The Warburgs

by Ron Chernow

  In Lüneburg, Eric witnessed a memorable scene of justice being handed out to the Germans. Robed, bewigged British judges presided over a trial of forty offenders from Bergen-Belsen and-Auschwitz. Sitting with sordid, brutish faces, the Nazis wore large numbers for identification. Eric was thrown into emotional turmoil, torn between a desire to punish these men and to let normal justice proceed. To calm his nerves and sort out his feelings, he sat in the old Lüneburg church, which had the organ once played by J. S. Bach. Convinced of the need to rehabilitate and not punish Germany, he was upset by the broad-based denazification campaign that stigmatized so many people. “I would be much harsher with several hundreds of thousands of Germans who are real stinkers, if necessary more, but the rest must have a hard chance, but a chance,” he insisted.25

  Eric would always be disturbed by the facile equation of Germans with Nazis. At Allen Dulles’s behest, he spent time with members of the German Resistance at Wiesbaden that summer, to make them feel less isolated, and in coming years he provided financial help to their families. As wartime head of the Swiss office of the Office of Strategic Services, Dulles had been in charge of American intelligence for Germany. He had trained Eric in mail drops and other intelligence methods. Having collected information on Hitler’s opponents, Dulles wrote a postwar book about the German Resistance, and Eric assisted him with the research, bringing him into intimate contact with many brave figures and reminding him of German traditions other than National Socialism.

  Eric devoutly believed that Germany must reform itself and he feared the imposition of outside morality. Repeatedly he warned Washington that the denazification program was netting too many little people. When Dulles asked for his thoughts, Eric argued for swift justice against Nazi bigwigs. “Otherwise, the Nazi criminals would use the floodlight of the courtroom not for the first time in order to fully exploit such a stage and which many of them are only too anxious to do.”26 Fearful of the Soviet Union, Eric wanted to push the political agenda beyond the Third Reich toward economic renewal. It worried him that most Germans believed America would go home while the Soviets would stay.27

  As an American colonel, Eric declined to participate in the Nuremberg trials that began in November 1945, believing the Germans should judge themselves. He also spurned an offer from John McCloy to participate in the Control Commission for Germany. Instead he functioned as a watchdog to ensure that the Nuremberg trials were conducted fairly.

  We might note two events of special Warburg interest. On October 25, 1945, Dr. Robert Ley, former Nazi nemesis of Max Warburg, committed suicide in his Nuremberg cell. Trying to hang himself by a towel, he choked to death instead. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht proved as arrogantly self-righteous on the witness stand as at the Reichsbank. Thirty-two prisons had not managed to dent his vanity. Able to point to his role in various anti-Hitler plots, he was acquitted by the court. A German denazification tribunal sentenced him to eight years in a labor camp. Dr. Schacht was finally acquitted on appeal and set free in September 1948.

  —

  Eric was a man of composite identity who felt American, German, and Jewish in turn. His Jewish identity was certainly the weaker part of his nature and he took actions in 1945 that would have been viscerally impossible for many Jews. He feared the Soviets would waylay many luminaries of German science; already, they were carting off rocket technology from Peenemünde. After alerting his dozing superiors to the scientific threat, Eric was authorized to requisition the Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof in Bad Kissingen. Working against time, he assembled a convoy of jeeps and trucks and rounded up German scientists and their families, housing them at the hotel. In a three-week period, he evacuated to the three Western zones about 160 scientists, including atomic researchers and V-2 rocket experts, a goodly number of whom ended up in the American space program. One of them was Wernher von Braun, who would visit Eric regularly after the war.

  This unquestionable triumph for Western security inevitably meant the rescue of many scientists tainted by Nazi associations. The V-2 rocket had not only killed thousands of British civilians, but twenty-five thousand concentration camp inmates had perished in the hellish underground tunnels that assembled it. Eric’s own files contain a report that in the Nordhausen tunnels 150 slave laborers died every day producing the giant rockets. In Germany’s atomic program, female inmates from Sachsenhausen were pressed into service to handle radioactive uranium plates. Eric himself would later secure reparations for victims of slave labor programs. Yet, as an intelligence officer in 1945, he showed no regrets about rescuing the scientists. If Eric had a strong sense of Jewish ethics, he didn’t have a Jewish nervous system.

  Eric was equally forgiving of the brilliant but weird Otto Warburg, one of Germany’s most distinguished biochemists. (Not to be confused with Otto Warburg, the botanist and Zionist mentioned earlier.) A cold, rigid bachelor, selfishly devoted to his work, Otto was descended from Simon von Cassel and hence was a distant relative of the Hamburg Warburgs. His father, Emil—a distinguished physicist and friend of Einstein—was a baptized Jew while his mother was a Christian. As a youthful prodigy Otto got a doctorate in chemistry and a medical degree. When he served in the Prussian Horse Guards in World War I, Einstein persuaded him that he was too promising a scientist to risk his life, and Otto, having won an Iron Cross, duly returned to Berlin.

  Eric enjoyed collecting people. By the time he first befriended Otto in 1933, the latter had already won the 1931 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine for his work on respiratory enzymes. The Rockefeller Foundation had built Otto his own Institute for Cell Physiology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (later the Max Planck Institute) in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. The solitary Otto was oblivious of political realities. When he visited Kösterberg after Hitler seized power, he didn’t know that Germany had left the League of Nations. Eric found Otto vain and pompous, but also witty, charming, and bristling with original insights. Whenever Otto telephoned in the 1930s, he asked Eric, “You don’t smoke, young man?” and “You ride every day, young man?” Eric would reassure him on both counts.28 Throughout the 1930s, Eric supplied Otto with everything from books to riding breeches.

  The Nazis didn’t bother Otto, who treasured the seclusion of his Berlin lab. At one point, he discussed with Max and Eric taking a post in a British university, “but imagine if I had to talk with the other Professors, and above all with their wives!” he said.29 In April 1933, when the Interior Ministry expelled all Jewish scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Otto and other directors were spared. In 1937, Max Warburg was chased from the Kaiser Wilhelm board—which was, by then, performing nasty racial research masquerading as science—but Otto remained.

  Otto’s survival in Nazi Germany aroused considerable controversy in the scientific community. In 1935, Hitler had a polyp removed from his vocal cords. Afterward, he dreaded that he would develop cancer and hoped Otto might devise a cure. Indeed, during his career, Otto would make notable strides in cancer research, showing the carcinogenic nature of food additives and cigarette smoke and demonstrating how cancer cells are destroyed by radiation. He became so obsessed with environmental carcinogens that he would not eat store-bought bread and had his own organic garden to produce fruits and vegetables. Otto displayed a certain arrogant idealism during the Third Reich. Outspokenly critical of the Nazis, he retained a Hungarian Jew, Erwin Haas, as his technician until 1938. When the Gestapo challenged Haas, Otto replied that he thought the anti-Jewish laws applied solely to German Jews!

  In 1941, Otto lost his post briefly because of his Jewish ancestry, but a few weeks later received a personal order from Hitler’s Chancellery to resume work on his cancer research. Otto’s Reichswehr friends got Göring to take a second look at his genealogy, which produced a convenient finding that Otto was just one-quarter Jewish. Otto was content to profit from this sleazy maneuvering. As Otto’s biographer, Hans Krebs, later wrote, “Warburg’s willingness to let his Jewish blood be diluted in this way, and thus to make a p
act with the Nazis, incensed colleagues outside Germany.”30

  In 1944, Otto won a second Nobel Prize for his enzyme work, but Hitler decreed that Germans couldn’t accept Nobel Prizes. Because he had narrowly missed winning in the late 1920s, had won in 1931, and had won but couldn’t accept the award in 1944, Otto entered that rarefied circle of scientists who have been considered three times for the Nobel Prize. He justified his decision to stay in Nazi Germany by claiming that he was performing extremely important cancer research that would save lives and that he couldn’t transfer his research operation abroad.

  At war’s end, Otto didn’t shrink from instructing the advancing Soviets about his own importance. “Do you know who I am?” he said. “The famous Nobel prize winner, Professor Otto Warburg from Berlin.”31 Once the Soviets let American troops into Berlin, Eric scouted out Otto, who remained in hiding. In a dramatic reunion, Otto walked out of a dark underground passage. For a few seconds, he actually exhibited human emotion, telling Eric tearfully, “I always knew the war would really be over only when you stood before me.”32 Then Otto reverted to his workaholic self, telling Eric that he needed forty liters of petrol to pick up scientific instruments. When Eric said this was forbidden, Otto scoffed. “I couldn’t care less; all I want is the 40 liters of petrol.”33 Eric obliged him. Until Otto died in 1970, Eric showed great solicitude for him. In his last letter to Eric, Otto wrote, “I shall get the third Nobel Prize for us, because in one or two years we shall have resolved the problem of cancer.”34

  —

  In this season of bittersweet wonders, Eric returned to the hilltop pleasance that had symbolized beauty and civility for the Warburgs: Kösterberg. He had a moving reunion with the redoubtable Braunau farm girl, Kathi Schwärz, whom he had recruited as a housekeeper for Noah’s Ark after the Nuremberg Laws. While German officers occupied Kösterberg and swam in the pool, she had safeguarded the premises from abuse. She would fearlessly lecture Wehrmacht officers who threw their boots on the furniture. “You’d jolly well better behave here as you do at home,” she told them.35 (They stripped the place of its furniture anyhow.) Eric was also amazed to find his old Newfoundland dog, Teddy, who was now blind and unable to recognize his long-absent master. With his innate dislike of uniforms, Teddy had been the bane of Nazi officers. Touring the grounds, Eric saw the dreadful changes wrought by war. Because of the property’s height, the Germans had mounted antiaircraft guns and radar atop the two water towers. A bomb had chipped off a corner of Noah’s Ark. The Nazis had turned Kösterberg into a military hospital specializing in jaw injuries, with Malice’s villa converted into surgical wards and Max’s studio serving as the operating room. Fritz and Anna’s house had been a sick bay for wounded soldiers. The military had thrown up dozens of barracks across the lawns, leaving the grounds rank and unweeded; the Roman terrace was converted into a potato patch. Wehrmacht cars had flattened the rhododendron bushes. Despite these grotesque transformations, Eric could already picture the place pruned, tidied up, restored. “Altogether Kösterberg is as beautiful as ever and I am sure that the mess can be cleaned up very easily,” he wrote to Bettina and Nina.36

  For the time being, it was a moot point as to whether the Warburgs would ever inhabit Kösterberg again. Encouraged by British authorities, Eric pressed ahead with plans to resettle children from concentration camps on the estate. Aided by the Joint and the Jewish Agency, Eric created a center for orphans from Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, and elsewhere. The estate that had recently hosted German officers suddenly swarmed with 100 to 150 German, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian Jewish children.

  The lice-infested children who came to Kösterberg found it hard to adjust to normal life. Still plagued by nightmares of the camps, many refused to take showers for weeks. At Kösterberg, they learned foreign languages and job skills that would prepare them for life abroad. Ironically, this former residence of a leading non-Zionist Jewish family became a nursery of Zionist militancy. “Everybody wanted to go to Palestine,” said one of the children. “You were almost looked upon as a traitor if you didn’t. We were training for the Irgun—the Jewish underground. We saw the British as no better than the Nazis.”37 Hundreds of children would rotate through Kösterberg before the program ended in the late 1940s.

  In August 1945, Eric went by train to Sweden and at the Stockholm train station set eyes on Fritz and Anna for the first time in six years. Now in their mid-sixties, they had helped many German refugees during the war years. Two of their daughters planned to move to Palestine. With Max sick and Alice worried that her son would contract disease in the German rubble, Eric didn’t dawdle and returned to New York in September, sailing from Bremen on a Liberty Ship with six hundred other soldiers.

  The Colonel Eric Warburg who sailed across the Atlantic that September was a far more accomplished, self-assured man than the socialite of earlier days. For his wartime service, he would receive the American Legion of Merit medal, the Order of the British Empire, and the French Croix de Guerre. Delighted and slightly astonished by this sudden blossoming, Max still wanted Eric to resume banking as soon as possible—a field in which his son was never born to excel. So Eric returned to the same dilemma he had faced in prewar days. In war, he had shown surprising leadership gifts. When peace broke out, he had to step down from the pantheon of war heroes and resume the role of an ordinary mortal.

  Part Five

  THE RETURN OF THE ALSTERUFER AND MITTELWEG WARBURGS

  ——

  Siegmund Warburg and his son, George, in officer training corps uniform, Deerhaddn, 1941. (Private collection)

  CHAPTER 38

  ––

  The Upstart

  On April 18, 1939, Siegmund Warburg had become a naturalized British citizen, giving him a measure of wartime security and protection. But he knew all the terrible fears and apprehensions of a Jew who had escaped from Germany. Early in the war, his New Trading Company had managed a Cash-and-Carry syndicate with the Rothschilds, Hambros, and other banks to finance American imports. In German propaganda broadcasts, William Joyce—dubbed “Lord Haw-Haw” from his sneering tone—had denounced German-Jewish perpetrators behind the operation. As Britain braced for invasion in the summer of 1940, Siegmund decided he wouldn’t be taken alive by the Nazis and got an arsenic capsule from a friendly doctor, to whom he remained profoundly indebted. After the war, Siegmund’s name would have appeared on a Nazi blacklist of the first people to be rounded up if Germany invaded England, except for a clerical error, which put his son George’s name on the list instead.

  Grateful to be in England, Siegmund and Eva never spoke German to their two children, and Lucie operated in English from the time she arrived. Siegmund regretted that he couldn’t appreciate English poetry as much as German poetry. Yet he steeped himself in Churchill histories and Charles Dickens novels and, in a typical bit of hyperbole, declared that reading Anthony Trollope surpassed a university education. He collected wartime speeches and clippings, with a view to possibly writing a book about the war. Roused by Churchill’s fiery exhortations, he rated them the finest public utterances since the ancient Greeks.1 Like other scholarly projects in Siegmund’s life, the war book came to naught. However much he immersed himself in British culture, Siegmund would always remain, in mind and manner, a product of Weimar Germany—its cultural pessimism, its sweeping, dialectical generalizations, its mystical yearnings for close friendships, its fear of the dark forces of history.

  Both as a German refugee and a Jew, Siegmund was extremely sensitive to slights. One morning, he took a train into the City from his house near Great Missenden and inadvertently gave in the wrong ticket at the end. The ticket collector didn’t care for people with German accents and asked him to pay a fine. Siegmund thought he had made an honest mistake and, after Nazi Germany, didn’t care to be bullied. While his friends and lawyers at Slaughter & May advised him to pay the fine and forget the petty insult, he refused to knuckle under to pressure. He retained a tough lawyer and suc
cessfully contested the fine, yet often talked later about the fear he felt in opposing the state.

  Even if never entirely at home in England, Siegmund was greatly impressed by the cheerful resilience of the British, the quiet heroism of ordinary people. Their plain, stoic, no-nonsense manner pleased the German puritanism he had imbibed from his mother. After a “doodlebug” attack on London in 1944, he marveled at the uncomplaining reaction of his staff, telling a correspondent, “It is significant that when I came the other morning to the office our liftman told me that he had been bombed out the night before, but he was just as punctual for his morning duty as on every previous occasion, and he was just as jolly as usual.”2

  Like many refugees, Siegmund and Eva were struck by the often kindly treatment they received from the British. After going to great pains to retrieve her Swedish citizenship in 1933, Eva was reluctant to renounce it again, but being a Swedish national entailed certain wartime hardships. Once she had to pick up Siegmund at the train station after curfew hours and phoned the police to ask for permission. The officer said slyly, “Well, madam, I can’t give you permission, but I won’t see you.”

  Lucie, now an old woman in her seventies, spent her days writing letters and playing the piano. But she still qualified as an enemy alien. Periodically this elderly lady had to answer police questionnaires about whether she owned a motorcycle or harbored any dangerous weapons.

  Even when he later grew rich, Siegmund never lived lavishly and didn’t try to ape aristocratic London bankers, with their posh clubs and country houses. Driven neither by greed nor social climbing, he could display a monkish austerity. Because of petrol rationing during the war and the bombing of train lines, Siegmund and his family gave up their Great Missenden house in 1942 and stayed in a pretty suburban apartment in Roehampton Lane, with a splendid park view. This modesty suited Siegmund just fine. As he told a friend, “it accords with my passionate wish to simplify life as far as possible which I think is one of our chief duties as far as personal life is now concerned.”3