by Ron Chernow
In March 1937, when Trott stopped in New York en route to a Rhodes fellowship in China, Ingrid met him at the pier. She arranged for him to discuss the German Resistance with her new friend, Eleanor Roosevelt. (The first lady—ugly duckling in a dashing family—reminded Ingrid of her father.) As he tried to alert influential foreigners to the existence of a legitimate German opposition, Trott was plagued by questions about his own authenticity. How could a true Resistance member travel as a member of the information section of the Foreign Office? Such apprehension was reinforced by memories of the ill-advised letter Trott sent to the Manchester Guardian in 1934, denying the persecution of German Jews.
Drawn mostly from old nobility and high military ranks, the German Resistance was never a broad-based, populist movement, and its members’ stature worked against them. Composed of a loose network of small groups, it lacked a coherent political philosophy aside from the urgent desire to overthrow Hitler. The most important component was probably the Kreisau Circle, so named since its members met in Silesia at the Kreisau estate of Count Helmuth von Moltke who, like his friend Trott, was a former Rhodes scholar. For many outside Germany, it seemed unthinkable that such highly placed figures could be bent on subversion. After having been duped repeatedly by Hitler, Western governments were wary of being deceived again.
In June 1939, Trott bravely disclosed the nature of his sub-rosa work to Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and others in London. They stared at him blankly. It was hard to accept at face value a conspirator whose fare was being paid by the German Foreign Office. And when Trott pleaded that England should keep the door open for negotiation with Germany, it sounded like a fresh appeal to appease Hitler. When Trott came to New York that October—the war had now started—he had several Warburgs vouch for his sincerity. Eric told him, “Mr. von Trott, something must be done about Germany,” and Trott replied, “You, Mr. Warburg, do it here, and I will do it in Germany.”19
Adam went to Ingrid’s small apartment at 25 West Fifty-Fourth Street, which was decorated with a blue sofa and other relics salvaged from Hamburg. The Oxford Adonis now seemed tired and older, his hair thinning, his manner beleaguered. Officially, Adam was to represent the German Foreign Office at a conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations. In reality, he planned to make covert contact with FDR as a member of the Kreisau Circle. Ingrid saw that Adam’s commitment to Resistance work was now irrevocable and that he was prepared to pay the steepest price. Nonetheless, he encountered ingrained suspicion at a time when people equated Germans with Nazis. Ingrid and Adam walked across Central Park to see Frieda, who chatted amiably enough with Adam. But afterward Frieda scolded Ingrid, “How dare you bring a German in my house!”20 For three months, Adam’s movements were tracked by FBI agents, as well as the Gestapo and British intelligence. Nobody was quite sure what game he played or whether he could be trusted.
Ingrid introduced Adam to left-wing refugee activists associated with the Resistance group Neu Beginnen. She also wangled an invitation for him to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt and her friends. The first lady seemed oblivious of the extraordinary peril involved in Trott’s mission and introduced him airily by saying, “This is Adam von Trott, a friend of ours, who will tell you about the German underground movement.”21 Afraid of alienating FDR, Trott handled this amazing gaffe with aplomb.
While Trott met with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and State Department officials, the president evaded him. Trott conveyed the message that Britain and France should openly repudiate any wish to wage a war of extermination against Germany. This would undercut Hitler’s paranoid ranting and erode his support. Throughout the war, many Warburgs believed that the Allied policy of unconditional surrender only stifled opposition in Germany and reawakened fears of another Versailles, whereas publication of generous peace terms might actually have fomented resistance to Hitler.
Having received warnings about Trott from England, Felix Frankfurter poisoned Roosevelt’s mind against him. After J. Edgar Hoover supplemented this with FBI reports on Trott’s movements, the president saw only a potential security breach. “For heaven’s sake,” he told Frankfurter. “Surely you did not let your Trott friend get trotted out of the country without having him searched by Edgar Hoover. Think of the battleship plans and other secrets he may be carrying back.”22 It didn’t dawn on Roosevelt that Trott might be a bona fide Resistance figure.
Meanwhile, to Ingrid’s eternal regret, Trott returned to Germany and married Clarita Tiefenbacher, the daughter of a Hamburg lawyer. Henceforth, Trott and other Resistance members, spurned by the outside world, would operate alone. Ingrid later said that because of her knowledge of this small band of courageous anti-Nazis, she couldn’t assign universal guilt to all Germans. In the end, Adam would make a believer of the skeptics by entering the conspiracy to kill Hitler and paying the ultimate price.
Engaged in many causes, including schools for refugee students and orphans, Ingrid would be best known for her work with the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), which was formed in her apartment after France fell to the Nazis in June 1940. Millions of people made a chaotic exit from the occupied north to the southern zone, which was under control of the Vichy government. Many European anti-Fascists who had taken refuge in France now found themselves trapped. The ERC was set up to obtain emergency visas, affidavits, and money for these stranded Nazi opponents. Eleanor Roosevelt helped the group bypass the bureaucracy in obtaining visas for leading anti-Fascists.
Ingrid’s apartment overlooked the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, which provided the names of many endangered artists. Thomas Mann and others submitted lists of authors. As executive assistant to the ERC chairman, Frank Kingdon, Ingrid took part in the struggle to save Marc Chagall, Walter Mehring, André Masson, and Franz Werfel, while other ERC members aided André Breton, Max Ernst, and Heinrich and Golo Mann. On an earlier visit to Stockholm to see her parents, Ingrid had brought back across an Atlantic swarming with U-boats the stepdaughter of Carl Zuckmayer, the playwright. Cynics in the Warburg family observed that Ingrid always managed to save the celebrities and leave the less glamorous cases to others.
Ingrid often welcomed rescued artists at the New York piers, and many incongruous scenes unfolded as the exotic leaders of central Europe’s avant-garde washed up on American shores. She especially remembered the Surrealists’ wives, who stepped off the ship in sandals with colorful, handmade necklaces and green-lacquered fingernails. There were a fair number of prima donnas. When Nina threw a luncheon for Franz Werfel, his wife, Alma Mahler, gave a rather theatrical description of her escape from Europe. She told how she had picked pebbles from her sandals with her poor little pooch in her arms, as if she had made a barefoot trek all across Spain.
The ERC was often flying blind in tracking down threatened artists and intellectuals amid the alarums of war. In July 1940, the group decided on a daring operation in Ingrid’s apartment: They would send their own hand-picked underground agent to Marseilles. They chose Harvard-educated Varian Fry, a fastidious young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a literary background. A former editor of The New Republic and author of many foreign-policy books, he ran the publishing program at the Foreign Policy Association. A month later, when he left for Lisbon in a Brooks Brothers suit, he carried a letter of recommendation from Eleanor Roosevelt and refugee lists drawn up by the Museum of Modern Art and the New School for Social Research.
Even though nothing in his background had prepared him for intrigue, Fry worked miracles in Marseilles. Shadowed by the Gestapo, he worked in a feverishly oppressive atmosphere of suicides, nervous breakdowns, and desperate entreaties for help. He secured forged papers; set up clandestine convoys to take refugees into Spain on foot; and helped prisoners escape from internment camps and evade the Vichy police. The overwhelming pressure brought out heroic qualities in Fry. “I’ve almost become a monomaniac as far as my work is concerned,” he wrote home. “I think of nothing els
e, dream of nothing else, speak of nothing else.”23 In the end, Varian Fry saved several hundred anti-Nazi refugees from almost certain death. Uneasy about Fry’s illegal maneuvers, the well-bred Joint steered clear of his work, but it had its own Scarlet Pimpernel, Wilfrid Israel, who distributed certificates to Palestine while working in Iberia. (Israel, we recall, was an intimate of Lola’s from Berlin days and Max’s secret intermediary with British Jews.) The Joint would help ten thousand French Jews to escape through Lisbon.
After losing Adam von Trott, Ingrid was ripe for another memorable crusader. One day, an Italian friend brought a free-spirited Italian leftist named Veniero Spinelli to an ERC meeting. A funny, colorful character with a checkered past, he had been jailed in Italy as a Communist organizer, fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and then entered the Foreign Legion to escape arrest by the Fascists. When he showed up in Ingrid’s apartment, he still wore the tattered uniform of the Foreign Legion. For a woman eager to reject her bourgeois upbringing and dive headlong into revolutionary politics, the roguish, irreverent Spinelli had a storybook perfection.
It turned out that Veniero came from a highborn family of Bourbon nobility. But as a socialist agitator, he couldn’t afford to be addressed as “Marchese” and dropped the title. Frieda thought this a shame—it was what most appealed to her about him. “But darling,” Frieda gently prodded Ingrid, “why doesn’t Veniero use his title? You know, it is important even here.”24 Many saw Veniero as a self-centered opportunist who wanted to underwrite revolutionary fantasies with Warburg money. He unfortunately chose a moment when the fabled Warburg gold was turning to dust.
Ingrid steadfastly ignored hints of family displeasure about Veniero’s character. In January 1941, he issued an ultimatum; either Ingrid would marry him immediately or not at all. She consented and bought two platinum rings once she realized that Veniero had overlooked this bourgeois custom. They had a private civil wedding, followed by an awkward reception for family and friends. Veniero asked Ingrid if he could make a speech. “Please, you’d better not,” she cautioned.25 Suddenly the family liberal, Nina drew the bridegroom aside and said, “Veniero, please tell me which side you fought for in Spain. You can tell me, but better not tell the others.”26 Nina gave him the armchair in which Paul had drawn up plans for the Federal Reserve—a curious gift indeed for this scourge of the status quo. Max made a wistful speech about the united Europe that would emerge after Hitler’s defeat. Then he kissed Ingrid and shook Veniero’s hand with the plea, “Stop the revolution!”27
At first, Veniero entered the U.S. Army to fight in Italy, then deserted in protest over American insistence on unconditional surrender. Meanwhile, Ingrid had two children by the itinerant agitator, who would disappear for long stretches to fight in Italy then unexpectedly reappear in New York. At one point, he materalized to announce that he needed a thousand dollars to publish a pamphlet on Italian autonomy. To oblige him, Ingrid pawned her ruby-and-diamond bracelet. These sudden appeals for money for political causes would form a leitmotif with Veniero. Many Warburgs thought that Veniero was abusing Ingrid and tried to dissuade her from continuing the marriage. Lola went on a special mission to reason with her, but to no avail.
When Ingrid met Veniero, her life turned a corner and was never the same again. It created a radical discontinuity between her aristocratic past and proletarian future. After the war, the Spinellis lived in a working-class section of Rome and had five children in all, bringing them up as Catholics. Despite Veniero’s revolutionary talk, his sense of comradeship didn’t extend to shared child-rearing and kitchen duty. Veniero never really held a fixed job and worked as a full-time political activist, adopting causes and periodically disappearing. In Stockholm, Fritz and Anna Beata worried incessantly about Ingrid and their Italian grandchildren. At one point, Ingrid stayed with them and Fritz talked vaguely about getting Veniero a job in a bank. After Adam von Trott and the breathless early years fighting Fascism in New York, the rest of Ingrid’s life would seem something of an anticlimax. She stayed married to Veniero and brought up five lovely, interesting children. But she never recaptured the high sense of beauty and purpose that had animated her time with Adam and the Emergency Rescue Committee.
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Mittelweg 17, home of the Warburg Secretariat in the bleak days after 1938. (Warburg family, Hamburg)
CHAPTER 35
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Deathwatch
Even as the Warburgs sounded the alarm about the German menace in America and Britain, the Nazis exploited their good name in foreign banking circles. Until 1941, the authorities insisted that the Aryanized firm retain the M. M. Warburg name so regularly denounced by Der Stürmer. The new owners, of course, favored keeping the old name, which added value to their purchase, and Brinckmann later told Siegmund he had only changed the name under intense political pressure.1 Most Warburgs, however, found it profoundly upsetting that a bank in Nazi Germany, over which they no longer exercised control, still bore their name. Many Jewish employees followed them into exile, but six stayed and perished in the camps.
After the war, the Warburgs, at least in public, would idealize Rudolf Brinckmann as a man who had resisted the Nazis and piloted the firm through the dark years. Did Brinckmann deserve these encomia? Evidence can be marshaled on both sides. Brinckmann did bravely withstand pressure to contribute to Nazi causes, such as the Karl Kaufmann Foundation. (Kaufmann was the Gauleiter of Hamburg.) On the other hand, he caved in to demands to hire extra Nazis and to purge the staff of Jews within a specified period. Every staff member had to join Dr. Robert Ley’s German Labor Front.2 In fairness to Brinckmann, it is hard to imagine any employer who could have flouted such demands. After May 1938, the bank also had to conform to general banking practice under the Third Reich. For instance, it had to report all deposits to the authorities in two categories: Aryan and non-Aryan.
Oral testimony from Warburg employees presents a mixed picture of Nazi meddling at the bank. In 1933, not a single employee belonged to the party, and the staff refused to elect the in-house labor council required by new legislation. By the time a Herr Glücksmann joined the bank in 1936 in a clerical position, however, he already felt surrounded by Nazis: “… and the other colleagues who sat in the room were all party comrades.… Everything was ‘Heil Hitler’ from the first day on.”3 Either because this was hidden from them or because they chose to look the other way, the Warburgs never spoke about such infiltration. One suspects that a dual reality had emerged: one when the Jewish bosses were around, another in their absence.
After the 1938 Aryanization, the house Nazis who had formerly concealed their insignias behind their lapels began to brandish them openly. That December, Max’s secretary, Martha Beyer, returned from abroad and was shaken by Brownshirt penetration of the bank. “We had had the impression that the Warburg firm was an oasis in this brown tide and when I returned and saw the different old colleagues again, wearing the party insignia—which one didn’t expect at all—I was very shaken.”4 Fear seized the staff. Beyer suspected that the man seconded by the Industriekreditbank (now a one-fourth owner) was a hard-core Nazi spy.5 Nonetheless, M. M. Warburg enjoyed some immunity from party harassment. At one point, the staff was summoned to a nearby cellar and had to suffer through dreary speeches exhorting them to join the party, but it proved an isolated episode. For a time, an SS man was assigned to the bank and was supposed to review everything. In fact, he interfered little and when he was drafted into the army, he wasn’t replaced.6
Once the Warburgs were gone, Dr. Kurt Sieveking still negotiated several Aryanizations from the Berlin office, including that of the fashionable N. Israel department store. At the same time, Brinckmann and Adolf van Biema campaigned to win back Aryan clients that had dropped the Warburg bank from political pressure. They traveled to Essen to regain the Krupp account and wrote numerous letters inviting companies to resume business with M. M. Warburg, reminding them that the reasons for their original decision n
o longer applied. The letters all ended “Heil Hitler” or “German greetings,” the Nazi salute.7 Brinckmann made a concerted effort to recoup lost corporate board seats and membership on the local Reichsbank committee.
The Nazis quickly reneged on the 1938 deal made with the Warburgs. The former partners had left behind about three million reichsmarks as a silent participation. Within six months, the Gau’s economic adviser told the bank to deduct 500,000 of that and the remainder was converted into an interest-bearing bank account. On March 27, 1941, the government decreed that all business names must be Aryanized. Remarkably, Nazi bureaucrats at the Economics Ministry, the Four-Year Plan office, and the Reichsbank wanted to exempt M. M. Warburg. Their request was spurned and on October 27, 1941, the bank was finally christened “Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co.”8 The government also confiscated the Warburgs’ silent participation and took over Kösterberg, thus completing the pauperization of one of the mightiest families in Germany.
Not all Warburg assets in Germany had remained in the firm. In October 1938, Max and Fritz set up a Secretariat with a twofold mission: to manage the Warburg blocked mark estates and to provide money and advice to needy emigrants. To supervise this office, they chose Robert Solmitz, who also assumed their places on Jewish charity boards.
The Secretariat was headquartered at Mittelweg 17, the old house that once belonged to Charlotte and Moritz, then to Fritz and Anna Beata. Hamburg Jews called it the Oasis, with good reason, for it provided relief from their barren and dangerous existence.
