by Ron Chernow
Another revered figure was Stefan Zweig, who had become a pacifist during the war and lived in Austria. By 1923, Siegmund, twenty-one, was corresponding with the famous writer, having sent him a fan letter about his biography of Romain Rolland. As with Rosenberg, Siegmund admired qualities in Zweig that seemed to mirror his own. He liked his refusal to take easy, crowd-pleasing positions, the way he spurned the superficial pleasures of radio and sports. Like Rosenberg, Zweig relished books and ancient beauty while rejecting soft, corrupt, bourgeois pleasures. Siegmund shared Zweig’s pessimistic view that the world might pass through a dark, collectivist period of state bureaucracies before returning to a time of individual freedom. This dark interlude would be filled with gloom, barbarism, and intolerance.
The move to Berlin gave Siegmund a front-row seat for the disintegrating Weimar Republic. Sharply critical of the Young Plan, he joked that it would lead to ever “younger” plans until the whole reparations farce ended.25 When the Credit-Anstalt collapsed, he saw that the fixed stars could indeed fall from the heavens. As he later said, “It was fantastic. People everywhere had said it couldn’t happen. Well, it did happen.”26 Heading a Berlin office of about ten people, Siegmund dipped into politics and wrote political pamphlets. He later said only Hitler’s advent ended his career in politics.27 Siegmund liked to shake things up and often expressed shocking political opinions. In 1930, he told historian Alfred Vagts that a German war against Russia would solve internal German problems and crises.28
In the Warburg debate over Hitler’s future, Siegmund would later symbolize the pessimistic, far-sighted view of events. Yet before 1933, he was far less alarmed than Uncle Max and, in fact, conspicuously blind to the threat. In 1930, he told his cousin Karl that he didn’t share the resentment toward the Nazis common in their circles. The anti-Semitism aside, he saw redeeming qualities in the party. “The Nazis are doubtless in part dreadfully primitive in human and political terms,” he wrote. “On the other hand, one finds among a large part of them valuable, typically German strengths, which are indeed incredible in a political connection, but show strong feeling for social and national duties.…” He regretted that the ranters had given anti-Semitism a central party role.29 With his Hegelian vision, Siegmund seemed philosophically resigned to the growing radicalism of late Weimar Germany, arguing that it was a transitional part of the ebb and flow of history.
Like Carl Melchior, Siegmund succumbed to the delusion that if the Nazis entered the cabinet, they would behave more responsibly. “I have no doubt that the Nazis, once they are in the government … would hardly commit any more stupidities than most other governments.”30 This is worth stressing, for Siegmund was later withering in his mockery of Uncle Max’s belief that the Nazi fever would pass. Yet in December 1931, Siegmund urgently told Jimmy that Germany needed shock treatment and that the longer the Nazis were banned from government, the more power they would wield when they entered it. A certain amount of anti-Semitism, he conceded, would accompany this move. “But I don’t believe that any deeply invasive measures in this direction will be taken and that, in any event, only during a short, transitional period, because the best and most capable followers of the Hitler movement won’t go along with such demagogic trains of thought.”31 If Siegmund was later caustic about those misled by false hopes, it probably stemmed, in part, from embarrassment about his own youthful myopia.
CHAPTER 26
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Journey into Fear
The worst casualty of the global depression, the Germany of 1932 was fertile ground for demagogues, as unemployment soared to almost 30 percent of the work force. In Hamburg, knots of children gathered before open windows, singing hymns so that strangers would toss down coins. The fleet of mothballed ships grew daily in the harbor. This abject misery made the populace ripe for irrational diatribes against Jewish bankers, enabling the Nazis to give a leftish veneer to their propaganda and feed off populist resentment of the rich.
Their screeds extended to corporations with close ties to Jewish banks, such as the chemical giant I. G. Farben, which had ten Jews, including Max Warburg, on its boards. In June 1931, the Nazi press branded the concern a tool of the “Jew Warburg.”1 With malicious humor, I. G. Farben was restyled “Isidore G. Farber.”2 Afraid that its state-backed synthetic fuel program might run into political obstacles, the firm dispatched two operatives to meet with Hitler in June 1932. Already envisioning the Volkswagen and the Autobahn, Hitler recognized the importance of synthetic fuel and muted subsequent attacks on the firm. That year, Max left the Farben supervisory board.
For Max, the progressively more strident anti-Semitism provoked an emotional mix of anger and dismay. He thought the Nazi fever would fade as prosperity returned, that the intolerance was just a passing phase. In the meantime, he fulminated against a cowardly middle class that groveled before Hitler and was aghast that Germany should repay its loyal Jewish citizens with such ingratitude. The Vaterland had “left the ranks of civilized nations and lined up with the ranks of pogrom nations. Nothing has so depressed me as a German in recent years as this anti-Semitic propaganda.…”3 When he resigned from the German People’s Party in 1932, he ruefully joked that Germany only had parties one could leave, none that one could join.4 Max had long cudgeled his brain for ways to reconcile German and Jewish tradition, but this exercise now seemed futile. For the Warburgs, the stars had darkened.
The Nazis triumphed at a time when German Jews were sloughing off their Jewish identity. Hitler caught them off balance, leaning the wrong way. In 1932, the rate of intermarriage among Jews reached an astounding 60 percent.5 With just a modicum of patience, the Nazis could have solved the entire “Jewish Problem” through sheer inaction. The Holocaust originated in a country where the Jewish population was highly acculturated, lending the violence a bitter, fratricidal edge. In the Soviet Union, gentiles looked down on downtrodden Jews, but in Germany, they envied them, even though Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population. It wasn’t their alien quality so much as their familiarity, their uncomfortable resemblance to other Germans, that enabled Hitler to tap fears of “racial pollution.” His stress on biological purity would have made no sense if Jews hadn’t mingled so intimately with non-Jews.
For a well-connected Hamburg banker, the enemy could seem curiously faceless. Max dealt mostly with upper-crust industrial leaders, who largely opposed Hitler in the early days. Wealthy Germans derided National Socialists as contemptible boors and dreaded their alleged socialism. More contact with small businessmen might have spared Max many illusions. Only at Bad Harzburg in October 1931 did major industrialists of the Ruhr and Rhineland flirt openly with the Nazis; Dr. Schacht, steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, and other businessmen joined with them in declaring a national front against Bolshevism.
The Warburgs did fight the Nazis. Eric joined a group called the Circle of Young Hamburgers, which fought against the polarization of the late Weimar period.6 In September 1931, they waged a successful campaign against the Nazis in local elections. Backing a centrist coalition, they distributed brochures that deplored both Left and Right extremism. They didn’t focus on anti-Semitism but on Nazi protectionism, which threatened Hamburg’s foreign trade. In an imaginative brochure entitled “Keep the Gate Open,” the Circle depicted a man valiantly pushing open the trade gates as Nazis and Communists tried to slam them shut.
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Eric Warburg, Lola Hahn-Warburg, and her son, Oscar, at Lola’s Wannsee house in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)
In late 1931, Hamburg’s Jews were shaken by a series of cemetery desecrations, and community leaders sought an ecumenical protest. Aby S. Warburg was assigned to appeal to the Protestant Church and he wrote to his friend, chief pastor Dr. Heinz Beckmann, suggesting that Jews unite with Christian leaders in a newspaper ad to protest these abominations. Beckmann declined in a mealy-mouthed reply. “If I may express my personal opinion, I don’t expect much in these turbulent days from public statements
. It is much more important that each man and woman, in the circles in which they can have an effect, should fully express their views repeatedly.”7 This letter foreshadowed the cowardice of many German pastors in protesting Nazi atrocities.
The economic crisis destroyed the republic’s legitimacy, radicalized the masses, and destroyed the appeal of moderate parties to the middle class. By 1932, the ceremony of law disintegrated as street fights between Nazi and Communist thugs became daily events in Berlin. Communists would raid shops, then the Storm Troopers of the SA would show up as saviors of the shopkeepers. Many Hamburg stores sported swastika flags during Reichstag elections that summer, as fear gripped the seaport. As Christabel Bielenberg wrote, “I knew it to be advisable to refrain from taking a stroll through certain parts of Hamburg on a Sunday, because the Monday morning newspapers nearly always carried an obituary of an over-ardent politician, or of some innocent bystander, who found themselves taking part in a political demonstration over the weekend.”8
The Warburgs hovered above the level of Brownshirt beatings, street taunts, and blatant humiliation. Yet they saw the abyss yawning before them. “The world grows blacker and blacker,” Max wrote Jimmy in April 1932. “One always believes that it can’t get any blacker, but then there are new surprises and you are amazed that you’re still standing on your own two feet.”9
In late May, Max was surprised when Brüning fell, succeeded by the centrist Franz von Papen. The strongman in the new cabinet was the defense minister, General Kurt von Schleicher, an authoritarian figure who had headed the political bureau of the Reichswehr. Both the chancellor and defense minister thought they could neutralize Hitler and manipulate him for their own purposes. The Warburgs didn’t foresee that the von Papen government would destroy the last foundations of the republic and produce a deadly political vacuum. Siegmund applauded the changes, praising von Schleicher as courageous and decisive and von Papen as smart and decent.10 Max hailed the new regime for its tough stand toward labor.11 Only Felix spied a conspiratorial pattern, viewing Brüning as victim of a plot masterminded by industrialists who wanted to abolish the welfare state.12
As the Warburgs discussed collective action in case of a Nazi victory, they faced the old dilemma of asserting their power and risking a backlash, or lowering their profile and emasculating themselves. Most of the time, they opted for caution. When discussing Nazi attacks against the Jewish deputy police commissioner of Berlin, Bernhard Weiss, Max argued: “Wouldn’t it be better, if they [the Jews] kept in the background, in any event politically, in these times and didn’t assume responsibilities they couldn’t discharge?”13
In late July 1932, the Nazis scored stunning election gains. Capturing 13.7 million votes and 230 out of 608 Reichstag seats, they established themselves as the nation’s largest party. Carl Melchior was appalled that respectable politicians now trafficked with men who “have committed murder in the usual sense of the Penal Code and thus should have been condemned to death even by a regular tribunal.”14 Though the murderers had momentum on their side, they suffered a temporary setback in the November elections, losing two million votes. We should note that on the eve of the Third Reich, a majority of Germans still opposed Hitler. Unfortunately, the opposition was badly splintered, Weimar’s failures having discredited gradualist, reform politics. The constitutional sphere seemed irrelevant as four hundred thousand SA and SS thugs poured into the streets, giving “democracy” a paramilitary flavor.
What is striking in these waning Weimar days is how frequently the Warburgs were governed by hope and not fear. In their papers, the nearness of the impending nightmare isn’t evident. In September 1932, Siegmund cabled Jimmy that the new government shouldn’t create alarm: “On the contrary, probable that energetic, stable political development assured for next few months.”15 In December, Max told Felix that all was not bleak because Hindenburg had decided not to appoint Hitler as chancellor.16 In a speech at the Rotary Club, Max lauded the year’s “upward movement” and the “return to an even and calm development in politics and the economy.”17 Proximity blinded the German Warburgs, while distance aided their American relatives.
When Eric telephoned from London on January 30, 1933, he learned that Adolf Hitler had just become chancellor and declared that they should “give him enough rope to hang himself.”18 The Warburgs would nurse such forlorn hopes for years. At once, swastikas bloomed in Hamburg, as Jews were insulted by bands of newly emboldened Nazis. Throwing up barricades, the Communists tried a general strike, but the SA and SS cleared the streets.
For Max, Hitler’s advent didn’t express popular anger so much as high-level machinations. Unable to adjust to these grisly new realities—to see that history had turned a corner suddenly—he still placed his faith in the common sense of the German people. “I considered it absolutely inconceivable that this man [Hitler] could ever become sole ruler of one of the most creative, competent, industrious and powerful of peoples,” he later confessed.19 The events of early 1933 struck him as fleeting madness. Indeed, modern German history provided no precedent for such total, systematic barbarism. The gradual, stealthy pace of change helped to lull its targets. The strangler, by design, would tighten his grip slowly, then release it, then slowly tighten it again. “We always thought we had reached the all-time low,” said Max’s daughter, Gisela. “Then the Nazis would ingeniously invent something else.”20
In retrospect, Max Warburg’s actions over the next five years would seem blind, daring, foolhardy, and courageous all at once. He had strong powers of self-deception and one feels exasperated with his incurable hopefulness even as one admires his dogged courage in the face of incalculable danger. The glandular optimism, the sense of invincibility, that had lifted him to the apex of the German business world would now be his undoing. We should note that Max’s views often reflected those of other Jewish leaders. After Hitler came to power, a major Jewish organization, the Central verein, announced confidently, “We are thoroughly able to hold our own and to fight successfully against the attacks made by Mr. Hitler and his followers.”21
As patrons of a rich array of local institutions, it seemed inconceivable to the Warburgs that they could ever be driven from Hamburg. In this tolerant, cosmopolitan city, the Nazi triumph didn’t seem foreordained. The Warburgs believed in Hamburg’s general freedom from anti-Semitism, although other Hamburg Jews saw the local variety as just more subtle and insidious. Not only did the aristocrats who lived by the Alster Lake have a snobbish contempt for the Nazis, but the left-wing dockworkers of “Red Hamburg” made it a stronghold for Social Democrats and Communists. In the Reichstag vote of March 5, 1933, these two parties got 44.5 percent of the Hamburg vote, surpassing the Nazis. Nationwide, however, the Nazis received 44 percent of the votes—their peak performance before the complete dismantling of democratic government.
In Hamburg, the party moved swiftly to suppress local dissent and consolidate their power. On March 8, when the Hamburg Bürgerschaft voted in a new senate, menacing Storm Troopers lined the chamber walls and excluded Social Democrats and Communists. Instead of the local Gauleiter, the Nazis installed as mayor the patrician Carl Vincent Krogmann who came from an old shipping family. Krogmann once said that he supported the Nazis because they seemed the only alternative to a dictatorship based on bayonets! After the new Nazi-dominated senate voted him in, Krogmann appeared on the Rathaus balcony amid resounding church bells, with the swastika flag flying overhead and jubilant throngs cheering below. Believing Krogmann a conciliatory figure, Max approved the choice. As Emil Helfferich, who participated in the selection process, said, “Krogmann with his unwavering single-mindedness deceived many who had expected him to be a compromiser, including Max Warburg.”22
Less than a week later, Krogmann sent Baron von Schröder to see Max. The baron cordially explained that Max shouldn’t take it amiss if the mayor didn’t consult him as much in future about financial matters affecting the city. He said that Krogmann needed to refute char
ges in Nazi party circles that Max, “being the financial dictator of Hamburg, had insisted that he [Krogmann] be elected to his office and that he was really burgomaster” by Max’s grace. Max replied that he understood and that Krogmann shouldn’t worry.23 Four days later, in a radio speech, Krogmann pandered to hatred of Jewish bankers, saying Hamburg must develop banks independent of Berlin banks and foreign connections—a clear swipe at M. M. Warburg.24 Before long, the Nazis purged Jewish officials from the civil service, including Leo Lippmann, who had served Hamburg for decades. Upon hearing this, a shaken Max said, “Death rides fast.”25
Despite these events, Max whistled in the dark, seeing Nazi ideology as a blend of good and bad ideas. Perhaps the evil elements could be purged, he thought, leaving the good. As with Siegmund, German Jews weren’t entirely immune to the Nazis’ ringing, nationalistic appeals, even if they abhorred the anti-Semitism. On March 19, Max told Jimmy that he hoped peace and order would soon prevail in Germany. Of the Nazis, he said, “It is a pity that this movement, which has so much good in it, is encumbered by so much rubbish and that the anti-Semitism makes it impossible to line up in formation with this movement.”26 Max fooled himself into believing that Dr. Schacht and non-Jewish friends would furnish political protection.
The Warburg women generally seemed less deluded, perhaps because they heard fewer promises from business associates who proved faithless in the end. Tough and unsentimental, Max’s wife, Alice, thought it futile to stay in Germany and pleaded with her husband to leave. But Max said he must defend his firm and the Jewish community and so Alice stood loyally by his side. When Max urged Eric to leave for the United States, he refused to budge. “I didn’t want—as the only son—to see my father in a German concentration camp while I was living on Park Avenue in New York.”27 Eric did, however, make trips to America over the next five years to renew his American residency status.
