Name Gunter Reimann Role Financial expert | Books The vampire economy | |
 | ||
Died February 5, 2005, New York City, New York, United States | ||
Günter Reimann (November 13, 1904 – February 5, 2005) was an expert on finance and currencies as founder & editor of International Reports, a New York-based weekly publication he sold to the London Financial Times in 1983. Prior to World War II, he was a member of the Communist Party of Germany and at the forefront of the underground resistance to Adolf Hitler within Nazi Germany.
Drawn to the leftwing intelligentsia at an early age in Berlin, Reimann associated and worked with Ernst Thälmann, Anna Seghers and Walter Ulbricht at the Romanisches Café. Still a teenager, Reimann assumed the position of economics editor for the communist newspaper, Rote Fahne, taking on the pen-name of Günter Reimann.
After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Reimann went underground to oppose the new National Socialist regime under the resistance movement of the German social democrats and communists. He fled Germany in 1934, first to France, and then London, as the Gestapo continued to zeroing in on his location, finally raiding his house and arresting Hu Lan-Xi, who later achieved the status as the Red Army's first female general.
Reimann was born Hans Steinicke in Angermünde, German Empire. After fleeing Germany for London, he wrote The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, published in 1939. In that treatise, Reimann documented how the oppressive rule of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through severe regulations and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offences. As an economist, he later founded the "International Reports on Finance and Currencies" financial newsletter in 1947. He also authored Patents for Hitler in 1942.
After his migration to the United States, he lived in New York City, where he met Miriam Weber, a socialist activist, with whom who he later married and fathered two children, before the two divorced. Thereafter, he married Jutta Ruesch, a German citizen, and they subsequently had two children.
Reimann later moved to Manhasset, Long Island, New York. In 2004, Reimann was awarded Germany's Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit, the nation's highest civilian award.
Reimann is survived by his wife Jutta, his four children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.