Viktor von Ephrussi
Viktor, Ritter von Ephrussi is an Austrian banker born November 8, 1860 in Odessa (Ukraine) and died February 6, 1945 in Tunbridge Wells (United Kingdom). Itinerary. Viktor von Ephrussi was the heir of the Ephrussi & Co bank in Vienna (Austria), founded by his father Ignaz von Ephrussi. He was knighted and made a knight (Ritter) in 1872 by the Emperor of Austria, at the same time as his father. He married in Vienna on March 7, 1899 Baroness Emmy Henriette Schey von Koromla (1879-1938), from a family linked to the Rothschilds (see Rothschild family). The couple  had four children Viktor von Ephrussi lived at the Ephrussi Palace in Vienna (Austria), 14 Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring (renamed in 2012 "Universitätsring"). In 1920-23, Viktor was severely affected by inflation which partially ruined him. Nazi persecution. In May 1938, he was robbed of all his property by the Nazis who had just annexed Austria: his palace, its art collections, as well as the Ephrussi bank were "Aryanised". Ruined and threatened with deportation, he first took refuge in Slovakia in his country house in Kövesces, where his wife died, then, before the advance of the Nazis, with his daughter  Elisabeth in the United Kingdom in 1938, and died in Tunbridge Wells (Kent) in 1945. Her children left Vienna in the 1920s. Elisabeth was the first woman doctor of letters in Austria and then moved to the United States at the time of the Anschluss. Gisela left for Madrid in 1925. Ignaz-Iggie became a fashion designer in Paris before moving to America as well, enlisting as a military intelligence agent and then exporting cereals to Tokyo. Legacy. His great grandson Edmund de Waal wrote a best-seller about the fate of his family under the Nazis, "The Hare with  Amber Eyes". The event reunited the family which had been dispersed in the world by the Nazis.