Emil Perels

Emil Perels was born on 17 June 1880 in Vienna, the son of Emil Perels (1837–1893), professor of agricultural engineering at the Hochschule für Bodenkultur (University of Agriculture), and of Rosa Volkmar (1850–1882), whom he lost at an early age. His brother Ernst became a professor of history in Berlin, his sister Frida Becher von Rüdenhof a physician and women's rights activist. Perels studied law and political science at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in law in 1904. Although a lawyer by training, he turned early to economic theory. He took part in Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's seminar and belonged to that close circle of young Viennese who, from 12 March 1908, met regularly under the roof of the Central Association for Housing Reform (Zentralverein für Wohnungsreform) to discuss fundamental questions of economics. Mises himself counted this circle of Karl Pribram, Else Cronbach, Perels, and himself as the original nucleus of what was formally constituted in 1918 as the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft (Economic Association). At the same time Perels worked at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and served on the Scientific Committee for War Economy of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of War, to which Mises, the Pribram brothers, and Othmar Spann also belonged. After the First World War, Perels took over the management of the Austrian clearing office (Abrechnungsstelle), a quasi-governmental authority for settling international questions of reparations and debt. When he left this post in 1921, Ludwig von Mises succeeded him in the position, and Friedrich August von Hayek found his first employment there shortly after completing his doctorate. In his main occupation Perels was a board member of several Austrian companies, director of the Schottwien-Semmering gypsum works (Gipswerke Schottwien-Semmering), and director of the Austrian Credit Institute for Public Enterprises and Works (Österreichisches Credit-Institut für öffentliche Unternehmungen und Arbeiten). A lifelong personal friendship bound him to Mises, expressed in shared ski tours in the Austrian Alps. Although baptised a Protestant of the Augsburg Confession, Perels was regarded after 1938 as 'non-Aryan'. He lost his post as a bank director and found a further position in the financial administration of the Protestant Church. At the age of 58 he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy for the summer semester of 1938, but was soon driven out. From his sister's apartment at Wickenburggasse 17 he was deported to Theresienstadt on 24/25 September 1942 and sent on to Auschwitz on 16 October 1944, where he was murdered. His last sign of life was a letter from 1943 to his sister Frida.