Guido Goldman, who used his vast inherited wealth and extensive network of friendships in politics and the arts to help rebuild America’s relationship with Germany after WWII, died Nov. 30 at his home in Concord, MA. He was 83.

Mr. Goldman’s fingerprints can be found on many of the leading postwar academic and cultural institutions linking the United States and Germany, including the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, which he founded with his mentors Henry Kissinger and Stanley Hoffmann.

Mr. Goldman’s father, who was president of the World Zionist Organization, instilled in his sons a commitment to social justice, which led Mr. Goldman to underwrite civil rights activism in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Already rich from his mother’s inheritance, Mr. Goldman amassed even more wealth during the 1970s and ‘80s as a real estate investor and private money manager — money he gladly and often anonymously dispensed among his friends and people he admired, including civil rights activists like Harry Belafonte and Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, the New York Times said.