The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

by Daniel Ammann

  After a lunch of chicken with potatoes and green beans, I sit with Rich on the sofa in front of the panorama window. We drink a 2000 Rioja Imperial Reserva from CVNE, Rich’s favorite wine. “It’s a clean wine,” he says curtly. The heavy wine, pressed from Spanish Tempranillo grapes, is not a status-symbol wine from Bordeaux. In St. Moritz you can buy a bottle for roughly thirty dollars. A fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach sounds from the speakers, and a frozen Lake Silvaplana sparkles before us in the rattling cold. The glimmering blue Piz Corvatsch casts its shadow over the valley.

  “My father.” Rich answers my question without hesitation. “My father is definitely the person who influenced me most. We fled from Belgium, and he managed to build up an important business from zero.” He then begins to tell me a story—a story of poverty and riches, power and morality, politics and genius. His story, and in many ways the story of oil in the past and the future.

  a JEWISH FATE

  D

  avid Reich bought his first automobile, a used black Citroën, on Wednesday, May 8, 1940. He sensed that very little time remained for himself and his small family. Only wealthy people were able to afford a car at that time, but David Reich was by no means rich. The thirty-eight-year-old shoe retailer spent virtually his entire savings on the used vehicle, yet the purchase did not fill him with pride. Not at that point in history. Not as an Orthodox Jew in Belgium.

  The writing on the wall was clear enough for those who wanted to read it. The German Wehrmacht had just overrun Denmark and Norway, and eight months previously, in September 1939, Nazi Germany had invaded Poland. It was the beginning of World War II, which was soon to develop into the biggest and deadliest conflict in human history. It was probably only a matter of days until the German troops would also attack France via Belgium. By the spring of 1940 it was easy to predict what would then happen to a Jewish family. The racist Nuremberg Laws, which systematically discriminated against and disenfranchised the Jews, had already been in force in Germany since 1935. Books by Kurt Tucholsky, Upton Sinclair, Sigmund Freud, Anna Seghers, and Lion Feuchtwanger had been publicly burned. Jews were effectively excluded from economic, political, and social life in the German Reich. Following legal discrimination and the expropriation of Jewish property, the Kristallnacht in November 1938 signaled the start of their physical persecution as well.

  Adolf Hitler’s notorious speech on January 30, 1939, the sixth anniversary of his takeover of power, was heard on radios and seen in the weekly newsreels in cinemas. The words tumbled out of the dictator’s mouth in the Reichstag as he screamed, staccato, “If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”1

  David Reich, an energetic man possessed of a simple elegance who was the father of a bright five-year old boy, had stopped deluding himself by May 8, 1940. He had already witnessed too much, having personally experienced anti-Semitic persecution, as had his parents and grandparents. He was born in 1902 into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Galician shtetl of Przemyl among the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Pshemishl, as the town was then known in Yiddish, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now situated in southeastern Poland on the border with Ukraine. When the Austro-Hungarian monarchy fell during World War I, there were once more terrible pogroms against the Jews in Galicia. David Reich fled with his parents and relatives toward Western Europe.

  He started a new life from scratch twelve hundred kilometers from the place of his birth, in Frankfurt in the German Reich. It was an experience he shared with many European Jews, and an experience that in-grained itself in the collective memory of the Jewish people. In many Jewish households a suitcase packed with the essentials was always kept ready at hand, in order to leave at a day’s notice “if it starts again.” After Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, which also brought ultimate power to the Nazis, David Reich soon found it was time to get out that suitcase. Once more he was to leave his home, never to return, as he had done with Pshemishl.

  In this fateful year of 1933 that would lead Germany to its greatest catastrophe, he met a petite, attractive woman called Paula “Pepi” Wang. Born in 1910 in Saarbrücken, she fascinated him, not least with her boundless energy. She was a woman who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to say it. The couple married and decided to settle in Antwerp, a Belgian town of special significance for Jews. Antwerp was at that time (and is now once again) one of the great centers of European Jewry. The city on the river Scheldt is a commercial center with a glorious past and boasts one of the largest ports in the world. The French historian Fernand Braudel described it as “the centre of the entire international economy” in the sixteenth century.2 Portuguese ships unloaded their precious cargos there, whether pepper from India or cloves from Zanzibar. It was an international, cosmopolitan town of traders and businessmen from the major trading nations all unified in their desire to make a profit. It was also an extremely tolerant town that permitted the development of a large Jewish community. David S. Landes characterizes Antwerp as a center of industrial, commercial, and mental progress used to economic, intellectual, and spiritual diversity.3

  The city to which David and Paula Reich emigrated in late 1933 was the most important center for the global diamond trade. Eighty percent of the world’s finished diamonds were produced and traded here.4 Of all the diamond businesses, 90 percent were in Jewish hands, but David Reich did not have either the luck or the right contacts to get a foothold in this lucrative business. He thus practiced one of the few professions that had been open to European Jews for centuries: trade. He worked harder than most and traded everything that could be sold, first scrap metal and then fabric, before concentrating on shoes. “David was always on the move. He was very dynamic and had lots of ideas,” a family friend told me. Antwerp was a town that imbued its inhabitants with a mercantile mentality.

  Their income was sufficient to ensure a modest lifestyle—an apartment in the inner city, three meals a day, and an occasional trip to the movies. Today it would be called lower middle class. Their little paradise was complete when Paula Reich gave birth to a boy on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 18, 1934. They called him Marcell, after Mars, the Roman god of war. His middle name was David, after his father.

  Marcell David Reich, who was later to make a name for himself as Marc Rich, was born into a devout Orthodox family that adhered to kosher rules and said Hebrew prayers. His father was a learned man, strict with himself and with his family, and uncompromising when it came to discipline, hard work, and religion. He was a demanding father whom Marc adored. He was also a reliable, honest man who could be trusted implicitly. Paula, his mother, was an astute, intelligent, and subtly ironic woman of French stock with a natural air of authority about her. Throughout her life she had two heroes: her husband and her son Marc. Friends of Marc remember her as a typical “Jewish mother”—caring, encouraging, and overprotective. Young Marc grew up bilingually, speaking his father’s native German at home as well as his mother’s French. He attended Tachkemoni School in downtown Antwerp, a Jewish school that still exists near Pelikaanstraat, the town’s world-famous diamond center. He loved Selma, his German nanny, with all his heart.

  The Escape from the Holocaust

  It could have been a decent life, but then it did “all start again.” It was once more time to get out the packed suitcase. By May 8, 1940, there was real cause to fear that the Nazis would bring the whole of Europe to its knees, and so David Reich spent virtually everything he had in order to buy the used black Citroën. It was a prudent move, for Nazi Germany commenced its push westward two days later. On Friday, May 10, 1940, at 5:35 A.M. the Low Countries were attacked by the Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe bombed the port of Antwerp.

  “My father put us all in the car. My mother, my n
urse Selma, myself. We started to drive away. I saw the German planes. I heard the bombings,” says Marc Rich. We sit in his office in the Swiss town of Zug and drink coffee. We talk about his childhood, his relationship to his parents, and what has influenced him. The German attack and the hasty get-away are his first real memories—the fear, the confusion, the uncertainty. The trauma of flight and loss of home were etched into the mind of the five-year-old boy.

  Thousands of Belgians tried to save themselves that day by heading into France. David and Paula Reich, with Marcell and Selma, were also driving south in great haste. The French border was less than a hundred miles from Antwerp. They made the terrible discovery at the border that the officials would not permit Selma, the non-Jewish German nanny, to enter the country. France had been at war with Germany since September 1939, and no amount of discussion could persuade the authorities to change their minds. Selma had to be left behind at the Belgian border and was forced to get by as best she could on her own.

  Their escape to France saved the Reich family from the Holocaust. Almost as soon as the Nazis captured Antwerp eight days later on May 18, 1940, between six thousand and ten thousand Jews were rounded up.5 The Jews were deprived of their property, their businesses were liquidated, and their institutions were banned. It was all part of Hitler’s plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry in its entirety. Out of the estimated fifty-two thousand to fifty-five thousand Jews still living in Belgium in 1940, twenty-five thousand had been deported by the end of the war to Eastern Europe, where they were murdered in the death camps, primarily in Auschwitz.6

  Nazi Germany seemed invincible in the spring of 1940, and the German word Blitzkrieg was soon understood in every language. The Germans overran Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland within a matter of days. They attacked France in early June, and the first German soldiers were posing for photographs in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on June 14.

  Casablanca

  Driving the black Citroën, David Reich took his family down to Marseille in unoccupied southern France. He hoped to find a ship in the country’s largest port city that would take them away from Europe, although very few countries were still prepared to take Jewish refugees in the summer of 1940. Australia was accepting refugees, but a passenger ship sailing “down under” was out of the question, as it was beyond the family’s means. However, after weeks of waiting Reich finally found a cargo ship, the Monviso, that was traveling to Australia and would take on Jewish refugees for a few francs.

  The Monviso left Marseille on a Saturday. That was reason enough for several refugees to forgo the journey that would have saved their lives. “Since the boat was leaving on a Saturday, which is Shabbos, they refused to go and stayed behind,” remembers Marc Rich. Devout Jews were forbidden from using means of transport on the Sabbath. However, David Reich knew that the Sabbath laws may be broken to safe a life, and this was definitely one such case.

  The family slept below deck on improvised hammocks strung between pipes. The passengers were fed meat from goats kept in an enclosure on deck. The freighter may have been cramped, uncomfortable, dirty, and reeking of oil, but it nevertheless saved the Reich family from the Nazi gas chambers. A photo from that time shows little Marcell in shorts and sandals standing next to his parents and looking exceptionally happy. His mother, wearing a headscarf and smiling shyly into the camera, is standing in the middle. His father is wearing glasses, a white shirt, and white shorts. A man is seen hugging a crying child in the background. Almost all of the ship’s passengers were destitute Jews.

  The Monviso, however, did not get very far. It had just crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and started heading south when it was stopped off the Moroccan coast near Casablanca. Officials refused to let the ship continue and detained the refugees. Marc Rich and his family were initially held for a few days on the freighter before being interned in a refugee camp in Azemour, south of Casablanca. Their dream of finding a new life in Australia, far away and safe from the Nazis, abruptly fell apart.

  Three months went by, and then four. The longer they were interned in the camp, the less likely it was that the Rich family would be set free. It was a traumatic experience for Marc to be held prisoner, guarded by grim policemen. He could sense his father’s helplessness.

  The family was finally saved by three skills possessed by Marc’s father. David could speak German, Yiddish, and French, which made him a sought-after translator in the camp. His down-to-earth, determined approach won the trust of his fellow internees, who elected him as their representative. Most important, this position enabled him to make contacts among the Moroccan authorities, who accepted him as an intermediary. He consequently managed to achieve a freedom of movement that he would not otherwise have enjoyed as an internee. He was allowed to travel to Casablanca regularly in order to negotiate with officials and was finally permitted to contact his sister, who had moved to the USA some years before. She worked for a Christian organization, which granted her access to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington.

  This contact turned out to be the Reich family’s ticket to freedom. The sister managed to obtain visas permitting her brother and his family to enter the United States. Instead of traveling to Australia as planned, the Reich family was unexpectedly allowed to go to America, a country that had strictly limited immigration when it passed the 1924 Immigration Act. Instead of traveling below decks on an oily freighter, the family was now booked on a regular passenger ship. The SS Serpa Pinto was “nice and comfortable,” recalls Marc Rich.

  “We Lost Everything, but We Survived”

  One spring day in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, the American entry into the war, and the Babi Yar massacre, a small Jewish boy from Antwerp stood at the railing of an oceangoing steamship.7 He looked at the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of New York in excitement. He had never seen a skyscraper before and could not speak a single word of English. A twist of fate had ensured that Marcell David Reich was allowed to enter the United States. There were two reasons for his survival: first, an accumulation of what were in themselves unfortunate events, and second, the foresight and skill of his father. “We lost everything,” says Marc Rich, “but we survived.” It was the greatest success—certainly the most important one—of David Reich’s life. At the time, it was the very definition of success for European Jews: survival. Only one in ten Jews survived the persecution in Galicia, where the Reich family once lived. If David Reich had not moved first from Przemyl to Frankfurt, then on to Antwerp, before fleeing to Marseille, his chances of survival would have been slim. As it turned out, the Reichs were now lucky survivors in the Promised Land.

  Marcell Reich, alias Marc Rich, would always retain the mentality of a survivor and refugee; he would always be “different.” His determination to succeed is rooted in this mentality, as well as his feelings of uprootedness. This determination is further strengthened by his experience as a Jew living in the Diaspora, as well as by the fact that he was an only child. Research has revealed that only children score significantly better in achievement motivation and personal adjustment than siblings.8

  A dossier compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service on Marc Rich contains a strange piece of information stating that the Reich family apparently moved directly from the steamship SS Serpa Pinto to Manhattan’s exclusive Fifth Avenue. In reality Rich initially lived with his parents at his aunt’s house, the same aunt who had secured their visa. She lived in Crestwood, New York, a neighborhood in Yonkers where there was a substantial Jewish community. They then embarked upon an odyssey that lasted years. The family first moved to Philadelphia before moving on to Kansas City and back to New York, this time to Queens, and finally ending up in Manhattan.

  “He Was Small, He Had an Accent, and He Was Jewish”

  Marc Rich recalls that he attended twelve different schools in twelve years. This fact made it even more difficult for him, as a refugee and an only child, to find friends. He remained a loner who was left to his own de
vices, a force of habit that developed with time into a characteristic. Rich would always be an outsider, someone who neither belonged to the establishment nor wanted to. He was someone with a nothing-gets-me-down attitude who had something to prove. “You cry a little and then you move on,” he replies when asked how he deals with defeat.

  In February 1943 the Reich family changed their name to the more American-sounding Rich—and Marcell was henceforth known as Marc. However, the Riches were still Europeans at home, where they mainly spoke French and German with each other. A year later they moved to 4404 Holly Street in Kansas City, Missouri. They lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor of a brick building situated in a fairly unglamorous neighborhood in the south of the city. The Rich family became American citizens on February 14, 1947. For the first time since fleeing from Galicia, they had a real home.

  The few classmates who remember him in Kansas City recall that Marc Rich was an unobtrusive, quiet boy who participated very little in social activities. The family mainly kept to itself. Marc attended the E. F. Swinney Elementary School, Westport Junior High School, and finally Southwest High School. He took classes in Hebrew in the evenings and on weekends. He appears in the class photo of the 1949–50 Southwest High School yearbook but is not listed as belonging to any clubs or sports teams. One classmate, Elaine Fox, says, “I remember he was small, he was quiet and he had lots of black, wavy hair. I think one of the reasons he was quiet was because he was different. He had an accent and he was Jewish.”9