CHAPTER XI — THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939-45)

 

All three French Rothschilds at the head of the bank today were serving at the front when Germany overran France in the spring of 1940. The sons of Baron Robert — Alain and Élie, thirty and twenty-three years old — were taken prisoner, Alain in the hospital where he was removed after being wounded, £lie near the Belgian frontier. £lie had gone to war on a horse and was captured along with most of his cavalry regiment, the truly Anciens IIèmes Cuirassiers. Both brothers were fortunate enough to be treated as officers, not as Jews.

Nevertheless, they raged at the inactivity imposed upon them, Élie immediately began to plot an escape from Nienburg, near Hamburg, where he was imprisoned, but his plans were detected and he was sent to Colditz for a year, then to Lübeck, an even more rigorous reprisal camp, where he finished the war. The camp, however, had one attraction; here he became united with his brother, Alain, who had tried to escape from Oflag 6, at Soest, in a laundry basket of dirty linen. He had been caught and transferred to Lübeck as a punishment.

Only in the unlikely field of matrimony was the restless, rebellious Élie successful in imposing his will. He wrote to his childhood sweetheart, the clever, vivacious Liliane Fould-Springer, and asked if she would marry him by proxy. Although the Fould-Springers were opposed to the idea, pointing out that it was not helpful to bear the name of Rothschild with the Gestapo swarming over France, Liliane agreed. The wedding ceremonies of bride and groom took place on different days many months apart. Élie gave his pledge at Colditz on 7 October 1941, and Liliane at Cannes on 7 April 1942.

Such circumstances would make any marriage poignant, but this one also had a Romeo and Juliet flavour, for Liliane was a great-niece of Achille Fould who had fought James de Rothschild so bitterly in the days of the Second Empire. Fould’s Crédit Mobilier had threatened to smash the Rothschild financial supremacy, but in the end attacker, and not attacked, had bitten the dust.

The third Rothschild who was at the front when German armour came pouring through France was Guy, son and heir of the senior partner of Messieurs de Rothschild Frères, Baron Édouard. Édouard and his cousin Robert, both elderly gentlemen, had fled to New York in the spring of 1940. Guy served in a motorized cavalry unit which fought in Belgium and eventually retreated to Dunkirk where it was evacuated by the British. Guy returned to France almost at once; a few months later his regiment was disbanded and although the tide was running strongly against Jews, he was singled out to carry the standard, an honour reserved for the bravest. A year later he joined his wife and father in America, but in the spring of 1943 he made his way back to London to serve Charles de Gaulle. His ship was torpedoed en route and he spent the night — seven hours in all — on a raft top-heavy with people and washed by every wave. At dawn the survivors were rescued by a British destroyer. When Guy reached England he spent a few days recuperating as a guest of his cousin, Miriam Rothschild, in Northamptonshire. Ashton Wold, the big house belonging to Miriam’s mother, had been turned into a hospital. Miriam worked at the Ministry of Supply during the week but often helped in the hospital at weekends. Here she met a handsome Hungarian-Jewish refugee who had anglicized his name to George Lane, joined the British commandos, and been wounded in action. In 1941, after a whirlwind courtship, Miriam married him.

All Rothschilds of fighting age squeezed the maximum adventure out of the war. It was a conflict that perfectly suited the family temperament. Not only was the cause just, not only did it have a special significance for Jews, but the swiftly changing tempo, the cross currents of passionate allegiance and secret resistance offered great scope to intrepid spirits. Although, as someone pointed out, the Rothschilds were field-marshals in civilian life, a rank denied them in war, each one operated with the authority and individuality of a special agent; and in some instances that is what they were.

Dr Henri de Rothschild’s two sons, both over forty in 1943, arrived in London within a few months of Guy. James, who had flown aeroplanes in the First World War, joined de Gaulle’s Military Liaison section, while Philippe trained in the civil affairs department. Philippe had had all sorts of hair-raising adventures. He had gone to Morocco in 1940 to escape the German occupation, but had been arrested by the Vichy Government. In prison he started a keep-fit campaign and a language school, his star pupil being M. Mendès-France. Finally he was released and returned to France, but as he soon saw that he was heading for a concentration camp, he walked across the Pyrenees, made his way to Portugal and embarked for England. When he arrived in London he went to see M. Gaston Palewski at the Hyde Park Hotel. As he was walking through the lobby a stranger ran up to him and embraced him with deep emotion saying: ‘Thank you, thank you, for helping us through the blitz and making life bearable.’ Philippe was amazed. ‘Who are you? What on earth are you talking about?’ ‘Mouton Rothschild, Baron Philippe, those lovely bottles, each one with your name on it!’, the man replied and then introduced himself as Cyril Connolly.

Before long Philippe found himself billeted at the Free French Club, none other than 107 Piccadilly. This was the house bought by Nathan Rothschild in the 1820s and later occupied by Nathan’s daughter Hannah, a sister of Philippe’s great-grandfather. However, with the cross-channel invasion the Rothschilds again were scattered far and wide. James’s wife, Claude, was smuggled into France before the landings to make contact with resistance workers imprisoned by the Germans. For her work she received the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur. Guy was one of the first to arrive in Paris, where he served as an aide to de Gaulle’s Military Governor, while James was attached to a French fighting unit as an interpreter. Philippe was put in charge of the Le Havre area and, like Claude, won the Croix de Guerre, and the Légion d’Honneur; these decorations were also won by Guy, Alain and Élie.

Meanwhile Lionel’s eldest son, the English Edmund, was serving in the British Army. Eddie had graduated from Cambridge in the spring of 1938 and in the autumn had been sent around the world by his father as the finishing touch to the educative process. The year, of course, was overshadowed by Hitler’s menacing behaviour and Eddie, a quiet, thoughtful youth with a profound sense of mission unusual in someone barely twenty-two, was deeply disturbed. ‘Am I Civis Britannicus or have I to give up everything I know and have and become Civis Judaeus?’ he wrote in his diary after Munich, on 5 October 1939. ‘… A day of almost unceasing rain. The world seems to weep for the tormented people of Israel — or is it fancy?’[145]

When war broke out Edmund joined the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry, and served as a captain in an artillery regiment in North Africa and Italy. In 1944 Churchill authorized the formation of a Jewish Infantry Brigade and Edmund joined the field regiment as a major in command of ‘P’ Battery. The Brigade began as a mixture of Yorkshiremen and Jews but grew to contain Jewish refugees from almost every country in Europe and from Palestine. As Palestine was not a nation, and the British did not wish to offend Arab susceptibilities, no Palestinian flag was allowed to be displayed. However, Major Rothschild found a happy compromise. ‘When we had a march past the General,’ wrote Edmund, ‘I arranged a dais with two flagpoles, one with the Union Jack and the other with the blue-and-white Magden David flag. The General looked very sharply at me and asked. “What is this?” I replied, “Sir, that is the P Battery Standard” and we got away with it.’[146]

After VE Day Edmund’s brigade marched from Italy across the Alps through Germany to Holland and Belgium. On the way they went through Mannheim. At the entrance to the city they passed a stone triumphal arch with the inscription ‘Judenrein’ engraved on it. The city had been heavily bombed and shelled and there was scarcely a house left standing.

I was leading the column in an armoured car [wrote Edmund]. As we entered the city, a few people came out of the rubble of their shattered houses to stare at us and the word went round: ‘Die Juden kommen, die Juden kommen.’ More and more people came out to watch us pass and by the time we came to the centre of the city, before crossing the Rhine, about two hundred people had gathered in the central square. Suddenly there was a scuffle and from out of the crowd came three or four people dressed in Belsen garb who ran toward my armoured car, where they knelt down and kissed the sign on it, the Magden David.[147]

It would have been even more dramatic if Edmund’s regiment had marched through Frankfurt or Cassel, but these cities were in the American sector. Nevertheless history had its own bizarre twists, for the princely family of Hesse-Cassel, like the Rothschilds, had continued to prosper through the years and, when war broke out in 1939, were one of the richest families in Europe. Although in the days of Napoleon the Hesses and the Rothschilds had joined hands against the common aggressor, this time the two families were on opposite sides.

The head of the Hesse-Cassels, Prince Philip, was a passionate supporter of Hitler; and as he was married to Princess Mafalda, daughter of the King of Italy, he was chosen to serve as a messenger between Hitler and Mussolini. When Hitler quarrelled with the Italian dictator, poor Mafalda was thrown into a concentration camp. A deeply spiritual woman, she managed to forget her own tribulations and devoted herself to nursing and caring for her fellow sufferers. Eventually she died of starvation and maltreatment, one of the great heroines of the war.

Prince Philip survived and is still alive, living not far from Frankfurt at the palace of the Empress Frederick (Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter), the Friedrichshof at Kronberg, which has been turned into a hotel. Apparently the Hesse-Cassels continue to have a talent for making money, for although Prince Philip backed the wrong side and survived a holocaust, he is reputed to be the richest man in Germany, and the richest prince in Europe. This is the same claim that people made in 1800 for the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, the ancestor who unwittingly helped Mayer Rothschild to lay the foundation of his own family fortune.

*

Meanwhile Anthony and Lionel de Rothschild tried to keep the bank running. During the terrible air attacks on the City in 1940-41 Anthony was at his desk in New Court every day. In the evenings, accompanied by his wife, Yvonne, he had supper in the restaurant and slept in the cellar, surrounded by vaults and safe deposit boxes. The morning sun often rose on a world of chaos: street after street not only had its gaping holes, but was inundated with water from broken mains. New Court seemed to be protected by some magical hand, for soon it stood alone, a single building, looking on a sea of rubble.

Nevertheless the brothers took precautions. Early in 1940 it occurred to them that if a bomb hit New Court both the dynasty and the business might come to an end. As a result they formed Rothschilds Continuations Ltd, a holding company, to which the shares of the bank were transferred and which guaranteed a future for Rothschild youths. Lionel died peacefully, however, in 1942, and Anthony remained in sole charge until his own retirement fourteen years later. 

The war offered not only scope but variety, and the Rothschilds took full advantage of the diversions open to them in the line of duty. This particularly applied to twenty-nine-year-old Victor, the present Lord Rothschild, who offered his services to the Ministry of War and soon found himself detailed to dismantle ‘sabotage bombs’.

This occupation had one advantage. It was not overcrowded, therefore if one survived it was easy to reach the top. Furthermore there were no experts to awe the novice, as the sabotage bombs manufactured by the Germans were new and ingenious. They were camouflaged to look like a variety of harmless objects such as lumps of coal, a thermos flask, containing real tea, a mackintosh, a walking stick, a coat hanger.

The bombs contained a fuse connected to a delay mechanism which sometimes operated by clockwork, sometimes by acid eating through metal. The problem was to get the fuse out of the bomb. The enemy made the operation as difficult as possible, usually by incorporating booby traps so that the removal of the fuse caused the bomb to explode; sometimes the fuse itself was booby-trapped so that it exploded when it was being examined after removal.

Many of these bombs found their way from Algeciras to Gibraltar. The Spaniards allowed the Germans to sink a vessel outside the Algeciras harbour, from which deep-sea divers swam across to Gibraltar. Sometimes they tried to blow up Allied shipping, sometimes they slipped their bombs into crates of vegetables, or other articles, being sent to Britain.

There was no one to instruct Lord Rothschild in his work. Dismantling bombs, he was told, was simply a question of trial and error, and not too much error. Fortunately he proved to be a brilliant choice. ‘Who else,’ commented a colleague, ‘combined nimble, jazz-playing fingers with a first-class scientific brain?’ A stout heart also was a qualification, for Victor frequently was forced to face the unpleasant consequences of failure. Once he was called upon to deal with a crate of onions that had been imported from Spain and had turned up in Northampton. ‘The fuse,’ he wrote, ‘turned out to be a type that might be booby-trapped. On this occasion when taking the bomb to pieces I thought it desirable for there to be a record in case of accidents, and I therefore dictated through a microphone each step in the process of dismantling the bomb.’

On another occasion, after travelling to Liverpool to lecture the police on sabotage, one of the officers asked him to look at a large can of liquid eggs which had come from China but was thought to have been interfered with in Gibraltar. ‘Having extracted the fuse,’ wrote Victor, ‘which was a seven-day clockwork type, I took the bomb and its fuse to London in my car. The fuse was suspected of being booby-trapped as a Naval Officer in Gibraltar had, a few weeks earlier, been seriously wounded when taking an identical fuse to pieces. I took the fuse to pieces in my office in London, kneeling behind a heavily padded armchair so that if it was booby-trapped, only my hands and the lower part of my arms would be damaged. All went well.’[148]

Soon Colonel Rothschild was looked upon as the nation’s leading expert in dismantling; and, as one step leads to another, it occurred to some fanciful brain that he was just the person to protect one of Britain’s ‘key points’ against enemy saboteurs. The key point was Winston Churchill; the anticipated weapon, poison; the carrier, gifts of food, drink or cigars. On one occasion when the Prime Minister was walking from 10 Downing Street to the House of Commons, a French General came up to him, saluted smartly, and presented him with a Virginia ham, one of his favourite delicacies. Churchill told the secretary who was accompanying him to give it to the Downing Street cook with instructions that he would have it for breakfast. According to routine, however, the ham was sent to Rothschild to ensure that it had not been poisoned. The latter consulted the Medical Research Council, who said that in the twelve hours available there was no chance of testing it for deadly bacteria. But if, on the other hand, it had been poisoned, the best way of finding out would be to feed a slice to the Medical Research Council’s cat, which they were prepared to sacrifice for the sake of the Prime Minister. This was done, and when in the early hours of the morning the cat leapt out of its basket and swished its tail, Churchill was allowed to have the ham for breakfast.

The Prime Minister was not told that his food was scrutinized for poison; but officials were unable to hide the fact that his cigars were examined, for the simple reason that whenever he received this sort of gift he did not see it for days, sometimes weeks. On one occasion, when he was running out of Havana cigars, an admirer sent him a supply of ten thousand. ‘But where are they?’ he fumed. ‘Who’s whisked them away? It doesn’t seem too much to ask that I should be allowed to enjoy my own cigars …’ So he was told that Victor Rothschild, whose grandfather had entertained him as a youth, was vetting them for explosives or other lethal substances. In order to satisfy Churchill’s impatience Lord Rothschild decided to rely on statistical techniques, testing one in every ten, or some such number. Apparently this fascinated Churchill, who liked to speculate on the gamble, comparing it romantically to Russian roulette.

Occasionally the Rothschild team derived unexpected benefit from their protective role. At the end of the war they accompanied Churchill to Paris, supposedly to ward off attempts on his life. A distinguished industrialist presented him with twelve bottles of very old, priceless Armagnac which, as usual, were sent to Victor for examination. ‘I said,’ Lord Rothschild wrote many years later, ‘that I could not take the responsibility of releasing the bottles to him unless a thirteenth was produced for testing. The industrialist reluctantly agreed to this and I and my colleague had a very enjoyable evening.’[149]

While in Paris Victor installed himself at 23 Avenue de Marigny, the great house set in several acres of gardens in the midst of Paris, belonging to the Robert de Rothschilds and their children, Diane, Alain, Cécile and Élie. This imposing residence, across the street from the Élysée Palace, was packed with priceless furniture and objets d’art. Inexplicably, it was the only Rothschild property in the capital that had not been stripped of its possessions, despite the fact that it served as German Air Force Headquarters and often was frequented by Hermann Goering, famous for his light fingers. Later, when the Rothschilds’ housekeeper, who remained in charge throughout the occupation, was asked why the Germans had respected the property, she replied: ‘Even the Germans know that Führers come and go but the Rothschilds remain forever.’ The French servants, however, had taken no chances and had done everything in their power to remove temptation from the path of the invaders. They had removed the most valuable pictures and other priceless objects to a secret room, behind the bookcases, where they remained undiscovered throughout the occupation.

The house was not very comfortable in 1944 due to a shortage of fuel for heat and water. But Victor decided that as it had escaped despoliation by the Germans it would be sad to see it ransacked by the Allies, and dutifully took possession. Luckily he had some influence with the Americans as he was seconded to the United States Army to give a course on the mysteries of counter-sabotage. Indeed, in 1946 he was awarded the US Bronze Star for his work. In the citation President Truman referred to him as ‘one of the world’s greatest experts’. ‘He gave unstintingly of his time and energy,’ said Truman, ‘in personally training American officers as counter-sabotage specialists. He wrote and edited many technical manuals used as textbooks by the US Army, especially by bomb-disposal engineers and counter-intelligence personnel.’[150]

During this period Victor prevented rapacious generals from taking possession of his cousins’ house. He managed to hold them at bay until Baron Robert’s daughters — Diane and Cécile — his sons, daughters-in-law and grand-children reinstalled themselves under the spacious family roof.

Other Rothschilds were not so fortunate. Forced to flee for their lives when the German army streamed through France in the spring of 1940, all members of the family made hasty attempts to safeguard their most valuable possessions. The task was daunting, as many Rothschilds — such as Henri, Édouard, Maurice, and Maurice’s sister, Miriam, not only owned large houses in Paris (in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, La Muette, the Rue de Monceau, and the Rue Saint-Florentin), but equally imposing houses in the country, ranging from Robert’s Chateau de Laversine, near Chantilly, to Édouard’s palace at Ferrières; Henri’s Abbaye des Vaulx de Cemay to Maurice’s Armainvilliers. They placed their valuables in the homes of friends, in bank vaults, neutral embassies and museums. One of the hiding places in the south-west of France was discovered by the French authorities because of ‘denunciation’ by an anonymous informer. The directors of the Louvre were informed and immediately took the treasures under their protection, ‘for the duration’.

Yet much of it was to no avail. In the autumn of 1940 Field Marshal Keitel, Commander of the German Armed Forces, announced that Alfred Rosenberg had been appointed custodian of the arts, a polite word for looter-in-chief and that all subterfuges to protect Jewish property would be uncovered and declared null and void by the Gestapo. Keitel’s declaration read as follows: The ownership status before the war in France, prior to the declaration of war on September 1,1939, shall be the criterion.

Ownership transfers to the French State or similar transfers completed after this date are irrelevant and legally invalid (for example Polish and Czech libraries in Paris, possessions of the Palais Rothschild or other ownerless Jewish possessions). Reservations regarding search, seizure and transportation to Germany on the basis of the above reasons will not be recognized.

Reichsleiter Rosenberg and/or his deputy Reichshauptstellenleiter Ebert have received clear instructions from the Führer personally governing the right of seizure; he is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Fuhrer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.

Hitler meant business, for he instructed the Gestapo to assist Rosenberg in uncovering ‘hidden Jewish treasures’, and Rosenberg assembled a staff of art experts to deal with the confiscated objects. When Paris was liberated one of Rosenberg’s Nazi assistants told the French military authorities: After the seizure of the most famous Jewish art collections in Paris, all abandoned dwellings of the wealthy Parisian Jews, as well as the warehouses of all shipping firms and many other art depots of emigrated Jews, which were very often camouflaged by French gentiles, were systematically searched by the special staff for pictorial art and very considerable art treasures were found in this manner. These seizures were carried out on the basis of exhaustive preliminary investigations into the address lists of the French police authorities, on the basis of Jewish handbooks, warehouses inventories and order books of French art and collection catalogues. The clearly established Jewish origin of the individual owners was proved in each case in cooperation with the French police authorities and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) as well as on the basis of the political source material of the staff itself.[151]

The author of this statement swore to the following affidavit, revealing that nearly twenty per cent of the confiscated treasures came from the Rothschilds.

Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s Staff St. Georgen/Attergau

Special Staff for Pictorial Arts Kogl I, 14 July 1944

Enumeration of seized works of art, according to the inventory lists received up to 13 July 1944 from 203 locations.

The most important locations [collections] are: 

I. ROTHSCHILD with 3,978 inventory numbers

II. KAHN with 1,202 inventory numbers

III. David WEILL with 1,121 inventory numbers

IV. Levy de VENZION with 989 inventory numbers

V. SEILGMANN Brothers with 556 inventory numbers

The total number of objects is 21,903.

Over 137 freight cars stacked with works of art left France for Germany in the three years from 1941 to 1944. Yet once again the adage about the ill wind was proved accurate, for if the valuables had not been removed it is doubtful whether they would have survived the incoming Allied armies. As it was, they were handled with great care by the German art experts.

These shipments were taken to six repositories in the Reich, unpacked and stored with attention to all conservation, air raid and fire protection measures … A restoration workshop equipped with all technical aids was established by the special staff at one of the repositories (Buxheim) and has been occupied with the care and restoration of seized articles of artistic value … Several hundreds of the works of art that had been neglected by their Jewish owners or had earlier been inexpertly restored were restored in this workshop and their preservation assured.[152]

In the autumn of 1944, however, no one knew what had happened to the treasures exported to Germany. That spring James Rorimer of New York Metropolitan Museum of Art had been appointed Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Officer attached to the American Seventh Army. Originally his task was to protect cultural objects in the wake of the invading forces, but after a stay of several months in Paris he became increasingly interested in ‘the missing treasures’ that had vanished from France to Germany. He did his own detective work, and placed his faith in Mile Rose Valland, who had worked at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, and been present during Goering’s many visits to select works of art for his private collections. Rose was certain, although she had no proof, that many of France’s treasures had gone to the two castles near Füssen on the southern confines of Bavaria. One of these was Neuschwanstein, a fantastic pseudo-Gothic castle constructed by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

James Rorimer put his faith in Rose and when the American army reached Füssen in the spring of 1945 he took a jeep and drove to Ludwig’s remote summer palace. ‘As we approached from the north through an open valley,’ he wrote, ‘it looked in its mountain setting like a prototype of all story-book castles. It was a castle in the air come to life for egocentric and mad thirsters after power; a picturesque, romantic and remote setting for a gangster crowd to carry on its art looting activities.’

As the castle was built at the side of a mountain the floors were linked by almost vertical winding staircases. Works of art were stacked in every nook and cranny, most of them marked with a Paris cypher; paintings, jewellery, furniture, tapestries, books, silver, bric-a-brac, everything was there.

We were guided to a hidden, thick steel door; this one locked with two keys. Inside there were two large chests of world-famous Rothschild jewels and box upon box of jewel-encrusted metalwork …

In April of 1941 thirty special baggage cars of art objects, and in October of that same year twenty-three carloads more, had been brought here from France. One shipment alone of these objects back to France required 36 freight cars for 1,221 crates which contained 6,ooo objects. I passed through the rooms as in a trance, hoping that the Germans had lived up to their reputation for being methodical and had photographs, catalogues and records of all these things. Without them it would take twenty years to identify the agglomeration of loot.[153]

Rorimer’s hopes were realized. In one room there was a photographic laboratory in which Rosenberg’s acquisitions were recorded of the 203 private collections taken from France. Their contents revealed that the bulk of Rothschild property was in the building: furniture stacked to the ceiling in specially constructed racks, tapestried fire screens, books, jewels, and paintings, among them Baron Maurice’s Three Graces by Rubens.

The filing cabinets were so vitally important that they had to be protected.

We could take no chances on any harm coming to these irreplaceable records [wrote Rorimer]. We decided that neither the Germans not the American guards could be permitted to enter these two rooms under any circumstances. Toward that end we nailed down the trap door in the floor, which connected with a secret ladder, and covered it with a heavy steel trunk. We locked the doors behind us, and as a final expedient I took one of the antique Rothschild seals — SEMPER FIDELIS — and sealed the doors with sealing wax and cord.

Gradually members of the Rothschild family filtered back to France and gradually their possessions were restored to them. As the older generation had been stripped of their nationality by the Vichy Government, and some of the properties put up to auction, lawyers wrangled for months to straighten out the legal complications. Apparently most of the people who had bought their confiscated possessions were only too willing to return them if they could get back their money. The new government agreed to reimburse, and in the end the difficulties were overcome.

The Austrian Rothschilds decided to remain in the United States. As most of Central Europe had come under Soviet rule, there was no future for private bankers in this part of the world. Eugene bought a house on Long Island where he lived with his wife, a famous beauty, the former Countess Kitty Shönborn. In 1946 she died, and after this he spent most of his time travelling.

He had a minor triumph involving no less a person than Einstein. Although Eugene had never cared for banking he was very good at figures and amused himself by studying mathematics. Indeed, like other Rothschilds, he grew so professional in his hobby that he read Einstein’s theories for relaxation; and one day he came across a mistake in the great man’s logic. He wrote to him, and a week later received effusive thanks for having discovered a printer’s error.

The fortunes of Eugene and Louis seemed to resemble a seesaw, for when one was down the other was up. Only two months before Eugene became a widower, sixty-four-year-old, dyed-in-the-wool bachelor Louis had walked to the altar with an enchanting Austrian lady, Countess Hilda von Auersperg. Hilda soon made a home for her sophisticated bridegroom in Vermont of all places. Apparently the hills reminded Louis of the Alps, and the taciturn Vermonters, who talked in monosyllables, were a welcome contrast to prying gossip writers. Furthermore, as Louis was a scientist, he enjoyed filling his house with professors from nearby Dartmouth College and discussing botany and art.

In 1947 Louis and his bride visited Austria. The Russians were still in Vienna, and the country, once again truncated, was in severe economic difficulties. News of the Rothschild visit spread and a crowd gathered outside the hotel where they were staying. Hundreds of people begged the Baron for help and he gave it to them. He turned over to the Austrian Government all the properties that originally had been seized by the Austrian Nazis but which, after much litigation, had been partially restored to him. His gift, however, had a proviso. The Government was obliged to pass a special law converting the Rothschild assets into a state-administered pension fund, the object of which was to provide each of Louis’s former domestic and business employees with the same security and income as that enjoyed by retired civil servants. Then Louis returned to Vermont. He made a practice of visiting the Caribbean in the winter, and in 1955 died while swimming in Montego Bay.

Meanwhile Louis’s brother, Eugene, had married an English actress, Jeanne Stewart. They lived for many years in the house on Long Island but in the 1960s returned to Europe and bought a flat in Monte-Carlo. Eugene is still alive, and will soon celebrate his ninetieth birthday.

*

While the Austrian Rothschilds were buying houses in America, the French Rothschilds, led by seventy-seven-year-old Baron Édouard and sixty-three-year-old Baron Robert, were trying to pick up the pieces and reopen the bank on the Rue Laffitte. Within a few weeks of returning to Paris in 1945 Edouard sent a trusted employee, old M. Moccand, on a tour of France to ‘dig up’ the securities that had vanished from the vaults, almost magically, as German armour rolled into the capital.

The trip was not easy as hundreds of bridges had been destroyed and miles of railway track pulled up by the Germans. He first went to Vercors, a grassy plateau five hundred miles southeast of Paris, where bitter fighting had taken place. Part of the way, Moccand travelled by train, but where there were no tracks he thumbed rides from army lorries or took to his feet, stumbling over roads blasted by shelling. As things were still in a state of flux he slept with a gun beside him, never knowing whether he would be accosted by stragglers or confronted by members of the resistance wedded to an anarchistic life.

Finally he reached a small farmhouse on the edge of the plateau. The tenant farmer had once been employed by Messieurs de Rothschild Frères as a teller. ‘It’s all here,’ he told Moccand warmly. ‘Come and see for yourself.’ Moccand followed him into a cellar where several iron chests were stored. They were stacked with important papers; 50,000,000 francs in negotiable securities, property titles, industrial records, archives. The scene was yet another variation of history. One hundred and fifty years earlier there had been another cellar with chests filled with important documents. On this occasion the Rothschilds had saved the fortune of the Elector; now others, if not in a position to save the fortune of the Rothschilds, at least were shoring up the losses of Rothschild customers, for almost all the valuables belonged to Jewish clients.

Moccand spent three weeks travelling about France. Among the people he visited was a young Parisian clerk and his wife at a seaside villa near Marseilles, who had hidden securities in an artesian well; an insurance salesman in the Dordogne and a shopkeeper in Auvergne who had concealed bank notes under planks in the floor. When Moccand had finished his preliminary visits, he bought an old truck and retraced his steps, picking up the valuables. After three months he limped into Paris with cash and papers worth some millions of francs.

However, M. Moccand was not the only person engaged in retrieving the bank’s treasures. Over fifty dummy accounts had been opened in provincial banks all over France to conceal the property of more Jewish clients. There were also two holding companies in Lyons and a third in Marseilles, created solely as repositories for imperilled securities. It took six months before this errant capital was rounded up and once again placed in the vaults of the Rue Laffitte. What was astonishing was the fact that not a single stock or bond withdrawn under the noses of Germany’s financial gauleiters had been lost or misappropriated by the chain of hands through which it had passed.

*

No one knew what to make of the Paris Bourse on 30 June 1949. There was no reason for a slump, yet the great Royal Dutch Shell shares dipped unexpectedly. So did those of the metal combine, Rio Tinto; the giant mining corporation, Le Nickel; and the diamond trust of De Beers. Brokers were surprised, then anxious, and many hurried to sell. At the close of the day prices were lower than they had been for months.

Next morning the mystery grew less mysterious when the public read that eighty-one-year-old Baron Édouard de Rothschild had died in the morning of the previous day. The Rothschilds were heavy shareholders in all the companies that had fallen. The Baron’s obituary, on the front page of the Paris papers, was accompanied by financial articles speculating on his estate, and explaining that the tax on the dead man’s investments would be based on closing prices on the day of the decease. The family always mounted combined operations in time of crisis, and together had driven down the quotations. And now, while the funeral arrangements were being made, they again acted in concert, rebuying all the shares which they had sold forty-eight hours earlier.

A new generation was now in charge of the Rothschild interests in France, for Baron Edouard’s two cousins, Robert who had run the bank with him before the war, and Henri the doctor-playwright, had preceded him to the grave by a few months. The main responsibility fell on Edouard’s only son, forty-year-old Baron Guy. This slim, elegant, fair-haired man was the most unRothschild-looking Rothschild ever to become head of the bank. As one writer pointed out, he looked more like a marquis in a sophisticated play than the grandson of the formidable Alphonse who had raised the French indemnity after the war with Prussia, or the great-grandson of James, gold-runner to Wellington’s armies and founder of the Chemin de Fer du Nord.

But if Guy lacked the protruding lip and the protruding Rothschild girth, no one could accuse him of a scarcity of Rothschild energy. Everything seemed to fall on his plate at once, but he dealt with it all, quietly, quickly, effectively. He sold the great family house off the Place de la Concorde, which had once belonged to Prince Talleyrand, to the only customer rich enough to buy it: the United States Government. The residence had been stripped of its furnishings by the Nazis and would have cost millions to put in order. Besides, in the uncertainties of the post-war era it was too big, even for a Rothschild. First it became Headquarters for the Marshal Plan; then Headquarters for the US Mission to NATO; and finally the home of various European regional organizations.

However, Guy held on to Ferrières, the family château built a hundred years earlier and set in nine thousand acres of farmland, nineteen miles east of Paris. This, too, had been ransacked by the Germans who not only took carpets and furniture but to everyone’s puzzlement even stripped the zoo of its animals, why nobody knows to this day. Gradually the objets d’art unearthed by Rorimer arrived back in France and Ferrières became a huge storage vault for the entire family. First came train loads of looted Italian faïences and master paintings; then fifty-nine cases of rare books; then tapestries and silver and furniture, some of the pieces restored by craftsmen and in much better condition than when they were taken. Other works of art came from other hiding places; some from the foreign embassies who had hidden them in their cellars for the duration; others from the Louvre which had managed to disguise them by mixing them in other people’s collections. As usual, the Rothschilds showed their gratitude in a princely way. Alain and Élie and their sisters said thank you by bequeathing to the Louvre several priceless works of art including Gainsborough’s Lady Alston, while Guy and his sisters donated The Countess Doria by Van Dyck.

Ferrières remained shut and uninhabited for over a decade. During this period an American visitor was taken through the dismantled rooms by a caretaker. ‘At first he found himself in a golden thicket of clocks. He thought he had stumbled into a clock museum until the caretaker explained that this was merely the room where the chateau’s timepieces were stored. Next the visitor came upon a huge, glorious array of Louis XIV and XV chairs. In still another chamber there was a dazzle of tables. Finally he saw a number of objects adorably wrought out of rosewood and flowered antique Chinese porcelain. He puzzled, looked again — and understood the caretaker’s smile. Here stood scores of the world’s most exquisite bidets.’[154]

Houses and objets d’art were only a small part of Baron Guy’s concern. As his father had been the biggest racehorse owner in France, and as his stables had been put up to auction in 1941, the consequences took a great deal of unravelling. Some things, of course, could not be put right. Many of Edouard’s mares had been crossed with stallions belonging to Marcel Boussac, France’s textile king and Rothschild’s greatest rival at Longchamp.

M. Boussac ungenerously pronounced the forced unions as ‘unauthorized and irregular’; yet it was vital for the Baron Guy to persuade the arbiters of the Stud Book, the equine Almanack de Gotha, to register the Rothschild colts, the progeny of these illegal matches. At first the committee refused to consider it, but after months of argument the judges relented and legitimized the issue.

Under Guy’s aegis the reconstructed stables began to acquire the same prestige that his father had enjoyed. As early as 1950 he topped the list of both owners and breeders and in 1963 his champion, the four-year-old stallion, Exbury, won the Coronation Cup at Epsom and the Arc de Triomphe at Longchamps. Shortly afterwards it was sold to a syndicate for over £400,000 and for years Exbury earned its owners a steady quarter of a million a year.

While the French Rothschilds were feeling their way in the post-war world, the English Rothschilds were trying to come to grips with the austerity imposed by the hardships of peace, and exalted by a Labour Government determined, as Churchill unfairly put it, on an equality of misery. More of the Rothschild houses came on the market. Leo’s house at 5 Hamilton Place became a club, Les Ambassadeurs, while Charles Rothschild’s house in Kensington Palace Gardens was sold to the Rumanians for an embassy. And although Anthony, senior partner of the bank, continued to live at his country house, Ascott, near Wing, filled with treasures gathered by himself over the years, in 1949 he handed it over to the protective embrace of the National Trust.

Since the death of his cousin Lionel, in 1942, Anthony had run the bank alone. Although in 1946 he was joined by Lionel’s son, Edmund, who had inherited the great estate at Exbury, the young man could not relieve him of any responsibility until he had learned the business. The war years were worrying enough for bankers; but the post-war years, with their periodical currency crises, were even more of a nightmare. The depressed 1930s seemed to belong to a world of serenity. The fact that times were changing becoming startlingly apparent when, in 1949, Anthony ceased to arrive in New Court in a chauffeur-driven limousine and took the tube to work. Much to his surprise he found the journey far quicker than travelling by car; others copied him, causing ‘a tycoons’ mini-revolution’.

Many people felt that by this act alone the Rothschilds had accepted the ultimate in democratization. Yet in other ways Anthony was not prepared to compromise. A grand seigneur, intellectual, artistic, a man of impeccable taste, the new era with its strident voice and aggressive competition was inimical to everything in which he believed. Yet while newcomers scrambled to get business, one of the biggest development schemes of all times fell into Anthony’s lap, without his so much as lifting a finger for it.

It happened because of the Rothschild name. In 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had become Prime Minister for the second time, he received Mr Smallwood, the Premier of Newfoundland. Smallwood unfolded plans for a vast development scheme in Labrador and Newfoundland. To carry it out British capital was needed on a truly mammoth scale. ‘After Mr Smallwood had left the Cabinet Room,’ wrote Edmund de Rothschild, ‘Churchill turned to his private secretary, J. R. Colville and said: “Jock, whom do we know in the City?”’ It is one of those coincidences of destiny that Jock Colville, a life-long friend, had been that very day at New Court and he at once replied: ‘Rothschilds.’ ‘“Good”,’ said Churchill and began to quote from the Lord Chancellor’s song in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe: The shares are a penny and ever so many Are taken by Rothschild and Baring, And just as a few are allotted to you You awake with a shudder despairing

The great man was a personal friend of Anthony and when the consortium of firms was formed he was delighted that N. M. Rothschild & Sons should head it. Later he wrote to Edmund referring to the close relations between the two families and adding: ‘I am very glad to feel that the connection is not broken in my old age.’

After a good many luncheons and a good many hours of talk Brinco — the British Newfoundland Corporation — came into being, backed by a consortium of twenty-nine major firms, among them the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company, Bowaters, English Electric, the Frobisher Mining Company and Rio Tinto.

Although Anthony laid the foundation of Brinco, he was taken ill a few years later and the project fell into Edmund’s lap, where it has remained ever since. Brinco’s terms of reference were breath-taking: the exploratory rights to sixty thousand square miles in Newfoundland and Labrador, an area larger than England and Wales, containing enormous resources in minerals, timber and water. Altogether in the last twenty years Brinco has earmarked over £1,000,000,000 for development. The hydro-electric power scheme at Churchill Falls in Labrador is the largest private-enterprise undertaking in North America. Here, at one site, seven millions of horse power are harnessed. The underground power house covers more space than New York’s Grand Central Station, and each of the eleven generators is the size of a nine-storey building.

But Brinco was only a beginning. More Rothschilds and more triumphs were on the way.