Germaine de Rothschild

Origins and early life

Germaine de Rothschild was born Germaine-Alice Halphen in the eighth arrondissement of Paris on 29 February 1884, daughter of the financier Émile Halphen and of Louise Fould, and married Baron Édouard de Rothschild in 1905; their children were Guy, Jacqueline Piatigorsky and Bethsabée de Rothschild.

Work and career

She was a writer and a musician before anything else, author of a life of Luigi Boccherini published in 1962 and of studies of Bernard Palissy, and she kept a salon. In 1938, after Kristallnacht, she founded the committee for Jewish children refugees from Germany and central Europe and put her own château de la Guette, in Seine-et-Marne, at its disposal: about a hundred and thirty children arrived there from Germany and Austria, some of them the last of their families.

She engaged as her secretary, to run the charitable operation, a young German refugee philosopher named Hannah Arendt. When France fell, the children had to be moved south and then hidden, and in 1942 she arranged the emigration of a hundred and thirty of them to the United States, an operation of paperwork, money and nerve conducted while the deportations were running. She was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour and died in Paris on 1 January 1975; she is buried at Père-Lachaise.