Olof Aschberg

In Stockholm, Aschberg founded the first Swedish bank for trade unions and cooperatives (Nya Banken) in 1912 and became a friend of Hjalmar Branting. When financial operations in favor of the Germans in 1918 caused him trouble with the Allies of World War I, the bank was renamed Svensk Ekonomiebolaget. He was already a successful banker and businessman when he met first Willi Münzenberg who visited the Stockholm Youth Socialist Congress of 1917. Later, during the Bolsheviks aspirations to rebuild the Russian economy, it was Münzenberg's task to expand their modest pool of capital by floating so-called "workers' loans" using his Workers International Relief organization. By means of this subterfuge the money used for buying machines and goods in the West looked like being the outcome of proletarian support, in reality it came directly from the Kremlin, confiscated from Russia's rich and the Church.

Established in Berlin in the 1920s, Aschberg's Garantie- und Kreditbank für den Osten was charged with repayment of the WIR workers' loans, although he had not been very fond of it from its very beginning on and had even contributed to abolish it soon after its launch. Aschberg had already gained the Soviet leaders' favor, by being one of the main connections in the early years after 1917 in evading the international boycott on gold robbed by the Bolsheviks, which he offered on the Stockholm market after having the bullions melted down and given new markings. At the end of the 1920s Aschberg moved to France, where he bought Château du Bois du Rocher at Jouy-en-Josas (in 1950 offered to UNESCO and subsequently sold to the Yvelines department).

In a U.S. State Department file a Green Cipher message from the U.S. embassy in Christiania (renamed Oslo in 1925), Norway, dated February 21, 1918, it reads: "Am informed that Bolshevik funds are deposited in Nya Banken, Stockholm, Legation Stockholm advised. Schmedeman".

Olof is the grandfather of the journalists Robert Aschberg and Richard Aschberg.

He built up a collection of Russian icons containing 245 pieces which he donated to the Swedish Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1933. This largest and finest collection of icons outside Russia was supplemented in 1952 and put the Nationalmuseum among the leading museums in this field.