The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  In gratitude for these kindnesses, Richard's brother Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the new head or Reichsstatthalter of the Ostmark, agreed to see Gretl. Seyss-Inquart, a Gruppenfuhrer of the SS, passionately pro-German and anti-Semitic, has gone down in the annals and almanacs of history as an evil man. As minister of the interior in Schuschnigg's cabinet, he had operated behind the scenes to open the doors to Hitler. Two years after Anschluss he was appointed Reichskommissar in the Netherlands and in 1946 was hanged at Nuremberg for his culpability for the deaths of 100,000 Jews. Gretl did not take to him much but, for a month at least, she had his ear and used it to plead the case of several distressed friends, including Paul. She told him that her brother was in a nervous state, that she had looked after Richard when he was similarly distressed, and now she needed his help to save Paul from possible suicide. She accepted that emigration was out of the question, but argued that since his racial status was not yet resolved it would be reasonable to grant him a short break to give a few concerts in England. Seyss-Inquart told her that he would arrange Paul's visa on condition that she promised he would return to the Reich. This she did, with Paul's authority, and on August 23 her brother obtained a three-week exit permit and left the Reich on the following day.

  For a fortnight he stayed in England visiting Marga in Oxford and Ludwig in Cambridge. To both he explained his desperate need to emigrate. Since he could not access his capital share of the Wistag Fund and was forbidden to leave the Reich with money or valuables, he was concerned about his income. Marga invited him to live with her and her sister in Oxford, assuring him that she would provide all the money he needed. Pathologically averse to accepting help from others, Paul wrote to her on his return:

  One thing I can say: that you, dear Marga, are one of the few people from whom, without thinking twice about it and without any bitterness, I would accept help, including material assistance, with the same sincerity with which it was offered. But I do hope, however, that it will not come to that even in the worst case!

  Marga tried to persuade him that England was a natural choice. He spoke the language fluently, knew the literature, had visited every year for the past fifteen years, his brother lived there, he was a welcome star of the concert platform and, through her, had made many English friends; but in Cambridge he was deterred from the idea by his younger brother. As Ludwig had earlier been warned by Piero Sraffa: "As to the possibility of war, I do not know: it may happen any moment, or we may have one or two more years of 'peace.' I really have no idea. But I should not gamble on the likelihood of 6 months' peace." It could take a year or two to get British citizenship and if war broke out between England and Germany in the meantime Paul would face deportation or imprisonment as a resident alien.

  Five days before his Reich exit visa was due to expire he returned to Vienna but only to find himself, once again, in deep trouble with the authorities. A threatening, formal and bureaucratic letter from the State Commissioner for the Personal Property Sector of the Assets Handling Agency of the Ministry of Economics and Labor lay still unanswered on his desk:

  Herr Paul Wittgenstein

  Re: III Jews 29/38 g

  Pursuant to Article 7 of the Ordinance, dated 26 Apr 1938 (Reich Legal Gazetteer I, p 414), relating to the Registration of Assets by Jews, I hereby require you, in exercise of the authority granted me by the Commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, to offer the foreign investment securities registered by you, pursuant to the above-mentioned ordinance, for sale to the Reichsbank branch responsible for your usual place of residence in Vienna and, if so requested, to sell to them. Your offer must be made at the latest within one week of receipt of this demand.

  Far worse even than this stifling demand was the realization that the authorities had now discovered Hilde and the children. Paul was served with a court summons on a charge of Rassenschande or racial defilement, and the guardianship of Elizabeth and Johanna was taken away from him. According to Section 5, Article 2 of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, a Jew who had extramarital intercourse with a subject of the state of German blood would "be punished with imprisonment or hard labor." In 1939 the average sentence for a Jewish man caught with an Aryan woman was between four and five years' imprisonment. Later Rassenschande would be treated more seriously and by 1945 it was one of the forty-three crimes punishable by death. By a curious anomaly, among the many codified definitions of what did or did not constitute Jewishness, it was ordained that "the offspring of an extramarital relationship with a full Jew born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936," be classified as a full Jew. This meant that Johanna, Paul's younger daughter (born in March 1937), counted to the Nazis as Jewish while her sister Elizabeth (born May 1935) did not.

  Paul's reaction to these pressures was immediate. He packed his bags, taking as many valuables as he could reasonably cram into his pockets or squeeze between the clothes of his suitcase. It was the first time he had ever packed for himself but on this occasion he did not wish for the servants or anyone at the Palais to know what he was doing. He left the building without saying good-bye, hailed a cab to the station and boarded a train bound for the Austro-Swiss border. To his surprise and utter relief, neither German nor Swiss guards attempted to stop him. As soon as he was safely through the border checkpoint he passed a message to Hilde telling her to pack her things and bring the children immediately out of Austria. She would have to go first to Italy and wait on the Italian-Swiss border while he tried to organize their entry visas. Karoline Rolly, her fifty-three-year-old maid from Nymphenberg in Bavaria, was well traveled. She had worked in England and visited the Chicago World's Fair Exposition in July 1933. She had no attachments, disliked the Nazis and adored the children, who called her "Tante." Without a second's thought she agreed to accompany them into exile. It was vital that they left right away and told nobody where they were going for as soon as the police realized that Paul was abroad they would all be in danger of arrest.

  Most importantly, Hilde was not to inform her father. Franz Schania was one of the millions of Austrians who had embraced the new regime. He had always been a vacillator, moving quickly to wherever his bread was most thickly buttered. In 1932 he was a member of the red Social Democratic Party, but after the failed uprising of February 1934 had joined the fascist Vaterlandische Front. After the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 he moved into an apartment on the Kandlgasse (recently expropriated from a family of Jews), joined the Nazi Welfare Movement known as Nazionalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, and operated as a Blockhelfer, responsible for spreading Nazi propaganda to the residents of his apartment block and relaying information about them and their political loyalties to the Partei Blockleiter. In the 1940s ten Jews were deported from Kandlgasse 32. Franz Schania remained resident in Flat 19 at that address until his death in February 1970.

  In Vienna Paul had defied his teaching ban by writing to each of his Conservatoire students and inviting them for free private lessons at the Wittgenstein Palais, "because," he said, "I do not want you to suffer any interruption due to any radical political changes." Some refused the offer on the grounds of his Jewishness, but many came. Then suddenly, at the end of August 1938, they turned up for their lessons only to be told by a Palais servant: "He is not here!" Wherever they went to find him they were told the same: "He is not here!" So the rumor soon spread that he had committed suicide--the fourth Wittgenstein brother, so they believed, to have done so.

  ARREST

  In Vienna efforts were continued to ascertain whether Hermann Christian Wittgenstein was a bastard of Prinz Georg of Waldeck and Pyrmont or the legitimate son of Moses Meyer of Korbach, and things were made no less complicated by the discovery in the Vienna City Archive of a family tree, apparently drawn up in 1935 by someone outside the family, which claimed that he was the son of Hirsch Wittgenstein, a Jew from Bielefeld. Genealogists were sent to both places and in neither could they find any record of Hermann Christian's birth. This the family claimed as a small v
ictory, for if he wasn't listed in the Jewish registers, they argued, then he was not a proven Jew.

  Officers from the Reich Agency for Genealogical Research in Berlin were not entirely satisfied by this reasoning and at the end of September a cousin, Brigitte Zwiauer (the granddaughter of Karl's sister Millie), sent a bundle of photographs with copies of baptismal certificates and family trees, to add her weight to the case. She argued that neither Hermann Christian nor any of his eleven children looked Jewish--this might seem a frivolous argument but the experts at the Agency took the matter of appearance very seriously--and she insisted that Hermann had been a brazen anti-Semite. The older generation of Wittgensteins were, she claimed, embarrassed by his illegitimacy, which was why they never mentioned it, but now that it all mattered so much even they were prepared to acknowledge it as true. Much of Frau Zwiauer's case smacks of "clutching at straws," but perhaps the most convincing of her arguments was that which she based upon her examination of Hermann Christian's 1839 baptismal certificate--the only document in the family's possession that confirmed his date and place of birth at Korbach, thus scotching the Bielefeld-Hirsch line of inquiry.

  It is noteworthy that in Hermann Christian's certificate of baptism (copy attached) his wife is described as born legitimate (conjugal) whereas for Hermann Christian the formula "educated in the Jewish faith" is used, which is clearly not normal, and has been chosen deliberately in order to demonstrate that he is actually not part of the Jewish community but was only raised within it.

  Frau Zwiauer's arguments fell on deaf ears. In the orgy of Reich-wide anti-Semitic hooliganism, known as Kristallnacht, that took place on the night of November 9-10, the synagogue at Korbach, with all its records of who was born to whom, was burned to the ground. Kurt Mayer at the agency in Berlin ruled that the Wittgensteins were Volljuden and that was that--or at any rate Kurt Mayer may have believed that that was that. In fact the situation had taken a new turn and the matter was now being considered by government departments far more powerful than his.

  This change of tack was brought about by a realization at the Reichsbank that Paul had fled the Ostmark, that the Wistag Trust, bound by its deeds until 1947, could in fact be broken with the agreement of all of its beneficiaries, and that as well as several million Swiss francs in foreign currency the trust also held, in the bank vaults at the Kreditanstalt and Bankverein in Zurich, 215-kilogram bars of fine gold. This may not seem a great deal but Nazi greed for gold (in any amount) is well documented. The Austrian National Gold Reserves worth $99 million were taken to Berlin immediately after the Anschluss and the Wittgensteins' hoard, valued in 1938 at $235,000, was worth more than one-tenth of the Czech national gold reserves that were seized by the Germans a year later. Without Paul's signature, however, the Germans would get nothing. Like it or not, they were going to have to negotiate with Paul either in Vienna or in Switzerland. But before the first of these Reichsbank-Wittgenstein confrontations took place at the beginning of November 1938, an appalling new disaster befell the family.

  Gretl, as an American citizen, had far more freedom than her siblings. She could flit in and out of the Reich like a brightly colored butterfly without too much interference from the authorities. Shortly after Paul's escape she went to see him in Switzerland, where she gave him one of her famous rockets for having broken his word and caused her to lose face with Arthur Seyss-Inquart. She had also been wearied and disgusted to discover that he had been concealing a young mistress and two illegitimate children from the family all this time, but that was not why she had gone to see him. He had wired her to come to Switzerland as a matter of urgency. Hermine and Helene, he said, had no idea of the acute danger they were in because news censorship in Vienna did not allow them to discover what was really going on, whereas abroad it was well known that war was imminent and that the Jews would soon be locked away in concentration camps, maltreated, malnourished and possibly exterminated. He insisted that Gretl relay this information to them and that they consider doing everything in their power to emigrate.

  Gretl returned to Vienna in a state of panic, summoned Hermine and told her to go personally to a certain lawyer in the Kohlmarkt who, she said, could obtain Yugoslavian citizenship for all three of them--Hermine, Paul and Helene. This Hermine did, but with a heavy heart. Personally, she had no wish to leave the Reich and not enough imagination to fear a concentration camp. When Anton Groller, the family's manager and factotum, heard of the plan he was terrified and bitterly hostile to it, but, as he had no alternative scheme of his own, Gretl managed easily to overrule his objection.

  At his plush Kohlmarkt office the lawyer assured Hermine that he arranged not false passports but genuine Yugoslavian samples, which the Yugoslav government would sell to any Austrian Jew wishing to emigrate. Hermine swallowed the story and paid a large sum to the lawyer feeling rage inside herself against Paul, whom she blamed for coercing her with scare stories from abroad into taking action that she did not wish to take.

  Gretl also put Hermine in charge of telling Helene about the scheme. This was far from the easy task that it seemed, for Helene was nervous and risk averse. Her husband Max, on top of his dementia, was now suffering also from cancer. Any tension could be detrimental to his health. For her part Gretl volunteered to drive to Zagreb to fetch the passports, but when the moment came felt too ill and sent her sister Helene's son-in-law, Arvid Sjogren, instead. As soon as he saw the place Arvid realized that it was no Yugoslavian government office but the grubby demesne of a back-street forger; he took the passports all the same and delivered them, at great personal risk, to Hermine in Vienna. Straightaway she noticed that the dates stamped in them did not correspond to the planned dates for her great escape, so she took them back to the Kohlmarkt lawyer, who assured her that an agent would come in the next couple of days to rectify the error. It was now mid-October 1938.

  The deadline passed and the agent never arrived. In panic, the women changed their plans. Hermine would go to Munich instead--a place where she hoped no Wittgenstein would be recognized--and have Swiss visas put into the passports there. On the journey out she discovered that none of the passports had been signed and, in panic, telephoned Gretl, who told her to return at once to Vienna. At Gretl's house the two scheming sisters signed all of the passports except their own with false signatures. These actions made Hermine nearly sick with apprehension. She was terrified that border officials would recognize them and that Max, her senile brother-in-law, might give the game away, but Gretl, the fearless one, urged her to stay calm. This time she would give the passports to her secretary, Hedwig, to take to Munich as she could be trusted to keep her head better than Hermine. That afternoon Gretl, shivering and feverish, retired to bed, only to be roused by her agitated nephew-in-law, Arvid, bearing the news that the soi-disant "passport office" in Zagreb had been busted by the Yugoslavian police, who had passed to the Gestapo a list of all those to whom the fake passports had been issued. A wilier criminal mind would have seen to it that the fake passports were quickly destroyed before the police arrived, but Gretl, in her distress overlooking this obvious expedient, proceeded instead by telling the others how she intended to take all the blame upon herself. It was, after all, she who had forged most of the signatures. She would insist that she had signed them all, even Hermine's, that it was her plan from the start, that she had bought the passports for her siblings without their knowledge, that she had done so as a simple precaution, something for them to put in a drawer in case of emergency. Being a well-connected American citizen she was confident that she would get away with it. No sooner had Hermine and Arvid consented to this improbable scheme than there came a loud banging on the door.

  For several hours the police pounded around the house and, after preliminary interviews at which the agreed line was taken by all interrogatees, they departed. Everyone was relieved and Helene, imagining the danger to be over, decided to drive her husband out to the country for a break. But the very next day the police returned in for
ce and arrested Her-mine, Gretl and Arvid as well as the lawyer who had taken payment for the passports. Gretl, who by this stage was suffering full-blown pneumonia, was forced out of bed, pushed with her sister into a waiting van and rushed at reckless speed to the central police station on the Rossauer-laende. There each of the accused was individually interrogated and each staunchly glued his or her narrative to the prearranged explanation of events. But the lawyer had not been properly primed and as soon as it was known that Hermine had three times visited his offices on the Kohlmarkt, she, Gretl and Arvid began to crumble. On that same day Helene was also apprehended while out shopping in Gmunden.

  Brought before a magistrate, all three agreed that they had lied in their initial statements and, after two nights at the police station, they were carted off to the National Prison. The fate of the Kohlmarkt lawyer is not recorded. Behind the scenes Anton Groller and various nephews and nieces, including Arvid's wife Clara, were working frantically to get them released on bail. A huge sum was demanded and on the sixth day Hermine and Arvid were released.

  Without his wife Max Salzer went wild, and his brother, daughter and servants did the best they could to distract him with games and amusements and the lame excuse that Helene was ill and had left the house for a while in order that he should not catch her bug. Most of all they feared that he might read about the scandal in the newspapers and explode with rage and shame. Helene was released as soon as news reached the police station at Gmunden that Hermine and Arvid were out of jail in Vienna. Only Gretl remained behind bars. In her heart Hermine believed this was all her fault for shouting "GRETL!" out of her cell window one night and arousing the guards' suspicions. But it was nothing to do with that.