Page - 569 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

The War Bonds 569 Czech banks, and it was certainly not only Jaroslav Preiss who advised the public to in- vest elsewhere. However, just as the temporary boycott of the Czech credit institutions cannot be ignored, there is also no denying the fact that the sums subscribed by the German Austrian credit institutions themselves were by far the highest. Subscription results for large Austrian credit institutions to the first four war bonds (in millions of kronen) 1st w.b. 2nd w.b. 3rd w.b. 4th w.b. Creditanstalt für Handel und Gewerbe 20 30 45 55 mln. Wiener Bankverein 20 30 40 50 mln. Österreichische Länderbank  20 30 40 50 mln. Niederösterreichische Escompte Ge- sellschaft 20 30 40 50 mln. Böhmische Union Bank 7 8 12 15 mln. Böhmische Eskompte-Bank 5 7,5 10 12 mln. Zentralbank der deutschen Sparkassen 2 3 5 10 mln. Živnostenská banka 3 6 10 15 mln. Česka průmislová banka 1 2 3 4 mln. Zentralbank der tschechischen Sparkassen 0.01 0.1 2 3 mln. From : Hermann Heller (ed.), Unsere Kriegsanleihen. Monumente des Patriotismus. Historisch-statistische Skizze nach authentischen Quellen 3 : 1914–1917, Vienna 1917, 21–58, and Winkelbauer, Wer bezahlte, 391. Institutional investors, which were predominantly the large credit institutions and in- dustrial companies, subscribed 40.6 per cent of the papers issued for the first war bond. For the third and fully for the fourth war bond, almost half of the subscribers were already institutions. For the fifth war bond, institutional investors alredy provided over half the total sum, and for the eighth war bond, the share of major institutional inves- tors would come close to the two-thirds mark.1333 Others also paid, subscribed to war bonds and made very substantial contributions to financing the war. Top of the list among the non-institutional investors were the major war suppliers and armaments companies. They invested a share of their assets  – and in some cases much more than that  – in bond securities and, in this way, refunded a part of the profits. Quite clearly, they were not acting purely for altruistic reasons. At the top of the list of the war suppliers was the Hungarian war product public limited company (Hadiermény r.t.), which with 211 million kronen subscribed almost twenty times the value of its deliveries to the army and fleet, followed by Gebrüder Böhler & Co (Vienna), which subscribed a total of 78 million kronen for the first seven war bonds. It was followed by Dynamit Nobel (Vienna) with 74 million, Wetzler & Co