Elisabeth de Rothschild
|
|
Elisabeth de Rothschild (March 9, 1902, Paris, France - March 23, 1945, Ravensbrück, Germany) was a member by marriage of the wine-making branch of the Rothschild family.
Born Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure and known as Lili, she was a daughter of a French count and a member of a Catholic family whose roots were in the Burgundy region.
In 1935, immediately after her divorce from her first husband, Maurice Rheims, she married her lover, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, a member of the prominent Rothschild family and the owner of one of France's most famous vineyards, the Château Mouton Rothschild in Pauillac in the Médoc. They had two children:
- Philippine de Rothschild (1935-)
- Charles Henri de Rothschild (1937-1937), born deformed and died soon after birth
Following the occupation of France by the German army during World War II, she and her then-estranged husband were arrested by the Vichy government and the vineyard property seized. Philippe de Rothschild escaped and made his way to England where he joined the Free French Forces of General Charles de Gaulle. However, the Gestapo shipped Rothschild's wife, who had since reverted to her maiden name of Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure, to Ravensbrück, a German concentration camp located about 50 miles north of Berlin.
In 1945, with the advance of the Allied armies into Germany, and the end of the War in sight, the Germans began a massive amount of killings in the gas chamber at Ravensbrück. On March 23, 1945, only weeks before the War ended, Lili de Chambure was gassed.
As scholar Niall Ferguson has pointed out, it was ironic that the only member of the Jewish Rothschild family who was killed by the Nazis was Lili de Chambure, a Catholic.