Olof Aschberg

Olof Aschberg (July 22, 1877 – April 21, 1960) was a Swedish banker of Jewish descent who served as head of the Stockholm bank Nya Banken. From August 18, 1922 on he served as Director-General of Roscombank, which was later transformed into Vnesheconombank. Aschberg was a leftist sympathizer and helped finance the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. In gratitude, the Bolshevik government allowed Aschberg to do business with the Soviet Union during the 1920s. His codirectors included prominent Swedish cooperatives and Swedish socialists, including G. W. Dahl, K. G. Rosling, and C. Gerhard Magnusson.

Early years

In Stockholm, Aschberg founded the first Swedish bank for trade unions and cooperatives (Nya Banken) in 1912 and became a friend of Hjalmar Branting. When financial operations in favor of the Germans in 1918 caused him trouble with the Allies of World War I, the bank was renamed Svensk Ekonomiebolaget. Alain Dugrand / Frédéric Laurent, ''Willi Münzenberg. Artiste en révolution (1889–1940)'', Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard 2008, pp. 218–219, 585 He was already a successful banker and businessman when he met first Willi Münzenberg who visited the Stockholm Youth Socialist Congress of 1917. Later, during the Bolsheviks aspirations to rebuild the Russian economy, it was Münzenberg's task to expand their modest pool of capital by floating so-called "workers' loans" using his Workers International Relief organization.Sean McMeekin, ''The red millionaire: A political biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s secret propaganda tsar in the West'', New Haven & London,Yale University Press 2003, pp. 135, 138, 296, 297, 301 By means of this subterfuge the money used for buying machines and goods in the West looked like being the outcome of proletarian support, in reality it came directly from the Kremlin, confiscated from Russia's rich and the Church. Established in Berlin in the 1920s, Aschberg's " Guarantee and Credit Bank for the East" was charged with repayment of the WIR workers' loans, although he had not been very fond of it from its very beginning on and had even contributed to abolish it soon after its launch. Aschberg had already gained the Soviet leaders' favor, by being one of the main connections in the early years after 1917 in evading the international boycott on gold robbed by the Bolsheviks, which he offered on the Stockholm market after having the bullions melted down and given new markings. At the end of the 1920s Aschberg moved to France, where he bought Château du Bois du Rocher at Jouy-en-Josas (in 1950 offered to UNESCO and subsequently sold to the Yvelines

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