Franz Urbig (23 January 1864 – 28 September 1944) was a German banker. He joined the Disconto-Gesellschaft as a trainee on 15 July 1884 and built much of his career and reputation within this bank in Southeast Asia during the final part of the nineteenth century. Between 1902 and 1929, when the bank merged with the larger Deutsche Bank, he was a partner in the Disconto-Gesellschaft. Between 1930 and his death in 1944 he was chairman of the supervisory board at the enlarged Deutsche Bank. His long career was not without controversy.
After he died the Villa Urbig, the large family home on the western edge of Berlin which he had commissioned in 1915 and which had been designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, brought Urbig enhanced posthumous publicity in the English-speaking world of a kind he cannot have anticipated. It became the setting for some of the most carefully staged and widely viewed press photographs of the post-war period. During the first part of 1945 surviving family members were forcibly ushered out by Soviet troops: three months later British Prime Minister Churchill moved in with a large retinue of staff. The plan was for Churchill to use the residence for the duration of the Potsdam Conference, but in the event, following a United Kingdom national election in July 1945, Churchill moved out and Prime Minister Attlee moved in for the conference's later stages.
Life
Provenance and early years
Franz Urbig was born in Luckenwalde, a small town south of Berlin along the main railway line towards Halle and Leipzig: Urbig himself would later describe Luckenwalde as a "typical manufacturing town of its time". His father worked in the cloth trade, in the end becoming a factory foreman in a textiles company. Franz Urbig grew up in surprisingly modest circumstances and was forced to drop out of school following the early death of his father. He worked between 1878 and 1884 as a clerk at the district court house in Luckenwalde. It was here that he came to the attention of Ferdinand von Hansemann (1861-1900), a young lawyer who would later come to wider prominence for his shrill anti-Polish nationalism. The lawyer came from an exceptionally well connected family: the most relevant of those connections for Urbig's future career was his father, the entrepreneur-banker Adolph von Hansemann (1826-1903) who had been chief executive officer ("Geschäftsführer"), since the death of his father in 1864, of the Disconto-Gesellschaft, at that time an aggressively expansionist bank with extensive interests abroad, notably in Southeast Asia. Based on his son's recommendations, Adolph von Hansemann accepted Urbig's application for a traineeship, which commenced on 15 July 1884.
Disconto-Gesellschaft (bank) After joining the bank Urbig mastered the theory and practice of banking with what several sources refer to as "iron energy". Most of the parts of the world in which the bank saw the greatest opportunities for expansion were component territories of the British or French empires. He used his spare time to master English and French. In 1889, still aged only 25, Urbig was entrusted with the role of "Registratur des Chefkabinetts", which in effect meant he was employed as secretary to the board of directors.