BERNARD VAN LEER
by Pauline Micheels, historian and author of De vatenman, Bernard van Leer (1883-1958), Amsterdam 2002.
Bernard (Bé) van Leer came from a family of Jewish traders who, in the course of the 19th century, had managed to achieve a comfortable standard of living. He was the fourth son in a family of eight children where a good education and the Jewish faith were both considered important. Bernard's father was a businessman - first in Amersfoort till 1885, and subsequently in Haarlem (1885-1886), Amsterdam (1886-1892) and Nijmegen (1892-1904), but without much success. He was more interested in literature, politics and religion than in business matters. Consequently, his business interests took second place, and this led to successive bankruptcies, the last in 1904, whereupon he moved first to Cleves in Germany and finally to Switzerland.
Bernard's school career in Amsterdam and Nijmegen was, unlike those of his brothers and sisters, undistinguished. As a result, at 14 he took a job as an ordinary workman at the Automatic Screw Works, a screw factory in Nijmegen. In 1902, Van Leer moved to Amsterdam, where he started work with the DSM Kalker company, which dealt in building supplies. Two years later he moved to the engineering wholesalers RS Stokvis & Zonen in Rotterdam. With this company, he came into his own, and in 1907 he became the manager of a new branch in Amsterdam. In a very short time, he had turned this into a flourishing business. During the First World War, in particular, he was able to take advantage of the neutral status of the Netherlands. In 1918, he resigned, probably after a difference of opinion about money.
In 1912, Van Leer had married Polly Rubens, the youngest daughter of an Amsterdam broker. Although both Polly and Bernard came from strictly religious backgrounds, the Jewish faith was of little significance in their marriage and in the upbringing of their two sons Wim and Oscar - born 1913 and 1914, respectively.
Van Leer started his own business in 1919, at the age of nearly 36. He set up the limited company Van Leer's Vereenigde Fabrieken in Amsterdam, a combination of various small packaging factories which he had bought up, all involved in the (mass) production of articles such as cans, barrels, cases and boxes of all shapes and sizes. Initially, the company was far from successful financially, but the tide turned when, in the mid-1920s, Van Leer managed to win a large order for asphalt barrels from the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij.
In 1927, Van Leer succeeded in bringing off a coup, when he entered into a licensing agreement with an American company making barrel closures. This allowed him to produce and sell these technologically advanced closures in a large number of countries outside the United States. From then on, Van Leer concentrated on barrels and barrel closures, aiming at the international as well the domestic market. First he set up barrel factories in Great Britain, France, Germany and Belgium, and then - mostly in conjunction with Shell - in Africa (Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa), the Dutch East Indies and the Caribbean (Trinidad, Curaçao). With a mixture of energy and bluff, he managed - in spite of cut-throat competition and an international economic crisis - to sell his products.
Van Leer possessed business sense, intuition and commercial insight. "Don't tell me it's not possible", he would say to his staff. He was an indefatigable businessman, who subordinated everything and everyone to his business interests; a driven individualist, a quick thinker, restive and irritating, but a good husband and father. "Let the others talk," was one of his sayings, "We'll work."
By the mid-1930s, Van Leer's financial situation had reached a level where he was able to fulfil some of his most cherished ambitions. Always an enthusiastic horseman, he now began to buy rare breeds and to train them himself. In 1935, he commissioned two architects to design a small-scale moveable circus in the French style, which would seat an audience of about 300. Apart from a few professional musicians and ballet dancers, this 'Circus Kavaljos' was completely staffed by amateurs. Family, office staff, anybody could be roped in as a stable boy, an usherette or even as a lion or a bear. Van Leer himself performed a dressage act. He gave performances in Amsterdam and also in Paris, Brussels and Copenhagen. The proceeds always went to good causes.
In addition to all his other activities, Van Leer began a new business venture in the autumn of 1937. As it was becoming increasingly difficult to buy steel at a reasonable price, it seemed to him that it would be a good idea to finance and build a rolling mill - the first in the Netherlands. When Van Leer's Walsbedrijven was officially opened in 1938 on the Hoogovens terrain in Velsen, the guests included not only the Minister of Economic Affairs and Prince Bernhard, but also all the leading figures of Dutch industry.
The Second World War and the German occupation brought about radical changes in Van Leer's life. Although a ship lay ready to take him and his family to Great Britain on 14 May 1940, he decided, after long deliberation, to stay where he was. And, only a few days after the surrender of the Dutch armed forces, the first German orders for barrels started to come in. After consulting his staff, Van Leer supplied the barrels. It would, he thought, be unwise to refuse; he was a Jew and the Germans would probably immediately replace him with an administrator.
It soon became clear that the Aryanisation of Dutch industry was only a matter of time. When Van Leer heard that some of his German competitors were preparing to divide up his companies among themselves, he himself started secret sales talks in the summer of 1940 with the huge Düsseldorf iron concern, Mannesman Röhrenwerke, a company he had heard encouraging reports about from German-Jewish refugees in the same line of business. The Ministry of Economic Affairs in Berlin, which preferred to keep matters in its own hands, thereupon mounted a counter-offensive. The managing director of Mannesman, representing the other interested parties as well, was sent to see Van Leer in order to discuss with him the sale of his businesses. There was to be no question of coercion - negotiations would only take place if Van Leer himself was willing. But grasping this opportunity was a matter of common sense. In the long run, he, as a Jewish businessman, would not be able to survive.
After months of negotiation, a provisional deed of sale was signed on 14 March 1941. This laid down that Van Leer would sell his businesses in the occupied territories for around five million guilders - half the price he had asked for. In exchange, he would be given permission to leave for the United Sates with various members of his family, his circus (packed into boxes) and his horses. However, the actual permit from Berlin took a long time to arrive and anti-Jewish measures were increasing by the week.
Van Leer finally left the Netherlands by train on 23 June 1941 with fourteen fellow passengers - nine members of his family, the circus manager with his family, and the violinist and bandmaster Max Tak - plus nineteen horses. A few days earlier he had had to pay the Germans two million guilders in tax - for which, read ransom money. Van Leer was allowed to give away a quarter of a million guilders from his private fortune. The rest was to be used by the liquidator for 'payments to the Jewish Council'. The intention was that this money should be given by the Council to Jewish charities of their choice. Otherwise, he was allowed to take three thousand dollars out of the country, in addition to hand luggage and jewellery.
After a fatiguing journey via Spain and Cuba, Van Leer reached New York on 22 July 1941. He bought a house with stables on a country estate in Briarcliff Manor, to the north of New York. He was to stay here for the duration of the war. But, by December 1941, Van Leer was giving his first performance with his horses at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. The next summer, he organised a major circus tour along the east coast of America. However, in spite of an enthusiastic reception by the public, he was forced to break off the tour after a few weeks because of shortage of funds.
Van Leer did not take kindly to his refugee status, the more so because financial problems gave him the feeling that he was under guardianship. This was because he was constantly in conflict with the Dutch authorities in London, who had not only frozen his foreign assets, but who were also extremely suspicious of what seemed to them to be the puzzling way in which he, a Jewish businessman, had managed to escape from the occupied territories.
On his return to the newly liberated Netherlands in the summer of 1945, Van Leer was once again confronted with these suspicions. In 1946, he bought back the factories which he had sold to the Germans, by demanding restoration of his legal rights, and, at first, there seemed to be no obstacle to rebuilding his business enterprise. But, in 1948, the Collaboration Department of the Political Investigation Service nevertheless started an enquiry into his conduct during the first year of the war. This focused in particular on Van Leer's supplying the Germans with barrels and on the sale of his businesses. Van Leer maintained that the latter had taken place under duress, while the investigators assumed it was done voluntarily. The matter never reached court. In January 1949, the case against Van Leer was dropped unconditionally. It is possible that this decision was influenced by Van Leer's threat to move his head office abroad.
Van Leer expanded his enterprise considerably in the post-war years. In order to avoid tax, he changed his domicile to Lucerne in Switzerland, and lived in the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam whenever he came to the Netherlands. His wife and his elder son, Wim, settled in Israel, his younger son, Oscar, remained in the United States. Towards the end of the 1940s, Van Leer had a notarised document drawn up to the effect that his entire estate - he was the sole shareholder! - should be placed with a number of charitable foundations and allocated to good causes. In so doing, he disinherited his immediate family, an arrangement which was possible in Switzerland though not in the Netherlands. At the same time, he set up a family fund with the aim of leaving none of the Van Leer family unprovided for.
Van Leer turned out to be a truly great philanthropist. In the 1930s, he had donated large sums of money to help Jewish refugees from Germany, but after the war he set up huge aid operations which not only served humanitarian purposes but also generated publicity. Substantial sums of money went - almost always anonymously - to good causes of all kinds. Eventually, this led to constant, and often irritating, demands for money being made on him. Van Leer was a rich man, but he also became a lonely man, keeping the grasping outside world at an ever greater distance.
Throughout his life, Van Leer displayed an innate feeling for publicity and show. So it was that, in 1946, he had lunch with Winston Churchill so that he could show off his two finest horses to the British war leader he admired so much. In 1947, he spent two months touring all his factories throughout the world in an aircraft chartered from KLM, and, in the early 1950s, he went round Europe with a travelling barrel factory. It had to be spectacular, it had to have style, like the design of his new head office of his business in Amstelveen, for which he commissioned the American architect, Martin Breuer in 1957.
Bernard van Leer died in early 1958 at the age of 74. His wife and sons decided that he should be buried in Jerusalem. A memorial service was held in a hangar at Schiphol Airport, and his body was then flown to Israel.
