Foreign News: Death of Deutsch

When Death came to the son of a certain obscure Jewish cantor, at Berlin last week, thousands of Germans mourned and even the President of the Republic, Old

Paul von Hindenburg, took a pen into his stiff, rheumatic fingers and wrote laboriously a letter of condolence.

The dead man thus honored was Dr. Felix Deutsch, 70, President of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electric Company) famed as the A. E. G. Smart U. S. citizens knew Dr. Deutsch as the brother-in-law of Manhattan Banker-Art Patron Otto Hermann Kahn.

Although the A. E. G. was founded by the late Dr. Emil Rathenau,* Dr. Felix Deutsch was a pioneer co-executive with the Rathenaus, father and son, and succeeded them as the chief directing genius of the A. E. G.

By no means a harsh, impersonal “business dictator,” Dr. Deutsch surrounded himself with numerous trusted associates, of whom Dr. Hermann Beucher seems most likely to succeed him. So rock founded is the prosperous solidarity of the A. E. G. that its securities did not so much as flutter upon the German bourse, last week, when kindly Dr. Deutsch was smitten down by heart failure. Since great secrecy always surrounds the details of large German fortunes, no estimate of the estate left by Dr. Deutsch can be made; but his annual salary income as a director of more than 40 corporations was not less than $200,000.

* Father of the late famed Dr. Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) onetime President of the A. E. G. and one of the greatest of post-War German Foreign Ministers.