He joined the Disconto-Gesellschaft as a trainee on 15 July 1884 and built much of his career and reputation within this bank in Southeast Asia during the final part of the nineteenth century.

During the first part of 1945 surviving family members were forcibly ushered out by Soviet troops: three months later British Prime Minister Churchill moved in with a large retinue of staff.

[6] Franz Urbig grew up in surprisingly modest circumstances and was forced to drop out of school following the early death of his father.

The lawyer came from an exceptionally well connected family: the most relevant of those connections for Urbig's future career was his father, the entrepreneur-banker Adolph von Hansemann (1826-1903) who had been chief executive officer ("Geschäftsführer"), since the death of his father in 1864, of the Disconto-Gesellschaft, at that time an aggressively expansionist bank with extensive interests abroad, notably in Southeast Asia.

[3] In 1889, still aged only 25, Urbig was entrusted with the role of "Registratur des Chefkabinetts", which in effect meant he was employed as secretary to the board of directors.

[10] The move was not without its political sensitivities since Kolkata was still the focus of Britain's fantastically lucrative opium trade and an important commercial centre in British India.

Although investee companies welcomed the newly increased availability of investment capital from Germany, the political authorities were more conflicted over some of the issues arising.

[7] Alongside interests in Southeast Asia, during the first part of the twentieth century the bank was becoming increasingly prominent in Germany's recently acquired African colonies.

The globalisation of world trade which up till 1914 had underpinned more than three decades of rapidly growing prosperity - especially for western Europe and the United States - was thrown into reverse for more than a generation.

[12] In 1919 he accepted the politicians' invitation to attend the Paris Peace Conference in his capacity as an internationally acknowledged German expert on finance and trade.

[1][7] At the conference he made the case that no country - not even the United States of America - would be capable of sustaining the financial burdens which the victors proposed to impose on the new German republic.

However, in the spirit of mutual hatred engendered by four years of bitter fighting and the accompanying war-time propaganda to which populations had been subjected on the home front, it became clear that the reparations demanded by the French leadership would not be significantly scaled back by the hoped for pressure from the British and Americans, notwithstanding the concerns eloquently expressed by at least one respected member of the British delegation.

[7][15] Urbig resigned his mandate as a member of the German delegation, with the parting advice that the conditions proposed (and subsequently imposed) by the war's military victors could never provide the basis for a lasting peace.

[13][6] He had been invited to accept the position of "National Currency Commissioner", but his response that his appointment should involve both repudiation of the burdensome reparations imposed at Versailles and the selective unwinding of the "excessively progressive" social reforms introduced since 1919 evidently led those responsible to conclude that Urbig, despite his financial expertise and experience, would not, after all, be an appropriate currency commissioner.

[17]) The creation of this General Council was part of a broader reconfiguration of the Reichsbank constitution which had been agreed under pressure from creditors as a pre-condition for the Dawes Plan in the so-called "London agreement" (which also contained a number of more overtly political provisions), signed off on 29 August 1924.

[7][17] As part of the 1929 merger of the Disconto-Gesellschaft with the larger (but conspicuously less well capitalised) Deutsche Bank Franz Urbig, who was reaching what many would have seen as a conventional retirement age, became a member of the oversight board of the merged entity.

The architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was little known at the time, though he would later - after radically changing his approach - achieve notability as a pioneer of modernist architecture, becoming in 1930 the last director of the Bauhaus School in (since relocating from Weimar in 1925) Dessau.

[1] The Villa Urbig was used as a backdrop for the 1935 UFA comedy film Frischer Wind aus Kanada, directed by Paul Hörbiger.

Semmelhaack attracted criticism in English newspapers in 2006 when he refused to allow a plaque to be placed on his "private residence" celebrating its Churchill connections.

Under pressure he nevertheless agreed that Mary Soames, who by this point was Winston Churchill's only surviving child, was very welcome to visit and look around: "It's empty at the moment.