The House of Rothschild (108 page)

The next target was the Witkowitz ironworks, which Goring had already identified as a potentially profitable addition to his burgeoning industrial empire centred around the Reichswerke Hermann-Göring. Of course, Witkowitz remained on Czech territory and, as Göring’s emissary Otto Weber soon discovered, was no longer owned by the Vienna house but by the Alliance. In addition, the Witkowitz board had safeguarded against sequestration the company’s stake in the Swedish Freya ore mines as well as £200,000 in foreign currency. Louis therefore had a real bargaining position. When Himmler sought to ingratiate himself by sending some ornate French furniture to the prison, he was able to send it away complaining that it made his cell look like a “Cracow bordello.” Although Louis had to hand over most of his Austrian assets to secure his own release, the family was able to insist that a price be paid for Witkowitz (albeit a discounted price). But such legal niceties were ultimately bound to be swept aside by Nazi
force majeure.
Eugène’s hopes of selling the ironworks to the Czechoslovak state for £10 million were dashed when Hitler bullied the Prague government into accepting partition in March 1939. With the works effectively under German control, Göring’s commissioner Hans Kehrl, assisted by the Deutsche Bank board member Karl Rasche, turned up the pressure. A new supervisory board was set up, including Kehrl, Rasche and Paul Pleiger (the Reichswerke’s general director). At the same time, Fritz Kranefuss—Himmler’s adjutant and a supervisory board member of the Dresdner Bank—informed Rasche on the basis of Sicherheitsdienst intelligence that the transfer abroad of the ownership of Witkowitz had been illegal under currency laws. Finally, in July 1939, it was agreed to sell the plant for £2.9 million. However, the outbreak of war gave the Germans the perfect excuse not to pay. As a result, Witkowitz joined the lengthening list of Rothschild properties confiscated without compensation by the Nazi regime. In January 1941 Goring was able to take the process a step further when 43,300 Witkowitz shares were seized from the vaults of the Paris house (though even this did not give him a technical controlling interest). (It was not until 1953 that the communist government established in Czechoslovakia in 1948 finally paid compensation to the Rothschilds—amounting to £1 million—for the works.)

Yet it was not their industrial investments which Hitler and his lackeys really coveted so much as their investments in art—the Old Masters, the Sèvres, the Louis Quinze bureaus—which were the most dazzling fruits of the family’s financial success. In fleeing Austria, Alphonse had left behind one of the great European private collections; and attempts to buy it by Lord Duveen (possibly bidding on behalf of the original owners) were in vain. For the acquisition of so many old masters had given Hitler the idea of establishing a new German gallery at Linz, to give the Reich its Louvre. In June 1939 he authorised Hans Posse to begin work on the project, putting the best works seized from Austrian Jews into a “Führer Reserve” for this purpose. It was the beginning of one of the greatest art thefts in history.

Up until the outbreak of the war in 1939, the corollary of the expropriation of the Jews was their emigration from German territory. (It was significant in this respect that the Rothschild palace in the Prinz Eugenstrasse was occupied by Adolf Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which worked closely with Rafelsberger’s Asset Transactions Office.) Naturally, many (though not all) German and Austrian Jews wanted to get out, while the Nazis had no objection to their leaving, provided they could be mulcted in the process. Leading German Jewish bankers—notably Max Warburg—saw little alternative but to facilitate this process. However, for Jews like the Rothschilds who remained outside the area of German control, this created a number of acute dilemmas. As early as June 1933, Lionel became one of the five presidents of a new Appeal Council of the Central British Fund for German Jewry (later the Council for German Jewry), to which the London house made an initial donation of £10,000.
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Five years later, in early 1938, it was reported that the Council had raised £1 million, including a further Rothschild donation of £90,000; this was followed by £50,000 in November. It was not obvious, however, how best to use this money to help the German Jews. There were disagreements within the Board of Deputies over the idea of a boycott of German goods, for example, which may have precipitated Walter’s resignation as vice-president. When James G. McDonald and Felix Warburg addressed a meeting of Jewish businessmen in January 1934, they found little enthusiasm for the alternative strategy of encouraging emigration from Germany. The following year McDonald returned with a more coherent plan (devised by Max Warburg) for a new bank with £3 million capital to finance the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. But despite Lionel’s initial “almost amazing enthusiasm” the scheme foundered when details leaked prematurely to the press. Both Anthony and Lionel were even more wary of a later Warburg scheme for an Anglo-American Jewish political bureau, arguing that “one can endanger his [
sic
] English citizenship if one becomes too strongly active in Jewish world actions.”

Lionel’s nephew Victor also became involved in the Central British Fund. “But for an accident of birth,” he told a meeting of the Zionist Federation in October 1938, “I might be a refugee, or I might be in a concentration camp, or I might be a guest in the Hotel Metropol, Vienna.”
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However, the rest of his speech was a (somewhat muted) defence of the government’s policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. He struck a similar note of ambivalence when he addressed a meeting of the Earl Baldwin Fund for Refugees at the Mansion House that December:

“The slow murder of 600,000 people,” he told his audience, “is an act which has rarely happened in history.” Yet he went on: “In spite of humanitarian feelings, we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country, even for relatively short periods of time.” As for increasing migration to Palestine, the British government’s position there was “appallingly complicated.” In March 1939, after visiting the United States to meet American refugee organisations, Victor appealed for a further £160,000 for the Council for German Jewry to promote emigration from Germany. Again there were qualifications. “No matter what doubts we may feel,” he argued, “we can only make an impression on this immense problem if we can get an orderly exodus and some slight financial concessions from the German side”; he remained pessimistic about the possibilities of “mass colonisation of hundreds of thousands of people.” Even in 1946, speaking in the House of Lords, Victor defended the policy of restricting immigration to Palestine, despite the fact that “he himself had had a 75 year old aunt clubbed to death by the SS outside an extermination camp.”

Rather different anxieties beset the Rothschilds in France, where more than a thousand Jews arrived in the first year of the Nazi regime by crossing the border. Although Robert gave his support to an informal agency set up to assist these refugees—which in 1936 was reconstituted as the Committee of Assistance to Refugees—he worried about the effect of the influx on the established Jewish community in France. In May 1935 he made remarks to the general assembly of the Paris Consistory (of which he had become president two years before) which could only be construed as a criticism of the newcomers. “It is essential,” he declared, “that foreign elements assimilate as quickly as possible ... Immigrants, like guests, must learn how to behave and not criticise too much ... and if they aren’t happy here, they’d do better to leave.”
²⁷
This was the old assimilationist lament about new Jewish immigrants.

The only logical solution was therefore to find some alternative territory for the Jews to go to. The Nazis themselves thought of Madagascar. Interestingly, Guy Burgess’s first assignment (when he was still a freelance intelligence agent) from MI6’s D Section was—as he faithfully reported to Moscow in December 1938—“to activate Lord Rothschild” in an attempt to “split the Jewish movement” and “create an opposition towards Zionism and Dr Weitzmann [
sic
].” At around the same time, the Paris house forwarded to New Court a proposal to purchase 200,000 acres of Brazil’s Mato Grosso “for colonisation purposes”; and another to settle Jews in Sudan’s Upper Nile Valley between Malakhal and Bor—supposedly “a huge territory ... with no population and where Jews might organize themselves an important colony.” Kenya, Northern Rhodesia and Guiana were also considered. Only at the eleventh hour, it seems, did the Rothschilds recognise the need to admit refugees into Britain and France. In March 1939 Edouard’s wife Germaine turned an old house at the edge of the Ferrières estate into a hostel for around 150 refugee children. After the German invasion, they were evacuated south and later dispersed, some escaping to the United States. A more secure refuge was found at Waddesdon for thirty children who were rescued from an orphanage in Frankfurt shortly before the outbreak of war.

By 1939, of course, numerous members of the Rothschild family were themselves refugees. The German invasion of France in May 1940 increased their number substantially. Even before the fall of Paris, Robert had already reached the safety of Montreal, taking with him his wife Nelly and daughters Diane and Cécile. It was not until July, however, that his cousin and senior partner Edouard—now in his seventies—opted to leave France, finally reaching the United States after a circuitous journey through Spain and Portugal. (He too was accompanied by his wife Germaine and daughter Bethsabée, his elder daughter Jacqueline having already settled in America with her second husband.) Their former partner Maurice also ended up in Canada, while his ex-wife Noémie and son Edmond took refuge on the estate at Pregny. The other French Rothschild of that generation, Henri, was already resident in Portugal. Finally, Alain’s pregnant wife reached the US via Spain and Brazil, while Guy’s wife Alix took the route through Argentina, though she later rejoined her husband.

That left the men of the younger generation to fight. Robert’s sons Alain and Elie were both taken prisoner by the Germans and ended up spending much of the war in a POW camp in Lübeck (and, in the case of Elie, Colditz). Edouard’s son Guy was luckier. As a cavalry officer in charge of a hastily motorised platoon, he saw heavy fighting in Northern France (for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre), narrowly eluding capture by the Germans on at least two occasions. After the French capitulation, Guy returned to the part of France left unoccupied by the regime, settling in the small Auvergne spa town of La Bourboule, where the offices of de Rothschild Frères had been moved. But in 1941, increasingly aware of the Vichy regime’s readiness to echo and even anticipate German anti-Jewish measures, he decided to leave, securing the necessary papers after an initial abortive attempt to get out through Morocco.

Both Henri’s sons, James and Philippe, had rather similar experiences. The former served in the air force (as he had in the First World War) before escaping through Spain to Britain. Philippe was prevented by illness and a skiing injury from taking a part in the fighting, but endured perhaps the most difficult escape from France. Having been arrested in Morocco on his first attempt, he finally ended up crossing the Pyrenees on foot and flying to England from Portugal. Many of the French Rothschilds then elected to return to the continent with General de Gaulle’s Free French (though it should be emphasised that there were elements within de Gaulle’s army which were far from philo-Semitic).
²⁸
Guy’s decision to join de Gaulle nearly cost him his life when the ship taking him back across the Atlantic was torpedoed. He survived, was given a job with de Gaulle’s Mission Militaire de Liaison Administrative and returned to France with General Pierre Koenig in 1944. James also joined the Free French, as did his brother Philippe, his wife and elder daughter.

As had happened in Austria, the victorious Germans wasted no time in laying hands on the family’s assets. The Paris house had managed to send some things abroad before the invasion of France (its shares in Royal Dutch were deposited with a Montreal bank, for instance, though these were then frozen as enemy assets when France fell). In addition, some family members were able to take jewellery with them when they fled: according to one report, Edouard arrived in New York with precious stones worth $1 million. However, the bulk of the family’s wealth remained within relatively easy reach of the occupiers. On September 27, 1940, as the Germans began the process of identifying Jewish-owned companies, Field-Marshal Keitel issued a specific instruction to the Military Government in Occupied France to confiscate “possessions of the Palais Rothschild,” including any which had been handed over to the French state. The following month, the Germans ordered that administrators be put in charge of Jewish firms. The Luftwaffe and later a German general occupied the Rothschild house at 23 avenue de Marigny.

Yet the Germans soon found themselves in competition with the puppet Vichy regime they themselves had called into being. Even before Keitel’s order, the Pétain regime issued a decree which declared that all Frenchmen who had left mainland France after May 10 had “removed themselves from the responsibilities and duties of members of the national community”: accordingly, their assets were to be confiscated and sold, the proceeds going to the Vichy state. This was explicitly applied to Edouard, Robert and Henri. Soon after this, Pétain laid claim to the Rothschild offices in the rue Laffitte for a government welfare agency and showed every sign of intending to treat other buildings belonging to the family in a similar fashion, putting them all in the hands of a new Public Property Office.