The Baroness

by Hannah Rothschild

  In 1934, Nica, Victor and other family members attended the screening of a new feature film, The House of Rothschild, for a charity event in aid of German refugees. This rather romanticised celluloid depiction of Rothschild history starred George Arliss and was nominated for an Academy Award.

  From the outset, the Nazi regime used the Rothschild family as a model for the apotheosis of evil Judaism. In response to The House of Rothschild, Goebbels commissioned another feature film, Die Rothschilds, which blamed the family for the world’s problems. In his diaries, Goebbels reveals that he discussed the production at length, often “deep into the night,” and his intention was to create a “propaganda masterpiece.” However, the film was so garbled, and its message so obtuse, that audiences were left confused as to who exactly was supposed to be in the wrong. Goebbels recut the film, which survives as a “curiosity,” a piquant reminder of horrific prejudice.

  An added problem was that family loyalties and policy had become fragmented and, as a result, the Rothschilds who had achieved so much by remaining close began to split apart. Since leaving Frankfurt more than one hundred years earlier, the brothers and their descendants had made homes in new countries; now their allegiances were divided between kith and kin. Victor and his siblings did not see a conflict between being Jewish and being British, but there were many in public life who considered the claims of faith and nationality as an “either-or” situation. British Rothschilds raised over £1 million to help German Jewry but one cousin warned they might endanger their “English citizenship if [they became] too strongly active in Jewish world actions.”

  Few people anywhere could agree on a safe haven for Jewish refugees. The Nazis’ preference, in the early days at least, was to send every last one to Madagascar. Jewish committees tried to raise funds to buy land in Brazil, Kenya and Rhodesia. Some Rothschilds campaigned noisily for international action to halt Hitler, while others argued for a more discreet approach. In France, Robert de Rothschild set up a fund to help the tide of refugees flowing over its borders from German-occupied Europe but advised that “foreign elements learn how to assimilate as quickly as possible … If they are not happy here, they would do better to leave.”

  An alternative lay with the settlements created in Palestine in 1882 by one of the French Rothschilds, Edmond. A leading proponent of the Zionist movement, Edmond spent over $50 million acquiring more than 125,000 acres, promoting industrialisation and encouraging economic development in Palestine. But there was not enough land to house the millions of Jews under threat from the Nazi regime, and Edmond foresaw other problems with his scheme. In a 1934 letter to the League of Nations, he stated with prescience that “the struggle to put an end to the Wandering Jew, could not have as its result, the creation of the Wandering Arab.” At that time the British government viewed the Palestine question as “appallingly complicated.”

  Some Rothschilds feared that the promotion of a Jewish state would create another ghetto for Jews, another prison in which to keep them. Victor’s own conflicted feelings were stated clearly in a speech made for Pathé News in 1938:

  We the British Jews will do what we can to protect this country; we will fight, as every good citizen should.

  In spite of our humanitarian feelings, we probably all agree that there is something unsatisfactory in refugees encroaching on the privacy of our country even for relatively short periods of time. The refugees themselves share that feeling in a different way. To have to depart suddenly into a foreign country, with unknown customs, unknown language, with different food even, unwanted, and to feel that one is dependent both morally and materially on the charity of others, is one of the most humiliating experiences that I can imagine a human being can endure.

  I have been the unhappy recipient of so many heart-rending letters from children; and commented reports and personal accounts from observers that it is difficult for me to believe that I shall ever become again the rather carefree and happy scientist that I was before all this began.

  His speech is laced with double meanings. Victor was only a few generations away from being a refugee himself. His mother and grandmother had been immigrants but he considered himself British. He also knew that he had a responsibility to an international community of Jews who looked to the Rothschilds for financial and political support. The reports coming out of Germany were increasingly desperate but the answer was not obvious. Most members of the Commons supported the policy of appeasement while many in the Lords were actively pro-German. The Right Club, founded by Archibald Ramsay in 1939, was created “to oppose and expose the activities of organized Jewry.” Its “first objective” was “to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence.” Members included Lord Redesdale, the Duke of Westminster, the 5th Duke of Wellington and others, many of whom had been guests of the Rothschilds and who saw no apparent conflict in accepting the family’s hospitality while, at the same time, displaying hostility towards Jews. Nica’s contemporary Unity Mitford moved to Germany to be near Adolf Hitler; Unity’s brother-in-law Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists. While many practised subtler forms of anti-Semitism, the Black Shirts accused the Rothschilds of “bleeding and sweating” profits from the public. The claustrophobic, insular nature of upper-class British life meant that Victor looked across the narrow benches in the House of Lords at, or attended parties with, members of the same families who had chased his father across the playing fields of Harrow, some of whom now wanted the young Lord Rothschild drummed out of public life. As a family, the Rothschilds remained passionately patriotic and grateful to England, and would risk their lives and fortunes during the war.

  When the Conservative government signed the Munich Agreement in September 1938 there was little resistance in Parliament. One of the few resignations from Chamberlain’s Cabinet was that of a Rothschild family friend, Duff Cooper. “You say you expect I shall receive less than a thousand [letters of support],” Duff wrote to Victor following his resignation. “I have actually received over a thousand, and nearly as many telegrams—which shows that although I was alone in the Cabinet, I am not quite alone in the country.” The two men remained in constant correspondence during the 1930s, ardently discussing what could be done about the Nazi problem.

  Telegram from the British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay to Victor Rothschild on March 6, 1939, inviting him to meet President Roosevelt at the White House (Photographic Credit 11.1)

  Victor is sometimes blamed for doing too little but he did push, against an apathetic Parliament, to publicise the plight of the Jews in Germany. He made speeches, wrote cheques and sold some of his remaining works of art, such as Joshua Reynolds’s The Braddyll Family, to support Jewish refugees. In 1939 he flew to America to present the Jewish cause to President Roosevelt, the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. Another invitation came from J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the FBI, to discuss chemical warfare. During the same trip Victor managed to fit in some piano lessons with Teddy Wilson, travelling from Washington to the pianist’s apartment in New York.

  The Austrian branch of the Rothschild bank was forcibly closed in 1938 and its head, Baron Louis, was captured and imprisoned for a year. He was released following the payment of an enormous ransom by his brother Albert. Hitler and his officers had no qualms about freeing Jews for the right price or absorbing Jewish-owned art into their collections; priceless artworks belonging to the German and Austrian Rothschilds were confiscated while Adolf Eichmann occupied the Rothschild Palace in Prinz Eugenstrasse, where he set up the infamous “Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung,” the “purpose” of which was to “organise” the emigration of Jews from Austria. In theory, Jews could buy their way out of Austria; in practice, even after the Nazis’ demands were met, many were given a one-way ticket to a concentration camp.

  Having made France her home, despite the disturbing intelligence coming from her brother, Nica decided to stay at the Château d’Abondant during t
he late 1930s. In her letters and diaries Nica hardly mentions politics, nor does she take much interest in world events. For someone who thought little of jumping into a plane or a car, and was used to moving effortlessly around on a cushion of wealth and privilege, the threat of the advancing Nazi army must have seemed avoidable.

  Even when the threats against the Jews and, in particular, against the Rothschilds infected the French leadership, Nica remained in denial. Like many wealthy people, she was able, for a time, to draw a financial curtain around herself; life continued as before, bound up in dancing and fashion. The collections of 1939 were noted for their extravagant designs and gaiety. Schiaparelli presented an evening dress of ermine and introduced her famous high-heeled shoe. It was a glorious summer, too beautiful, most reasoned, to be an overture to war.

  Between the summer of 1938 and the early months of 1939, some European members of the Rothschild family moved to New York. In January 1939, Hitler ordered the launch of Plan Z, a five-year naval expansion programme to build a fleet capable of crushing the British Royal Navy. In a speech which he delivered at the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, calling for an “export battle” to increase Germany’s earnings abroad, Hitler was clearly thinking of his nemeses, the Rothschilds: “I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

  In March, German troops annexed the last parts of Bohemia and Moravia; Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. In May, the Germans took back their former province of Memelland from Lithuania, and the two dictators Mussolini and Hitler signed the Pact of Steel. By the end of July, the last remaining Jewish enterprises operating in Germany were closed down. On September 1 the Nazis invaded Poland and war was declared.

  Still Nica remained in France with her children at her chateau. One by one the men left, as the gardeners, chauffeurs and grooms went to join the army. Jules was not long in deciding to go too. In his memoir I read incredulously that he buried a tin of money in the garden and hid a car in a garage in case of an emergency. He did not, however, tell Nica about this secret stash. Perhaps his actions demonstrate his belief in her abilities: knowing Nica, he assumed she could make her own escape with their children.

  Leaving his wife with a hand-drawn map explaining how to get to the coast, Jules joined up. At first he became a lieutenant in the reserves in Rouen; then in January 1940 he was made commander of an anti-aircraft battery, overseeing an advanced radar system to warn of approaching enemy aircraft. On the night of the German invasion of France, on May 10, 1940, he was at Bordeaux. Initially, the battery did well, taking out a Heinkel bomber, but soon enemy tanks surrounded them. Managing to cross the Somme, Jules ordered his men to destroy whatever equipment or fuel reserves they could not take with them, before escaping along the riverbed.

  When news reached Jules that the French government had surrendered to Germany on June 22, 1940, he immediately resigned his commission. Rounding up a group of 110 officers, NCOs and volunteers, he managed to get to England on the Polish boat Sobieski to volunteer for the Free French Army.

  Extraordinarily, Nica and her children remained in France, where the only man left at the chateau was a fat chef. Ignoring the advice of friends and family, she had opened her doors to passing refugees and within weeks sixty evacuees were sleeping in the beds once occupied by her guests. The wireless had been Nica’s conduit to her favourite music, bringing jazz over the airwaves from America, but now the set was tuned to the World Service. She heard her old friend Winston Churchill, who had attended her coming-out ball and been a frequent guest at Tring, issue his clarion call: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat … You ask, what is our policy? Victory—victory at all costs.” I wonder whether Nica’s decision to stay was based on arrogance, bravery or foolishness. Is it too easy with hindsight to judge others’ decisions, to assume that abandoning one’s home with one’s children and just a few possessions was a simple precautionary step?

  News reached Nica of her cousin Mary de Rothschild’s lucky escape from Château Lafite. Heavily pregnant with her second child Eric, and with her first, Beatrice, only two years old, Mary caught the last boat from Bordeaux just before the Nazis arrived and took over their house.*

  Jules got word to Nica that she must escape. The Germans were getting closer, and as a Jew, her fate was sealed. She made swift preparations for evacuation, but now there were no commercial ships, let alone commercial flights, and petrol was rarer than gold. Nica could not get hold of enough to fly her plane out of the country.

  To leave France, she had to get exit visas for herself, her two children, her stepson Louis, her Swiss maid and her French nanny. Wishing to spare her mother anxiety, she telegrammed her sister Liberty in England. The family waited to see if and when she would arrive. They knew that the Germans were advancing towards the chateau; that the roads thronged with desperate refugees; that the chances of getting a place, let alone a berth, on a boat were slim. Rozsika described the wait as “days of agony.” Writing to her sister in Hungary, she described her daughter’s journey:

  Jules was unable to leave his post which was under continual bombardment but she [Nica] managed it most efficiently, leaving at dawn on Saturday, among streams of refugees from Belgium and Northern France. They were told they would reach the port in ten hours, instead of which it took them two days and nights and no food after the first day when they shared their luncheon basket with other hungry travellers. On Tuesday they reached London and yesterday Wednesday, they were here. Nica was as fresh as a daisy and the three children none the worse for the journey. Nica’s description is worth recording, but in spite of all the difficulties, her sense of humour never left her. Also she kept meeting English men who helped her gallantly and The Salvation Army whom she blesses for providing tea to thousands of poor refugees all alone. She really was wonderful arriving as if she came from a picnic.

  Rozsika’s account explains in part why Nica had dithered over leaving her French home. Brought up not to make a fuss, she had set out like an innocent, unworldly Jemima Puddle-duck with her luncheon basket, oblivious to the dangers posed by the nasty old Nazi fox. Contemporary footage clearly recorded the roads jammed with thousands heading for the coast, the chaotic state of the ports, the over-crammed ships, the rank fear on fleeing faces. However, arriving back at Ashton Wold, Nica knew what was expected of her: she had to keep up appearances, look “as fresh as a daisy” and await Jules’s instructions.

  Three days after Nica left the chateau, the Germans arrived. Her mother-in-law, who refused to leave, was seized and her days ended at Auschwitz. A similar fate befell Philippe de Rothschild’s first wife Elisabeth, who was arrested in front of her daughter and taken to Ravensbrück, where she died.

  Two young French Rothschilds, who had joined up in 1939, were captured in 1940. Alain was wounded and interned in a military hospital, while Elie, who had ridden off to war on a horse, was taken prisoner, along with most of his regiment, near the Belgian frontier. Both men tried to escape: Elie was sent to Colditz and then to Lübeck, a reprisal camp. However, they were lucky to be treated as officers rather than Jews. Their cousin Guy was on a boat that was torpedoed while making his way to London to fight for de Gaulle’s Free French. Injured, he was sent to recuperate at Ashton Wold.

  He found the house bursting at the seams and learned that some former employees had miraculously escaped from Dunkirk. “The housemaid Ivy’s two brothers had swum half way across the channel while Victor’s chauffeur escaped with a family friend, now a Colonel, in a tiny dinghy,” Rozsika wrote to her sister. On the whole the news was very bleak. Many childhood friends would not be coming home.

  Some of the children who were evacuated to Waddesdon during the Second World War (Photographic Credit 11.2)

  Rothschild houses in Brita
in were requisitioned as billets by the army or used to board refugees. At Waddesdon, James and Dolly de Rothschild lined the staterooms with beds for evacuated children. Alfred’s former home Halton became an officers’ mess for the Royal Air Force. Miriam joked that it was quite fun because she never knew who was going to turn up. One soldier billeted there turned out to be Clark Gable, whom she described as “good-looking”; another was George Lane, whom she married.

  In 1940 Victor became head of a tiny department at MI5 where he worked on enemy sabotage and bomb disposal. Years of dissecting frogs and playing jazz had given him a steady pair of hands. “When one takes a fuse to pieces,” he wrote, “there is no time to be frightened. One also becomes absorbed in its beautiful mechanism containing Swiss watches.” Later Victor admitted that at the final moment of dismantling, he would pull out the last wire from behind a chair, saying, “I could face losing a hand or two but I really couldn’t bear to lose my eyesight.” After the war he was awarded the George Medal “for dangerous work in hazardous circumstances.”

  Miriam joined Alan Turing’s gang of decoders at Bletchley Park, where she claimed she had helped “shorten the war by a couple of years” (few agree with her). She was briefly arrested as an enemy agent when carrier pigeons, a suitcase full of codes and a sack of corn were found at a cottage that she kept at Aberdovy on the Welsh coast. It turned out that keeping pigeons was just a family hobby and the so-called codes were mathematical puzzles that both she and Victor used to keep their minds razor sharp.