Post-War Story

No one walking along Heerengracht Canal, Amsterdam, fortnight ago, would have bothered to look twice at No. 412. Four stories high, of dull sandstone, the modest building had no name plate by its door. Nor was there anything spectacular inside, just 30 quiet employes working amidst a lot of papers.

No one would have turned his head for a second look at four people and a rabbi waiting for a flowerless hearse in a small cemetery near Paris last week.

Yet those were the headquarters and that was the funeral of one of the richest men in the world, a man who by floating loans could keep whole countries from sinking, whose death and its subsequences may cause a political crisis in France. This financial emperor was a fat-lipped, mean, noxious, cigar-smoking German Jew, one of whose mistresses had a gold bathtub and who, after 20 years in The Netherlands, could not speak enough Dutch to boss his own chauffeur. His name was Dr. Fritz Mannheimer.

No one ever liked Fritz. He was too smart. During the War, barely out of college, he got a job in the German Government bureau directing the flow of raw materials through Germany. In no time, he headed it. At 27 he persuaded Belgian industrialists to accept the paper currency issued in occupied territory. After the War he managed Germany's central monetary office, where his first job was to organize the Amsterdam branch of the famous, 125-year-old Mendelssohn & Co. Bank. The branch grew bigger than the tree. At 30, Fritz Mannheimer set up Mendelssohn & Co., Amsterdam, as an independent bank, made himself its head.

From then on, Fritz Mannheimer was a regular E. Phillips Oppenheim character. Mysterious (few people even knew his name), powerful, grasping, he began to formulate the financial policies of nations and to get fat. At one time he worked simultaneously for the German, Austrian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav and Rumanian Central Banks. Twice he turned down the presidency of the German Reichsbank, the second time proposed Dr. Hjalmar Schacht in his place. Schacht got the job. He began to buy antiques--among them the valuable Eucharistic Dove stolen from Salzburg's Cathedral. He was too skeptical to have any truck with Ivar Kreuger or any private financier. His was the last Jewish-owned bank allowed to do business in Germany.

For some time he has been the brains behind France's Finance Minister Paul Reynaud, in his effort to stop the flow of gold from France to the U. S. In the process, Mannheimer's health broke, his weight dropping from 264 to 143 Ibs. But Paul Reynaud was grateful, served as best man when, only eight weeks ago, the dying financier surprised everyone by marrying a tall, dark, 21-year-old Brazilian girl named Marie Antoinette Reiss. The marriage was as doomed as Fritz Mannheimer's bank. The groom had a heart attack during the ceremony, was revived with two injections to get through it. Recently he fainted in the French Finance Ministry. Twenty-four hours after his death the bank announced it was suspending payments. Immediately Paul Reynaud announced that the French Government was in no way affected, that all Mendelssohn contracts had been carried out. But in Wall Street money wiseacres suspected that Mendelssohn's crash might bring down with it many another European banking house.

Fritz Mannheimer was typical of Europe's post-War financiers--too ambitious to be dismayed by the wreckage that demoralized older economists, too tough to be rebuffed by the snubs and cuts of a decaying financial aristocracy, slippery enough to make his way through the crevices that appeared as the social structure cracked under war strain. Adroit to the end, he died before his bank closed its doors.

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