The House of Rothschild (109 page)

In some ways, it made little difference to the Rothschilds whether it was the Germans or the Vichy regime which stole their property. The latter was motivated by anti-Semitism too, as evidenced by the decrees Pétain issued on October 3, 1940 and June 2, 1941, which drastically restricted the rights of French Jews, and the constant vitriolic attacks on the Rothschilds in pro-German papers like
Paris-Soir
and
Au Pilori.
Nor can it seriously be argued that Vichy officials were somehow more lenient in their treatment of Rothschild property than the Germans would have been. Maurice Janicot, who ran Pétain’s Public Property Office, is said to have prevented the Germans from clearing the cellars of Lafite, for example; but a lack of buyers seems the most likely explanation for his failure to sell Elie’s Neuilly stable of horses, Alain’s house on the rue du Cirque and Miriam’s houses in Boulogne and Paris. As can be seen from his statement to the German authorities in May 1941—to the effect that de Rothschild Frères now belonged to the Vichy state—the aim was to pre-empt the Germans, not to protect the Rothschilds. The attempt by Pétain’s Commissariat for Jewish Questions to convert the Institut de biologie physico-chimique founded by Edmond in 1927 into a laboratory for the eugenicist Alexis Carrel says much about the fundamental compatibility of Vichy and the Third Reich.

If Vichy had managed to beat the Germans to the assets of the Paris house, the Germans beat Vichy in the race to loot the private art collections of the French Rothschilds. This was partly because so much of it could not be moved out of the occupied zone in time. In the panic of May and June 1940, Miriam hastily buried part of her collection among sand dunes at Dieppe (the pictures hidden there were never recovered); while Edouard’s collection was dispersed and hidden at his Reux estate, near Pont l‘Evêque in Normandy, and at his stud farm at Meautry. Robert’s collection from Laversine and elsewhere was hidden at Marmande in the south-west, while Philippe’s pictures were mostly in Bordeaux. All these caches were soon discovered. Even more readily accessible was the huge collection at Ferrières (though the Boucher tapestries were so well concealed that the occupiers did not realise they were still there); Henri’s collection at the chateau de la Muette; Maurice’s at the château d’Armainvilliers; and the paintings in the major Paris residences (Maurice’s at 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Robert’s at 23 avenue de Marigny).

It was Alfred Rosenberg—the Nazi racial theorist and “Führer’s Delegate for the Total Spiritual and Philosophical Development of the NSDAP”—who took the lead in tracking down and plundering these collections, arguing that “the Rothschilds are an enemy Jewish family and all their machinations to save their possessions should leave us cold.” Within a remarkably short space of time he had rounded up 203 private collections including most of those listed above: a total of 21,903 works. These were then stored at the Jeu de Paume, where Goring duly arrived in November 1940 to act as Hitler’s “buyer.” The Reichsmarschall grabbed a number of choice items for himself, including some Dutch and French works from Edouard’s collection, and a Memling Madonna for his wife; but the most prized Rothschild possessions—Vermeer’s
Astronomer,
Boucher’s
Madame de Pompadour
and thirty other masterpieces including portraits by Hals and Rembrandt—he earmarked for Hitler. Needless to say, these were not purchases in any meaningful sense: the valuations of the pictures he selected for himself and his master were absurdly low.
²⁹
Goring returned on similar sprees in February and March 1941, acquiring among other things a Rothshild-owned marble group depicting (fittingly) the Rape of Europa, which was transported to the grounds of his pseudo-Nordic hunting lodge, the Carinhall. On March 20 Rosenberg was able to report that he had completed his mission, sending a train loaded with stolen treasures to Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria. When the files of his Einsatzstab were scrutinised after the war, the Rothschilds turned out to be the most important single source of plunder: altogether 3,978 items taken from nine different locations were identified as belonging to members of the family. The Vichy authorities did less well, though they did turn up Maurice’s collection (valued at 350 million francs) at Tarbes, and a truckload of paintings belonging to Robert, Maurice and Eugène.

As the war drew to a close, most of the stolen works were found by the advancing Allied armies, though a few pieces—a Watteau, for example, and the Rape of Europa taken by Göring—have never been recovered. The Memling Madonna was found when Goring offered it as a bribe to his American captors. But a great deal more could have been lost. Only the intervention of the SS Intelligence Chief Kaltenbrunner prevented the fanatical Gauleiter Eigruber of Oberdonau from blowing up the Alt Aussee salt mines (southeast of Salzburg) to stop the many paintings hidden there from being returned to “International Jewry.”

If Hitler had successfully launched “Operation Sealion” in the summer of 1940, when Britain was at her most vulnerable, a similar fate might have befallen the English Rothschilds and their remaining private collections—a worse fate probably, as the invasion of Britain would have made the ultimate defeat of Germany infinitely harder to achieve. He did not, and they survived. Yet it was a tenuous kind of survival. Of the fifth generation, only Anthony lived to see the Allied victory, serving as a private in the Home Guard; Charles and Walter had both died before the war began, and Lionel died in January 1942. The next generation was too busy fighting to think of the bank; or too young, in the case of Lionel’s second son Leo (born in 1927) and Anthony’s own son Evelyn (born in 1931), who spent the years from 1940 to 1943 in America. Lionel’s elder son Edmund refused to do as his father had felt compelled to do in the First World War: that is, to sit out the war in St Swithin’s Lane. As an artillery officer in the Bucks Yeomanry, he served with the British Expeditionary Force in France, narrowly escaping capture at Cherbourg, and subsequently fought in North Africa and Italy with the 77th (Highland) Field Regiment. Victor began the war in the commercial section of MI5, later becoming involved in bomb disposal (for which he was awarded the George Medal) and the Prime Minister’s personal security. This brought him into close contact with Churchill and his private secretary Jock Colville and probably explains why he was entrusted with the highly sensitive investigation into the death of the head of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorksi, in July 1943. Another Rothschild link to Churchill was forged when Jimmy became Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Supply in March 1945 (though it was to prove the briefest of ministerial careers).

All this had little immediate significance for the family firm, however. For the Second World War even more than the First was financed in ways which left little room for the Rothschilds to play their traditional role. The sinews of war had ceased to be flexed by bankers and bondholders; a new Keynesian age was dawning, in which governments would manage economic life more directly, controlling the allocation of scarce factors of production, manipulating the level of aggregate demand and treating money as little more than a convenient unit for national accounting. In this age, the firm over which Anthony presided in the war years seemed an anachronism. New Court itself lay almost empty. More than half the clerical staff and all the current records were moved to Tring, out of reach of the Blitz. Others—the younger men like Palin—were called up. Only a few old hands like Philip Hoyland remained, using the basement as a bomb shelter. It was only by good luck that the offices escaped serious damage when they were hit by incendiary bombs on the night of May 10, 1941, during a ferocious bombardment of the City which destroyed the nearby Salters Hall and literally “surrounded New Court by fire.” Other Rothschild properties were also commandeered for war use. The Royal Mint refinery was converted to artillery-parts production. Exbury was taken over by the navy (and temporarily renamed HMS
Mastodon).
And Charles’s and Rozsika’s house at Ashton Wold was used by the Red Cross and the Ordnance Corps. Inevitably, these buildings also suffered some damage, not all of it through enemy action. In Evelyn Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
, such wartime depredations seem to herald the dissolution of an older, Catholic aristocracy. As she contemplated what remained of the gardens at Ashton before leaving for war work at Bletchley, Victor’s sister Miriam felt that her own family too was waning: “The Holocaust; the war; my parents’ deaths; the end of the garden. Nothing seemed to matter any more.”

Two members of the family died as a consequence of the Nazi policy of genocide. The aunt to whom Victor referred in his speech in the Lords in 1946 was his mother’s eldest sister Aranka, who perished at Buchenwald. The other victim was Philippe’s estranged wife Lili. “Why should the Germans harm me?” she had asked him in 1940. “I am from an old French Catholic family.” Despite reverting to her original title, the comtesse de Chambure, she was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and sent by the last transport to Ravensbrück where, her husband was later told, she was brutally murdered. It is thus the blackest of ironies that the only person named Rothschild killed by the Nazis was not a Jew and had disowned the family name.

Only a few months later, Major Edmund de Rothschild led his battery of the 200 (Jewish) Field Regiment—part of the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group formed in November 1944—into the town of Mannheim “through an archway which still bore the repulsive legend
judenrein.”
As they drove into the town, people began to shout: “Die Juden kommen! Die Juden kommen!” (“The Jews are coming!”) A few months later, he paid a visit to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the “Eagle’s Nest.” “Seeing a mass of broken Sèvres porcelain,” he later recalled, “I wondered if it had been stolen from one of my cousins” homes.“ It probably had.

SIR EVELYN DE ROTHSCHILD, 1996

 

 

T
he visitor to New Court today enters a black and white marble building in the modern style. The entrance hall, however, is dominated by William Armfield Hobday’s 1820 portrait of Nathan Rothschild and his family. That portrait would not hang there if the firm of N. M. Rothschild & Sons were not conscious of—proud of—its history. Nor would this book have been written. It is worth asking, however, what exactly the relevance of a bank’s past is to its present and future. For most of the nineteenth century, N. M. Rothschild was part of the biggest bank in the world which dominated the international bond market. For a contemporary equivalent, one has to imagine a merger between Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, J. P. Morgan and probably Goldman Sachs too—as well, perhaps, as the International Monetary Fund, given the nineteenth-century Rothschilds’ role in stabilising the finances of numerous governments. Today, by contrast, the bank occupies a relatively small niche in the international financial services business, dwarfed by such products of corporate hypertrophy as HSBC, Lloyds-TSB and the projected banking Behemoth Citigroup. Is looking back, then, anything more than an exercise in nostalgia? That is the question this epilogue seeks to answer. It should not be read as a history of the bank since 1945, but as an essay on the role history has performed in ensuring its post-war survival and its present success.
^a

The history of N. M. Rothschild & Sons might have ended in the 1940s. That it did not owed much to Anthony de Rothschild. After his brilliant youth at Harrow and Cambridge, and his distinguished record in the Great War, he had dedicated himself to conserving his heritage as a Rothschild. Like so many of his ancestors, he was a keen collector, with a particular enthusiasm for Chinese ceramics, and a devotee of first growth clarets.
¹
He had been elected to the Jockey Club in 1925 and kept up his father’s stable of horses and house at Newmarket. He had married (in 1926) Yvonne Cahen d‘Anvers, whose family had been associated with de Rothschild Frères since the 1850s (he had even met her at his relative the Marquess of Crewe’s residence when the latter was ambassador in Paris). His role in the Jewish community also echoed that of previous generations: like his uncle Natty, he was chairman of the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company; like his father and his great-uncle Anthony before him, he was president of the Jews’ Free School. Yet the greatest challenge Anthony faced was in preserving his family’s most fundamental role: as bankers.

To this task he brought a certain austere diligence. Every day, he commuted by train from Leighton Buzzard (the nearest station to his house at Ascott) to Euston and on to New Court. After lunch in the partners’ dining room, Harold Nicolson described being “hurried out” at 2.30 p.m., “as then the work begins again and the great wheels of the Maison Rothschild revolve.” In truth, however, the war had substantially reduced the size of N. M. Rothschild’s “wheels”—and Anthony’s approach to business was not calculated to make them revolve at great speed. “They know where we live,” Ronald Palin remembered him as saying. “If they want to do business with us let them come and talk to us.” As a watchword for the post-war world, this was perhaps too fatalistic. Edmund found life at New Court distinctly sedate when he returned from the war: the partners arrived at the Room between 10 and 10.30 a.m. and spent the morning perusing the incoming mail “to see if there was anything likely to result in some business”:

Apart from a short and unhappy New York apprenticeship at Guaranty Trust and Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (where he “was made to feel very much the poor relation”), Edmund received little financial training before he became a partner. His younger brother Leopold, who became a partner in 1956, also did a tour of duty at Kuhn, Loeb, as well as at Morgan Stanley and Glyn, Mills; but Anthony had advised him
not
to read economics at Cambridge precisely because he was expected to become a partner. Nor was the former Lloyd’s treasurer David Colville—who now came to New Court as a kind of de
facto
partner—strictly speaking new blood: his step-grandmother was the Marchioness of Crewe, daughter of Hannah Rosebery. Much of the day-to-day running of the business was left to Hugh Davies, who had succeeded Samuel Stephany as general manager, and his assistant Michael Bucks—both men who had worked their way up through the clerical ranks at N. M. Rothschild.