The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Fritz never shared Max’s certitude that Nazism, like a bad dream, would vanish in time. “He wasn’t as nationalistic a German as Max,” said his daughter. “He was more realistic about it because he talked to more people. But he didn’t think it could happen to him.”17 Indeed, Fritz and Anna Beata didn’t frequent the elegant dinner parties attended by Max and Alice and so perhaps had a more sober view of things. After 1933, Fritz headed the Jewish community in Hamburg, attending to the perpetual financial crisis of the local Jewish hospital. He also chaired an adult education committee that tried to keep a flicker of civilization alive amid the general bestiality. After having given her career to the Fröbel kindergarten association, Anna Beata was kicked off its board and set up her own Jewish kindergarten. When her daughter, Eva, was dismissed from her teaching job at a kindergarten amid a good deal of anti-Semitic abuse, she, too, started her own day nursery. Fritz’s family hadn’t been religious, but they now had to study Jewish history and lore to teach the Orthodox Jewish children who flocked to them. Eva was converted to Zionism and began to keep kosher at Kösterberg.

  In 1933, Ingrid and Eva were already young women, but Fritz’s third daughter, Charlotte Esther (“Noni”)) was just eleven and experienced National Socialism through more innocent eyes. At night, she dreamed that Nazis hid in the Kösterberg park and were about to come and snatch her away. Each morning, when the chauffeur drove her to school, she looked out the window and saw anti-Warburg graffiti scratched on the walls. Hurt and bewildered when teachers and students began to tease her about her wealth, she made the driver drop her a block from her school, so other children wouldn’t see the rich Jewish girl embarking from a fancy, chauffeur-driven car.18 After a time, the Nazis purged the old liberal teachers and brought in a new corps of conformists who made the children salute the swastika flag each morning. When the headmaster banished Jewish students in 1935, Noni was sent to the Eerde school in Ommen, Holland. Started by English Quakers the previous year to serve, inter alia, as a refuge for persecuted Jewish children, it received financial aid from Eric Warburg. Aby M.’s son, Max Adolph, went there to teach.

  By a pleasing biological joke, the prettiest of the three sisters, Ingrid, most resembled the homely Fritz. With her darkly exotic good looks and statuesque carriage, she reminded everybody of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Ingrid would later describe her early years at Kösterberg as an earthly paradise, with the family house shaded by towering beech trees that Fritz called his “elephants.” It was a place where the dahlias seemed to bloom forever and the apples and pears hung heavy on the trees. “One believed in a progressive development of Germany in economics and politics and the Jewish Warburg family, with its far-flung family and professional connections abroad, would doubtless be a part of that development.”19 Ingrid often stayed with Lola in Berlin, attending Max Reinhardt productions and viewing the art of Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz.

  Fritz and Anna Beata gave Ingrid a good education, sending her to Salem and then to the University of Heidelberg. In 1932, she and Gisi studied English at Somerville College at Oxford. This year would acquire a powerful retrospective glow. Ingrid met Chaim Weizmann, who warned of the fate about to overtake German Jews. She also befriended Isaiah Berlin and Fritz Schumacher, the nephew of the well-known Hamburg architect and later famous as the “small-is-beautiful” economist. Most of all, she was smitten by a German Rhodes scholar at Balliol College named Adam von Trott zu Solz, who was destined to become a storied member of the German Resistance.

  Tall, handsome, and urbane, Adam would flit temptingly through Ingrid’s daydreams for a lifetime. He had blue-blooded antecedents. His father was a Prussian culture minister and his grandfather an ambassador under Bismarck. On his mother’s side, he was descended from John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. A thoughtful and principled young man, Adam starkly saw the horrors ahead in Germany, yet was imbued with a patrician sense of state service. In 1933 he returned to Germany, determined to fight the Nazis from within. This decision disappointed and confused many Oxford friends, who saw any government service in Nazi Germany as prima facie evidence of betrayed idealism.

  After her time at Oxford, Fritz urged Ingrid to resume her education at Hamburg University. She studied English, German, and philosophy and wrote a dissertation on the English Puritan Lucy Hutchinson. Ingrid was grateful for being rooted, one last time, in German culture before it was rudely snatched away.20 Fritz also encouraged her to immerse herself in the Jewish philosophy of Martin Buber and the plays and novels of Sholem Asch. This simultaneous dedication to German and Jewish culture summed up the entire tragic dilemma of the Warburgs.

  In the twilight reality of 1933, the terror had an eerie way of intruding from the shadows then disappearing—as if nothing had happened. On a vivid day that spring, Ingrid was out strolling with a young lawyer named Peter Bielenberg. (The Warburgs would introduce Peter to Adam and the two became blood brothers in the Resistance.) They crossed the lovely Lombardsbrücke that separated the two lakes in downtown Hamburg. The bridge had pretty Victorian lamps, with garland-wreathed cherubs at the base. Ingrid and Peter suddenly saw a commotion ahead. Two short men ran by them in terror, clutching briefcases, pursued by two husky, winded SA men. Instinctively, Peter made a move to stop the SA men, but Ingrid—with a self-protective instinct—squeezed his arm. “Peter,” she said, “are you mad?”21 Ingrid’s gaze made him stop. When they turned again, the crowd that parted for the frantic chase scene had regathered. They again formed part of a large group of pedestrians enjoying the sunshine. The lake shone, the unpleasant incident had ceased, the curtain had closed over the hideous reality. The two hunted men were probably trade unionists. In early May 1933, Hitler disbanded the unions and raided their offices. The trade-union offices in Hamburg were in the Hotel Atlantic, beside the Lombardsbrücke.

  Increasingly, Kösterberg seemed a sanctuary from a world governed by madness. As Ingrid said of the 1933 summer she and her family spent there, “More than ever, Kösterberg was like a tranquil island.”22 With its consoling shade and beauty and ancient trees, the estate embodied the wealth and culture the Warburgs had enjoyed for generations. That summer, fresh from his Oxford exams, Adam von Trott visited Kösterberg and tried to convince Fritz that the Warburg wealth wouldn’t immunize the family from persecution. When Adam insisted that no Jewish family was safe, Fritz didn’t believe him.

  The love affair between Adam and Ingrid was doomed to be a casualty of circumstance. While serving his legal apprenticeship, Adam came under strong pressure to join the Nazi party. One morning in December 1933, as the mist rose from the Elbe below, Ingrid wrote a long, anguished letter to Adam, saying that their friendship couldn’t survive his entry into the party even if it was meant to camouflage his political dissent. “Because it is humanly impossible that you should belong to a group for whom an important position is repugnance for my group.”23 This by no means ended Ingrid’s affection for Adam and she rendered important help to him in his Resistance work in coming years.

  In February 1934, Adam von Trott committed an error in judgment that would later haunt his efforts to win foreign support for the Resistance. The Manchester Guardian ran a series about the persecution of Hessian Jews, and Adam sent the paper a letter that denied any problem and sounded suspiciously like a Nazi whitewash. He wrote that Jews encountered no discrimination in Hessian courts, nor were Jewish merchants penalized by the Nazi boycott. “Again and again I have spoken to active storm troopers who feel themselves pledged to the race doctrine of their leaders but would never consider themselves justified to execute it with methods of violence, and who turn with indignation from the suggestion of atrocities being committed in their presence.”24 The letter was a grievous lapse of judgment.

  For Ingrid and other Warburgs, the Nazi threat first appeared as a sudden chill in the air, not a knock at the door. At the university, students drifted silently away from her. One day, a student approached her and apologized tha
t in future he couldn’t greet her anymore or he might have to forfeit his scholarship.25 Another day, Ingrid climbed up a ladder at the university library to fetch a book. Losing her balance, she crashed to the floor and blacked out momentarily. When she awoke, she saw that the students still sat at their desks, pretending not to notice. Nobody had risen to help her. While driving back to Kösterberg, she realized that her arm was broken. “The shock over the behavior of my fellow students was greater than the pain.”26

  For the Warburgs, the Hitler years were often such an incongruous mix of banal, quotidian reality suddenly tinged with horrible, sadistic touches. When Ingrid took her oral exams at the university, two professors concealed Nazi badges behind their lapels as they quizzed her about Plato.27 When she passed the test and became one of the last Jews to graduate in 1936, her parents decided to reward her with a trip to Uncle Felix in New York. Before going, she made a poignant farewell trip through Franconia and Bavaria with some friends bound for Palestine. While the landscape was peaceful and lovely, anti-Semitism shattered the tranquility at every stop. Many towns had warning signs at their entrance saying, “Jews enter this town at their own risk.”28 As they rolled through a Germany bedecked with swastikas and throbbing with a palpable hatred, Ingrid and her friends sang German and Hebrew songs, including the Hatikvah, the Jewish anthem, saying good-bye to the Fatherland in their own way.

  CHAPTER 30

  ––

  The Closing Doors

  For Max Warburg, the final illusions of influence began to yield to the reality of a country drenched in violence and bloodshed. Each hope was dashed by some terrible new setback. On June 28, 1934, Max met with Franz von Papen to protest the treatment of Jews, and the vice-chancellor was charming, if noncommittal. When Max said Jews could leave Germany in orderly fashion if the government cooperated, von Papen agreed to ponder the matter. Two days later came the “Night of the Long Knives.” Ernst Röhm, the SA chieftain, and hundreds of Storm Troopers were massacred in a gruesome power struggle that established Himmler’s dominance. For Max, it was all doubly devastating because the murder victims included von Papen aides whom he had met with forty-eight hours before.

  That September, the Nazi weekly, Der Stürmer, launched a searing attack against the Warburgs, complete with a photo of Max captioned, “Representative in Versailles, Financial Backer of Social Democracy.”1 The article raked over the moldy lies about Paul and Max being at Versailles and said an American Warburg had attended a world Jewish Congress to strengthen the boycott of German goods. As if one could quote Scripture to the devil, Max insisted that his lawyer, Dr. Hermann Samson, write a formal protest letter to the Gestapo! Dr. Samson duly wrote, pointing out that Max had belonged to the conservative German People’s Party and sat on the right side of the aisle in the Hamburg Bürgerschaft. How could such a man be accused of aiding Social Democracy?2

  A few weeks later, Max and Alice sailed to New York. Their spirits were refreshed by these periodic trips abroad. They still held to the belief that fate had unpacked all the horrors that could possibly befall them. As Felix wrote, “Brother Max and Alice and Anita arrived looking remarkably well and they are courageous and anxious to do things for others.” Then he added, with a note of exasperation, “On what their optimism is based, I haven’t been able to find out, outside of the fact that they feel things cannot go on as they are now.”3

  In 1935, Malice returned to America to lobby for aid to German Jews. Even in New York, Max was shadowed by the Gestapo, and his speeches to Jewish groups were monitored. Sticking to the official line of the German-Jewish leadership, he pleaded for an end to the organized boycott of German goods. Communist groups assailed him with anti-Semitic propaganda dressed up as progressive thought. The Communist Daily Worker told its readers that Max came to the United States representing the Nazi government and was “rewarded handsomely” by being named an “Honorary Aryan.”4 Echoing the old Sidney Warburg canard, the Yiddish paper Freiheit made the hurtful charge that Felix, a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie, had given the Nazis a seven-million-dollar loan in 1933.5

  The libel of the “Honorary Aryan” circulated so widely that Felix felt obligated to respond in a letter to Samuel Untermyer, a distinguished Jewish lawyer. He evoked the humiliations that Max had suffered, the expulsions from corporate boards. But he knew the real uneasiness resided with Max’s access to Dr. Schacht and other Nazi officials. As he explained to Untermyer, Max believed that “so long as he has some sort of contact with people such as Schacht, he owes it to his co-religionists to make some effort (probably mostly unsuccessful) to get some relief for the people who cannot leave and cannot get their funds out. It is a great source of anxiety and sorrow for me to have him over there and I have made every effort to tempt him to leave the country, but he feels that he is too old to expatriate himself and that it may be of some use to his co-religionists for him to be there. He doesn’t care what happens to him personally.”6

  In this perilous time, Max still had his old powerful presence, the barrel chest and firm jaw, but heavy pouches hung from his eyes and his expression seemed beleaguered. His lack of concern for his own safety was partly bluff. “He was afraid every day what might happen to him,” said his daughter. “He was really risking an awful lot.”7 As a thick pall settled over the Warburgs, Alice sometimes retreated into a world of private melancholy. When she was distraught, she sat alone in the corner of a beautiful room that she had designed in green satin with Italian furniture. This setting seemed to comfort her. Eric later said he felt that during this time he had one foot in the concentration camp.

  ——

  Max and Felix Warburg conferring at the Hotel Bellevue in Baden-Baden, 1930s. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

  Starting in the spring of 1935, reports reached Felix that Max was slipping into fathomless despair. Everything he believed in was now being twisted and debased. After meeting Max in Paris, Dr. Bernhard Kahn told Felix, “He, too, has lost all the optimism he still had a few months ago and sees no way out but the emigration of Jews from Germany within a period of 10 to 15 years.”8 Max, who had once been proof against depression, now couldn’t slough it off. Eric entreated him to flee, but Max thought it unconscionable for community leaders to depart. He also thought his wealth and power would shield him. One day, he and Eric were walking by the Inner Alster Lake when Max pointed to the M. M. Warburg building. “See that building there,” he said. “That is more than a building. That is our fortress. It will protect us.”9

  Despair gave Max the gallant, giddy pugnacity of the hopelessly defeated. After spending an evening with him in May 1935, Rabbi Morris Lazaron likened Max to a “lion at bay.” He sent Felix this telling vignette: “We had quite an argument the other evening at his [Max’s] home in Hamburg. Erich took the position it was useless to fight. Your brother [i.e., Max] was magnificent! ‘We have nothing further to lose,’ he said. ‘If we are degraded to second-class citizens, if these laws go through it is only a question of time when we shall all be forced out. They are using us now because we can help. I’m for fighting.’’ ”10

  In his confused, unsettled state, Max urged Jews to stay and fight while also making clandestine overtures to have them admitted into Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, and Latin America. He helped to start the Paraná Project, which settled a small number of German Jews as coffee planters in the Brazilian jungle. He explored prospects for Jewish settlers on a coffee farm that he partly owned in Guatemala. All the while, he couldn’t shed his dream of Jewish assimilation in Germany amid its universal negation. Even for ordinary Germans, it was agonizing enough to sacrifice the wealth, position, and friendships accumulated over a lifetime. For the Warburgs it meant renouncing a banking empire built up over almost 140 years. It seemed inconceivable that their centuries of faithful service to Germany could end so suddenly, so ignominiously. In 1935, Adam von Trott and a friend visited Ingrid at Kösterberg and again urged Fritz to flee with his family. “My father didn’t take their war
nings seriously and referred repeatedly to the long-standing and profound connection of the Warburgs with Hamburg and Germany,” Ingrid recalled.11

  Max had identified so implicitly with Germany’s destiny that to abandon the Fatherland was tantamount to repudiating his fundamental being. No matter how despondent he became, he still had no inkling of how bad things would become. When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in October 1935, Max told his grandson Oscar, “You must really follow the military developments in this war carefully, because it will be the last war in your lifetime.”12 At the Berlin bar mitzvah of Felix Meyer, an Alsterufer Warburg, in early 1937, Max proposed this toast to the Jewish boy: “Always remember that you are a German.”13

  Until this point, Max had tried the path of reason, attempting to persuade Nazi officials that by stripping Jews of wealth, they deterred them from leaving. If the path of appeasement seemed hopelessly sterile, we must recall that Jewish leaders operated in a totalitarian atmosphere of constant surveillance. Even when Max chaired the Aid Society of German Jews (Hilfsverein), he was watched by police and had to delete risky passages from speeches. That April, he was extremely upset when Berlin insisted that the group change its name to the Aid Society of Jews in Germany, implying that a German Jew was a contradiction in terms. Even though he became a vice-chairman of the Reich Representation in 1936, Max later admitted that the group had been too polite in contesting Hitler. “Again and again, though unsuccessfully, I sought to substitute flaming words for the polite documents of Privy Councillors.”14

  Max’s split personality perhaps mirrored the contradictory position of his firm, which was in a grim but not entirely desperate state. As small Jewish banks were hounded from the provinces, it created an advantage for large, metropolitan Jewish banks, such as M. M. Warburg, which picked up clients. As one scholar noted, “In the course of the Nazi period, the bank had acquired more and more Jewish customers and had become the preferred bank of the Jewish economic sector.”15 M. M. Warburg ensured confidentiality to harried Jewish businessmen of a sort a non-Jewish bank could never match. The bank aided them with foreign exchange; negotiated the sale of Jewish businesses to “Aryans” and sold German assets for foreign companies. Hence, while the volume of its credit business contracted, the number of Warburg clients actually rose in 1935 from 1,875 to 2,183, and the bank booked more than one million reichsmarks in profit. The bank wasn’t thriving amid the crisis, but it certainly kept afloat.