The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

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  Concentration camp orphans on the steps of Max Warburg’s former villa Kösterberg, May 1946. (Courtesy of George Schwab)

  Then the biggest surprise appeared. Eric drove to the small downtown lake, the Inner Alster, which had been covered with camouflage during the war. The neighborhood east of the lake showed extensive wreckage, and only one building seemed unscathed. “The bank building, like a miracle, is standing like a fortress in a mass of surrounding rubble,” Eric wrote home excitedly.5 The preservation of the Ferdinandstrasse building was a minor miracle, tarnished by a vicious whispering campaign in town that alleged, “That’s typically Jewish. They [the Warburgs] got them not to shoot the building.”6 In fact, the building had taken a direct hit in March 1941, when a bomb whistled down the marble stairwell and struck a metal plate above the bank vault, unleashing a choking cloud into a crowded air-raid shelter. So many bombs exploded around the bank that employees joked that their main wartime business was sweeping glass. The Berlin office that Siegmund had run was demolished in an air raid.

  Eric learned that Brinckmann and Wirtz, along with other Hamburg bankers, had been placed under house arrest by British authorities. Through a friendly American liaison officer, Major Spivak, Eric had already provided Brinckmann with privileges enjoyed by no other local banker. Spivak got Brinckmann groceries, fetched his car from Bremen, and even posted an “off-limits” sign around his house. When Eric drove out in his jeep to see him, the grateful Brinckmann emerged from his doorway and greeted him with tears in his eyes. For Eric and other Warburgs, Brinckmann momentarily seemed a hero who had saved the bank while managing to minimize cooperation with the Nazis.

  Did Brinckmann deserve such high praise? The employees of the bank would later agree that Paul Wirtz had remained politically clean. But Brinckmann’s record wasn’t spotless, nor could it possibly have been in Nazi Germany. Some of his wartime business likely had military significance. One annual report from the war years contains a cryptic reference to a shipping deal guaranteed by the Reich. Brinckmann had friends among Greek shipping moguls, and bank employees visited Greece during the war.7 One former employee said that British occupation authorities fired several bank employees who were Nazi party members—an assertion Brinckmann denied.8 For several years, the British Trading with the Enemy Department would probe an unspecified Brinckmann transaction.9 The Turkish-born Brinckmann had also visited Teheran during the war to foster trade. So while Brinckmann never collaborated outright with the Nazis and clearly didn’t sympathize with them, an odor of suspicion clung to him.

  Eric knew nothing of this history as he embraced Brinckmann in May 1945. After their reunion, Eric went to English Brigadier General Armitage to request that the military field hospital be removed from Kösterberg so displaced persons could be housed there. Armitage asked who attended the estate during the war. “The General Management Company, which is located at Brinckmann, Wirtz & Co.,” Eric replied. He was startled by the general’s rejoinder. “Oh, Brinckmann, Wirtz are a bad lot, they threw out the Warburgs.” Eric, introducing himself, explained that Brinckmann and Wirtz had behaved quite respectably.10 After a tussle, he prevailed upon the British to lift Brinckmann’s house arrest and let him, Wirtz, and their new associate, Hermann Schilling, return to the bank within three days—weeks ahead of their counterparts at other banks. But Eric wouldn’t see Kösterberg until September.

  It must have been eerily moving for Eric to reenter the beautiful neoclassical bank, now a spectral place denuded of its cherished artifacts and mementoes. Only three paintings adorned the vacant corridors: an oil portrait of Hitler, a Bismarck picture, and an English hunting scene. In a touching gesture, Brinckmann said to Eric, “Here is your desk. Let us begin again.”11 Eric reminded him, delicately, that the Warburgs were no longer partners and that he still served in the American Army. For seven years, it had seemed inconceivable that the Warburgs might start afresh in Germany. “But the hope was nevertheless always there,” Eric confessed.12

  To his immense credit, Brinckmann did ask Eric point-blank whether the Warburg partners wished to return and retake control of the bank.13 He also wrote to Max, saying he had but one wish—to place the old firm back in his hands.14 This clearly appealed to Max, but he was now old and ailing. The timing of the offer proved unfortunate in other ways. Like most Jews, Eric reeled as the full magnitude of the Holocaust was revealed. Germany seemed a mournful place of tears and ashes. What Jew would rush back? It furthermore appeared that decades would pass before a ruined Germany ever returned to normality. Eric also wanted to know more about the financial controls on banks.15 Finally, there were political considerations. Hamburg now lay just thirty miles from the Soviet zone and was severed from its lucrative trade links along the lower Elbe River. Eric fretted about a Soviet invasion. In fact, through channels, he had urged General Eisenhower to keep the populous states of Thuringia, Saxony, Western Saxony, Magdeburg, and West Mecklenburg instead of West Berlin, which he feared would simply become a mousetrap.16

  Yet Eric was also impressed by the speed with which industrious Germans were cleaning up their cities and he never ruled out the possibility of return. As he told his father, “It is too early to make any decision with regard to the future there (return). I personally think it’s out on a ‘for good’ basis but I think that if those in control really welcome it, some liaison might be worked out later.”17 Clearly, the prospect tantalized him, and John J. McCloy would later give him the official seal of approval he wanted.

  Meanwhile, Eric directed food parcels to Brinckmann, Wirtz and fostered a resumption of business. Evidently through Eric’s aid, Brinckmann sat on a Denazification Tribunal—no small political advantage for a postwar German banker. Distressed by his problems with occupation authorities, Brinckmann felt inordinately grateful to Eric for his help. In general, one can say that Brinckmann behaved as the loyal, decent caretaker figure the Warburgs had pictured when they chose him in 1938. When Eric gave him a handwritten letter from Max, Brinckmann “was deeply touched by again seeing Father’s handwriting after all these years and was quite humble after having been somehow depressed and restless before,” Eric told his parents.18

  Before leaving Hamburg, Eric performed an act of family piety. For his father’s sake, he wanted to make sure that the graves of Charlotte and Moritz and Sara and Aby had not been desecrated. While searching for them, he found himself, by accident, not in the Hamburg cemetery, but in the ancient Altona Jewish cemetery, which contained Alice’s Warburg ancestors. To build barracks, the Germans had leveled the grounds and pushed aside gravestones, and heartless locals now swiped gravestones to use as doorsteps. Eric strung up barbed wire around the cemetery and began to restore the gravestones. It turned out that the Warburg burial sites in Hamburg were intact; Eric’s grandparents and great-grandparents had slept undisturbed throughout the Third Reich. Eric was also reunited with the one Warburg who had spent the war in Germany: Aby’s eldest daughter and his cousin, Marietta, who had married the Christian Peter Braden. Finding her thin and underfed, Eric procured Care packages for the Bradens and many other old friends.

  Eric had the rank and mobility to get a bird’s-eye view of a defeated Germany. He flew down to Bavaria, swept over a shattered Nuremberg, then glided by Hitler’s Berghof, tucked away in solemn Alpine splendor on the Obersalzberg. Eric got out to inspect the hollow remains of Hitler’s retreat, reflected on the dreadful Munich tragicomedy of 1938, pondered the lofty mountain peaks. Events had moved with disorienting speed. As Eric told Freddy, “we drove down the steep mountain road where a few days before the gangsters were still racing with their big Mercedes cars.…”19

  Later, riding in Mussolini’s personal bulletproof car, Eric and his chauffeur went to Hochried, Jim Loeb’s estate in Murnau, now occupied by the U.S. Army. Soldiers were amusing themselves by taking target practice with Jim’s collection of antique Egyptian glass. His books and ashes had been preserved by his friends, the Count and Co
untess Resseguier, who had defended the property against SS encroachment. When Eric entered the house, he was startled to see a portrait of old Solomon Loeb staring at him from above the fireplace.

  In Berlin that September, Eric found Rudolf and Lola’s Wannsee house still standing in an expanse of debris.

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  An uproarious Felix Warburg in Cortina, Italy. August 1922. His teenage son, Eddie, took this high-spirited picture that was dubbed “Greeting the Dawn.” (American Jewish Archives)

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  A somber Max Warburg seated beside Gisela and Charles Wyzanski at their July 1943 wedding. A uniformed Eddie Warburg stands behind the newly weds. (Courtesy of Katharine Weber)

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  Anita Warburg. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

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  Gisela Wyzanski. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

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  Gisela and Charles Wyzanski in later years. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Felix Warburg chairs the Joint Distribution Committee, August 16, 1918. Jacob Schiff, lower right, grudgingly yields center stage to Felix. By this point, the Joint had raised $12 million for Jews in war-stricken Europe. (American Jewish Archives)

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  The Warburg mansion at 1109 Fifth Avenue, circa 1920, today home of the Jewish Museum. Jacob Schiff found the Gothic architecture unforgivably goyisch. (The Jewish Museum)

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  Frieda Schiff Warburg. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Lola Hahn-Warburg with her lover, Chaim Weizmann. Note how they kept a protective distance from each other in case the photo fell into mischievous hands. (Private collection)

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  Prince Philip visits Lola and Rudolf Hahn at their Burnside home in England. Observe how the regal Lola marches one step ahead of the prince. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Anna Beata Warburg and her three daughters in front of Noah’s Ark at Kösterberg. The ship-like silhouette of the house is visible from this angle. (Courtesy of Tamar Nussey)

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  Anna and her Swedish mother. (Courtesy of Tamar Nussey)

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  Fritz and Anna Beata Warburg around the time of their marriage. (Courtesy of Tamar Nussey)

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  A portly old Fritz Warburg in Stockholm, circa 1950, with grandchildren, Tamar, left, and Benjamin. (Courtesy of Tamar Nussey)

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  Ingrid Warburg Spinelli. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Veniero Spinelli. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  A fascinated Siegmund studies his colorful grandfather, Max Kaulla. (Private collection)

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  Lucie, Georges, and the lordly infant, Siegmund. Notice that Lucie’s gaze is much stronger and steadier than her husband’s. (St. Paul’s Girls’ School)

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  Siegmund clutches his teddy bear. (St. Paul’s Girls’ School)

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  Siegmund, in rear, exhibits thespian talent in a family spoof of Carmen in the park of Aby. S.’s house at Travemünde, July 1928. He poses with his cousins. (Private collection of E. G. Lachman)

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  Siegmund and Eva Warburg with her Philipson mother, brother, and father. The photo suggests Mauritz Philipson’s commanding nature. (Private collection)

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  Portrait of Siegmund Warburg done for his wedding, November 8, 1926. The photographer admirably captured his penetrating eyes. (Private collection)

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  Bridal picture of the exquisite Eva Warburg, November 8, 1926. (Private collection)

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  Siegmund Eva, George, and Anna at The Hyde, Little Missenden, August 1938. (Private collection)

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  Lucie Warburg visiting Siegmund at Selsdon Court, near Croydon, 1934. Siegmund sometimes got pudgy and took fasting cures. (Private collection)

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  This pensive study of Lucie Warburg shows where Siegmund got his extraordinary powers of intelligence. (Private collection)

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  Lucie shelters from the sun, probably in Travemünde. (Private collection)

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  Bettina Warburg. (Courtesy of Katharine Weber)

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  Nina Warburg in her roly-poly later years. (Courtesy of Katharine Weber)

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  Bettina and Jimmy Warburg, who never resolved an intense love-hate relationship. (Courtesy of Katharine Weber)

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  Piggy Warburg and the second of his three beautiful wives, Constance Woodworth, in the Road to Mandalay Club before their January 1939 wedding. (Wide World)

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  Gerald Warburg. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

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  Frederick Warburg at the time he received a distinguished service award from the Boy Scouts, May 1963. (Wide World)

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  Ace kibbitzer Eddie Warburg gets a belly laugh from Golda Meir. (From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward M. M. Warburg)

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  Eddie sits flanked by Eleanor Roosevelt and a stony-faced Golda Meir. (From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward M. M. Warburg)

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  Eric Warburg as a dapper young man. (Warburg family, Warburg)

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  Eric in Palm Beach, Florida, in an officer training program, 1942. Twenty to thirty men collapsed daily in the semitropical heat. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

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  Max Warburg and daughter Renate at Woodlands during World War II. Observe Max’s sudden paunch, hearing aid, and chastened expression. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Eric Warburg meets with John J. McCloy. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Inside the Hamburg bank, Eric pauses beneath a portrait of Paul Warburg. (Warburg family, Hamburg)

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  Eric’s son, Max, one of the few Mittelweg Warburgs ever blessed with hair. Today he heads the house of M. M. Warburg & Co. (Bent Weber)

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  Dorothea and Eric Warburg with their children at Hunt Cottage, White Plains, in the early 1950s. From left: Erica, Max, and Marie. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)

  However indignant at the Nazis, Eric was moved by the almost prehistoric misery to which starving Germans had been reduced. Some people were too weak to stand or hold a cane or lift a light parcel. As Eric told Nina, “I am the last who forgets what the Nazis have done and of the indescribable guilt of theirs. But I seriously doubt that this is the answer and one day there will be a feeling of deep shame upon us in the West that this is the better world we have been fighting for.…”20

  Even before his Hamburg homecoming, Eric had heard about the death camps and their legions of cadaverous inmates. After studying some of the first snapshots from the camps in early May, he wrote, “And the faces of these human beings who have gone through a golgotha compared to which a soldier’s death seems like triumph, speak their own eternal words. And although these saints—50–70 pounds of bones—were perhaps for some time with their thoughts no more on this world, I am sure they would ask us if they could, never to forget.”21 When Eric showed the photos to one captured German officer, the man wept, telling Eric that he knew the Germans had lost the war, but only now did he realize that they had lost their honor.22 In 1933 there had been more than half a million Jews in Germany and about 170,000 of them had died in the camps.

  From afar, Eric participated in efforts to evacuate Theresienstadt near Prague, where tens of thousands of Jews had died. He obtained a list of Theresienstadt survivors which he forwarded to the Joint. The chief rabbi of Berlin, Dr. Leo Baeck, had been among the Jewish leaders sent there. He had spurned all invitations to leave for America, saying, “As long as one Jew remains in Germany, my place is with him.”23 Eric dispatched a lieutenant to Baeck with orders to reunite him with his daughter in England. But this
figure of exceptional nobility preferred to be the last to leave the camp. Even as the occupying Soviets goaded Jewish inmates to take revenge on Nazi guards, Baeck preached forgiveness: “Don’t touch them, ignore them. It’s not our task to repay one injustice with another.”24 This attitude deeply affected Eric.

  Eric’s refusal to engage in any revenge against the Germans also had historical roots. He thought of the impassioned letters his father had written from Versailles and how the Jews had ultimately been victimized by the vengeful spirit shown by the Allies. Throughout the war, he had talked of the need to avoid repeating that error. He hoped Max’s memoirs would appear around the time of the armistice, reminding the victors of the hazards of vengeance.