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One day in 1938, while Nazi troops stood over him with guns, Vienna's Baron Louis de Rothschild calmly finished his lunch, dabbed his fingers in a finger bowl, smoked a cigarette, approved the next day's menu—and then was marched off to prison. A year later, after Heinrich Himmler visited his cell, his freedom was bought in return for all the assets of the Austrian branch in Austria and abroad, and Louis found refuge in Vermont; the Austrian house never revived.† After Paris was occupied, the Rothschilds were forced to sell most of their French stocks on an already depressed market, and the Nazis carted off trainloads of priceless Rothschild objets. By 1940, when all the other French banking Rothschilds had fled or been captured, only the eldest son was left to salvage what he could. Says Guy de Rothschild: "From that date, I took over the bank."
Fresh Face. European historians reason that every Rothschild at birth is already 150 years old, and worth several millions. From his earliest years, Guy was imbued with a sense of family loyalty and duty, heard his mother lecture: "Don't flaunt your wealth." Four of Guy's great grandparents were Rothschilds, a result of the fact that half of the family's 59 weddings in the 19th century twined Rothschild men (and money) with Rothschild women. Guy entered the bank after studying law, then got called off to war. He was one of only three out of 26 officers in his mechanized cavalry unit who survived to be evacuated from Dunkirk; he went right back to France, was captured by the Germans but later escaped.
Under Vichy's puppets, Guy moved with the bank's offices to the south of France, where a small staff kept it going, then fled to the U.S., where he reassembled some more of the family assets. In 1943 Guy set out for England. His ship was torpedoed in mid-Atlantic, and he was rescued after sloshing around on a raft for seven hours. In England he joined the Free French as a captain.
With peace, Guy and Cousins Alain and Elie set out to put a fresh face on the aged Grande Dame of Paris banks. To keep the books, the young trio brought in machines to replace the old men with scratch pens. They sought out new banking customers as their more conservative fathers never would have done, and launched new companies to share in Europe's postwar boom. When Guy & Co. formed a consortium to explore for oil in the Sahara, the Rothschild name added glamour to the venture, and the entire stock issue was snapped up within hours.
With help from the World Bank, de Rothschild Freres created another consortium that has put up $166 million to exhume a rich iron lode in Mauritania. Among other companies that the Rothschilds control, Pefiarroya in Chile mines 7% of the free world's lead, and Le Nickel in New Caledonia produces 10% of the world's nickel. Under Guy, the Rothschilds have also built France's biggest private uranium mining company, which supplies some of the raw material for De Gaulle's force de frappe. And it was de Rothschild Freres that drafted the plan for financing the Channel tunnel that will connect France with Britain.