The rothschilds, p.25
The Rothschilds, page 25
Among the English Rothschilds, Edmund (sweet Leo’s grandson) and Lord Victor (Natty’s grandson) were of military age. Each had inherited a handsome portion of the Family willfulness. Edmund, today head of the English bank, took part in the Italian and North African campaigns as an artillery major. The most characteristic account of a Rothschild embroiled in military hierarchy revolves around him. “Eddy,” recalls a wartime pal, “made one of our keenest officers. But he never got the hang of going through channels. Anytime any of our men had an emergency—say their mother died and they needed a furlough and money—they wouldn’t go about it the regular way. No, it was straight to Eddy, even if they were from a different outfit. They knew he’d pull that Rothschild checkbook out of his pocket, or he’d be on the phone—about any old hardship case—he’d be on the phone to Buckingham Palace. ‘Eddy,’ I used to say, ‘Eddy, you can’t do that. You’ve got to fill out a form about the bloke, and send it on with your recommendation to the CO.’ ‘What’s the CO got to do with it?’ he used to ask. The moment he did something civilian, he just couldn’t understand what a superior was.”
“On the command level they are superb,” said another wartime observer of The Family’s warriors. “Below that they can be nuisances. They are born and brought up as field marshals, you know, and it’s a real problem for them to be just majors. We’d save ourselves a lot of trouble if a high enough rank would come automatically with that name.”
At one point this tribe of obstinate field marshals got a dose of its own obstinacy. The scene was Robert de Rothschild’s resplendent residence at 23, Avenue de Marigny in Paris, today inhabited by his elder son Alain. In contrast to all other Family palaces by the Seine, it survived the occupation virtually intact. Göring was always eager to have his boys crash the Rothschilds’, and he put into the mansion the commander of the Luftwaffe in France. Surprisingly, the Kommandant left the house more or less as he had found it. Göring himself, as a rule a fond looter of Rothschild palazzos, often visited but never despoiled 23, Avenue de Marigny. It was even spared during the skirmishes accompanying the liberation.
The trouble began afterwards. A young English lieutenant-colonel moved in, bringing with him a perilous laboratory. In the immediate neighborhood of rare furniture and priceless paintings began a series of experiments with high explosives. Baron Robert had not yet returned. His servants trembled through their tasks, helpless before the flare and boom of the colonel’s apparatus. The man was no idle prankster, and he was hard to dislodge. One of Britain’s most successful and audacious bomb-removal experts, his work had earned him the George Medal (a very high English decoration) as well as the U.S. Bronze Star and the U.S. Legion of Merit. But what intimidated Baron Robert’s retinue most was the fact that the colonel went by the name of—Victor Lord Rothschild.
The billeting authorities had thought it a charming idea to accommodate the colonel in his cousin’s home; they had not considered the zeal with which Family members pursue their objectives. It took the combined efforts of the British High Command and the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the American Army to move his Lordship’s endeavors into a more suitable milieu.
7. The Palace as Souvenir
Lord Rothschild’s tenancy at Avenue de Marigny was a postlude to an unprecedented situation in the art world. Like many Jews on the run after the fall of France, the Rothschilds had to leave behind most of their material possessions. Principal among these were their immense art collections, worth many millions of dollars. How could they be defended against the Nazi looters?
Actually, the defense of Family treasures had begun, with typical Rothschild far-sightedness, generations earlier. Back in 1873, after the Paris Commune, Baron Alphonse decided that his immense art properties needed fitting protection. For each painting, sculpture or objet a custom-tailored, specially upholstered and easily portable case was made. Since every new acquisition received its proper sheath, the private Rothschild museums vanished smoothly during World War I and during the Front Populaire crises in the 1930’s.
But these early alarms were only dry runs. When the German tanks came down on Paris in the summer of 1940, a systematically rapacious enemy began to grasp at Rothschild canvases and Rothschild marble.
Occasionally he was fooled. A number of paintings were quickly spirited into foreign embassies, such as the Spanish and the Argentinian, and faithfully preserved there for the duration. A few very valuable pieces spent the war in a secret room at 23, Avenue de Marigny. The servants who knew about the room never breathed a word, and the Germans never got wind of it. Göring himself often walked right past the bookcase which stood between him and the portraits for which his agents were combing all of France.
But for the majority of Rothschild treasures, all precautions did not suffice. A whole list of important items, for example, was turned over to the Louvre, to receive protection as French national property. A useless ruse. The Family possessions were so well known, and the German dictator so art-loving, that Hitler issued a special directive bearing on “nationalized” Rothschild art. In a document later captured, the chief of the German High Command, Keitel, instructed the Nazi Military Government in Occupied France as follows:
In supplement to the order of the Führer to search…the occupied territories for material valuable to Germany (and to safeguard the latter through the Gestapo), the Führer has decided:
Ownership transfers to the French State or similar transfers completed after September 1, 1939, are irrelevant and invalid (…for example possessions of the Palais Rothschild*). Reservations regarding search, seizure and transportation to Germany on the basis of the above reason will not be recognized.
Reichleiter Rosenberg has received clear instructions from the Führer personally governing the right of seizure; he is entitled to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him and to safeguard them there. The Führer has reserved for himself the decision as to their use.
Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s specially deputized pillager-in-chief, did his work well. Baron Edouard concealed most of his art works on the grounds of his stud farm at Haras de Meautry in Normandy. Baron Robert hid many treasures, particularly from his Château Laversine near Chantilly, at Marmande in the southwest of France. Rosenberg discovered both caches, as well as a number of others. Soon whole trains filled with precious Rothschild stuff rolled toward Germany.
After the liberation of France the Rothschild châteaux and town mansions, with the exception of Avenue de Marigny, were found to have been thoroughly emptied. The process of recuperation which began instantly and lasted years makes one long detective story.
The Sherlock Holmes of the operation was James J. Rorimer, then Fine Arts Officer attached to the American Seventh Army, now Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He arrived in Paris soon after the liberation and immediately interrogated a great many people on the whereabouts of looted art. From a horde of self-styled insiders, each of whom claimed to have the key to a hundred secreted Goyas, he picked out a girl named Rose Valland. A young art scholar, she had helped the Germans classify their booty. But as a member of the underground, she had also kept a sharp eye out for the destinations of the loot. It was her opinion that the Castle Neuschwanstein, near Füssen in Bavaria, was Hitler’s main collection point for Aryanized masterworks.
Some nine months later Bavaria fell, and Rorimer drove in a jeep up to the castle. Neuschwanstein, built by Mad Ludwig of Bavaria in pseudo-Gothic style and perched like an evil phantasm on top of a crag, furnished a picturesque backdrop to what he was about to find. Rorimer traversed two courtyards connected by an intricate flight of steps, negotiated a spiral staircase ideal for tumbling masked conspirators. Finally he reached the room he wanted. Here was the nerve center of the entire Hitler looting project.
The Germans had lived up to their fine reputation for being methodical. Row upon row of filing cabinets filled the office. The Nazis had carefully kept, and used, the catalogues of each of the 203 private collections they had abducted. It took Rorimer, one of the great experts in the field, a whole day to take in the rough scope of what was recorded there: 8,000 negatives and individual catalogue cards for nearly 22,000 itemized major confiscations. The Rothschilds, with nearly 4,000 major items, towered far over every other name on the list.
Another crucial discovery was made in the same room. Rorimer sifted some objects out of the soot in a coal stove: the remains of a Nazi uniform, a half-consumed document with Hitler’s signature, and some rubber stamps. These charred stamps proved to be the key to the world’s greatest organized art theft; Rorimer noticed that they bore ciphers indicating the location of all other hiding places. A small chamber in an Alpine castle held the secret to countless and immeasurable treasures. To prevent the entry of unauthorized persons, Rorimer sealed the door with an antique Rothschild seal saying “Semper Fidelis.”
Now a concerted search was on. Behind the stove of the castle kitchen Rorimer found Rubens’ “Three Graces” from the Maurice de Rothschild collection and other chef-d’oeuvres. But not all Family items were so deviously concealed. In one hall at Neuschwanstein stood rows of the rarest tapestried fire screens, taken from Rothschild homes. Elsewhere Rothschild furniture, usually Louis XV and XVI, was stacked to the ceilings in specially constructed racks. There was box after box of Renaissance jewelry and eighteenth-century snuffboxes from Maurice’s collection.
At other places there were other treasures. In the Carthusian monastery of Buxheim the chapel was inundated knee-deep with rugs, tapestries and textiles largely of Rothschild origin. In a salt mine near Alt Aussee in Austria investigators came upon huge accumulations kept in the name of the Führer, and containing, among others, sculptures, libraries and paintings owned by the Rothschilds.
Some of the caches, of course, had been shifted just before the collapse. Specific searches often turned into protracted, difficult or altogether futile affairs. But by and large, the great Family collections began the trek back from all corners of Germany into France. They converged on a central station for recovered art works in Paris. Here a coordinating committee of Rothschild butlers sat for weeks, identifying this Watteau as Baron Guy’s, that Picasso as Baron Elie’s—and was that Tiepolo Baron Philippe’s or Baron Alain’s?
It seems a reassuringly esthetic note on which to end the Rothschild side of World War II.
* * *
* Philippe is a great-grandson of that English Nathaniel who moved to France. Thus his descendants are English by family tree but French by citizenship.
* Italics mine.
X
A Dynasty Turns Jet
1. Decline and Rise
Things were getting back to normal in 1945. But what, in Family terms, was normalcy? Would it be the grandiose decay that had set in during the 1920’s and 1930’s? Would the Rothschilds, like the Habsburgs, begin living purely in, and on, the past?
For a while it almost looked that way. The Austrian branch had emigrated and would live, sonless, on estates in Long Island (Baron and Baroness Eugene) and Vermont (Baroness Louis). The English branch was in the throes of the austerity program. The French house, partly liquidated by the Nazi occupation, had its hands full with its own convalescence. Taxes waxed more cruel than ever. And more great Rothschild mansions succumbed.
The house at Hamilton Place, built by Leo, became one of London’s most luxurious clubs (Grandees of the Expense Account now lean against the hand-carved balustrade down which Edward VII used to slide). Another Rothschild residence, in Kensington Gardens, now constitutes —O tempora! O mores!—the Soviet Russian Embassy. Buckinghamshire’s Waddesdon Hall, inherited by colorful Jimmy de Rothschild, was rendered even more palatial by the additional French masterworks he showered on it. But when he died childless in 1957, death duties took more than twenty million dollars out of his fortune. No one inside The Family or out could provide fitting upkeep for so luscious a palazzo. Jimmy left it to the National Trust, together with 750,000 pounds (two million dollars) to defray at least part of the maintenance cost. Now sightseers aim cameras at the staircase on which Edward VII broke his leg. Mrs. Anthony de Rothschild still lives at Ascott Wing, bought by her father-in-law Leo; but this house, too, with its masses of Dutch masters and the world’s greatest collection of Oriental pottery (and a parrot that announces with great majesty, “I-am-Jack-O’Rothschild!”) has been made over to the National Trust.
And in France? The titanic manse at 2, rue Florentin on the Place de la Concorde has gone the way of all titanic manses. Talleyrand had lived there before Edouard de Rothschild moved in. When Edouard put it on the market, only one customer could afford the price—Uncle Sam. It became the European headquarters of the Marshall Plan and today is tenanted by the United States Mission to NATO and to European regional organizations. Henri de Rothschild’s huge place at 33, rue du Faubourg St. Honoré now houses the Cercle Interallié, a fancy international diplomatic club. On the same street the United States Embassy has taken over No. 41, built by the first Baron Edmond. The Rothschild monograms still crown the great portals of both houses.
Last, not least, Ferrières, the crown jewel among Rothschild possessions: no one was rich enough to buy it, nor did the French branch want to part with such a symbol. The fifty-nine cases of rare books which the Germans had taken away came back again, as did the trainloads of looted Italian faïences and master paintings. They remained in their crates. The château was kept shut and uninhabited; it was less of a drain that way. In 1949 an American visitor walked through the dismantled palace. At first he found himself in a golden thicket of clocks. He thought he had stumbled into a clock museum until the caretaker explained that this was merely the room where the château’s timepieces were stored. Next the visitor came upon a huge, glorious array of Louis XIV and XV chairs. In still another chamber there was a dazzle of tables. Finally he saw a number of objects adorably wrought out of rosewood and flowered antique Chinese porcelain. He puzzled, looked again—and understood the caretaker’s smile. Here stood scores of the world’s most exquisite bidets.
Year after year Ferrières signified luxury in mothballs. The existentialist era apparently did not encourage the functioning of fairytale castles. In fact, the existentialist era seemed on the point of equalizing and taxing The Family to pieces, as if it were just another collection of fustian has-beens.
But the Rothschilds did it again. Astonishingly, they became themselves once more. An old, cunning indestructibility began to reassert itself. In 1949 it became visible in traditional fashion at a traditional place: the stock exchange.
On June 30, 1949, strange things were happening on the Paris bourse. As soon as the bell signaled the start of business, Royal Dutch, the global oil company, began to fall. A great metal combine, Rio Tinto, declined steeply. There was absolutely no reason for such misbehavior; both companies were in excellent shape. Still they kept weakening. Sell orders swamped other issues as well. Le Nickel, a giant mining corporation, melted with each twitch of the ticker tape; so did the diamond trust of de Beers. Bewilderment spread, nervousness outran it, panic flooded all. Most investors joined the rush to sell. Prices reached their deepest low in months.
Few people isolated the factor common to all four slipping issues: The Family was a heavy stockholder in every one. Only other important holders of these same shares knew of Edouard de Rothschild’s death that day, at the age of eighty-one. They realized that the enormous death duties would decrease the Baron’s estate and thus the potential of the companies he backed. The minimization of the death levy was the call of the hour.
Next morning, of course, everyone read the Baron’s obituary on the front page. Financial columns, discussing the death duties involved, stated that the tax on the dead man’s stock holdings would be based on the closing price of his securities on the day of decease. And while funeral arrangements were being completed, brokers received buy orders from the same sources which twenty-four hours ago had instructed them to sell. The so-called Rothschild papers rose as punctually as they had fallen.
Suddenly there occurred without warning, though with ample precedent in Rothschild history, one of those leaps which lifted the clan off the downhill side and placed it back on the accustomed position at the top. In 1855 it had risen to crush its tormentor, the Crédit Mobilier. Some hundred years later it woke up, to turn twentieth-century with a vengeance. Almost overnight it caught on to the smallest gray practicality of our times. One day in that same year, 1949, the head of the London bank sent his butler out to buy a map of the London Underground. This plebeian item became as integral a part of Anthony de Rothschild’s belongings as his checkbook. Within the city he dispensed with chauffeur and limousine, thereby avoiding the delays of midcentury traffic and contributing to subway revenues. By tube he often managed to arrive on the spot long before banking rivals who had themselves driven all the way.
