1938 (46 page)

Great-Aunt Kathi died in Darjeeling in 1927, shortly after giving birth to a boy called Martin. Martin was bitten by a venomous fly and developed brain damage. Kathi’s husband, the Latvian Jew Dr. Rudolf Rapaport, demanded my aunt’s dowry, and my great-grandmother had to sell her last properties—the villa in Hietzing and country house on the Mondsee near Salzburg and the heavily mortgaged shop in the Graben—to pay him off. After escaping the Nazis from the south of France, Rapaport achieved fame as the painter Rudolf Ray in Mexico and the United States. Kathi may have had a second child called Bonifacius, the fruit of a liaison in Paris during her student years. He was secretly lodged in an orphanage in Klosterneuburg. The fate of Bonifacius is unknown.

My grandfather and my great-uncle Walther had started up a small business after the
déroute
caused by Rudolf Rapaport demanding my great-aunt’s portion. They naturally had no future in Vienna after March 1938. My great-uncle Walther was arrested in June, along with all the Viennese jewelers. He was sent to Dachau before being transferred to Buchenwald. He was eventually released. His Protestant, Bavarian wife had divorced him. Whether she had bought him out, or whether he was released for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, no one seems to know now. He died a broken man in Central America in 1963, where he ran a coffee plantation.

My grandfather Felix Zirner had married Katharine Bacon. She was an English Catholic, the daughter of the Royal Academician John Henry Bacon. They had a daughter—my mother. The marriage broke up soon after, and Katharine Zirner returned to England, where she died of tuberculosis in a nursing home in Haselmere, Surrey, in 1938. Felix was refused entry into Britain, where he might have joined his daughter. He left for Argentina from Genoa in September. His admission was presumably engineered by the pressure exerted by Rublee on the backtracking Argentinians. He made his way to Bolivia—“the Rolls Royce of emigrations”—and established a small firm restoring churches. It is not known how he financed the journey and visa. A member of his wife’s family probably obtained the latter for him in London or Washington. He died of heart failure in 1943 at the age of just thirty-eight.

Gisela Zirner died in 1930. Her sister Ella was still running the family department store in the Kärntnerstrasse with her son Ludwig as managing director. Ella was one of the most prominent women in Vienna. She led a fabulous life, took many lovers, and had an estate in Yugoslavia where guests were collected from the station by a carriage drawn by a team of white horses. In 1933 the Zirners rented out the department store’s former canteen to three Hungarian noblemen who turned it into the famous restaurant Zu den Drei Husaren. In 1938 the owner, Count Paul Pallfy, decided that he no longer wished to operate a restaurant in a Nazi Vienna and sold the lease to Otto Horcher, the restaurant tsar of the Third Reich. During the war years its banquettes groaned under the weight of Hermann Göring and other Nazi luminaries. Ella had married my great-grandfather’s brother, Alexander, who sat on the board of the Jewish congregation with my great-grandfather. He was not only a pillar of the community but one of the most prominent industrialists in the city. Ella and Alexander went their separate ways before the First World War, and Alexander lived in a suite in the Imperial Hotel. When he died in 1924, several hundred people accompanied his coffin to the Central Cemetery.

Ella had three children. Renée married a diplomat, the scion of a Hungarian magnate family with the sonorous name of Hugo Erös von Bethlenfalva. Erich fled to Monaco when the Germans attacked France and was still there in the fifties. The third child, Ludwig, however, was not Alexander’s son but the result of a long-standing affair between Ella and the composer Franz Schmidt, the disciple of Bruckner who had known her since her time at the Academy of Music, where Ella had won first prize for piano.

Schmidt had wanted to marry Ella, but my great-great-grandfather felt the impecunious musician lacked prospects. Schmidt dedicated his First Symphony to Ella and later made a present to her of the score of his opera
Notre Dame
, which was also inscribed to her. At around the time he was writing
Notre Dame
, Schmidt was a constant presence in Ella’s apartment next to the Bristol Hotel on the Ring. Schmidt and Ella used to play duets together. A form of synthesis was achieved when Ludwig was born in February 1906. Ludwig also studied privately and at the Academy under his natural father, but his mother refused to allow him to become a professional musician. The Nazis greatly revered Schmidt and were presumably blissfully unaware that he had a Jewish son.

They commissioned a new work from him,
Eine Deutsche Auferstehung
(German Resurrection), which he was halfhearted about and failed to finish by the time he died in February 1939. Shortly before Ludwig left Vienna, a Gestapo man came to see him and confiscated the score of
Notre Dame.
He never learned for certain who had informed them that he had it in his possession, but he suspected that it was Schmidt’s pupil, the pianist Friedrich Wührer. Wührer was the first to tell Ludwig that he was Schmidt’s son. That was in America after the war; his mother had never discussed his paternity.

On April 6, 1938, Horcher became the owner of the walls of the restaurant as well, when Ella’s property was Aryanized. The Nazis swiped half her wealth, her creditors the other—principally the Zentralsparkasse der Stadt Wien. A large sum was paid into a closed account, of which Ella and her son Ludwig naturally saw nothing. After Ella and Ludwig were forced to relinquish their property, they made their way via Cherbourg to New York, Ella on the arm of her new beau, the painter Viktor Krausz. Ella died in 1970. She had wanted to return to Vienna and become involved with the department store again, but Ludwig would not hear of it. Having been given a part of her property back in 1951, she sold it again in 1957. When Krausz died, she took a younger lover who ran off with all that remained of the family fortune.

Ludwig was free at last. After serving as a musician in the American army, he cast off the fetters of commerce, sat numerous exams, and submitted a doctoral dissertation on American piano music. He finally achieved complete metamorphosis, becoming a professor of piano at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Assisted by his Viennese-born wife, Laura, he began the opera courses that were later to distinguish the school of music at Urbana, preparing and translating scores and conducting a wide range of operas. He was also the life and soul of the famous Tanglewood Music Festival. As Schmidt’s son, he was the heir to the purest Viennese musical tradition.

At his invitation, Stravinsky, Britten, Milhaud, Kubelik, Hindemith, and Beecham all visited Urbana. He was so successful that he was invited to take over the opera school at the Academy of Music in Berlin. He eventually realized his dream of building a proper opera house in Urbana, and although he was already a very sick man, shortly before his death he put on a performance of
Rheingold
there, with Wagner’s great-grandson, Wolf Siegfried or “Wummi” Wagner, at his side. After he died in 1971, Laura returned to Vienna to join their teenage son, August, who was training to be an actor. August is now an Austrian citizen and celebrated for his theatre and cinema performances in the German-speaking world.

The Zirners and the Zwiebacks were lucky. They were rich and wellconnected and were able to escape from Austria before it was too late. Only one of my close relatives perished. The painter Rudolf Rapaport abandoned his mentally retarded son when he fled to America. Martin Rapp was gassed at Hartheim in 1944.

Acknowledgments

Many people have given me helpful suggestions and references or have delved deep into their memories of a now-distant time: Rupert Allison, John Aycoth, Melanie Barber, Richard Bassett, Angela Bohrer, Ann Bone, the late Gerhard Bronner, Professor Michael Burleigh, Professor Andrew Chandler, the late George Clare, Tim Clarke, Venerable Patrick Curran, Wolf-Erich Eckstein, the late Sir Dudley Forwood Bt, Georg Gaugusch, the late Litzi Gedye, Lydia Hall, Gerhard Heilig, Uwe Kohl, the late Peter Leighton-Langer, Mairin Lodle, Celia Male, Patricia Meehan, Professor Lucien Meysels, Fritz Miesbauer, Gisela Müller, Stefan Popper, Professor Munro Price, Lorli Rudov, the late Arnold Sayers, Professor Hans Schneider, Father Franz Schuster OSB, Henry Wellisch, August Zirner, and Ed Zwieback.

Particular thanks are due to people who lent or sent books and papers, such as my friends Christopher Wentworth-Stanley and Sebastian Cody in Vienna. Sebastian also read the typescript and made a number of important points. Michael Smith of the
Daily Telegraph
gave me a copy of an interview with the deputy Viennese MI6 chief Kenneth Benton before Benton’s death. Peter Ede very kindly sent me his manuscript translation of Gräfin Maltzan’s memoirs and other helpful suggestions.

I should also like to thank the staffs of the DÖW archive and the Staatsbibliothek in Vienna, the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, and the library at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for providing me with copies of the Corder Catchpool papers. In London I received wonderful support from a number of institutions: the Public Record Office, Friends House Library, the London Metropolitan Archive for the papers of the British Board of Deputies, the Guildhall Library for the Anglican Church abroad, the Lambeth Palace Library, the Newspaper Library in Colindale, the British Library, the Wiener Library, and the German Historical Institute.

Thanks too to my agent, Georgina Capel, and her staff; to Lara Heimert and Leo Hollis, my editors in New York and London, respectively; to my wife, Candida, who read the manuscript; and to the rest of my family, for giving me a few moments of peace and quiet.

Notes

ix
Their consumption of strong alcohol doubled:
Richard Grunberger,
A Social History of the Third Reich
(Harmondsworth, 1974), 269.

1
No notes were to be taken:
Hermann Foertsch,
Schuld und Verhängnis: Die Fritsch-Krise im Fruehjahr 1938 als Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Zeit
(Stuttgart, 1951), 75–76. All texts quoted from German sources are the author’s translation.

1
Blomberg’s adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach:
Ian Kershaw,
Hitler
, vol. 2,
1936–1945: Nemesis
(London, 2000), 47.

2
Blomberg and Fritsch were the first:
Foertsch,
Schuld und Verhängnis
, 77–79.

2
There was much discussion:
Joseph Goebbels,
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Tel I, Band 5, Dezember 1937–Juli 1938
, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 2000), 29.

3
The German railway network:
See Adam Tooze,
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
(London, 2006), xxiii–xxiv, 239–243.

3
Goebbels came out with a typically Nazi:
Goebbels,
Tagebücher I, V
, 95, 96.

3
Halifax let it be known:
Andrew Roberts,
The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax
, 2nd ed. (London, 1997), 71.

3
In December, Prime Minister:
Michael Bloch,
Ribbentrop
, rev. ed. (London, 1992), 159–160.

3
“The hour approaches:
Fyodor Parparov,
The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogations of Hitler’s Personal Aides
, trans. Giles MacDonogh, ed. Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl (London, 2005), 25.

The epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Jochen Klepper,
Unter dem Schatten deiner Flügel: Aus den Tagebüchern der Jahre 1932–1942
(Stuttgart, 1955), 542.

6
foreign Jews in Germany:
Victor Klemperer,
Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933–1941
, ed. Walther Nowojski and Hadwig Klemperer (Berlin, 1995), 391; Goebbels,
Tagebücher I, V
, 82.

6
“The Jewish question has become a global problem:
Goebbels,
Tagebücher I, V
, 97.

6
a Jew arriving at an Austrian hotel:
Der Stürmer
3, January 1938.

6
He had been one of the first:
Der Stürmer
1, January 1938.

6
In January 1938 it was Jews:
Klemperer,
Tagebücher
, 395.

7
The Führer was in complete raptures:
Goebbels
, Tagebücher I, V
, 96.

7
As commander of the air force:
David Irving,
Göring: A Biography
(London, 1989), 194.

7
As he left the festivities:
Irving,
Göring
, 196.

7
Now he saw his chance:
R. J. Overy,
Goering: The “Iron Man”
(London, 1984), 69.

8
he liked Eva so much:
Jochen von Lang,
Der Adjutant: Karl Wolff–der Mann zwischen Hitler und Himmler
(Munich, 1985), 80.

8
He even went so far as to confess:
Goebbels,
Tagebücher I, V
, 54.

8
She had only just been granted:
André Brissaud,
Canaris: Le “petit amiral,” prince de l’espionage allemand (1887–1945)
(Paris, 1970), 161; Goebbels,
Tagebücher I, V
, 117.

8
Blomberg had been a stickler:
T. P. Conwell-Evans,
None So Blind: A Study of the Crisis Years, 1930–1939, Based on the Private Papers of Group-Captain M. G. Christie
(London, 1947), 115.

8
Blomberg finally told Hitler:
Foertsch,
Schuld und Verhängnis
, 86.

8
departed for their honeymoon:
Peter Padfield,
Himmler: Reichsführer-SS
(London, 1990), 212.