The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  In December 1938, Himmler took away Jewish drivers’ licenses, curtailing mobility. After September 1939, Jews couldn’t walk the streets after eight o’clock in the evening, were banned from public transport, and could shop only one hour per day. They were liable to be pressed into forced-labor brigades. The two hundred thousand desperate Jews left in Germany—about 60 percent had now escaped—were thrown back on their own resources and had to band together.

  At Mittelweg 17, the stranded Hamburg Jews cherished the older, better German culture that had sustained them. The Secretariat tried to keep local artists busy. Well-known actors read aloud from Rilke or Goethe, while pianists and violinists gave concerts in the first-floor library. Later on, their serenades were interrupted by air raids; the audience then descended to a large cellar shelter where the Jewish caretaker, Baer, lived with his wife and three small children. The head of the Jewish Community, Dr. Max Plaut, moved his office into the building, which seemed to gather people like a rescue boat picking up dazed survivors from a shipwreck.

  The Warburg Secretariat gave many desperate people hope as well as seed money for emigration. The revolving fund set up by Eric and Bettina still provided small advances through M. M. Warburg & Co. In a setting of constant intrigue, Dr. Plaut conducted almost daily negotiations with the Gestapo to spring people from prison. Once they were released, he and Solmitz rushed them out of Germany, for delay could mean a sudden detour to a concentration camp.

  Solmitz and Plaut frequently dealt with a Herr Göttsche, who headed the Gestapo’s Jewish department for Hamburg. Solmitz said Göttsche was one of the few Gestapo officials with a particle of conscience; perhaps for that reason, Göttsche committed suicide at the close of the war. At a time when emigrating Jews couldn’t return to Germany, Solmitz traveled freely back and forth to Stockholm to consult with Fritz. This freedom was illusory, however, for the Gestapo told Solmitz that if he didn’t return, his wife would be shot. When Solmitz had trouble reentering Germany after one trip, Herr Göttsche furnished him with a highly unusual I.D. that said, “Robert Israel Solmitz travels in the interest of the German Reich.”9 Whether this privilege resulted from Gestapo policy or money extorted from the Warburg Secretariat, one can only speculate.

  The Gestapo was certainly titillated by the idea of plundering Warburg wealth. This became clear after Germany conquered Poland and considered creating a vast Jewish settlement area near Lublin. One day, Göttsche called in Solmitz and Dr. Plaut and unveiled a secret plan, drafted in Himmler’s office, that carried the code name “The Hamburg Plan.” It envisioned a reservation state in Poland for European Jews, where they would be sent to govern themselves. Göttsche shamelessly appealed to his listeners’ vanity and lust for power, promising Dr. Plaut that he might be president of the new state and Solmitz the finance minister. The head of the Hamburg Talmud Torah school, said Göttsche, would be minister of arts and education.

  Having waved this before their eyes, Göttsche got down to the crux of the matter. “Naturally the implementation of the project would have to be financed by the Jews themselves,” he said. “The Warburgs are considered very suitable for that. If they only wanted to do it, the Warburgs in America could raise the necessary money to found such a reservation state.”10 Göttsche told Solmitz to consult Fritz in Stockholm, who could convey the suggestion to Max in New York. Solmitz promptly went to confer with Fritz for a few days.

  Fritz dictated a response, couched in guarded terms. Though he pretended he hadn’t heard from New York, his reply clearly shows that he had consulted with Max and the Joint. He said that he found the idea of a Jewish state in Poland an extremely interesting one, but that such large sums could only be mustered by the Joint Distribution Committee. And the Joint was upset by the disappearance of one of its representatives, whom the Germans had yanked off a ship bound for Stockholm.11

  When Solmitz read this to Göttsche in Hamburg, the latter jumped up and sent a message to the Gestapo in Berlin, which responded to the Joint’s complaint with lightning speed. A few days later, Göttsche told Solmitz that the Joint’s representative had been traced to a camp for foreign prisoners, Stalag II. The Joint official (who must have been startled by this miraculous event) was promptly released and sent to America. On March 23, 1940, word of the reservation plan leaked into the press, along with speculation that it would be an extermination center in disguise. With that, Göring and Himmler decided to scrap the plan.

  Meanwhile, the chances of escape dwindled for those Jews left in Germany. A sinister milestone came in late 1939 when the first gas chamber was constructed in Brandenburg. Deportations in Hamburg began in 1940, when Jews were rounded up and deported from a pretty, grassy triangle on the Moorweidenplatz. The first shipment contained mentally ill Jews, plucked from institutions; the sane and healthy soon followed. In September 1941, the Nazis revived the old medieval stigma, forcing Jews to wear a black star of David on a yellow background, with the word “Jew” inscribed across the middle. A month later, the massive deportations to the camps began. Of twenty-four thousand Jews living in Hamburg when Hitler took power, six thousand would head east to the death camps and never return. Most went to Theresienstadt, the “model” concentration camp set up to fool Jews and foreign visitors, but many also went to Auschwitz and Riga.

  By 1941, life for Jews had grown intolerable in Hamburg. They were herded into dingy, ramshackle quarters with each person assigned just five square yards of living space. In the spring of 1941, the Warburg Secretariat went out of existence, its headquarters expropriated for a Nazi party business operation. Solmitz and his wife fled through occupied France and Spain and entered the United States via Portugal. The valiant secretaries who had worked with him, plus the entire family of caretaker Baer, ended up being butchered.

  The Warburgs of Hamburg were spared the ghastly world of the ovens and crematoria, but their distant relatives, the Altona Warburgs, boasted no such luck. For a long time, the two clans had been locked in a fierce cultural and financial rivalry. A literate, musical family, the Altona Warburgs had entertained Brahms at their home and felt superior, in many ways, to their Hamburg relatives. Many had been baptized—which always remained taboo among the Hamburg branch. Then, after more than a century of business, the Altona banking house of W. S. Warburg merged with the North German Bank of Hamburg in the early 1900s, as the Altona Warburgs fell into decline. The grandfather of Max’s wife, Alice, had founded W. S. Warburg in 1804.

  The W. S. Warburg manager, Albert Warburg, had died right after World War I. The hyperinflation had chopped down his estate to 1 percent of its value. Albert’s widow, Gerta, began to sell off art while their daughter, Betty, worked as a doctor in Hamburg. To local residents, it seemed absurd that a lady named Warburg should work for a living, and to the Hamburg Warburgs this would have seemed decidedly vulgar.

  Gertrud Wenzel has written a touching memoir of her grandmother Gerta and aunt Betty. Already in her eighties, Gerta had money stashed away in England and could have escaped in the 1930s, but was too wedded to her adored Germany. “She loved the German nation. She had been a part of it for sixty years. She persuaded herself that the madness of the Thirties could not last.”12 One night after Kristallnacht, Dr. Betty Warburg was visiting a sick child when sadistic teenagers pounced on her and beat her face with sticks. She grew frightened and withdrew into her room. “Only late at night would she leave the house for a walk, armed with a stick, much too weak and frightened to use it in her defense.”13 Gertrud’s parents held on in Altona, her mother knitting in fear by the window and her father spending his days sitting down by the pier.

  Possibly from proud memories of the old rivalry, these Altona Warburgs never appealed to the Hamburg Warburgs, so far as one can tell. On May 8, 1940, Gerta and Betty belatedly crossed the border into Holland, only to be followed by the Nazis two days later. They ended up in the gas chamber at Sobibor. Gertrud’s parents remained in Altona, convinced that a compassionate world would never allow th
e Nazis to implement their monstrous rhetoric. They were martyrs to their innocence.

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  The final act of the Warburg drama in Europe was enacted on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, where the family had set up Warburg & Company in 1929. After 1933, this lone Warburg outpost beyond German borders proved a providential place to sell blocked marks and assist Jews to transfer money out of Germany. In 1936, to shield the Amsterdam bank from increasingly onerous Nazi regulations of foreign exchange and tax matters, the Warburgs had loosened the ties between Warburg & Co. and M. M. Warburg. Siegmund and Hans Meyer, a Warburg cousin, became sole Amsterdam partners, withdrawing from the Hamburg firm. At the time of the 1938 Aryanization in Hamburg, the Nazis fleeced the Warburgs of more than a million Dutch guldens as the steep price for keeping the Amsterdam bank.14

  Max’s wish to preserve the Amsterdam firm aggravated relations between the American and German Warburgs. In the 1931 bailout, Paul and Felix had set up the Kara Corporation to grant a seven-million-dollar loan to M. M. Warburg. After their deaths, Jimmy headed Kara. Extremely fatalistic about the European outlook and tired of forever indulging Uncle Max, Jimmy and his American cousins wanted to shutter Warburg & Company in Amsterdam, which was wholly owned by the Kara Corporation. They thought that the existence of two Warburg banks in Europe—one under Nazi supervision in Hamburg, another under Warburg control in Amsterdam—created a misleading equation between them and gave the Aryanized Hamburg firm an aura of family approval. As a result, they agreed, only with the deepest reluctance, to maintain the Dutch bank.15

  Knowing that the $7 million loan was gone forever (but not forgotten), the American Warburgs slashed the debt owed by their German relatives to $1.44 million. This last figure equaled the total value of assets held by the German Warburgs outside Germany. Jimmy adamantly insisted that heirs of the Hamburg partners shouldn’t receive money that their fathers still owed to the Kara Corporation.16

  On May 10, 1940, Jimmy’s forebodings were spectacularly confirmed when the Germans invaded Holland, trapping Warburg employees and relatives in Amsterdam. Having been neutral in World War I, Holland had seemed a promising sanctuary in case of war, and Jews had flocked there from many parts of Europe. In New York, Eric and Max felt powerless as they contemplated the prospect that fourteen relatives and coworkers might be consigned to concentration camps. The story of what happened next exists in several, slightly contradictory, versions, but the general outline seems clear.

  A few weeks after the Nazi invasion, Helmuth Wohltat was appointed the German Kommissar for Dutch banks. Having negotiated the ransom plan with George Rublee in Berlin, he knew the Warburg partners well. In a sympathetic manner, he notified the Warburgs that he would soon be forced to place Warburg & Company under German supervision. He admonished them that, as Jews, they couldn’t remain partners and should leave at once. He further advised them to transfer control of the Amsterdam bank into reliable hands.17 Both Wohltat in Holland and the Reich Economics Ministry wanted to transfer the Warburg bank to a German bank and urged Rudolf Brinckmann to take over Warburg & Co. in Amsterdam. Brinckmann—by now the Aryan for all seasons—at first hesitated to assume the burden of a second Aryanized bank.

  Stuck in another blind alley, the Warburgs still had some bargaining power left. In taking over Holland, the Nazis were at pains to prove that they had no plans for formal annexation of the country. To this end, they tried to maintain some facade of legality, however transparently fraudulent. In negotiating the fate of Warburg & Co, the Warburgs insisted upon safe passage from the country for all relatives and employees as part of any deal.

  The mysterious agent of fate in this volatile situation was a Berlin lawyer, Dr. Fritz Fenthol, who specialized in smuggling people from Germany through behind-the-scenes negotiation. His top-notch government connections enabled him to merchandise human lives. Depending upon which Warburg you ask, Fenthol was either a courageous intermediary with the Nazis, saving threatened Jews, or a base trader in human souls who exploited people’s misery for profit. Whatever the truth of this complex individual, he carried on a thriving trade in Nazi-occupied Europe.

  Fenthol had one vulnerable point, and potentially a fatal one: He had a Jewish wife stuck away in Switzerland. Some Warburgs believe that in 1940 Fenthol suddenly invented a mission to Japan due to rising Nazi suspicions about his wife. If that is so, his sudden appearance in New York must have occurred en route to the Far East. He confidentially informed Max and Eric that The New York Times was about to publish an exposé that would ruin his business and possibly end with his imprisonment. Presumably, the reporter planned to disclose the existence of Fenthol’s Jewish wife. Eric later claimed that he contacted friends at the Times and got the Fenthol story spiked. When Fenthol then returned in tears and asked how he could repay this great favor, Eric coyly replied that there was one favor he could ask, but that it lay beyond Fenthol’s powers. What was that? Fenthol asked and Eric told him about the fourteen people pinned down in Holland.18 Furnished with their names and addresses, Fenthol returned to Germany via Japan and the Trans-Siberian railroad and got in touch with Rudolf Brinckmann. Fenthol must have served as intermediary in the subsequent negotiations with the Nazis before fleeing to Brazil in March 1941.

  Brinckmann told the Berlin authorities that he would take control of Warburg & Co. in Amsterdam if they guaranteed safe passage from Holland for the fourteen Jews. Some family members say that the American Warburgs had to hand over a sizable bribe to the Gestapo to grease the deal, with one million dollars the most commonly cited figure.19 It is unclear whether Fenthol was bagman for the payoff. It is known that the Nazis operated a shakedown racket by which Jews outside Europe paid ransom to free those trapped in Holland. “It appears that the Dutch Warburgs and several other wealthy families took this way out of Holland,” notes one scholar.20 The Amsterdam bank placed under Brinckmann’s nominal control was renamed Kommanditaire Vennootschap M. M. Warburg & Co. and run by a trusted clerk, L. Bysterus Heemskerk. He tried to act as a caretaker, doing as little new business as possible so as not to aid the Nazi war effort.

  Warburg & Co. must have been worth a good deal to the German government, for in March 1941 these fourteen Warburg employees and family members received an unusual send-off from Nazi-occupied Holland. With Brinckmann waving farewell on the platform, the fourteen boarded a regularly scheduled train with a special SS-escort assigned both to watch and protect them. Accompanied by other Warburgs on the train as a result of a separate deal, they traveled across occupied France, unoccupied France, Spain, and Portugal. By one account, the Warburg contingent kept the doors locked during the trip so that Nazi guards couldn’t enter their compartment. Right before they crossed the French border, an SS man told one person in the Warburg party, “We are supposed to accompany you to San Sebastian, but I have a girlfriend in Hendaye. Would you permit me to leave you in Hendaye?” “I think we can handle ourselves,” the Warburg relation answered dryly.21 In Lisbon, the party boarded a ship to Cuba and entered the United States with visas secured by the American Warburgs. Several would work as employees of E. M. Warburg & Co. on Wall Street in one of the more elaborate cases of corporate relocation on record.

  One Warburg was excluded from the train: Olga Lachmann, the eldest daughter of Aby S. She had Dutch nationality since 1920, having lived in the Hague with her two children, Grace and Eddy. Olga would claim that Max had deliberately banned her from the train because of a bitter feud they had in the 1930s over the disposition of her father’s estate. She would base this charge on postwar discussions with Heemskerk, who claimed to have seen telegrams that passed between the Warburgs in New York and the SS police or Sicherheitsdienst in Berlin. There is no way to verify this grave charge or even to say whether Max had final say over the list of passengers. Passage, after all, was paid for by the American Warburgs, who may have had the last word. Miraculously, Olga and her children survived the war in Holland.

  —

  As the Warbu
rg train rolled out of Amsterdam in 1941, it also left behind Max Adolph Warburg, Aby and Mary’s son, who had taught at the Quaker Eerde school in Ommen in northeast Holland. A splendid refuge, the school was situated in a castle with parquet floors and marble staircases. This enchanted little educational kingdom was bound by a moat. Max Adolph not only taught art, history, and classical languages, but, with a nod to his father, created a frieze of constellations for the main salon and designed the cover of the school magazine.

  Like many sons of strong, tyrannical fathers, Max Adolph was starry-eyed, gentle, and sensitive and cherished Eerde as a place where children of all nations could learn under ideal conditions. As a classical scholar, Max Adolph shared Aby’s delight in untangling myths and decoding symbols. In 1934, he received a teacher’s diploma from Hamburg University for a Latin paper analyzing the representation of the Goddess Fortuna in the arts and literature—a quintessential Aby Warburg topic. Like his father, too, Max Adolph was a marvelously imaginative lecturer. Yet he lacked Aby’s colossal, almost demonic, drive. He was casual, even boyish, and free of great ambition.

  Brought up as a Lutheran, Max Adolph became a Quaker during his Eerde stay. He married Josepha Spiero, who had two children from a previous marriage. While her son was sent to safety in America in 1939, the protection of her Jewish daughter, Heilwig, would become a full-time preoccupation for Max Adolph and Josi. They also had their own little girl with the charming name of Lux. On May 10, 1940, the Germans jolted their fairy-tale realm of Eerde. As Josi recalled, “we woke up in the castle because the windowpanes were rattling so strangely—until we understood that they were blowing up bridges, that it meant us, and that now everything, everything was lost.”22