The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  Promoted to major, Eric got the prestige assignment of preparing an intelligence unit for the D-day landing in Normandy. After wading ashore near Isigny, he camped on the beach in a pup tent and bumped into his pint-sized cousin, Eddie, who wandered about in a steel helmet. Eddie wasn’t fashioned for the martial arts, and Eric thought he looked ludicrous. “During the landing, I lost my shaving brush,” Eddie said. Having appropriated a fashionable badger shaving brush from a captured Luftwaffe pilot, Eric handed it to the little chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee.29

  For reasons of statecraft, the Allies decided that the Free French should march into Paris alone on the first day of Liberation. For intelligence purposes, however, a tiny contingent of British and American officers, including Eric, accompanied Major General Philippe Leclerc on August 25, 1944. Ignoring instructions to clear the streets, delirious Parisians swamped the liberators with hugs, kisses, flowers. Parents held their children aloft to be blessed “as if we were saints,” recalled Eric. He later estimated that he had kissed seven hundred women during this effusive welcome on the Champs-Élysées. “It might have been fun with twenty of them, but not more,” he said.30

  Even as euphoria infected Paris, Eric tried to halt reprisals being meted out to Germans. He drove in his jeep to the Hotel Majestic, now a detention center for seven hundred German prisoners. After misinterpreting random shots of joy fired into the air, the French guards had marched out four German officers, killed two, and lined up ten more for execution. Eric told his companion, a Royal Air Force officer named Eric Dagset, that they couldn’t witness such atrocities without protest. Dagset feared that the vengeful French might react violently to any interference. When the French guards swiped Eric’s Tommy gun, he saw an opportunity to slow down the killings. He summoned the French deputy commander and threatened him with a court-martial if his Tommy gun was not returned. He also insisted that, for intelligence reasons, the ten Germans be interrogated before execution, a dilatory tactic that saved their lives.31

  Eric rediscovered tattered remnants of his prewar world. He rang the doorbell at 23 Avenue Marigny, home of Baron Robert de Rothschild, and an old butler in livery named Felix answered the door. He had guarded the residence against Nazi looters after the Rothschilds fled. Exhausted by D-day and the Liberation, Eric was now suffering from pneumonia. Felix nursed him in a four-poster bed beside a cheering wood fire. Eric shared the house with Lord Victor Rothschild, a British cousin then commanding a squad defusing bombs. The Paris police received keys to the palace of Baron Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue Faubourg St. Honoré, which had been used by Nazi officers during the Occupation. Retrieving the keys, Eric and Felix explored a mansion stripped bare of everything except for oil paintings of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels. Göring had helped himself to several Rothschild paintings.

  The Warburgs’ charitable instincts immediately surfaced in Paris. While Eric interrogated Luftwaffe officers at the Petit Palais, Eddie—who always dubbed Eric his fourth brother—arrived in Paris to crank up operations of the Joint Distribution Committee, Paris having been prewar center of the Joint’s European activities. Now a lieutenant in helmet and field jacket, Eddie went to the agency’s neglected, run-down office on the Rue de Teheran and discovered only a deaf old caretaker on the premises. The Nazis had incinerated ninety thousand French Jews, a quarter of the total population. About ten thousand Jews had survived the war in Paris, many concocting false passports and camouflage identities, and they were now close to starving.

  By his first night there, Eddie had ten soup kitchens up and running on the Paris streets. Eric prevailed upon Victor Rothschild to deliver a message to London, instructing the Joint in New York to authorize sixty-five thousand dollars in emergency borrowing to feed refugees. Read aloud at a fund-raiser in New York, Eddie’s cable quickly raised the full amount. Other Warburgs appeared on the scene. Eddie’s older brother, Piggy, brought in the secret files from North Africa to a newly reopened American embassy.

  Eric performed a service that would be thankfully remembered by the French Rothschilds. Baron Robert asked Eric to locate his sons, Alain and Elie, both captured French officers, and Eric traced them to a POW camp near Lübeck. It turned out that Eric had unwittingly saved Alain’s life. During one battle, Alain wore a pair of Zeiss binoculars around his neck that Eric had given him, and they absorbed shrapnel that would otherwise have pierced his heart. Writing to his pregnant wife from the prison camp, Alain suggested that if the child were a boy he should be named Eric, which in fact occurred. Later on, this son would be a senior figure in the Rothschilds’ Paris firm and sit on the advisory board of the Warburg bank in Hamburg.32

  In the spring of 1945, Eric sent a truck and driver to fetch the Rothschild brothers, who had spent five years in captivity. Eric was stunned when a shaken Alain balked at returning to Paris. “I’ve lost my mother, my father, my wife and my sister are in America,” he explained. “I don’t have anybody to whom I can return in Paris. Shouldn’t I stay with you who are closest to me?”33 A few days later, Eric gently coaxed him into flying back to Paris with him and starting over again.

  —

  Toward the war’s end, Eric again grappled with the perennially troubled Warburg library. After war broke out, Aby’s books had been evacuated to two spots outside London, while the staff soldiered on in South Kensington. To foster preservation, Warburg staffers photographed historic London buildings, such as the British Museum or 10 Downing Street, in case they were demolished during the blitz. Even this rump operation was disbanded when the Warburg librarian, Hans Meier, was killed by a bomb.

  When financial guarantees for the Warburg library expired in 1943, Aby’s books again faced a grave fiscal crisis. Fritz Saxl rebuffed an invitation from the Library of Congress in Washington to adopt the Institute, believing they had a moral obligation to remain in Britain. Also, a spot check showed that the British Museum didn’t have 30 percent of the books in the Warburg Institute, confirming the library’s local value. On behalf of the Warburg family, Eric negotiated an agreement in November 1944 whereby the Institute was formally transferred and incorporated into the University of London. The Manchester Guardian noted the irony of this coup. “The nation’s greatest Christmas present this year comes from Germany.”34 Eventually, the library would be housed in a building on Woburn Square and two Warburgs would always sit on the board of trustees. Having twice escaped organized German violence, Aby’s books now came to a safe resting place.

  —

  As interrogation chief for the Ninth U.S. Air Force, Eric had a bumper crop of captured German officers to quiz that spring. Many Luftwaffe pilots had been heavily indoctrinated by the Nazis and Eric had to break them without applying torture. To convince the Germans that their situation was hopeless, he would show them films of English air battles. If necessary, he played rougher. When he discovered that one recalcitrant officer had thirty-five letters from his mistress, he said coolly, “These letters will be returned to your wife through the International Red Cross.” The man blanched. “It is not enough that we will probably lose the war, and I will lose my job as a professional officer. Now you will destroy the last thing that I have—my family life.” Eric handed him one letter for each honest answer he gave until all thirty-five were tidily returned.35

  This work gave Eric a panoramic view of a German military caste thoroughly corrupted by Nazism. As he noted, they realized that “while they were in a technical sense ‘doing their duty,’ they had allowed political gangsters to lead their country straight into disaster.”36 The whole rogues’ gallery marched past him. Count Edwin von Rothkirch, who led German troops into Vienna in 1938, struck Eric as a Junker caricature. When he saluted another German officer, he wearily lifted two fingers to his cap, letting a beribboned monocle tumble from his eye. Eric also interrogated Franz Halder, the former chief of staff arrested in the 1944 plot against Hitler. As they walked in the woods for hours, Halder briefed Eric on Hitler. “Hate was the man
’s predominant characteristic,” he said, “and a passion for destruction, accounts of which caused him intense pleasure.”37 Not every German was repentant. Eric debriefed Göring’s aide, Oberst Walther von Brauchitsch, who said of the Allied victory, “This time you won it.” Eric noted the stress laid on the first two words.38

  Eric was often quick to forgive the German military and some old, slumbering admiration for the officers corps, especially its more aristocrat members, emerged. Eric spent weeks interrogating the tall, professorial General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the former military governor of Belgium. Eric believed that while he had deported prisoners to death camps, he had opposed the deportation of forced labor to the extent possible, thus saving hundreds of lives in Belgium. Eric also persuaded the Americans (but not the British) that Falkenhausen qualified as a member of the German Resistance. Though imprisoned for his role in the July 20, 1944, plot, Falkenhausen himself disclaimed any such identity. In Eric’s view, he refused to hide behind a shield, even one he had justly earned. After the war, Eric protested to Allen Dulles when Falkenhausen was detained in a prison camp. In March 1951, a Belgian military court sentenced him to twelve years hard labor, a conviction reversed on appeal. Because of Falkenhausen’s age and poor health, Eric welcomed the reversal. Years later, Freddy Warburg asked John J. McCloy, then high commissioner of Germany, about the early postwar years. “Was my cousin Eric during that time of any use to you?” “Yes, he really was, with one exception,” said McCloy. “Which was the exception?” asked Freddy. “The case of General von Falkenhausen,” said McCloy.39

  When Hermann Göring was captured by U.S. troops on May 6, 1945, the Allies wanted to pump him for information that might be usefully applied against Japan. With exquisite irony, this critical task was assigned to Eric, who arrived in Augsburg for the assignment in early May 1945. Göring’s economic bureaucracy had spearheaded the Aryanization of M. M. Warburg, and now fate, with a commendably poetic sense of style, created a fine opportunity for revenge. Eric would call it “the grand finale” of his wartime work.

  He spent more than twenty hours with Göring. At first, leaning on a cane, the 250–pound Göring shuffled in dressed in a blue shirt and gray sweater. Later, in his grandiose thespian manner, he switched to a gray uniform with gaudy epaulets of pure gold. Good with accents, Eric introduced himself as a Mister Vikstrom, the name of a Swedish-American officer whose family had known Göring’s Swedish first wife. Eric and Göring had met at parties in Sweden in the 1920s. Although Göring marveled at the excellent, very upper-class German of his interlocutor, he never recognized Eric. To disguise the interrogation and give it a more conversational flavor, Eric memorized, in batches, more than five hundred questions designed to reconstruct Luftwaffe tactics and strategy since the Battle of Britain. As the interrogation proceeded, a sergeant in the corner took notes.

  Eric handled Göring with elaborate mock courtesy and knew just how to exploit the field marshal’s insufferable vanity. Even before they reviewed Luftwaffe history, starting with German sorties in the Spanish Civil War, Göring confided, “I do not want to complain but I have been quartered in a house over there with three other prisoners of war who are nothing more than generals.” He noted the Reich’s gracious treatment of Pétain. “And he was after all only a marshal, I am the Reichsmarschall!” roared Göring, thumping his chest. Eric discovered he had only to call him “Herr Reichsmarschall” to manipulate him with ease.40

  In Göring’s confused ramblings about the Third Reich—it was hard for Eric and his fellow officers to keep Göring focused on any subject for long—several themes recurred. He professed that he had defended the government against Nazi penetration and blamed Hitler’s bungling for every Luftwaffe setback. Having once boasted that no enemy bomber would ever fly over German soil, Göring confessed amazement at the range of Allied planes. As for strategic bombing of Germany, he said the raids against synthetic-fuel plants had inflicted the most damage. “Without fuel, nobody can conduct a war.”41 Göring dwelled on the Soviet menace, as if even now, the Nazis could prey on fears of Communism to strike a deal with the West.

  Of course, Göring washed his hands of any responsibility for the Holocaust. Banging the table, he said, “I never signed a death sentence or sent anyone to a concentration camp. Never, never, never!—except, of course, when it was a case of necessity.”42 He had abhorred the anti-Jewish campaign, he said. “Of course Jewish influence had grown too strong, but I never approved the methods used to deal with it, and they cannot be excused.”43 He produced stubs of checks that his wife had allegedly sent to a Jewish tailor at Theresienstadt, confiding, “Theresienstadt was not as bad as it was reputed to be.”44 Describing a Jewish work detail he had seen at an East Prussian airport, he implied that far from being slave laborers, they were a bunch of pampered loafers. In his summary report, Eric warned that Göring was far from deranged. “In fact, he must be considered a very ‘shrewd customer,’ a great actor and professional liar who most likely made some mental reservations.…”45

  The parting scene between Eric and Göring again displayed the latter’s comic-opera pomposity. Göring was to be flown to Luxembourg in a Piper Cub and he appeared at the Augsburg airport in a white raincoat and cap that reminded Eric of a Berlin traffic cop on a rainy day. He took one frowning look at the little plane, said it looked unreliable, and refused to board it. Two hundred American officers and soldiers eavesdropped as Eric massaged the field marshal’s vanity one last time. “Herr Reichsmarschall,” said Eric, “we guarantee your safe arrival.”46 Satisfied, Göring squeezed his capacious body through the tiny door.

  The Göring interrogation taxed Eric both physically and emotionally. As he wrote to Freddy, “I am still exhausted from 20 hours with the fat boy.”47 Yet he described the interrogation as the most extraordinary two days of his life. He sent one of Göring’s uniforms to George A. Brownell who then strutted around the Pentagon in the Luftwaffe uniform to general merriment.

  Because of the lax security in his cell, Eric wasn’t particularly surprised when Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing a poison capsule. The Warburgs had now outlasted one of their chief tormentors. After the war, they would have the satisfaction of surviving many others.

  CHAPTER 37

  ––

  Charnel House

  In the autumn of 1944, Eric set foot on German territory for the first time since 1938, as the Allies carried the ground war to the Fatherland. On a damp, gray October day, he entered Aachen to observe firsthand the Third Reich’s ghastly legacy of gutted, skeletal buildings and dazed survivors. Eric described it as a dead city that conveyed a sense of “great coldness, tiredness and infinite exhaustion like in 1918.”1 He recorded ghoulish images: limbs protruding from rubble; a tailor’s dummy still sporting undershorts; stray, ravenous animals. The Nazi overlords had fled these charred ruins, leaving behind a wretched populace who inspired in Eric both compassion and disgust. “Of course they share the responsibility of what happened to this poor Europe very fully, for they probably ‘heiled’ when things went their way and they kept silent when they should have rebelled at a time when they still could have.”2 Eric and his men claimed as their headquarters one of only twenty roofed houses left in Aachen. In the cellar, huddled with children, they found several frightened nuns whom they recruited as their cooks.

  By spring 1945, the British advanced toward Hamburg while American troops swept north toward Berlin. As they maneuvered to encircle the Ruhr, two wings of General Eisenhower’s army were united at the ancient Westphalian town of Warburg. Three days after the armistice, Eric entered Hamburg. What a dreamlike moment as this German-Jewish refugee—now a conquering American lieutenant colonel—rode into town. “It was an extraordinary feeling to drive over the big—incidentally quite undestroyed—Elbe bridges after all these long years,” he wrote home.3

  When Eric had last seen Hamburg it was a thriving, elegant city. Within minutes, the appalling devastation overwhelmed him.
Whole neighborhoods had been scorched by firestorms, erased from the map. As he targeted German industrial centers, Bomber Harris had zeroed in on Hamburg for its shipbuilding and aircraft production and raw-material imports. Starting in July 1943, the town had been pounded by saturation bombing, and more than half of it had simply disappeared. The toll of destruction numbed the mind: 118,000 people dead, 60,000 disabled, 295,000 houses destroyed, 3,000 ships sunk in the harbor’s watery grave. The city lay paralyzed beneath 43 million cubic meters of rubble.

  The Hanseatic city, which had prided itself on its tolerance, had been turned into a charnel house. In the nearby Fuhlsbüttel and Neuengamme concentration camps, 50,000 Jews, Communists, social democrats, Gypsies, homosexuals, and Resistance fighters had perished. At the end, it seemed some might survive, and they were packed onto two ships in Lübeck Bay. Then British aircraft strafed the ships, burning or drowning seven thousand persecuted souls on the brink of deliverance. Only six hundred Jews survived the war in Hamburg, mostly those in mixed marriages.

  As Eric sped through the city, vistas of ruin unfolded before him. Once gracious, picturesque houses were reduced to hollow structures lining the canals. The proud tower of the Rathaus, which had defined the skyline, had burned down. The Blohm and Voss slipways, launch sites for the dazzling HAP AG liners, stood destroyed. Eric had lost Hamburg twice: once in 1938 and now again. He later wrote, “Four years of war hadn’t depressed me as much as the sight of that bomb-lashed city, where I had known every nook and cranny, even without street signs, which were now for the most part gone.”4

  Notwithstanding the ferocious bombing, Hamburg held some hope of regeneration. An astonished Eric found, still intact, the old Mittelweg house of Moritz and Charlotte, which had been used by the Warburg Secretariat as a refuge for trapped Jews. Aby’s former house and adjoining library building had also escaped serious damage. Despite all the destruction, Hamburg had retained its shape and silhouette. However ghostly and disfigured, it was recognizably the same place, especially in residential sections by the lake. The same could not be said of the Altona and St. Pauli factory districts, which had taken frightful punishment.