Did Any Of The Rothschild Dynasty Die In The Holocaust? – Mythbusting Berlin

“At seven o’clock [on 11 June 1940] we entered into conference. … I urged the French Government to defend Paris. I emphasised the enormous absorbing power of the house-to-house defence of a great city upon an invading army. I recalled to Marshal Pétain the nights we had spent together in his train at Beauvais after the British Fifth Army disaster in 1918, and how he, as I put it, not mentioning Marshal Foch, had restored the situation. I also reminded him how Clemenceau had said: “I will fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris.” The Marshal replied very quietly and with dignity that in those days he had a mass of manoeuvre of upwards of sixty divisions; now there was none. He mentioned that there were then sixty British divisions in the line. Making Paris into a ruin would not affect the final event.”
Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume Two: Their Finest Hour (1949)

In the spring of 1944, amid the clink of champagne glasses in the Nazi-occupied Paris and the rustle of haute couture, a French baroness made what seemed like a small, if bold, decision: she moved her seat to avoid sitting next to the wife of a high-ranking Nazi ambassador.

It was a subtle act of defiance, borne of quiet disgust.

Yet it set in motion a tragic chain of events.

That woman – Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure – would soon find herself arrested by the Gestapo and eventually perish behind the barbed wire of Ravensbrück, a notorious Nazi concentration camp north of Berlin.

In doing so, it has been said that she earned the grim distinction of being the only member of the illustrious Rothschild family to die in the Holocaust.

The Rothschild name has long been synonymous with immense wealth and influence. Spread across Europe, this prominent Jewish family weathered many storms over the centuries. But the Second World War and the Holocaust posed an existential threat inescapable even to the Rothschilds. Many of them fled or found ways to survive Nazi persecution.