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 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-scenes 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 police—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.
As the Nazi nightmare intensified, Herbert and Daisy existed like so many Germans in a strange netherworld between despair and hope. Some of their friends and relatives—including Fritz and Louise—urged them to leave. Others still believed that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish persecutions would eventually pass. Former friends or associates, such as Schacht and Von Ribbentrop, when they deigned to speak to Herbert at all, smilingly assured him that there was nothing to worry about: Herbert and other members of wealthy and established German Jewish families would not be harassed. Then the next day the Gestapo would be knocking on Herbert and Daisy’s door, checking on them, asking questions. There were odd, almost surreal social interactions. Once, during a visit to her hometown of Baden-Baden, Daisy to her horror found herself at a dinner party seated next to SS officer Sepp Dietrich, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard and a future SS general. Not knowing who Daisy was, Dietrich joked about executing prisoners during the Night of the Long Knives—the same purge that almost cost Herbert his life.
Finally it was too much. Herbert and Daisy decided to leave Germany, but it had to be done carefully so as not to arouse the Gestapo’s suspicion. During a visit to Fritz and Louise in Holland, Daisy smuggled her valuable family jewelry across the German-Dutch border hidden under her clothes—an almost insanely risky thing to do. Under Nazi currency and assets export laws, such smuggling could bring the death penalty. Herbert and Daisy sent their children to England one by one, ostensibly on vacation—first Luca, then Fredy, and finally little Marion. In late 1936, under the guise of attending a business meeting in Switzerland, Herbert and Daisy crossed the German border and made their way to England. With the help of Fritz, Herbert rented a suitable flat on London’s Park Lane. Back in Germany the Nazis’ punitive taxes on Jews and Jewish property took everything he had left, including Herbertshof.
Once safely in England, Herbert continued to receive demands from the German government. Documents, adorned with the Nazi eagle and swastika, ordered payment for various taxes. Again, it seems unbelievable, but Herbert, ever the loyal German, still hoping that Germany could regain its senses, still believing that he might return, filled out the forms and complied. Herbert’s “atonement tax” came to thirty-five thousand Reichsmarks.
In reality Herbert, and all others who had fled Germany, were forced to leave behind virtually everything they had owned. The taxes were nothing more than a device for “legally” stripping all Jewish assets.
Nevertheless, while financially ruined and forced, with a heavy heart, into the bitter life of a refugee, Herbert and Daisy were some of the lucky ones. Of half a million Jews living in Germany when Hitler and the Nazis took power, some three hundred thousand managed to get out before the war began and the door slammed irremovably shut. Of the two hundred thousand Jews who would not leave Germany or could not find another country that would accept them, 90 percent would perish.
• • •
The repercussions of the Nazification of Germany did not stop at the German border. In December 1933, with the Aryanization of the Dresdner Bank in Germany well under way, a delegation of bank officials, armed with a sheaf of writs and authorizations, arrived at the Proehl & Gutmann offices on the Herengracht in central Amsterdam. They curtly informed Fritz that, under the provisions of the Nazi “Professional Civil Service” law, his association with the Dresdner Bank was dissolved. Proehl & Gutmann’s assets—accounts, files, office furniture, the paintings on the walls, everything—were being seized. Among the paintings were two Goyas and a spectacular Guardi. It was all quite legal. The last tenuous link between the Gutmann family and the Dresdner Bank had been broken.
Ernst Proehl, as a German-born “Aryan,” might have been able to continue an association with the Dresdner, despite that his wife, Ilse, was Jewish. Proehl, who was fiercely anti-Nazi—a stance that would later almost cost him his life—wanted no part of it. Instead he and Fritz formed ostensibly separate but cooperating companies, Firma F. B. Gutmann and Proehl & Co. The former was to handle international credit and trade transactions; the latter was to continue the dealing with German companies that had formed the lion’s share of Proehl & Gutmann’s business.
Still, times were difficult. The Depression had hit Holland just as it had everyplace else, and business never had time to recover. As director of the Gutmann Family Trust, Fritz was also required to dip into the now-diminished trust capital to help support other members of the family. Herbert, obviously, was in need of funds, especially after he and Daisy fled to London. Kurt, now divorced from Vera, had fled to Paris to escape the Nazis and was, as usual, constantly broke. Max, now residing permanently in Italy, had never had a civilian job and was also a constant drain.
Yet, despite the financial crunch, increasing international tensions, and the loathsome persecution of Jews in Germany, Fritz and his family in Holland, and millions of other families throughout Europe, had an odd sense of normality, of life going on. There were still parties at Bosbeek, trips to Paris, and holidays in the Swiss Alps. The day-to-day business of earning a living and sending children off to school continued for Fritz.
In 1934 my father, Bernard, graduated from the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Switzerland and set off for England to enroll at Cambridge University. At Trinity College he majored in art history, girls, MG convertibles, and sports—not necessarily in that order. Unlike the crushed, taciturn, and damaged man I knew, in those days he was outgoing, gregarious, and fun—not to mention wealthy and well connected. He was a member of the best clubs and captain of the Cambridge Ice Hockey Club, then considered one of the elite university hockey teams in England. When the English national hockey team, which was composed primarily of professional ringers from Canada, went to the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, the outstanding Cambridge team went along to play some exhibition games.
It was the first time Bernard had been back to Germany since the Nazis took over. The 1936 Nazi eagle and swastika stamp on one of the old British passports I found in my father’s boxes was from that trip. During the Winter Games the Nazis went to great pains to temporarily downplay their anti-Jewish program, ordering the “No Jews Allowed” signs to be removed from stores and cafés and excising the more strident anti-Jewish rhetoric from newspaper articles. I don’t think my father was fooled for a minute; he was well aware of what the Nazis had done to his uncle Herbert and the Jews in Germany. I remember, as a young boy, being told the story about how my father had been tailed by Gestapo agents in Garmisch, tailed in an obvious and surely ominous way. My father, always self-deprecating, seemed to think it funny that they should take such notice of him. Regrettably this story was one of the tiny exceptions to my father’s normal rule of silence. Years later, after the war, when we were racing across Germany toward Switzerland without stopping, I wondered if my father remembered, too, as he kept looking in his rearview mirror.
Fritz was well aware of the long reach of the Gestapo and the German intelligence services, even into Holland. Aunt Lili recalls him warning her not to discuss politics while visiting Aunt Käthe at Hartekamp. Although still a teenager, Lili was already an ardent anti-Nazi. Fritz suspected, quite correctly, that Catalina von Pannwitz’s butler was a Nazi spy.
Reports on prominent German expatriates, Fritz included, were routinely forwarded to Berlin. The Nazi specter even loomed over the Netherlands’ biggest social event of the decade: the 1937 royal wedding between Crown Princess Juliana and the Gutmanns’ young friend Prince Bernhard zur Lippe-Biesterfeld. Prince Bernhard had wooed the heir to the Dutch throne after meeting her at the 1936 Winter Olympics. As a prelude to the wedding the prince had publicly renounced both his Nazi connections and his German citizenship. However, at a gala pre-wedding party in The Hague for twenty-five hundred guests, Fritz and Louise among them, members of Prince Bernhard’s family gave the Nazi salute and the band played the Nazi marching anthem, “The Horst Wessel Song.” In news photographs of the day everyone is smiling, the happy smiles of people who don’t understand what’s coming.
Meanwhile, Aunt Lili had met a young man, Franco Bosi, during her finishing school days in Florence. The Bosis were an old Italian family with extensive property holdings in Tuscany. Franco Bosi’s mother even owned two of the famous medieval towers in the old walled city of San Gimignano. (Today, the towers attract tourists by the seemingly endless busloads.)
Lili and Franco were engaged to be married in the summer of 1938, which would seem to be not a moment too soon, given that the Fascist government under Mussolini would later that year enact a set of Nuremberg-style laws. The new decrees prohibited marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans. All foreign Jews—with the exception of those over sixty-five years of age or those married to Italian citizens—were ordered to leave the country within four months or be forcibly expelled. Great-Aunt Lili was already married to Luca Orsini and, as a result, immune from these decrees, but Great-Uncle Max, on his own in Rome, was clearly at risk. Fortunately, the Italian people never took anti-Semitism as seriously as their budding German allies. While there was indeed persecution and harassment, initially the country’s fifty thousand Jews were mostly left alone. The true atrocities against Italian Jews did not begin until the Germans arrived late in the coming war.
So the wedding went on in Florence, although Fritz and Louise did not attend. I don’t know why—Aunt Lili to this day refuses to discuss the matter—but I sense that Fritz did not completely approve, that he felt his only daughter could have done better. Nevertheless, he was either unable or unwilling to stop the marriage. My father, however, freshly graduated from Cambridge with a bachelor of arts degree, did attend the wedding. He drove, no doubt at breakneck speed, from Bosbeek to Florence in one of Fritz’s convertibles. This time he took the long way, through France, avoiding Germany altogether. Then it was back to Bosbeek for a quick visit with his parents before returning to England to enjoy some postgraduate freedom. Meanwhile, he pondered what was no longer such a certain future. He could not have known that it would be eight years before he would see Bosbeek again.
Even as these family activities went on, Europe was inexorably moving toward catastrophe. Just twenty years after the end of the first war, unbelievably, “the lights were going out all over Europe” for a second time.
In 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. In 1937, the Nazis started bombing Republican forces in Spain. Then in 1938, Hitler annexed the German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Only a few months before, the German army had marched into Austria. This “union” or Anschluss was greeted with hysterical delight by most Austrians. Hundreds of thousands greeted Hitler’s triumphant entry into Vienna with flowers and Nazi salutes. Within days, Vienna’s Jews, including our distant Gutmann cousins, were being taunted, humiliated, beaten, arrested, and of course having their property confiscated. Through it all, the Western allies, namely England and France, averted their eyes and did nothing. Life went on blithely, unless you were a Viennese Jew forced by storm troopers to scrub sidewalks and privies, or a Czech antifascist hauled off to a concentration camp.
On November 9, 1938, in Germany, the Nazis used the murder of a minor German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew to unleash a nationwide orgy of violence against Jews. History knows this as Kristallnacht. Thousands of Jewish stores and shops were smashed and looted, at least a hundred Jews were murdered, and tens of thousands were arrested and locked up in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and over a thousand synagogues burned. While the Dresden synagogue that my great-great-grandfather Bernhard helped to build was destroyed, Bernhard’s grave in the Jewish cemetery in Dresden, and Eugen’s tomb in Berlin, miraculously survived almost untouched. In the wake of the violence, the Nazis imposed a 1 billion mark “atonement tax” on German Jews to pay for the damage. This was one of the taxes that Herbert, albeit safe in England, had no real choice but to pay.
Kristallnacht marked the turning point for those Jews who remained in Germany. No longer could there be any doubt what the Nazis had in store for them, even if the rest of the world still did not quite believe it. Those who could fled Germany, in the tens of thousands, their passports stamped with a large red J for Jude. Most were only allowed to take with them a few clothes and ten marks in cash after paying the Reichsfluchtsteuer, or Reich flight tax. Their remaining possessions in Germany were confiscated.
Holland had waxed and waned in its acceptance of German Jews, but in the wake of Kristallnacht some seven thousand German Jews were allowed into Holland, joining the twenty-five thousand German Jewish refugees who were already there. Among those was Louise’s mother, Thekla, who moved into Bosbeek. Another arrival in Holland was Louise’s second cousin Franz Ledermann, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin. While living in Amsterdam, his ten-year-old daughter, Susi, would become best friends with another young German Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Each day after school, Susi and Anne would play hide-and-seek. On weekends the Franks and the Ledermanns would listen to chamber music over tea in the Ledermanns’ crowded apartment.
Those immigrants without means or family connections were housed in a refugee camp at Westerbork, their expenses paid by the Dutch Committee for Jewish Interests, to which Fritz and Louise and their friends were substantial contributors.
By mid-1939, it was finally clear to almost everyone that war in Europe was coming. The prospect of Hitler’s not respecting Dutch neutrality had become a real possibility. For all of Hitler’s promises, for all of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasing talk of “peace for our time,” the Nazis would not stop with Austria or Czechoslovakia—which after the Sudeten crisis, Hitler had gone on to swallow almost whole.
Fritz, ever cautious, was all too aware from his World War I experience just how quickly events could overwhelm a country, and a continent. Urgently, he took steps to prepare. He transferred funds to several accounts in Switzerland and some securities to my father in England. A few artworks were sent to New York. A much larger portion of his art collection went, for safekeeping, to the Paris gallery of the art dealer Paul Graupe. After obligingly doing the Nazis’ dirty work with the “Jew sales” in Berlin, Graupe had finally fled, himself, from Germany to France to escape the Nazis.
Then, in September 1939, just over two decades after a conflict that had killed some 12 million people, Europe was once again at war. Thanks to a treaty negotiated by Herbert’s erstwhile friend Joachim von Ribbentrop, now the Nazi foreign minister, Hitler had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. Armed with the cynical nonaggression pact he had just signed with Stalin, Hitler invaded Poland unopposed. The Germans unleashed for the first time the lightning style of war known as blitzkrieg and easily gobbled up the western half of Poland, while the Russians took the rest.
England and France, finally awakening, declared war on Germany. As the French army and a British expeditionary force settled down behind France’s Maginot Line, the war entered into an uneasy stalemate—the so-called Phony War. In the Netherlands, the government hoped, as in the First World War, that the country could somehow stay out of the conflict. Despite this, Dutch intelligence reported an imminent German invasion. While some attempts were made to bolster defenses, hope seemed to be the Dutch government’s primary option. In April 1940, German armies invaded Norway and Denmark, both of which had, like Holland, been neutral in the last war.
Bernard sent telegrams imploring Fritz and Louise to leave Holland and join him in Britain while there was still time. Stubbornly Fritz refused, though he certainly had the means to do so. It’s one of those situations in which I want to shout back across the generations, to ask my grandfather why he stayed. Why didn’t he and my grandmother drop everything and flee? But there are no answers. Despite his own experience in the previous war, and despite what had happened to his brother Herbert, Fritz must have thought he could weather the storm. Perhaps he believed that his family would somehow be protected by his wealth and his connections with the Kaiser, with the Dutch royal family, and with the Italian government. Maybe he did not understand that civilization as he had known it, had, at least temporarily, come to an end. Under the Nazis, his native Germany had already descended into barbarism. Or maybe, in what clearly was a Gutmann family genetic trait, he was simply obstinate—a fifty-four-year-old man who was set in his ways, secure in his position, a man who refused to be run out of the home and the life that he had built, even in the face of armies on the march.
Whatever the reason, Fritz and Louise stayed in Holland. And by the time they realized their terrible mistake, it was already too late.
