The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  CHAPTER 5

  THE EPHEMERAL PEACE

  Among the many papers I have uncovered in my research is a faded and yellowed election pamphlet produced by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazis. It was from a poster designed by Rudolf Hess for the Reichstag elections of November 1932. This depressing document features a screaming headline: “Germans! Look at the men behind the government!”—adding another nail to the coffin of the fading Weimar Republic. Farther down, the pamphlet rants about “Jewish manipulators against true German leaders.” Four caricatures of prominent “German Jews” are rendered in typical Nazi style. All four have big ears, low foreheads, long, hooked noses, beady eyes, and stubbly five o’clock shadows. Each of these cartoonish, unsavory-looking characters is described as a “profiteer,” a “Jewish schemer,” and one of the “perpetrators” of Germany’s misery. The first caricature is identified as “Guttmann, Dresdner Bank”—“Gutmann” is misspelled, but it is clearly my great-uncle Herbert.

  Even now it is still chilling to see a member of my family with a Nazi target painted on his back. I imagine some hard-faced Nazi thug, with club in hand, pasting this vicious caricature of my great-uncle all over the streets of Berlin. It also makes me wonder, for perhaps the millionth time, how Herbert and so many other Germans did not, would not, see what was coming. While that is an easy question to ask from the safety of the twenty-first century, with the utter certainty of hindsight, at the time the answer was not quite so simple.

  • • •

  Like Fritz and Louise in Holland, for Herbert and Daisy in Germany the 1920s had been a happy, prosperous, and glamorous time. After the war, Herbert had turned their relatively modest summer home on Bertinistrasse, in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam, into an eighty-room, twenty-thousand-square-foot virtual palace known as Herbertshof. The estate featured, among other luxuries, an underground passageway to the boathouse on the Jungfern Lake, an indoor gym (reportedly Berlin’s first), tennis courts, a screening room for first-run films, a Turkish tiled sauna, and a vast collection of Near and Middle Eastern art and antiquities that Herbert had discovered during his many travels in the region.

  Later, my father would remember playing hide-and-seek with his cousins in the secret stairs behind the famous “Arabian room” at Herbertshof. This vaulted room had paneling carved by eighteenth-century Syrian artisans and was filled with various art treasures. From the hideaway, the children delighted in spying on the oh-so-grand houseguests.

  Herbert and Daisy entertained on a lavish scale. One Berlin society writer described the social life at Herbertshof this way: “No foreign diplomat, young or old, comes to Berlin without instantly leaving his visiting card at the Gutmanns and subsequently making his social debut at their salon. Every Sunday Herbertshof is open house for lunch. One finds 20–24 invited guests while numerous acquaintances and friends arrive unannounced by car from Berlin in the afternoon . . . . In winter one dances in the beautiful hall or films are shown that one has not yet seen at the cinema. In summer one goes to the pretty private bathing pavilion, swims, rows, rides rubber animals or the large motor boat on the lovely blue waters . . . . At the home of Herbert Gutmann you find the entire diplomatic corps, part of the Foreign Office, most Reichministers and the leading lights of high finance.”

  Several kings visited Herbert and Daisy at Herbertshof, including King Faisal of Iraq, King Fuad of Egypt, and King Amanullah of Afghanistan, which reflected Herbert’s position at the Deutsche-Orient Bank. In 1926 Herbert cohosted with his sister Toinon, wife of the Swedish ambassador, a grand ball in honor of King Gustav V of Sweden, in preparation for which Herbert had the grand salon remodeled to accommodate no fewer than three hundred guests. Herbert and Daisy also remained close to the former German royal family. After Crown Prince Wilhelm followed his father into postwar Dutch exile, his wife, Crown Princess Cecilie, chose to remain in Germany with their six children at her villa Cecilienhof, just down the Jungfern lakeshore from Herbertshof. Herbert took the Crown Princess and her children under his wing, keeping her supplied with funds and helping to resist postwar efforts for the confiscation of the royal family’s extensive assets, including the Potsdam villa. Years later, one of Cecilie’s sons, Prince Louis Ferdinand, heir to the Hohenzollern throne, noted in his memoirs that during this time “the Jewish banker Herbert Gutmann, one of our neighbors in Potsdam, proved most helpful” to the royal family. This was yet another indication that, decades after the Gutmann family’s conversion, they remained in German eyes, even friendly ones, still Jewish.

  Herbert’s social and professional connections reached into every corner of Berlin society. As a member of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, or Society of Friends, founded in the eighteenth century by the Mendelssohns as a Jewish charity, he was part of Berlin’s financial elite. He was also president of the German Golf Association. However, being the founder and president of the exclusive Berlin-Wannsee Golf and Country Club gave Herbert the most pleasure. On the other hand, my great-uncle’s membership in the somewhat right-leaning Anglo-German Union would eventually cause Herbert and his eldest son, Luca, unforeseen problems.

  Herbert playing at the Wannsee Golf Club, where he was president. The Wannsee club was nearby the house where the “Final Solution” was hatched and where the “Wannsee Conference”—the official beginning of the Holocaust—took place.

  Herbert was also president of the German-Persian Society and a consultant to the Islamic Department of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, a reflection of his artistic tastes and expertise.

  In addition to serving as a director of the Dresdner Bank and chairman of the Deutsche-Orient Bank, he was, in the German business style, also on the boards of directors of some fifty other major corporations. Intensely nationalistic, even monarchist in his political leanings, Herbert was associated with a number of prominent, and later sinister, German political figures. Frequent guests at Herbertshof included the ultranationalist future Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher, and the aforementioned Hjalmar Schacht, erstwhile Dresdner Bank employee and a future finance minister under the Nazis. Franz von Papen, yet another future Chancellor, was also a regular at Herbertshof.

  Given such wealth and powerful connections, it was reasonable to ask what a man such as Herbert would have to fear from some boorish, uneducated Austrian ex-corporal and his band of thuggish, low-class henchmen. Herbert’s son Luca later remembered a conversation between his mother and one of her guests during one of those grand dinner parties in the early 1930s. Daisy asked, “Who really is this Herr Hitler?” The guest assured her, “Madame, that is nothing for you, someone who lives in luxury and has such a high position, to be worried about.”

  German Jews tended to dismiss the rising Nazi Party as just another gang of street toughs and hooligans. From both the right and the left, many fringe groups infested the fractured German political landscape. Common also was the German Jews’ desire to sweep under the carpet the anti-Semitic tendencies of their acquaintances who might, at one moment, spout the most vicious, Nazi-style drivel about the Jewish “pollution” of German blood and culture—but in the next breath calmly reassure their Jewish friends that nothing would change.

  It seems astonishing now, but apparently Herbert and other prominent Jewish families actually believed that the Nazis and their supporters, at least the ones they hosted in their salons and drawing rooms, meant them no harm. For example, Herbert’s friends Crown Prince Wilhelm and the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen were both early supporters of Hitler, but that did not prevent their names from often gracing the guest book at Herbertshof. Worse still, some of Daisy’s relatives had got in the habit of living off Herbert’s largesse even as they openly admired Hitler. Another frequent guest and business partner of Herbert’s was Joachim von Ribbentrop, a relentless social and political climber. Ribbentrop actually counted Herbert as one of his good friends and turned to him when he needed financial help. Later he was deeply involved in the behind-the-s
cenes scheming that put Hitler in power and ultimately was promoted to foreign minister in the Nazi government. In the end, Ribbentrop was hanged as a war criminal at Nuremberg.

  In Holland, Fritz and his children maintained friendships with Prince Bernhard, who, while at university in Berlin in the early 1930s, joined the Nazi Party and the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA). He would later claim he had resigned all his Nazi Party affiliations in 1934, but his younger brother, Prince Aschwin, originally also a Gutmann family friend, remained a party member. Ultimately these two brothers would fight on opposite sides during the war.

  Fritz felt duty-bound to provide financial advice to Kaiser Wilhelm despite his increasingly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi leanings. The list of what now appear to be incongruous bedfellows was long, but symptomatic of a German society that had not yet completely unraveled.

  As difficult as it may be to believe now, some prominent German Jews, while decrying the Nazi party’s crude anti-Semitism, even expressed support for the Nazi platform of a strong, politically stable, and internationally respected Germany. For example, the banker Siegmund Warburg—the distant cousin who would much later turn me down for a banking job I didn’t really want—declared in 1930, “The Nazis are doubtless in part dreadfully primitive in human and political terms. On the other hand, one finds among a large part of them valuable, typically German strengths [that] show strong feeling for social and national duties.” Like many German Jews, Warburg assumed that Hitler and the Nazis could be controlled, that their vicious and increasingly popular anti-Semitism was a passing thing. In hindsight that seems preposterously and fatally naive.

  German anti-Semitism was not invented by the Nazis; it had waxed and waned throughout modern history, rising in times of social and economic stress and subsiding in times of peace and prosperity. German Jews were thus accustomed to it, so perhaps it can be understood why the Nazis’ anti-Jewish rantings, and the parlor-room anti-Semitism of their wealthy friends, did not cause Germans such as Herbert or Siegmund Warburg undue alarm at first. They had seen it before and, with a few isolated exceptions over the previous decades, it had never actually sparked widespread physical violence against Jews in Germany, or even any diminution of their civil rights. That it could, and eventually would, seemed inconceivable as the 1920s ended. Yet, within just a few years, that is precisely what happened.

  In January 1933, Hitler legally became Chancellor of Germany through a combination of bare-knuckle street violence and clever political manipulation, aided by the Great Depression, which put millions of Germans in misery. Less than a month later, the Reichstag “burned down” and Hitler assumed dictatorial powers under the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.” The opposition was effectively silenced. Almost immediately, the Nazis’ long-promised, and long-dismissed, persecution of Germany’s Jews began in earnest.

  Even before the complete Nazi takeover, Herbert became one of their first victims. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, when the “German Banking Crisis” hit its peak in July of 1931, the reaction of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and his finance minister, Hermann Dietrich, was not surprising. Despite their apparent differences with the nascent Nazi Party, the one thing they could all agree on was the “cosmopolitan Jewish character” of banking. Dietrich, who made no attempt to hide his anti-Semitism, declared to a fellow cabinet member, “The trading Jew, who has taken so much in interest from us, should now be really made to cough up.” As a result of the crisis, the Reichsbank assumed control of the major banks. Dietrich readily began his purge.

  Herbert Gutmann was the first “Jewish” banker to be sacrificed. Next was Jakob Goldschmidt of the Danat Bank, who happened, also, to be second after Herbert on that infamous poster. The Danat, like the Dresdner, was one of the top four German banks. Between 1931 and 1933 about half the directors of all the top four banks would be out of a job.

  Suddenly those same industrialists and financiers who had been Herbert’s friends now looked to Hitler and the Nazis as bulwarks against Bolshevism. Even those who had attended the lavish parties at Herbertshof decided that they didn’t want Herbert on their boards of directors anymore. As he and other Jewish board members were forced out of their positions, hacks sympathetic to the Nazi Party soon replaced them.

  Meanwhile, the so-called Aryanization of the Dresdner Bank, and of Germany, continued under the Nazis’ 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which required the dismissal of non-Aryan teachers, professors, judges, and other civil servants—including employees of government-controlled banks such as the Dresdner. Soon all six hundred Jewish employees of the Dresdner (about 5 percent of the total workforce), from board members to branch managers to the lowliest clerks, were dismissed, their pensions canceled or confiscated.

  In May 1933, Nazi brownshirts swarmed into the lobby of the Dresdner headquarters and smashed the bronze bust of Eugen to the ground. Eventually the bank founded by Eugen Gutmann was proudly declared by its new masters to be Judenrein—that is, “cleansed” of Jews.

  Herbert became a marked man. Nazi posters and pamphlets with his image continued to appear, denouncing Herbert and others of his circle as Jewish “schemers” and “parasites.” Long after Herbert’s loss of office, much to the family’s bewilderment, his caricature would often appear in the gutter press and Nazi pamphlets as a prime example of what a Jewish “bloodsucker” looked like. Jakob Goldschmidt also continued to be pilloried.

  Friends and acquaintances that Herbert and Daisy had known for years began to turn away. Daisy later recalled going to a concert at the Berliner Philharmonie and coming face-to-face with the former Dresdner executive Hjalmar Schacht. Now president of the Reichsbank, Schacht, in the company of various high-ranking Nazis, seemed to make a point of snubbing her; Daisy actually wept. In April 1933, Herbert was even kicked out of his beloved Berlin-Wannsee Golf Club, which he had founded and was still president of. The membership voted to no longer allow Jews as members.

  Curiously, after dismissing Herbert from the Dresdner board, the bank suddenly discovered that Herbert and other Jewish board members allegedly owed the bank hundreds of thousands of marks. In 1934, beset by debts, both real and invented, Herbert was forced to put his extensive art collection up for sale at the Berlin auction house of Paul Graupe, a Jewish art dealer who had assisted both Herbert and Fritz in acquiring their art collections. Graupe’s auction catalog for the Sammlung Herbert M. Gutmann listed more than eight hundred pieces for sale—Meissen and Chinese porcelain, Islamic art, ancient Syrian glass, bronzes, tapestries, and sixty-four paintings, including well-known works by Fragonard and The Coronation of the Virgin by Peter Paul Rubens. With German law preventing the foreign sale of the artworks, and with the German art market flooded with works from other similar “Jew auctions,” the auction was a fire sale. The proceeds barely covered Herbert’s alleged debts to the now-Nazified Dresdner Bank. In order to economize, he and Daisy moved out of Herbertshof and into a smaller rented home nearby.

  As the Nazi noose tightened, across Germany thousands of other Jewish families, suddenly faced with no jobs and no income, sold their homes and household goods—furniture, silverware, everything—at deflated prices, to try to survive. Other Germans were only too happy to snap up these bargains.

  The persecution of Jews intensified. The Nazi government called for a national boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. Brown-shirted storm troopers, from the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), broke windows of Jewish-owned stores and beat up Jews on the streets. On the night of May 10, 1933, forty thousand people, many of them university students, gathered in the Opernplatz, in the shadow of the Dresdner headquarters, to watch books by Jews and other disfavored writers go up in flames. Such Nazi book burnings spread throughout Germany.

  Families considered Jewish began to see their erstwhile Aryan friends and colleagues shun them. Sometimes it was out of Nazi conviction, sometimes for fear of the new Nazi state security polic
e—the Gestapo.

  People were also beginning to disappear. Herbert was one of them, at least temporarily. In June 1934, in what became known as “the Night of the Long Knives,” the Gestapo and the SS murdered scores of alleged Hitler opponents—including, perversely, the top leadership of their own SA. They also arrested more than a thousand others. Herbert’s friend the former Chancellor General von Schleicher and his wife were among the murdered, as was the top assistant to Herbert’s political associate Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen. Herbert was arrested by the SS and held under what was euphemistically described as “protective custody” in, ironically, the basement at (recently vacated) Herbertshof, along with nine other suspected opponents of Hitler. Among the nine was a former mayor of Cologne named Konrad Adenauer, who later would become the first Chancellor of West Germany after the war. Kept under armed guard for three days, Herbert feared he would be shot like so many others. Then the SS suddenly left after Herbert’s brother-in-law Luca Orsini Baroni intervened at the last minute. Orsini, the former Italian ambassador to Berlin, was now a member of the Italian Senate. With news of Herbert’s arrest, he persuaded Benito Mussolini’s office to request Herbert’s release.

  Despite the close call, Herbert and Daisy stayed in Germany, still hoping the Nazis were a passing nightmare.

  In 1935 the so-called Nuremberg Laws were enacted, codifying the persecution of Jews that was already taking place. Bearing such grandiose titles as the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor,” the new laws prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, prohibited Jews from employing female non-Jews under a certain age, and, most significantly, stripped German Jews of their citizenship, including the right to vote. The last was something of a grim joke, since by then the only party any German could vote for was the Nazis. “Full Jews” were defined as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. People with two Jewish grandparents, such as Herbert’s children—and like me—were dubbed Mischlinge of the first degree, meaning in English “mongrels” or “half-breeds.” They all had to register as such in their schools. Herbert’s daughter, Marion, later remembered how, at age twelve, a group of her classmates surrounded her in the playground and started shouting, “Jew! Jew!” Like me when I was a boy in England, Marion had never known that she was Jewish.