by Ron Chernow
Though the Dutch helped to protect many Jews, the SS campaign in Holland was one of special severity. Max and Josi thought they had found an escape hatch from the horror when the Fine Arts Department of New York University—which had been eager to house the Warburg library—offered Max Adolph an assistant professor’s post. It seems likely that the Warburgs in New York had a hand in this offer. The couple then made countless trips to the passport office in Amsterdam to fill out endless forms. Their passports had “J” for Jews stamped on them. At the passport office, Josi perceived that “one of the gangsters there was a little more human than the others” and she charmed him into bestowing upon them “Half Aryan” status.23 When the Nazis blocked them from traveling to America, they had to figure out how to survive the war in Holland.
Josi had plenty of spirit. As her daughter said, “She was cocky, strong, beautiful, bossy, and really the first woman my father knew.”24 She proved resourceful under pressure, as did the more delicate Max Adolph, who had suffered a nervous breakdown with his father after World War I. The German occupation seemed to free him temporarily from his private fears and gave him the large courage of a transcendent cause. He said that in Nazi-occupied Holland evil became so palpable that people forgot the daily little demons.25 “It was the best time of his life,” said their daughter, Lux, whom they christened Maria Christina to put out of harm’s way. “He was needed as a teacher and a father and he had to find hiding places for his wife’s daughter from her first marriage.”26
By the summer of 1942, the Germans began the systematic purge that would kill off three quarters of the Jewish population. Aided by Max and Josi, the Jewish children at Eerde began escaping into the forest. To avoid pursuit, they would stage fake suicides by leaving their shoes and a farewell note by a stream.
The hunt only intensified. On April 1, 1943, the Dutch newspapers announced that the province in which Eerde was located must be cleansed of Jews. Three months later, Josi gave birth to a frail, cross-eyed little girl named Iris, who turned out to have Down’s syndrome. This child adored the imaginative Max Adolph much as children were once charmed by Aby. By year’s end, the Nazis shut down Eerde, intending to turn it into a school for the Hitler Youth.
These terrible events strengthened Max Adolph. During the next two years, he and Josi found twenty-two separate hiding places for Heilwig, who had false identification papers. Much of the time they communicated with her by coded messages. Faced with gnawing poverty, Max Adolph led a primitive life, digging potatoes and chopping trees to sustain his family. He kept the cultural flame burning by delivering secret lectures on art history—a small defense of rationality amid omnipresent barbarism that would have pleased Aby.
By September 1944, the Allies landed in Holland, but liberated the south first and only slowly fought their way northward. That winter, Max and Josi sat in nightly agony behind blackout curtains in their farmhouse, listening to British planes buzzing overhead. Their house, not far from the assembly place for V-1 and V-2 rockets, was mercilessly bombarded by the Allies. One night, bombs rained down, and a terrified Josi grabbed the sleeping Iris from her crib. “I carried her in my arms and Warburg and I ran under falling timbers, crashing windows and dropping bricks—down the stairs and out of the house. We jumped into a foxhole on the road, and when there was a pause in the bombing, we went from one hole to the other. Under a hail of bullets and crashing bombs I threw myself into the snow, covering the dirty, fearfully crying Iris with my body.”27 They subsequently had to abandon this house with its smashed windows and a hole punched through its roof.
On April 10, 1945, Canadian troops liberated Ommen, and two days later, Max Adolph and Josi brought Heilwig out of hiding. At first, Max Adolph wanted to teach in Hamburg and reeducate the Germans, but couldn’t get a position there. He never lost his admiration for German discipline and culture. In the end, he and his family moved to England in 1947, settling in Dulwich near Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. Fiercely anti-German, Josi thought it her proudest moment when she received her British naturalization papers. By contrast, Max Adolph would find the British indecisive and wishy-washy and often said, “Life is too short to be English.”28
So strong and gallant during the war, Max Adolph broke down when they got to England. Once in the Promised Land, with the pressure off, he could no longer keep the old demons at bay. He taught art history at the progressive Dartington Hall while Josi worked there as the head housekeeper. Waves of depression made teaching difficult, and Max Adolph bounced from school to school. Over the years, suffering from severe manic-depression, he underwent psychoanalysis and electric-shock treatment. At one point, Lola got him posh psychiatric help but he drifted in and out of institutions for life. A small syndicate of relatives, including Eric, Fritz, Lola, Frieda, Freddy, and Max Adolph’s brothers-in-law, gave him generous financial support. His dream was to lecture at the Warburg Institute in London. When he finally stood up to deliver a lecture about his father, he stared at the audience and announced that he couldn’t do it. His life was blighted by unlucky genes and the dislocations of war and persecution. As Max Adolph once stated mordantly on an application form, “My life so far has been rich and varied, but obviously not a success story from Reader’s Digest.”29
In 1937, Max Adolph’s younger sister, Frede, had published in German a doctoral dissertation on Dr. Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” which she completed at Hamburg University. Remarkably, at that late date, Frede was still treated civilly by her teachers because she was Aby Warburg’s daughter. A year later, she married another German refugee, Adolf Prag, and spent the rest of her life in England, where Prag became a master of the Westminster School and they had three children. Very aware of Aby and Max Adolph’s psychological problems, Adolf Prag would gamely shield Frede from ever succumbing to a similar fate.
One Warburg spent the entire war in Nazi Germany: Max Adolph’s older sister, Marietta, who as a young woman had nursed Aby during his breakdown. In 1926, she married Dr. Peter Braden, a specialist in childhood diseases, who sometimes worked as a doctor for the Warburg bank. Braden was extremely bright and articulate, a diabetic, but also headstrong and irascible. He had several friends in the German Resistance—most of them later murdered—and had been dismissed from his Mannheim clinic for his political activities. Although anti-Nazi, Braden kept dithering about whether to stay in Germany and lost the chance to leave. Both he and Marietta, ignorant of foreign languages, were afraid to trust their luck and venture abroad.
Even though Peter was “full Aryan” and Marietta “half Aryan,” it is still hard to believe that a Warburg daughter lived unmolested in wartime Germany. Peter worked in a hospital while Marietta did part-time social work. They never knew whether Marietta’s ancestry would suddenly be exploited, so they had a hideout ready in a nearby well. They had a house in a Hamburg suburb, where they survived the war intact. Some Warburgs would describe them as living in relative comfort, while others would claim that Marietta suffered grievously from rheumatism and arthritis pains and nearly starved as she gave food to her diabetic husband. There were many such cases of Jews who eked out a subterranean life in Germany during the war, usually married to an Aryan. Through Marietta, the Warburgs maintained their record of at least four centuries of continuous existence in Germany, as if the family could never really let go of the place.
CHAPTER 36
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Little Man and Fat Boy
Settled in a comfortable apartment on Park Avenue and spending summers with Frieda at Woodlands, Max and Alice lived like impoverished royalty in exile during World War II. The splendor of the American Warburgs contrasted vividly with the fallen state of their German relations. Malice found it hard to take root in new soil and they sometimes seemed to live from packed suitcases. At times, Max was charming, a ham actor with slapstick humor, the old twinkle back in his eye. At other moments, he was gruff, bitter, a defeated warrior. He now had silver hair and a noticeable embonpoint. During mea
ls at Woodlands, he sat on the opposite side of the table from Alice, hiding behind the huge floral arrangement so she wouldn’t carp at his overeating. He took long walks, delighted in W. C. Fields movies, and shot an occasional golf game with his wife.
If some Warburgs saw Max as a broken, tragic figure, he insisted that he wasn’t discouraged. He had the good fortune to serve on the Executive Committee of the Joint, which remained in a position to aid European Jewry until American entry into the war. Starting in 1939, Eddie Warburg co-chaired the Joint and secured German government approval to aid Jews in occupied territories.1 Max worried about anti-Semitism in America and submitted blueprints for new strategic directions. He sent a lengthy memo to Eddie stating that “All Jews outside Palestine ought never [to] be politically active, but should rather interest themselves only in cultural and economic things”—advice he had long preached but never practiced.2 At meetings, Max seemed to fumble when he spoke and lacked the easy air of authority he had worn in Germany. The “uncrowned king of Hamburg” had the tentative, uncertain manner of an immigrant.
To keep up his spirits, Max reported daily to 52 William Street and sat on the advisory board of E. M. Warburg & Company, which mostly invested money for Hamburg and Amsterdam refugees. With his motto “Semper Avante”—“always ahead”—he had idle dreams of someday re-creating his empire in America. Ever the organization man, Max founded several organizations to assist refugees, including Help & Reconstruction—which still taught English and German to Jewish kindergarten children—and the American Federation of Jews from Central Europe.
Like other immigrants, Max and Alice felt grateful to America and toured its scenic spots with virgin wonder. When Nina accompanied them to Upper Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, Max seemed enthralled: “… I have never been more impressed by the beauty of this country, as well as the climate and the entire atmosphere, than by this part of the world.…”3 Chastened by Hitler, he shed the grandiosity he had sometimes flaunted during his giddy days of early success, when the progress of German Jewry seemed so triumphant, so irrevocable.
Max struggled with guilt over the trouble he had caused Paul and Felix, the money he had squandered in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although Frieda felt strongly that Max had speeded Felix’s death, she was never bitter and made things warmly inviting for Malice at Woodlands. Indignant over Nazi atrocities, Frieda privately ventilated anti-German sentiments that might have shocked Max. After one restless night, she confided to Edward that she had suppressed an important fact about his life. “For heaven’s sake, Ma, you aren’t about to tell me at this late date that I’m illegitimate?” “Well, actually, it’s along that line,” Frieda replied. “Edward, did you know that you were the only one of the children who was made in Germany?”4 Once, Edward took Frieda and Max to the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Paul rested amid beds of ivy and myrtle sprigs. The grave site released such a flood of powerful emotion in Max that his grief seemed almost beyond endurance. “He was all in tears and practically bellowing,” Edward said. “He was tremendously upset.”5
With his health declining, Max turned to the consolations of philosophy. His Job-like experience in Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany had taught him stern lessons about the impermanence of wealth, the vanity of worldly aspirations. After visiting Palestine in 1929, he had commissioned an artist to sketch Moses gazing at the Promised Land that he would never enter. In the picture, Moses sits on an angular boulder, a thin, elongated figure with a pointed white beard, his eyes calmly lifted toward Heaven. Max identified with the picture, which he hung above his New York workplace. Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, he inscribed on its back: “The events of the war and the revolutionary time in Germany only made it ever clearer to me that every possession is vanity. I didn’t want to chain my destiny too much to Kösterberg, which we all so dearly loved.”6 In late 1941, when he and Fritz lost their German citizenship and residual partnership stakes in Hamburg, Max wrote a moving birthday note to his daughter Anita. His last illusions were now in shreds. “The firm M.M.W. & Co. Hamburg is cancelled, my mark fortune is confiscated (I’m sorry for all those who could be helped by us!). I hope the Amsterdam firm will be cancelled too, so that we can start here a new M.M.W. & Co. in time. I am ausgebürgert [expatriated]. All that clarifies the situation.…”7
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Lieutenant Colonel Eric Warburg bids farewell to Hermann Göring after over twenty hours of interrogation in Augsburg, Germany, May 1945. (Warburg family, Hamburg)
Long a prince of philanthropy, Max now beseeched others for help. He began writing to poor relations whom he had once helped, trying to cadge money. On December 17, 1942, the man vilified by the Nazis as the omnipotent mastermind of world finance had to take a $12,500 loan from Nina Warburg. A week later, in what must have been a daunting blow to his pride, Max accompanied Jimmy to a law office to close the books on the Kara Corporation, the corporate vehicle for the 1931 bailout loan, now a worthless shell. Jimmy transferred to Uncle Max all the Kara assets for a one-dollar bill.8 It must have been a bitter moment for both men as they signed.
Max spent much of the war writing his memoirs in German. With a generous advance from Macmillan, he planned to finish the book within a year, but it became a taxing, Sisyphean task. Max filled up reams of paper and suffered through interminable drafts, as teams of scholars and friends were enlisted to doctor the sprawling manuscript. In the end, Jimmy, Gisi, and Hans Meyer teamed up in a little cabal to persuade Max to cancel the book, and he duly returned the advance in 1945.9 In the early 1950s, Eric privately published a posthumous, severely abridged version. Among other things, the Warburgs hesitated to publish the story of Max’s salad days in Germany at a time rife with anti-German sentiment.
Why Max’s agony over this book? The problem was partly literary. Max’s spontaneous charm disappeared in formal composition. If his tongue raced, his pen faltered. And there were deeper psychological problems. Because his ego had been so sorely bruised during the 1930s, he sought to recapture a vanished glory. This led to a bloated, self-aggrandizing style in which he boasted of even trivial contacts with government officials. To salve his wounded pride, he told stories of famous statesmen foolishly ignoring his sage advice and this created the impression of an arrogant, self-important man.
Too voluble in many places, the manuscript was excessively reticent in others. Max was justly indignant about the abuse he had suffered after 1933. But as the final shadow fell over European Jewry in World War II, he knew that a horrifying new standard of abuse was emerging. In the lethal year of 1942 alone, the Nazis exterminated two and a half million Jews. As Max wrote, “When, in order to compose this book, I reread my contemporary memoranda of the time of the National Socialist regime in Germany, it seemed to me that all I suffered in those days in hurt, humiliation, loss of opportunities for usefulness, and fortune, was insignificant and unworthy of mention compared to the unspeakable persecution which, more dreadful from year to year, has filled the world with horror.”10 He conspicuously evaded many subjects: his urging Jews to stay and fight; his opposition to the anti-German boycott; his various transfer schemes. In the end, Max couldn’t gaze deep into his own conscience and coldly tote up the moral balance sheet. He was in too weak a state to admit error.
As for Warburg bank history, he skipped over Karstadt and other lending disasters. Some of this was understandable. Hitler had plucked away his chance to resurrect the Hamburg bank after the 1931 disaster and he needed to clutch at some wisp of self-respect. Unfortunately, in this psychologically fragile state, he asked Jimmy to review the manuscript. Eric once reproached Jimmy for sprinkling his observations with too much paprika and the latter, indeed, could never tone down his criticism. Now he took dead aim at Max:
“As to the history of M. M. Warburg & Co., I hate to say this, but I find it shockingly hypocritical and inaccurate. The reader is led to believe that you and your partners conducted an extremely successful business in difficult circumstances, that you o
bserved sound principles of banking, did not speculate, did not overextend yourselves, and knew at all times just where you stood. The reader would very likely believe you required a modest amount of help from your American brothers, and that only when circumstances beyond your control made the going especially tough. The facts, as you and I know, were unfortunately quite different. I am not sure that it would be a good idea to tell the true story of M. M. Warburg & Co.; certainly it would be painful to do so; but at least the true story is far more dramatic than the one you tell …”11 Jimmy, if right, delivered the truth in a bald and brutal style. He told Max to write a book about political events in which he had participated.
In unpublished conclusions to his memoirs, Max showed that he had never fully dislodged Germany from his heart. He admitted that the Third Reich revealed flaws in Germany’s political culture, stemming from the undemocratic nature of the original member states in Bismarck’s Reich. He also condemned excessive power vested in the military hierarchy. “Germany was a bureaucratic and military state without statesmanlike thinking.”12 Yet he vigorously denied that all Germans were Nazis. He refused to see Germany as irredeemably evil, a stain on the European map, but rather as a human compound of good and bad impulses. When he brooded over Germany’s postwar destiny, it was less as an embittered exile than as a loyal, if keenly disappointed, German. Sure that Nazism would collapse, he believed the Jews would have a central role in rebuilding the postwar world, thus anticipating the postwar attitudes of Eric, Siegmund, and even Jimmy.
The hardheaded banker flirted with fanciful schemes for world federalism and regional groupings to supersede nation-states. He seemed a dreamy old man taking refuge in simplistic visions. Periodically, he circulated plans for a postwar order to Wall Street bankers. In one memo sent to Thomas W. Lamont, senior partner at the Morgan bank, Max called for a stronger League of Nations with a Department of Migration to redistribute the world’s population on a more rational basis.13 He still viewed Palestine as a place of cultural rebirth, open to all religions and governed as an international trusteeship. Max never overcame his sense that Weizmann betrayed the Warburgs and he resented that the Jewish Agency presumed to speak for Jews worldwide. In 1942, he spurned an invitation to see Weizmann, labeling him “a dangerously good orator and a most unreliable partner.”14 Despite the Third Reich, Max still believed Jews could be good assimilated citizens around the world. “The task of the Jews in all lands is to remain true to Judaism and simultaneously to be good citizens of the country in which they live; and adapt their customs to that country.”15