BARON ELIE ROBERT DE ROTHSCHILD DIES. Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild, who helped France's renowned Rothschild winemaking and banking dynasty recover from World War II, died Monday (August 6) while vacationing at his Austrian hunting lodge. He was 90.
Rothschild had been on a hunting trip at his lodge when he suffered a fatal heart attack, according to the AP. He is the second prominent Rothschild to die this year. In June, family patriarch Baron Guy de Rothschild died in Paris.
The family's prestigious Chateau Lafite-Rothschild winery, for whom Elie de Rothschild began working in 1946 after serving as an Allied soldier during World War II, credits him with at least two of the best and most memorable postwar Bordeaux vintages: 1947 and 1949.
Born May 29, 1917, Elie de Rothschild was captured by the Germans near the border with Belgium. He wound up at Luebeck, one of the Nazis' most infamous POW camps.
There, he was reunited with a brother, Alain, and although they were Jews, they were treated as captured officers and avoided execution.
Rothschild married his childhood sweetheart, Liliane Fould-Springer, who was one of France's leading patrons of the arts when she died in 2003. Together, the couple acquired works by Picasso, Rembrandt and other masters.
He held a 25% stake in the Rothschild banking empire and oversaw the conversion of the former Paris-Lyon-Marseille railway into a travel company of hotels and restaurants.
Rothschild is survived by a son, Nathaniel, a financier; daughters Elizabeth and Nelly; and five grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are yet to be completed.
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