The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  While Max never renounced his romance with Germany, Alice was determined never to set foot in Germany again. If suffering made Max softheaded and dreamy, it had made her tough and flinty. Whether playing bridge with Frieda or painting at Woodlands, she wore a craggy, no-nonsense expression. Still faithful to Max, she headed the women’s division of his Help & Reconstruction. She was a stoic woman of tremendous pride who scorned pity. Once during the war, Nina and Frieda decided to buy her a fur coat and Alice reared up, saying, “When I need a fur coat, Max will buy it for me.”16 She couldn’t quite fathom that her family’s wealth and standing had faded, miragelike. One day in Lola’s house in London, Alice spilled some water and absently rang the bell, waiting for servants to come. Lola had to remind her that they had no servants.17 In New York, Alice continued to shop lavishly, buying expensive high-fashion items from Bendel’s, and she thought it awful when Frieda bought plain print dresses from Bloomingdale’s.

  Alice sometimes seemed dazed, shell-shocked, by the expulsion from Eden. On two trips to New York, Siegmund perceived the pathos of Alice’s abstractions: “Aunt Alice seems to be quite well,” he told Fritz, “but one has not the impression that she has any feeling for what is going on in the world; she lives, so to speak, mechanically in the present but in reality in the past.”18 Another time, he wrote, “Aunt Alice is remarkably self-controlled, but so much so that I find it sometimes rather unheimlich [eerie].”19 In 1944, Max and Alice, age seventy-seven and seventy-one, scored 100 percent on their citizenship exams and became naturalized American citizens.

  —

  Exile loosened family bonds and dissolved the old Hamburg culture. Max could no longer veto inappropriate suitors for his daughters and lamented that he had been so cavalier about their religious upbringing. In London, Anita had married outside the faith to journalist Max Wolf. Max was upset but he knew that in a world gone mad, he could no longer control such matters. Gisela still worked for Hadassah, touring the country, frequently discussing Palestine with Frieda. In 1943, she married a young federal court judge, Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., in a fancy Woodlands wedding. Charles, thirty-seven, was an overseer of Harvard College who had already argued nine cases before the Supreme Court. Max was thrilled to have this Wunderkind son-in-law. Charles ended up suffering from manic-depression, confronting Gisi with a problem already too prevalent in her own family.

  The Warburgs avidly digested war news. Still haunted by the punitive Allied behavior at Versailles, they were dismayed when Churchill and Roosevelt called for unconditional surrender of the Axis powers at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, reversing an earlier pledge to seek a just, not a vengeful, peace. (As a captain in the Army Specialist Corps, Frieda’s son, Paul Felix, worked on Casablanca arrangements.) They hoped for an equitable settlement, not a war of extinction. When the decisive battle of Stalingrad ended in February 1943, Veniero Spinelli asked Max, “Mr. Warburg, you must, no doubt, be happy today?” “Why?” asked Max. “Hitler has lost the battle of Stalingrad,” retorted Spinelli. “No,” said Max, “that’s no reason for joy, for the last chance for Germany to obtain a just peace has now been wasted.”20

  Many Warburgs believed the Casablanca declaration would produce a fight-to-the-death mentality in Germany, eliminating any hope of a German opposition. Indeed, it caused profound dismay among Resistance members. Jimmy Warburg thought the doctrine played straight into Goebbels’s hands and submitted a memo to FDR to this effect. Belatedly, Ingrid Warburg’s faith in Adam von Trott was rather grimly vindicated. On July 20, 1944, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg planted a bomb under the table at Hitler’s war headquarters in East Prussia. Singed and shaken by the blast, Hitler nonetheless walked away intact and immediately ordered reprisals. Both a friend of Stauffenberg and his foreign-policy adviser, Trott was one of almost five thousand people arrested and murdered in revenge. He was hanged from a meat hook at Plötzensee jail on August 26, 1944. Realizing that her suspicions had been sadly misplaced, Frieda apologized to Ingrid: “You were right, my darling.”21 In the massive sweep following the plot, the Gestapo imprisoned Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler himself drafting the arrest order. The central banker who thought he could outwit the Führer finally fell victim to his own overweening pride and self-delusion.

  —

  Not surprisingly, several Warburgs wound up in Anglo-American intelligence work. As international bankers, they possessed the language fluency, intimate knowledge of foreign countries, strategic cunning, and necessary sense of discretion. They were also fiercely motivated to defeat Hitler. At first, the war promised to complete Jimmy’s rehabilitation in official Washington. In August 1941, he became a special assistant to Colonel William J. Donovan, who would spearhead anti-Nazi propaganda efforts as Coordinator of Information. After Pearl Harbor, Jimmy worked in the Office of War Information (OWI), headed by journalist Elmer Davis, which was responsible for defining the propaganda line in various countries.

  In the summer of 1942, Jimmy joined the first wave of propaganda specialists dispatched to London, serving as deputy director of the overseas branch. Enjoying top-secret security clearance and installed on the top floor of Claridge’s, he worked on the North African and Normandy invasions. During his OWI tenure, two events occurred that shocked and embittered him, foreshadowing his disenchantment with postwar U.S. policy. These battles served as catalysts for his metamorphosis from conservative, anti-New Deal scourge of the 1930s to ultraliberal pamphleteer and outspoken policy maverick of the 1950s.

  The first episode concerned the North African invasion in November 1942. Jimmy took part in a diversionary maneuver designed to trick Germany into thinking the Allies planned to invade Norway. Operation Torch crews were also slated to seize radio stations and newspapers in North Africa for propaganda broadcasts. But after the Allies landed along the Algerian and Moroccan coasts and quickly established control of the region, Admiral J. F. Darlan, a subordinate of Marshal Philippe Pétain, wouldn’t agree to a formal armistice. Darlan was a reactionary figure who had visited Berchtesgaden the year before, trying to pique Hitler’s interest in Franco-German cooperation in North Africa. The Allies now decided to cultivate Darlan as an alternative to the Vichy government and negotiated the Clark-Darlan agreement to secure his military cooperation. The deal acknowledged Darlan as head of French North Africa and gave him control of broadcast outlets taken over by Torch teams. This legitimated the existing government in Algiers, enabling Darlan to execute anti-Jewish laws. Like General Charles de Gaulle, Jimmy was scandalized by the betrayal of Allied ideals for short-term expediency and circulated strong internal denunciations of the pact. Incapable of tactical compromise, Jimmy gave way to unsparing opinions that always made him a disruptive force.

  This principled, headstrong streak again surfaced during a heated row over OWI broadcasts that followed Mussolini’s fall as Italian prime minister in July 1943. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, chief of the Italian General Staff, formed a new, non-Fascist government, but one that still claimed loyalty to the Axis. Assuming that the United States would reject the Duce’s collaborators instead of grooming them as successors, Jimmy and his colleagues on the airwaves called King Victor Emmanuel a “moronic little King” and Marshal Badoglio “a high-ranking Fascist.”22 The Roosevelt administration, in fact, wanted to negotiate with these Mussolini sympathizers and repudiated the London broadcasts. Right-wing opponents of the OWI waged a witch-hunt, denouncing supposed Communist influence in the agency. In February 1944, Jimmy tendered his resignation rather than upset OWI’s workings. He felt victimized by an internal power play and an abrupt reversal in American policy. Though disillusioned, he wrote speeches for labor leader Sidney Hillman in support of FDR’s reelection that year.

  These experiences again confirmed that Jimmy suffered from the curse of early success. As a banker, everything had proceeded smoothly for him. But in his rocky political life, he repeatedly acted with impulsive confidence and got into trouble. He was always being squeezed by burea
ucratic battles or undermined by slippery ideological shifts. For all his fine idealism, he had a tendency to shoot himself in the foot, as if some self-destructive streak prevented him from rising to the high level of his natural talents. Politics would be his nemesis, his obsession, his fickle, tormenting mistress. After his OWI service, Jimmy would be a Washington pariah, a renegade from the Establishment that had once so warmly embraced him. The golden boy of the Warburg family was too smart, too cocksure by half, too uncompromising to fit into any corporate or bureaucratic setting in a predictably imperfect world.

  —

  While his parents adjusted to the American scene with some difficulty, Eric Warburg exhibited his chameleon quality for blending into many backgrounds. A short, cheerful man with little apparent shadow in his nature, he seemed happy and hopeful even at the most implausible moments. Max had pounded into him the maxim “carpe diem,” which Eric took to heart. Like many domineering fathers, Max never strengthened his son’s confidence or delegated power to him. Only in World War II did Eric shake off his father’s enormous psychological weight. Now he would show a spontaneous flair for quiet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy and intelligence work. By offering scope for his talents, the war would be a happy period for him, a moment of internal liberation. Where wartime service would precipitate Jimmy’s break with the Establishment, it would secure Eric’s entrée in both Washington and Whitehall, where he collected powerful friends who would help to advance his postwar career.

  Genial and mild-mannered, Eric never pretended to be a deep thinker, had no vast talent as a banker, and didn’t take himself too seriously. He liked to sail and socialize with his wellborn friends. Yet he was imbued with Max’s German nationalism and shared his concern for Germany’s future. Unlike other German Jews, Eric never stopped thinking of himself as German, even as he fought tooth-and-nail against the Nazis.

  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Eric believed the Axis powers had committed a fatal blunder and itched for a chance to fight. Felix’s sons—Frederick, Paul Felix, and Edward—joined the U.S. Army. Rebuffed by the Red Cross, Eric volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Force Intelligence. The American military urgently needed people steeped in the German language, politics, and geography and so in the early summer of 1942, Eric was shipped to Florida for an officer-training course.

  Although the twelve hundred future officers were housed in Palm Beach hotels, the experience was anything but luxurious, since Florida suffered through its hottest summer in thirty years. The feet of the trainees blistered as they marched on hot pavements, and twenty or thirty officers regularly fainted on daily parade. At night, the wilted recruits slept in hotel rooms with windows sealed and blackened for security reasons. Eric thrived in this steamy hell, as his native talent for deftly handling delicate situations came into play. He overcame his shyness about public speaking and liked the Americans he met, especially Warner Marshall, a cousin of General George C. Marshall.

  At the end of his Florida stint, Eric went before a board of generals to receive his officer’s commission. As a veteran of the Prussian field artillery, he enjoyed clicking his heels smartly. As a practical joke, Warner Marshall told him to snap his heels for the generals. Eric was incredulous, but Marshall assured him he was serious. So when Eric entered the room, he clicked his heels rather ostentatiously. Agog, the commanding general asked where he had served in the armed forces. Trilling his r’s, Eric crisply replied, “Prussian Guard, Field Artillery.” The generals squirmed. Luckily, Eric had a chance to explain the circumstances of his departure from Germany. Dismissed with best wishes, he left with one last, snappy heel click.23 Apparently, his superiors saw the comic incongruity of having Eric in their ranks. One day he asked in his heavy accent, “What do I say if I’m taken prisoner?” and his superior replied, “Well, say that you’re from Milwaukee.”24

  Eric attended an intelligence school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, run by the Army Air Forces. He endured a grueling daily program of lectures and gymnastics. Even at meals, the young officers sat at tables where only German, Italian, or Japanese was spoken. Long the insouciant socialite, Eric was pleased and slightly surprised by his sudden utility in the war. The new captain wrote proudly to Alice, “According to the results of the last week your son must be considered a military genius, anyhow in the eyes of the school for they gave him the highest mark possible on a strategic problem involving many hours of blood and sweat and tears.”25

  Eager for combat, Eric was distraught when he was assigned instead to teach at Harrisburg. Refusing to spend the war in Pennsylvania, he protested to his friend, Brigadier General George Brownell, who retorted, “You are in the army, and you damned well do what you are being told. Is that quite clear?”26 Nevertheless, Eric lobbied in Washington to reverse the decision and two weeks later was roaring off in a bomber to England. With his brisk Prussian manner and British-accented English, he became a liaison officer between Army Air Force and the Royal Air Force and trained at a secret interrogation center in Buckinghamshire, where British agents grilled captured Germans. They accumulated voluminous files on the German armed forces, compiling sixty thousand documents on Luftwaffe personnel alone.

  Eric landed with Allied forces in North Africa and found himself in east Algeria. (Piggy also wound up in Algeria as an aide to Robert Murphy and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.) To inform the family of his whereabouts and bypass censors, Eric referred to a Kokoschka painting of the region owned by the Warburgs. This exotic spot of remote snowy peaks, desert, camel caravans, and lemon trees formed an unlikely setting for a Passover Seder in April 1943. Sitting beneath a picture of Pétain, Eric and seventy other Jewish soldiers sat in a stifling schoolroom, passing a bottle of wine and singing off-key. Eric, who had never worked with such fervor, coasted on a wave of enthusiasm. In a family haunted by angst and crippled by depression, he seemed almost abnormally well adjusted.

  The surrender of Germany’s Afrika Korps in May proved highly emotional. It stirred Eric to see thousands of his quondam compatriots trudging in defeat along dusty roads. The prisoners were gathered into camps without fences since they were surrounded by forbidding desert; escapees simply perished in the desert. Eric helped to run one prison camp for German prisoners at the Cap Bon peninsula in Tunisia. For his charges, he obtained proper food and medicine, actions that anticipated his postwar tolerance toward Germany.

  After the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, Eric went to investigate Luftwaffe positions. But Eric, who was about five foot six, was so weakened by dysentery that he weighed less than ninety pounds. To recuperate, he flew to London, where Lola and Anita took him to a German refugee doctor. Then he flew to Washington for a two-week stint at the Pentagon while convalescing at Freddy’s horse farm in Virginia.

  During this period, Eric influenced two critical military judgments. In 1942, the town of Lübeck was subjected to fierce aerial bombardment that destroyed many patrician homes celebrated in Buddenbrooks and damaged two majestic Gothic churches. The following year, the Royal Air Force intended to go back and flatten the town. Eric tried to dissuade the head of the British Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris—later dubbed “Bomber Harris” for his role in carpet-bombing Dresden—from this second bombing mission, arguing that Lübeck had no strategic but major cultural significance. After the bombing of London and Coventry, Harris retorted, he would freely bomb any German target.

  Eric then tried another tack. He got in touch with Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross in Geneva, who informed the British government that all letters and parcels sent to British prisoners of war in Germany were routed through Lübeck. Based on this information, Eric contended, the second Lübeck bombing was canceled.27 After the war, Eric would receive the Golden Ducat medal of the Lübeck Senate and always be hailed in the press as the “Savior of Lübeck.”

  While resting at Freddy’s farm, Eric also had a dramatic encounter at the Pentagon with his friend Warner Marshall. As a planning staff member, Marshall
was involved in framing postwar plans for Germany, which would be on the agenda at the forthcoming Teheran summit of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt. After passing through infinite checkpoints at the Pentagon, Eric was taken into a room that contained a map concealed behind a curtain. This map sketched the proposed American, British, and Soviet occupation zones. When the curtain was drawn back, Eric saw, to his consternation, that both Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein lay in the Soviet zone, with the Elbe River serving as a border.

  Several generals asked Eric to comment on this provisional division and he responded in purely strategic terms. If the Kiel Canal ended up in the Soviet zone, he explained, the Soviets would control the Baltic Sea. He also made a case for retaining Hamburg by noting that America would need a postwar seaport to handle troops stationed in Germany. When the generals cited Antwerp, Rotterdam, Le Havre, and Cherbourg, Eric argued for something closer. “Which harbor should we grab?” he was asked. Eric, naturally, said, “The best harbor is Hamburg. But if the British won’t let you grab Hamburg, try to get Bremen, if necessary by creating an enclave of Bremen territory which would be American held.”28 Eric never knew whether the generals heeded his arguments, but the Soviets got neither the canal nor Hamburg. The East-West partition was shifted just east of Hamburg, thus preserving the slim chance of a Warburg revival in Germany someday.