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Robert Maxwell was no mystery His is a story of self-hatred and Holocaust trauma

Robert Maxwell with Ghislaine and his wife. Credit: by Mirrorpix/Getty Images


February 22, 2021   5 mins

John Preston’s new life of Robert Maxwell is called Fall. But which fall? The moral one — he stole £460 million from his employees at the Mirror — or the fatal one, from the yacht named for his favourite child — now likewise fallen for helping Jeffrey Epstein in his crimes — the Lady Ghislaine? Or is it a more universal one, that took place in continental Europe in the 1940s — the Holocaust? I wonder if Preston is thinking of the last because Fall’s epigraph, from The Great Gatsby, could hardly be more apt for a Holocaust survivor: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him….” For the Holocaust survivor, memory itself is a burden. Maxwell would never be free.

Under Preston’s fair pen Maxwell is a clever, vulgar, frightened polyglot. In his heyday he was perceived as cartoonish — so inhuman that a guest at one of his parties at Headington Hall went through his cupboards looking for insights into his character. She told Preston she wouldn’t normally do this but it was Maxwell so who cares? (She found rows of salad cream.) His story is irresistible because it is barely believable. One reviewer called it “entertaining”.

Is it though? It is true Maxwell’s life was novelistic. He was a man of infinite possibility because he did not know who he was, and he could not bear to ask. He was a plutocrat who lived in a rented house. He was a sexual exploiter cuckolded by an employee. He was a father who appeared to hate his children. He styled himself, preposterously, as an English country squire and endured typical British snobbery for his trouble. (The Observer compared to him a Petticoat Lane market trader. The Sun called him a peasant.) He invented modern British scientific publishing but had fake book spines in his study. He was the first British passenger to fly one million miles, but he could not go home.

I do not find this story irresistible, or even very strange, but then I am a Jew. To me, Maxwell’s story is a fairly ordinary tale of Holocaust trauma, if not to Preston (but who wants to believe their subject is a type?). It is the story of a man who hated himself so much for survival he could not, for 40 years, admit to his Jewishness, or to his childhood name. It is possible he even forgot he was once called Ludvik Hoch. One of Maxwell’s sisters, Sylvia, was saved by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued her from a Budapest station as she was about to be sent to Auschwitz. He gave her, along with other Jewish children, Swedish citizenship, and she later came to England. Towards the end of Maxwell’s life Sylvia asked him why he called himself Jan Hoch. Maxwell replied it was his name. No, said Sylvia, he was named Ludvik. According to Preston’s account Maxwell looked “astonished” and asked: “Was I?”

He was born in what is now Ukraine, in 1923. “I remember how cold I was,” he said, “how hungry I was and how much I loved my mother.” His mother was adoring and his father abusive: Stalin’s family dynamic, precisely, one designed to cultivate suspicion in a child. He said he was once so hungry he ate a dog but that may not be true. He was not a reliable narrator. He was ever shifting. Perhaps that was why he became so fat. I wonder if he subconsciously sought to anchor himself to something, to anything, to this earth.

He was 16 when he left his family. He ended up fighting for the British against the Nazis. By the time the war was over his parents and all by two of his siblings were dead, some in Auschwitz, others en route. He had had nine brothers and sisters — he was the eldest son — and, with his non-Jewish wife Betty, he would have nine sons and daughters, as if to recover the lost family. Betty says he sank to his knees by a pool when they visited Auschwitz, pulled out some sodden splintered bones, and wept.

As Preston calmly relates, Maxwell’s criminality went far beyond the Man Who Saved the Mirror robbing its pension fund and treating his employees like serfs. (He particularly enjoyed tormenting the well-connected because they knew their place in the world.) That is the least of it. He was a killer. As a British soldier, he shot German civilians — he shot a mayor in the head in the town square — and German soldiers trying to surrender. (He could not understand why other British soldiers objected.) He robbed their corpses. His wife Betty, in her anguished memoir, said that even in the ecstatic early days of their marriage his own lips “depicted death and carnage”. He carried it with him to England, to the House of Commons — he was a much-mocked and talkative Labour MP — and to a publishing empire.

He gathered a robe of success around him, but it did not fit him. He learnt to stop changing his name after his bank manager told him he would close the account if he did not stop. (He had four different names before the age of 23.) He found it impossible to be intimate and walked around his parties with a PA system, so his voice would boom from nowhere. He had no friends, only employees. His most treasured possession was his passport, which was normal for Jews of his generation: the right passport could save your life. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, he asked his family to choose the music. Who doesn’t have music? A man who either cannot hear it or feels he does not deserve it.

He returned to Judaism and Betty thought that this, and his growing belief that he betrayed his family by marrying a non-Jew, destroyed their marriage. She said everything changed when they visited Slatinské Doly, the town of his birth, to a hero’s welcome, though the inhabitants could, or would, not save his family. He didn’t divorce her, but he verbally abused her, ignored her and lived in a ludicrous London penthouse alone. In reply, Betty became a skilled historian of the Holocaust. It was an attempt to understand him. It didn’t work. He would say: “I know what loneliness is like.”

He deserved to be lonely, but when I read the exhausting lies, I wonder if Maxwell was a thief because he believed he had nothing. In the most revealing passage Preston writes: “He took the logo of Mirror Group Newspapers — a roaring lion — from the Hollywood studio MGM; the names of the headquarters, Maxwell House, from a brand of instant coffee; and the name of his parent company, MCC, from the Marylebone Cricket”. Once, he pretended to have been in a military hospital with Ronald Reagan, a memory he stole from the Reagan film The Hasty Heart. Another time, preposterously, he pretended to be Scottish. All this is material to those who found him ridiculous, but it is, again, a normal reaction, if to be yourself meant death.

He was not, then, a mysterious person, but another rational product of Nazism. Even so, the mystery endures. Myths fly around his death. Did he commit suicide as his financial crimes came close to exposure? (Did he lock his bedroom door behind him, so the absence would not be discovered?) Was he murdered by the Israelis, who sent a Mossad assassin to a yacht in the ocean, only to give him a state funeral days later? (Anti-Jewish conspiracy theories bookend his life. They give it structure.) Did he fake his own death; does a fake Robert Maxwell lie in a Jerusalem grave? It doesn’t matter. You can argue that Maxwell was dead in every meaningful sense by 1945. That is not the story of every Holocaust survivor, but it is his. The rest, through scornful laughter or not, is detritus.


Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

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Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago

Tanya, have you considered this alternative explanation for his behaviour? That he was a psychopath? It’s simpler, more supported by the evidence (his behaviour and lack of empathy) and just plain more likely, statistically.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

You’re at cross purposes. You talking about what Maxwell was. Tanya Gold is talking about what made him what he was.

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

Appreciate your point. But circumstances don’t make psychopaths. Biology does. All that circumstances might do is a) accentuate the trait and/or b) allow it to express itself (e.g. concentration camp guard).

Prana
Prana
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

Sorry Michael, but not really – if you want to understand the concentration guard, look at the Milgram experiments from the 1970s. As for psychopathy, whilst there is small evidence that it maybe genetic it is far more influenced by environment in upbringing. The brain doesn’t mature until age 25, so what happened to him at 16 I think had a massive impact on his life path and behaviour. There are two paths from trauma – one is PTSD, and the other is PTG = post-traumatic growth. There is still the suffering/pain but as some point this is turned around and made into fertiliser for making one’s life for the greater good. This is clearly seen by people such as Viktor Frankl and his excellent book about his experience in concentration camps. So, it’s not the experiences per se, it is how we interpret the experiences. Maxwell’s trauma arose even earlier due to poor fathering. I found this article compelling and whilst certainly not excusing his awful behaviour it does help me to understand it. I can see parallels between him and Trump too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/what-makes-a-psychopath/z79f2sg

Mangle Tangle
Mangle Tangle
3 years ago
Reply to  Prana

We will have to differ on the nature versus nurture issue but suffice to say that the current understanding of psychopathy is that it is genetic and/or a result of adverse very early brain development. With regard to Milgram, I’m not talking about ‘ordinary’ humans who normally have empathy and a feeling of obligation for others but who can be coerced by circumstances into behaving inhumanely, but of those psychopaths who thrive in such situations and may actively seek them out. In Tanya’s piece she comments on Maxwell’s reaction to his fellow soldier’s disapproval of his executions. As she herself said, he was surprised by their reaction. He didn’t understand it. Classic psychopathy.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Reply to  Drahcir Nevarc

There were many others who managed to escape the Nazis, and some who survived the holocaust. I can think of no other psychopaths beyond Maxwell.

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

I guess you’ve never heard of Peter Rachman. Very similar story to Maxwell actually, similar response from the British establishment too as anyone who has seen the BBC’s Panorama hit job on him would attest.
And yet… there were those who admired his lack of hypocrisy in the less fortunate parts of London.

Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago

I have heard of Rachman but I had no idea that he had a background similar to Maxwell.

Drahcir Nevarc
Drahcir Nevarc
3 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Granted, but your argument is with Tanya Gold rather than me.

Alfred Prufrock
Alfred Prufrock
3 years ago
Reply to  Mangle Tangle

I have read the book and can confirm it is a very good read. Well written and Maxwell lead a very interesting life to say the least. Although Maxwell could be extremely unpleasant and a crook I never got the impression he was a psychopath.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
3 years ago

That is not even close to what Tanya Gold is saying. Take out the ‘but that’s alright’ part and you start to approach an understanding. Why would you want to distort Gold’s article in this way?

Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold
3 years ago

Patrick please take this down. Criticism of Israel is absolutely fair but Holocaust denial is not.

Daniel Goldstein
Daniel Goldstein
3 years ago
Reply to  Tanya Gold

I feel I’ve missed something here. An enjoyable read as ever though, Tanya!

Joe Burroughes
Joe Burroughes
3 years ago

Lockdown has really been big grey saggy pants, and one thing that has kept me sane is reading interesting and beautifully written articles (most on Unherd). Tanya, yours are quite the best (not the grey saggy pants..) You are a splendidly eloquent writer.

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Burroughes

100%.

Daniel Goldstein
Daniel Goldstein
3 years ago
Reply to  Joe Burroughes

She is a marvel.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago

That is highly offensive

Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold
3 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

And we don’t say that lightly here.

Chris Mochan
Chris Mochan
3 years ago

Really enjoyed this article, but I wonder how anyone could look at the life of Robert Maxwell and conclude that it was neither strange nor interesting. The author states this and then sets out a life story that is clearly astonishing. If Maxwell’s life was ordinary, then what could possibly meet the criteria of strange and interesting?

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
Reply to  Chris Mochan

Is anyone with neither books nor music interesting? ‘ Fake book spines’ says a lot.

Gerry Fruin
Gerry Fruin
3 years ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

What for example?

Chris Mochan
Chris Mochan
3 years ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

Perhaps not, but they would certainly be strange.

G Matthews
G Matthews
3 years ago

By far the best book on Maxwell is “Israel’s Superspy: the Assassination of Robert Maxwell” which explains how his publishing empire made him the perfect vehicle to peddle Promis software to governments around the world which had a huge backdoor in it for Mossad to exploit. Although the book also claims he was not completely faithful to Mossad and exchanged information with Russia too, and anyone else who paid for it. Here is a guy who had never lived in Israel and yet seven successive heads of Mossad attend his funeral. Recommended reading if you want to understand Maxwell and Epstein.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago

No mention of the fact that besides shooting a German Mayor in the head he did win the MC (Military Cross).
A rather odd omission.

Sidney Falco
Sidney Falco
3 years ago

I instinctively knew it wasn’t his fault.

Rowli Pugh
Rowli Pugh
3 years ago

An interesting and thoughtful perspective. I have one question, Why was Robert Maxwell buried on the Mount Of Olives, a rare honour, Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said at Maxwell’s funeral: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said.”

Michael Dawson
Michael Dawson
3 years ago
Reply to  Rowli Pugh

He was a long-time agent for Israel. One theory, alluded to in the article, is that the Israelis knew his business empire was about to collapse and feared that he would sell or tell all to enemies of Israel, hence their assassination of him. I read the book on this and found it very credible.

Raja Rajamani
Raja Rajamani
3 years ago
Reply to  Michael Dawson

Agree. Same is said in ‘Gideon’s Spies’. about Mossad

Lindsay Gatward
Lindsay Gatward
3 years ago
Reply to  Rowli Pugh

Was it because exhumation is not permitted so there was no risk of the body double corpse being found out while the real Maxwell roamed the World – Presumably his new identity involved a bit of dieting or was his rotundness that still allowed him to run so freely around the pitch celebrating his team victory actually a foam fat suite ready to be doffed when he disappeared? – Makes you wonder if similar accommodation was given to his daughters associate Epstein. For sure the calamity of coincidences at his prison were far more than needed for a suiciding.

Dapple Grey
Dapple Grey
3 years ago

So psychopaths become so because of circumstances?
I disagree with that – there are many many people who have suffered appalling abuse who don’t take it out on others.

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
3 years ago
Reply to  Dapple Grey

All bullies were bullied this is not to to say that all bullied people will become bullies. I know someone who got ran over by a bus once and lived; what does this tell you?

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago

30 Comments listed, but only 26 shown, where are the ‘other’ 4?

Gerry Fruin
Gerry Fruin
3 years ago

I’m concerned that the word psychopath is been used too freely. Using medical terms without qualification or knowledge is a dangerous trait. I understand that in private conversation words are used to express and enhance our view of others that’s OK. However, unless they are medically justified often in court, mental conditions should never be expressed without very careful thought.
I know the Maxwell story quite well having done business with his company and worked with his senior staff at that time. This review demeans Maxwell in a rather unpleasant way. Personally I find that cheap and shallow.
His background can be barely grasped by people of that time. By the current cohort of journalist’s I doubt they have the compassion or the intelligence to understand the reality of Maxwell’s time.
Leave the man be, he’s dead why pick his bones. Sadly an easy and common and cowardly trait in these celebrity led times.

Dick Barrett
Dick Barrett
3 years ago

So what if he shot some nazis? I would have done the same if I was a jew at that time.

G Harris
G Harris
3 years ago

A really good piece.

Growing up, somewhat naive and long pre-swan dive into the briny obviously, I remember being fascinated by ‘lefty’ Maxwell, particularly in his much publicised battles with ‘ultra right-wing’ Rupert Murdoch, always hoping that he would get one over on his less than savoury antipodean arch nemesis.

He never really did, of course, only ending up with the Mirror because Murdoch never wanted it in the first place, but their fates were seemingly intertwined long before that.

So the story goes, he almost got the upper hand when the two men met in Australia, then all but unknown to each other and many years prior to Maxwell himself becoming a UK media mogul, where he almost managed to convince Murdoch to buy into a door to door encyclopedia business he was trying to push.

Murdoch was all up for it and was due to sink a not inconsiderable amount of money into this new venture when he happened to speak to a shared associate only to discover that Maxwell had acquired a job lot of these encyclopedias for next nothing and had become rather well known for hawking the idea around looking for the next greater fool for some time.

Last edited 3 years ago by G Harris
Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
3 years ago
Reply to  G Harris

Although of course, they were more alike than either cared to admit. Both despised the British ruling class. Maxwell the cynical man who came from a world where the platitudes of the high and mighty seemed little more the empty bluster of the overprivileged, Murdoch the scion of the gadfly that destroyed Britains reputation in Australia during Galipoli and then turned the masses against it and shocked all bien-pensants with his purchase of The Times. And they both set out to humiliate it and reveal its hypocrisies, which they did in their own ways.
Some of the footage here about Murdoch is pretty revealing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/0de4228e-6af1-35a4-be4d-648a7ea15290

Last edited 3 years ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Steve Sailer
Steve Sailer
3 years ago

I had the misfortune of having to deal with Robert Maxwell in a business matter in 1989.
For a dead man, he seems to have had rather a lot of what he thought was fun.

Last edited 3 years ago by Steve Sailer
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
3 years ago

Has the notifier for someone replying to a comment disappeared? (this comment is a bit of a test for that)

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
3 years ago

Yes. It makes commenting almost pointless, doesn’t it?

Judy Johnson
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

Changes for the worse are almost invariably pointless! I wonder who designed these changes and if they benefit anyone!

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
3 years ago
Reply to  Judy Johnson

If it ain’t broke.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago

Yes, DISQUS has been sacked and the new system is almost worthless.
‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi’.

Last edited 3 years ago by George Lake
peter lucey
peter lucey
3 years ago

He was a monster, but there was pathos. I read that Maxwell once, as a new MP, boomingly, ordered “Drinks All Round” in the Members Bar of the HoC, like a Pools winner at his local pub. The ensuing silence was a moment of exquisite embarrassment,

Last edited 3 years ago by peter lucey
Martin Pollecoff
Martin Pollecoff
3 years ago

Great article that brings a different slant on the story. It’s not Tanya’s job to find “the truth’ as in ‘the one true God’. but rather to suggest and illuminate new aspects to the story. I never thought that I would be moved to pity Maxwell but Tanya’s work made me do just that.

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
3 years ago

You got me hooked Tanya. Brilliant writing.

andrewpwood
andrewpwood
3 years ago

I’ve always been fascinated by the man and the monster created by his tragic circumstances. He was a victim. This is an excellent article.

Stephen Follows
Stephen Follows
3 years ago

If he really did fake his own death, surely someone would have recognised the obese git somewhere by now.

greg waggett
greg waggett
3 years ago

Fascinating.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago

In answer to my previous question “where are the four missing posts”?
I now gather two were Tanya Gold herself, one by Peter Bradshaw Wilson Esq and the last unknown.

Has UnHerd really lived up to its name, and cast those ‘four’ posts into the ‘pit of eternal stench’. If so, why so?

Incidentally why has a Red Flag suddenly appeared? Nothing to do with the Internationale I trust?

Last edited 3 years ago by George Lake
Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold
3 years ago
Reply to  George Lake

Holocaust denial.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  Tanya Gold

Many thanks, I had missed that.

Under the DISQUS system you could have left it up, so the miscreant would have been castigated by all.

However under this new system I can see that that is impossible, thus “cancelling” was the only option.

Sadly UnHerd have wrecked a once unique comments forum.
As H.R.E. C V would have said:

‘You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world’

Last edited 3 years ago by George Lake
JR Stoker
JR Stoker
3 years ago
Reply to  George Lake

I think we were deleted because we both objected to a comment made by the unnamed unknown, who I presume the editors correctly deleted, taking our objections with it. No problem with that

Colin Haller
Colin Haller
3 years ago

James Gatz, indeed.

Raja Rajamani
Raja Rajamani
3 years ago

Nothing wrong in killing Germans during the days of WW2. After what the Germans did to his family.

George Lake
George Lake
3 years ago
Reply to  Raja Rajamani

Yes, regrettably Germany’s conduct between 1939-45 was so barbaric and completely outside the Classical tradition of Europe that it should have been literally exterminated.

As Tacitus said “we make a desert and call it peace.”.

What will always be unanswerable is how the nation of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe, and Kant could have behaved so appallingly.

Personally I think the failure of Rome to devastate the place after the unfortunate defeat of Publius Quintilius Varus has a lot to do with it.

Vale.

Last edited 3 years ago by George Lake