Felix Somary

Felix Somary (21 November 1881, Vienna, Austria-Hungary – 11 July 1956, Zurich, Switzerland) was an Austrian-Swiss banker; he is also noted as a student of political economy.

The son of a lawyer, Somary studied law and economy at the University of Vienna, where his fellow-students included Emil Lederer, Joseph Schumpeter and Otto Bauer. During that time he wrote an economics essay which was praised by Luigi Einaudi. After taking his PhD with Carl Menger, he worked for the Anglo-Austrian Bank, where he met Ernest Cassel. From 1910 to 1914 he taught at the Hochschule für Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung in Berlin, and he was also active in promoting commercial ties between Britain, Germany and Austria both in eastern Europe and the Near East. He later said that without the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand "the large-scale catastrophe [of World War 1] could have been averted, since all causes of the Anglo-German conflict had been eliminated". This opinion was contrary to a commonly held view at the time that the war was the result of Anglo-German imperialism and economic competition.

During World War I, he reorganized the national bank of occupied Belgium; he worked together with Hjalmar Schacht, of whom he speaks favorably in his memoirs. While in Berlin in March 1916 he co-authored a famous report with Max Weber. This warned Germany and Austria against intensifying the use of submarine warfare. Their argument was that intensification might provoke the US into entering the war on the side of Britain, and the consequence of this would be to remove the possibility of a neutral source of post-war credit, which would inevitably be needed by the combatant nations once hostilities had ceased. He also angered Ludendorff by writing a paper which stated that Poland could find a natural place in the multinational Austrian state. In 1919 he entered as a senior partner in Bankhaus Blankart & Co. in Zurich.

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