.

By 1940, I.G. Chemie had severed its direct ownership from its parent company I.G. Farben in order to avoid the seizure of its U.S. assets. Shortly after the start of the U.S. involvement in the War, on April 24, 1942, the U.S. government seized

General Aniline & Film (later GAF Materials Corporation), an Interhandel subsidiary, and it was not until 1963 that the long-running dispute between Interhandel and the U.S. government was resolved.

The company was acquired by the Union Bank of Switzerland in 1967.

In 1952, IG

Farben was split into BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst.
In 1965, the U.S. government sold General Aniline & Film, or GAF stock.
As a result of its 1966 acquisition of Sawyer's, GAF went on to produce the View-Master, a children's toy, made today by Mattel's "Fisher-Price" division. GAF

today still exists as GAF Materials Corporation, mainly as a manufacturer of asphalt and building materials.

Briefly in the 1970s, it was the official film of Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and at this time actor Henry Fonda served as the company's spokesman in several

television commercials, including one that featured Jodie Foster in her first acting role.

On January 7, 2001, GAF's principal shareholder became the 27th company in the United States to file for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code from liabilities relating

to asbestos-related bodily injury claims.

Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) was a Swiss investment bank and financial services company located in Switzerland. The bank, which at the time was the second largest bank in Switzerland, merged with Swiss Bank Corporation in 1998, to

become UBS to form what was then the largest bank in Europe and the second largest bank in the World.

UBS was formed in 1912 through the merger of the Bank in Winterthur and Toggenburger Bank, both founded in the early 1860s. UBS then continued to grow through acquisitions,

including Aargauische Kreditanstalt in 1919, Eidgenössische Bank in 1945, Interhandel Basel in 1967, Phillips & Drew in 1986, and Schröder, Münchmeyer, Hengst & Co. in 1997 among others.

Schröder, Münchmeyer, Hengst was formed through the 1969 merger of three German banks:

Schröder Gebrüder & Co., Münchmeyer & Co. and Friedrich Hengst & Co. (formerly known as Bank Siegmund Merzbach).

Da Rudolph Freiherr von Schröders Bruder Bruno Schröder 1910 Hauptanteilseigner des Bankhauses J. Henry Schröder & Co. wurde, entstanden enge Geschäftsbeziehungen zu

dieser Bank mit einem verstärkten Fokus auf Finanzgeschäfte.

Johann Heinrich Schröder (12 December 1784 – 28 June 1883) was a member of the Hanseatic Schröder family of Hamburg, who settled in London and founded Schroders, one of the United Kingdom's largest investment banks.

Having been admitted to his older brother's firm, J. F. Schröder & Co., at the age of 16, Johann Heinrich Schröder (John Henry Schröder) learnt about acting as principal in the shipping of commodities such as sugar and about acting as an acceptor of bills of exchange from an

early age.
He then went on to form his own firms: J. Henry Schröder & Co. in London in 1818 and J. H. Schröder & Co. in Hamburg in 1819. In 1829 John Henry was appointed Russian Vice-consul in Hamburg and this enabled him to establish expertise in exporting commodities to Russia.

The London firm shipped indigo and sugar to St Petersburg while the Hamburg firm shipped coffee and sugar to St Petersburg.
In 1839 he established a third firm, J. H. Schröder & Co., in Liverpool, receiving consignments of cotton from the Southern States of America.

By the 1840s

he was one of the United Kingdom's leading guarantors of bills of exchange relating to textile shipments.

Schröder married Henriette von Schwartz in 1819. Together, they had three sons and six daughters. His son John Henry William Schroder was also a banker and helped to

expand the firm started by his father.

Frank Cyril Tiarks OBE (also known as FC Tiarks) (Balham, 9 July 1874 – Loxton, 7 April 1952) was an English banker.

Among his appointments were a directorship of the Bank of England (1912–1945); a partnership in J. Henry Schröder & Co.; a

partnership in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (1917–1948); and High Sheriff of Kent for 1927.

He served in World War I under Sir William Reginald Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence, in Room 40 Admiralty, as Lieut.-Cmdr.
Of German descent himself, like his wife, he was also

listed as a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, of the British Union of Fascists and in Hitler's 'Black Book'.

Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall KCMG CB (28 June 1870 – 22 October 1943), known as Blinker Hall, was the British Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI) from 1914 to

1919. Together with Sir Alfred Ewing he was responsible for the establishment of the Royal Navy's codebreaking operation, Room 40, which decoded the Zimmermann telegram, a major factor in the entry of the United States in World War I.

Hall was appointed Director of the

Intelligence Division (DID) by the Admiralty in October 1914.

He was responsible for building up the naval intelligence organization during the war, encouraged codebreaking and radio-intercept efforts and provided the fleet with good intelligence, making the NID the pre-eminent

British intelligence agency during the war. He also encouraged cooperation with other British intelligence organizations, such as MI5 (under Vernon Kell), MI6 (under Mansfield Smith-Cumming) and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard (under Basil Thomson).

By 1914 the Anglo-Persian

project was nearly bankrupt for the second time in its short history.

Enter Winston Churchill, who had taken a new role in British politics as First Lord of the Admiralty. Britons were proud of their navy, and oil-powered vessels were the latest innovation. But while

Anglo-Persian executives had courted the Royal Navy for years as a prospective customer for its oil, the old guard at Whitehall had been hesitant to endorse coal’s upstart rival.

Churchill was a believer. He thought Britain needed a dedicated oil supply, and he argued the

case in Parliament, urging his colleagues to “look out upon the wide expanse of the oil regions of the world!” Only the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company, he said, could protect British interests.

1912
 
The first shipment of crude oil leaves Abadan in April – bound for

purchaser Royal Dutch-Shell.
 
1914
 
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company signs a deal with the British government to supply the navy with 40 million barrels of oil over the coming 20 years in return for £2 million and a majority shareholding.
 
6 weeks later, the World War I begins.

Churchill had ended Anglo-Persian’s cash crisis, and no one had long to quietly ponder the long-term implications of a company entwining its financial interests with a political entity.
 
Two weeks later, an assassin killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Six weeks

after that, Germany attacked France. The Great War had begun. By its end, war without oil would be unimaginable.
Despite its name, the British Petroleum brand was originally created by a German firm as a way of marketing its products in Britain. During the war, the British

government seized the company’s assets, and the Public Trustee sold them to Anglo-Persian in 1917.
 
With that, Anglo-Persian had an instant distribution network in the UK, including 520 depots, 535 railway tank wagons, 1,102 road vehicles, four barges and 650 horses.