title: Jordan

text: The official language is Modern Standard Arabic, a literary language taught in the schools. Most Jordanians natively speak one of the non-standard Arabic dialects known as Jordanian Arabic. Jordanian Sign Language is the language of the deaf community. English, though without official status, is widely spoken throughout the country and is the "de facto" language of commerce and banking, as well as a co-official status in the education sector; almost all university-level classes are held in English and almost all public schools teach English along with Standard Arabic. Chechen, Circassian, Armenian, Tagalog, and Russian are popular among their communities. French is offered as an elective in many schools, mainly in the private sector. German is an increasingly popular language; it has been introduced at a larger scale since the establishment of the German-Jordanian University in 2005.


title: Jordan

text: Life expectancy in Jordan was around 74.8 years in 2017. The leading cause of death is cardiovascular diseases, followed by cancer. Childhood immunization rates have increased steadily over the past 15 years; by 2002 immunisations and vaccines reached more than 95% of children under five. In 1950, water and sanitation was available to only 10% of the population; in 2015 it reached 98% of Jordanians.


title: Jordan

text: Jordan prides itself on its health services, some of the best in the region. Qualified medics, a favourable investment climate and Jordan's stability has contributed to the success of this sector. The country's health care system is divided between public and private institutions. On 1 June 2007, Jordan Hospital (as the biggest private hospital) was the first general specialty hospital to gain the international accreditation JCAHO. The King Hussein Cancer Center is a leading cancer treatment centre. 66% of Jordanians have medical insurance.


title: Jordan

text: The Jordanian educational system comprises 2 years of pre-school education, 10 years of compulsory basic education, and two years of secondary academic or vocational education, after which the students sit for the General Certificate of Secondary Education Exam ("Tawjihi)" exams. Scholars may attend either private or public schools. According to the UNESCO, the literacy rate in 2015 was 98.01% and is considered to be the highest in the Middle East and the Arab world, and one of the highest in the world. UNESCO ranked Jordan's educational system 18th out of 94 nations for providing gender equality in education. Jordan has the highest number of researchers in research and development per million people among all the 57 countries that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). In Jordan there are 8060 researchers per million people, while the world average is 2532 per million. Primary education is free in Jordan.


title: Jordan

text: Jordan has 10 public universities, 19 private universities and 54 community colleges, of which 14 are public, 24 private and others affiliated with the Jordanian Armed Forces, the Civil Defense Department, the Ministry of Health and UNRWA. There are over 200,000 Jordanian students enrolled in universities each year. An additional 20,000 Jordanians pursue higher education abroad primarily in the United States and Europe. According to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, the top-ranking universities in the country are the University of Jordan (UJ) (1,220th worldwide), Jordan University of Science & Technology (JUST) (1,729th) and Hashemite University (2,176th). UJ and JUST occupy 8th and 10th between Arab universities. Jordan has 2,000 researchers per million people.


title: Jordan

text: Many institutions in Jordan aim to increase cultural awareness of Jordanian Art and to represent Jordan's artistic movements in fields such as paintings, sculpture, graffiti and photography. The art scene has been developing in the past few years and Jordan has been a haven for artists from surrounding countries. In January 2016, for the first time ever, a Jordanian film called Theeb was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.


title: Jordan

text: The largest museum in Jordan is The Jordan Museum. It contains much of the valuable archaeological findings in the country, including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Neolithic limestone statues of 'Ain Ghazal and a copy of the Mesha Stele. Most museums in Jordan are located in Amman including The Children's Museum Jordan, The Martyr's Memorial and Museum and the Royal Automobile Museum. Museums outside Amman include the Aqaba Archaeological Museum. The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts is a major contemporary art museum located in Amman.


title: Jordan

text: Music in Jordan is now developing with a lot of new bands and artists, who are now popular in the Middle East. Artists such as Omar Al-Abdallat, Toni Qattan, Diana Karazon and Hani Mitwasi have increased the popularity of Jordanian music. The Jerash Festival is an annual music event that features popular Arab singers. Pianist and composer Zade Dirani has gained wide international popularity. There is also an increasing growth of alternative Arabic rock bands, who are dominating the scene in the Arab World, including: El Morabba3, Autostrad, JadaL, Akher Zapheer and Aziz Maraka.


title: Jordan

text: Jordan unveiled its first underwater military museum off the coast of Aqaba. Several military vehicles, including tanks, troop carriers and a helicopter are in the museum.


title: Jordan

text: While both team and individual sports are widely played in Jordan, the Kingdom has enjoyed its biggest international achievements in taekwondo. The highlight came at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games when Ahmad Abu Ghaush won Jordan's first ever medal of any colour at the Games by taking gold in the −67 kg weight. Medals have continued to be won at World and Asian level in the sport since to establish Taekwondo as the Kingdom's favourite sport alongside football and basketball.


title: Jordan

text: Football is the most popular sport in Jordan. The national football team came within a play-off of reaching the 2014 World Cup in Brazil when they lost a two-legged play-off against Uruguay. They previously reached the quarter-finals of the Asian Cup in 2004 and 2011.


title: Jordan

text: Jordan has a strong policy for inclusive sport and invests heavily in encouraging girls and women to participate in all sports. The women's football team gaining reputation, and in March 2016 ranked 58th in the world. In 2016, Jordan hosted the FIFA U-17 Women's World Cup, with 16 teams representing six continents. The tournament was held in four stadiums in the three Jordanian cities of Amman, Zarqa and Irbid. It was the first women's sports tournament in the Middle East.


title: Jordan

text: Basketball is another sport that Jordan continues to punch above its weight in, having qualified to the FIBA 2010 World Basketball Cup and more recently reaching the 2019 World Cup in China. Jordan came within a point of reaching the 2012 Olympics after losing the final of the 2010 Asian Cup to China by the narrowest of margins, 70–69, and settling for silver instead. Jordan's national basketball team is participating in various international and Middle Eastern tournaments. Local basketball teams include: Al-Orthodoxi Club, Al-Riyadi, Zain, Al-Hussein and Al-Jazeera.


title: Jordan

text: Boxing, karate, kickboxing, Muay Thai, and ju-jitsu are also popular. Less common sports are also gaining popularity. Rugby is increasing in popularity, a rugby union is recognized by the Jordan Olympic Committee which supervises three national teams. Although cycling is not widespread in Jordan, the sport is developing as a lifestyle and a new way to travel especially among the youth. In 2014, a NGO Make Life Skate Life completed construction of the 7Hills Skatepark, the first skatepark in the country located in Downtown Amman.


title: Jordan

text: As the eighth-largest producer of olives in the world, olive oil is the main cooking oil in Jordan. A common appetizer is hummus, which is a puree of chick peas blended with tahini, lemon, and garlic. Ful medames is another well-known appetiser. A typical worker's meal, it has since made its way to the tables of the upper class. A typical Jordanian meze often contains koubba maqliya, labaneh, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, olives and pickles. Meze is generally accompanied by the Levantine alcoholic drink arak, which is made from grapes and aniseed and is similar to ouzo, rakı and pastis. Jordanian wine and beer are also sometimes used. The same dishes, served without alcoholic drinks, can also be termed "muqabbilat" (starters) in Arabic.


title: Jordan

text: The most distinctive Jordanian dish is mansaf, the national dish of Jordan. The dish is a symbol for Jordanian hospitality and is influenced by the Bedouin culture. Mansaf is eaten on different occasions such as funerals, weddings and on religious holidays. It consists of a plate of rice with meat that was boiled in thick yogurt, sprayed with pine nuts and sometimes herbs. As an old tradition, the dish is eaten using one's hands, but the tradition is not always used. Simple fresh fruit is often served towards the end of a Jordanian meal, but there is also dessert, such as baklava, hareeseh, knafeh, halva and qatayef, a dish made specially for Ramadan. In Jordanian cuisine, drinking coffee and tea flavoured with na'na or meramiyyeh is almost a ritual.


title: Unit 731

text: , short for Manshu Detachment 731 and also known as the Kamo Detachment and Ishii Unit, was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was based in the Pingfang district of Harbin, the largest city in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (now Northeast China) and had active branch offices throughout China and Southeast Asia.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. It routinely conducted tests on people who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs". Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, hypobaric chamber experiments, biological weapons testing, vivisection, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women) and children, but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound. The victims came from different nationalities, with the majority being Chinese and a significant minority being Russian. Additionally, Unit 731 produced biological weapons that were used in areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces, which included Chinese cities and towns, water sources, and fields. Estimates of those killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people, and none of the inmates survived.


title: Unit 731

text: It was officially known as the . Originally set up by the "Kenpeitai" military police of the Empire of Japan, Unit 731 was taken over and commanded until the end of the war by General Shirō Ishii, a combat medic officer in the Kwantung Army. The facility itself was built in 1935 as a replacement for the Zhongma Fortress, and Ishii and his team used it to expand their capabilities. The program received generous support from the Japanese government until the end of the war in 1945. Unit 731 and the other units of the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department operated biological weapon production, testing, deployment, and storage facilities.


title: Unit 731

text: While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crime trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States covered up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip.


title: Unit 731

text: Japan started their biological weapons program in the 1930s, partly because biological weapons were banned by the Geneva Convention of 1925; they reasoned that the ban verified its effectiveness as a weapon. Japan's occupation of Manchuria began in 1931 after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Japan decided to build Unit 731 in Manchuria because the occupation not only gave the Japanese an advantage of separating the research station from their island, but also gave them access to as many Chinese individuals as they wanted for use as human experimental subjects. They viewed the Chinese as no cost research subjects, and hoped that they could use this advantage to lead the world in biological warfare. The majority of research subjects were Chinese, but many were of different nationalities.


title: Unit 731

text: In 1932, Surgeon General , chief medical officer of the Imperial Japanese Army and protégé of Army Minister Sadao Araki, was placed in command of the Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory (AEPRL). Ishii organized a secret research group, the "Tōgō Unit", for chemical and biological experimentation in Manchuria. Ishii had proposed the creation of a Japanese biological and chemical research unit in 1930, after a two-year study trip abroad, on the grounds that Western powers were developing their own programs.


title: Unit 731

text: One of Ishii's main supporters inside the army was Colonel Chikahiko Koizumi, who later served as Japan's Health Minister from 1941 to 1945. Koizumi had joined a secret poison gas research committee in 1915, during World War I, when he and other Imperial Japanese Army officers were impressed by the successful German use of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Allies suffered 5,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded as a result of the chemical attack.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit Tōgō was set into motion in the Zhongma Fortress, a prison and experimentation camp in Beiyinhe, a village south of Harbin on the South Manchuria Railway. The prisoners brought to Zhongma included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, as well as political prisoners and people rounded up on trumped up charges by the Kempeitai. Prisoners were generally well fed on a diet of rice or wheat, meat, fish, and occasionally even alcohol in order to be in normal health at the beginning of experiments. Then, over several days, prisoners were eventually drained of blood and deprived of nutrients and water. Their deteriorating health was recorded. Some were also vivisected. Others were deliberately infected with plague bacteria and other microbes.


title: Unit 731

text: A prison break in the autumn of 1934, which jeopardized the facility's secrecy, and an explosion in 1935 (believed to be sabotage) led Ishii to shut down Zhongma Fortress. He then received authorization to move to Pingfang, approximately south of Harbin, to set up a new, much larger facility.


title: Unit 731

text: In 1936, Emperor Hirohito issued a decree authorizing the expansion of the unit and its integration into the Kwantung Army as the Epidemic Prevention Department. It was divided at that time into the "Ishii Unit" and "Wakamatsu Unit", with a base in Hsinking. From August 1940 on, the units were known collectively as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army" (関東軍防疫給水部本部) or "Unit 731" (満州第731部隊) for short.


title: Unit 731

text: His younger brother, Prince Mikasa, toured the Unit 731 headquarters in China, and wrote in his memoir that he watched films showing how Chinese prisoners were "made to march on the plains of Manchuria for poison gas experiments on humans."


title: Unit 731

text: In addition to the establishment of Unit 731, the decree also called for the creation of an additional biological warfare development unit, called the Kwantung Army Military Horse Epidemic Prevention Workshop (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 100), and a chemical warfare development unit called the Kwantung Army Technical Testing Department (later referred to as Manchuria Unit 516). After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, sister chemical and biological warfare units were founded in major Chinese cities and were referred to as Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Units. Detachments included Unit 1855 in Beijing, Unit Ei 1644 in Nanjing, Unit 8604 in Guangzhou, and later Unit 9420 in Singapore. All of these units comprised Ishii's network, which, at its height in 1939, oversaw over 10,000 personnel. Medical doctors and professors from Japan were attracted to join Unit 731 both by the rare opportunity to conduct human experimentation and the Army's strong financial backing.


title: Unit 731

text: A special project, codenamed "Maruta", used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and sometimes euphemistically referred to as , used in such contexts as "How many logs fell?". This term originated as a joke on the part of the staff because the official cover story for the facility given to local authorities was that it was a lumber mill. However, according to a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army working in Unit 731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz", German for log. In a further parallel, the corpses of "sacrificed" subjects were disposed of by incineration. Researchers in Unit 731 also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on nonhuman primates called "Manchurian monkeys" or "long-tailed monkeys".


title: Unit 731

text: The Togo Unit employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of select body organs. If Ishii or one of his co-workers wished to do research on the human brain, then they would order the guards to find them a useful sample. A prisoner would be taken from his cell. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an ax. His brain would be extracted off to the pathologist, and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal.


title: Unit 731

text: , professor emeritus at Osaka University, studied at Kyoto University during the war. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit 731. He later testified about the playfulness of the experimenters:


title: Unit 731

text: Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: ‘What would happen if we did such and such?’ What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play."


title: Unit 731

text: Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. Prisoners were also repeatedly subjected to rape by guards.


title: Unit 731

text: Thousands of men, women, children, and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often performed without anesthesia and usually lethal. In a video interview, former Unit 731 member Okawa Fukumatsu admitted to having vivisected a pregnant woman. Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body.


title: Unit 731

text: Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Limbs removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite side of victims' bodies. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from others. Imperial Japanese Army surgeon Ken Yuasa suggests that practising vivisection on human subjects was widespread even outside Unit 731, estimating that at least 1,000 Japanese personnel were involved in the practice in mainland China.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 and its affiliated units (Unit 1644 and Unit 100, among others) were involved in research, development and experimental deployment of epidemic-creating biowarfare weapons in assaults against the Chinese populace (both military and civilian) throughout World War II. Plague-infected fleas, bred in the laboratories of Unit 731 and Unit 1644, were spread by low-flying airplanes over Chinese cities, including coastal Ningbo and Changde, Hunan Province, in 1940 and 1941. These operations killed tens of thousands with bubonic plague epidemics. An expedition to Nanjing involved spreading typhoid and paratyphoid germs into the wells, marshes, and houses of the city, as well as infusing them in snacks distributed to locals. Epidemics broke out shortly after, to the elation of many researchers, who concluded that paratyphoid fever was "the most effective" of the pathogens.


title: Unit 731

text: At least 12 large-scale bioweapon field trials were carried out, and at least 11 Chinese cities attacked with biological agents. An attack on Changde in 1941 reportedly led to approximately 10,000 biological casualties and 1,700 deaths among ill-prepared Japanese troops, in most cases due to cholera. Japanese researchers performed tests on prisoners with bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases. This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread bubonic plague. Some of these bombs were designed with porcelain shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.


title: Unit 731

text: These bombs enabled Japanese soldiers to launch biological attacks, infecting agriculture, reservoirs, wells, as well as other areas, with anthrax- and plague-carrier fleas, typhoid, cholera, or other deadly pathogens. During biological bomb experiments, researchers dressed in protective suits would examine the dying victims. Infected food supplies and clothing were dropped by airplane into areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces. In addition, poisoned food and candy were given to unsuspecting victims. Plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed at least 400,000 Chinese civilians. Tularemia was also tested on Chinese civilians.


title: Unit 731

text: Due to pressure from numerous accounts of the biowarfare attacks, Chiang Kai-shek sent a delegation of army and foreign medical personnel in November 1941 to document evidence and treat the afflicted. A report on the Japanese use of plague-infected fleas on Changde was made widely available the following year but was not addressed by the Allied Powers until Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a public warning in 1943 condemning the attacks.


title: Unit 731

text: the plan of Unit 731 was to use kamikaze pilots to infest San Diego, California, with the plague. The plan was scheduled to launch on 22 September 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.


title: Unit 731

text: Human targets were used to test grenades positioned at various distances and in various positions. Flamethrowers were tested on people. Victims were also tied to stakes and used as targets to test pathogen-releasing bombs, chemical weapons, shrapnel bombs with varying amounts of fragments, and explosive bombs as well as bayonets and knives.


title: Unit 731

text: In other tests, subjects were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death; placed into low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped from the sockets; experimented upon to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival; hung upside down until death; crushed with heavy objects; electrocuted; dehydrated with hot fans; placed into centrifuges and spun until death; injected with animal blood, notably with horse blood; exposed to lethal doses of X-rays; subjected to various chemical weapons inside gas chambers; injected with seawater; and burned or buried alive. In addition to chemical agents, the properties of many different toxins were also investigated by the Unit. To name a few, prisoners were exposed to tetrodotoxin (pufferfish or fugu venom), heroin, Korean bindweed, bactal, and castor-oil seeds (ricin). Massive amounts of blood were drained from some prisoners in order to study the effects of blood loss according to former Unit 731 vivisectionist Okawa Fukumatsu. In one case, at least half a liter of blood was drawn at two-to-three-day intervals.


title: Unit 731

text: As stated above, dehydration experiments were performed on the victims. The purpose of these tests was to determine the amount of water in an individual's body and to see how long one could survive with a very low to no water intake. It is known that victims were also starved before these tests began. The deteriorating physical states of these victims were documented by staff at a periodic interval.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 also performed transfusion experiments with different blood types. Unit member Naeo Ikeda wrote:


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 tested many different chemical agents on prisoners and had a building dedicated to gas experiments. Some of the agents tested were mustard gas, lewisite, cyanic acid gas, white phosphorus, adamsite, and phosgene gas. A former army major and technician gave the following testimony anonymously (at the time of the interview, this man was a professor emeritus at a national university):


title: Unit 731

text: Takeo Wano, a former medical worker in Unit 731, said that he saw a Western man, who was vertically cut into two pieces, pickled in a jar of formaldehyde. Wano guessed that the man was Russian because there were many Russians living in the area at that time.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 100 also experimented with toxic gas. Phone booth-like tanks were used as portable gas chambers for the prisoners. Some were forced to wear various types of gas masks; others wore military uniforms, and some wore no clothes at all.


title: Unit 731

text: Some of the tests have been described as "psychopathically sadistic, with no conceivable military application". For example, one experiment documented the time it took for three-day-old babies to freeze to death.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 also tested chemical weapons on prisoners in field conditions. A report authored by unknown researcher in the Kamo Unit (Unit 731) describes a large human experiment of yperite gas (mustard gas) on 7–10 September 1940. Twenty subjects were divided into three groups and placed in combat emplacements, trenches, gazebos, and observatories. One group was clothed with Chinese underwear, no hat, and no mask and was subjected to as much as 1,800 field gun rounds of yperite gas over 25 minutes. Another group was clothed in summer military uniform and shoes; three had masks and another three had no mask. They also were exposed to as much as 1,800 rounds of yperite gas. A third group was clothed in summer military uniform, three with masks and two without masks, and were exposed to as much as 4,800 rounds. Then their general symptoms and damage to skin, eye, respiratory organs, and digestive organs were observed at 4 hours, 24 hours, and 2, 3, and 5 days after the shots. Injecting the blister fluid from one subject into another subject and analyses of blood and soil were also performed. Five subjects were forced to drink a solution of yperite and lewisite gas in water, with or without decontamination. The report describes conditions of every subject precisely without mentioning what happened to them in the long run. The following is an excerpt of one of these reports:


title: Unit 731

text: Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water of varying temperatures, and allowing the limb to freeze. Once frozen, Yoshimura would strike their affected limbs with a short stick, "emitting a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck". Ice was then chipped away, with the affected area being subjected to various treatments, such as being doused in water, exposed to the heat of fire, etc.


title: Unit 731

text: Members of the Unit referred to Yoshimura as a "scientific devil" and a "cold-blooded animal" because he would conduct his work with strictness. Naoji Uezono, a member of Unit 731, described in a 1980s interview a grisly scene where Yoshimura had "two naked men put in an area 40–50 degrees below zero and researchers filmed the whole process until [the subjects] died. [The subjects] suffered such agony they were digging their nails into each other's flesh". Yoshimura's lack of remorse was evident in an article he wrote for the Journal Of Japanese Physiology in 1950 in which he admitted to using 20 children and a three-day-old infant in experiments which exposed them to zero-degree-celsius ice and salt water. Although this article drew criticism, Yoshimura denied any guilt when contacted by a reporter from the "Mainichi Shimbun". Yoshimura developed a "resistance index of frostbite" based on the mean temperature 5 to 30 minutes after immersion in freezing water, the temperature of the first rise after immersion, and the time until the temperature first rises after immersion. In a number of separate experiments it was then determined how these parameters depend on the time of day a victim's body part was immersed in freezing water, the surrounding temperature and humidity during immersion, how the victim had been treated before the immersion ("after keeping awake for a night", "after hunger for 24 hours", "after hunger for 48 hours", "immediately after heavy meal", "immediately after hot meal", "immediately after muscular exercise", "immediately after cold bath", "immediately after hot bath"), what type of food the victim had been fed over the five days preceding the immersions with regard to dietary nutrient intake ("high protein (of animal nature)", "high protein (of vegetable nature)", "low protein intake", and "standard diet"), and salt intake (45 g NaCl per day, 15 g NaCl per day, no salt). This original data is seen in the attached figure.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit members orchestrated forced sex acts between infected and noninfected prisoners to transmit the disease, as the testimony of a prison guard on the subject of devising a method for transmission of syphilis between patients shows:


title: Unit 731

text: After victims were infected, they were vivisected at different stages of infection, so that internal and external organs could be observed as the disease progressed. Testimony from multiple guards blames the female victims as being hosts of the diseases, even as they were forcibly infected. Genitals of female prisoners that were infected with syphilis were called "jam-filled buns" by guards.


title: Unit 731

text: Some children grew up inside the walls of Unit 731, infected with syphilis. A Youth Corps member deployed to train at Unit 731 recalled viewing a batch of subjects that would undergo syphilis testing: "one was a Chinese woman holding an infant, one was a White Russian woman with a daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian woman with a boy of about six or seven." The children of these women were tested in ways similar to their parents, with specific emphasis on determining how longer infection periods affected the effectiveness of treatments.


title: Unit 731

text: Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. The hypothetical possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to child) of diseases, particularly syphilis, was the stated reason for the torture. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though "a large number of babies were born in captivity", there have been no accounts of any survivors of Unit 731, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed after birth or aborted.


title: Unit 731

text: While male prisoners were often used in single studies, so that the results of the experimentation on them would not be clouded by other variables, women were sometimes used in bacteriological or physiological experiments, sex experiments, and as the victims of sex crimes. The testimony of a unit member that served as a guard graphically demonstrated this reality:


title: Unit 731

text: In 2002, Changde, China, site of the plague flea bombing, held an "International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare", which estimated that the number of people slaughtered by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and other human experiments was around 580,000. The American historian Sheldon H. Harris states that over 200,000 died. In addition to Chinese casualties, 1,700 Japanese troops in Zhejiang during Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign were killed by their own biological weapons while attempting to unleash the biological agent, indicating serious issues with distribution. Harris also said plague-infected animals were released near the end of the war, and caused plague outbreaks that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 to 1948.


title: Unit 731

text: Some test subjects were selected to gather a wide cross-section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, homeless and mentally disabled people, which included infants, men, the elderly and pregnant women, as well as those rounded up by the "Kenpeitai" military police for alleged "suspicious activities". Unit 731 staff included approximately 300 researchers, including doctors and bacteriologists.


title: Unit 731

text: At least 3,000 men, women, and children—from which at least 600 every year were provided by the "Kenpeitai"—were subjected to Unit 731 experimentation conducted at the Pingfang camp alone, not including victims from other medical experimentation sites such as Unit 100. Although 3,000 internal victims is the widely accepted figure in the literature, former Unit member Okawa Fukumatsu refuted it in a video interview. He stated that there were at least over 10,000 victims of internal experiments at the Unit and that he himself vivisected thousands.


title: Unit 731

text: According to A. S. Wells, the majority of victims were Chinese, with a lesser percentage being Russian, Mongolian, and Korean. They may also have included a small number of European, American, Indian, Australian, and New Zealander prisoners of war. A member of the Yokusan Sonendan paramilitary political youth branch, who worked for Unit 731, stated that not only were Chinese, Russians, and Koreans present, but also Americans, British, and French people. Sheldon H. Harris documented that the victims were generally political dissidents, communist sympathizers, ordinary criminals, impoverished civilians, and the mentally disabled. Author Seiichi Morimura estimates that almost 70 percent of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese (both military and civilian), while close to 30 percent of the victims were Russian.


title: Unit 731

text: No one who entered Unit 731 came out alive. Prisoners were usually received into Unit 731 at night in motor vehicles painted black with a ventilation hole but no windows. The vehicle would pull up at the main gates and one of the drivers would go to the guardroom and report to the guard. That guard would then telephone to the "Special Team" in the inner-prison (Shiro Ishii's brother was head of this Special Team). Then, the prisoners would be transported through a secret tunnel dug under the facade of the central building to the inner-prisons. One of the prisons housed women and children (Building 8), while the other prison housed men (Building 7). Once at the inner-prison, technicians would take samples of the prisoners' blood and stool, test their kidney function, and collect other physical data. Once deemed healthy and fit for experimentation, prisoners lost their names and were given a three-digit number, which they retained until their death. Whenever prisoners died after the experiments they had been subjected to, a clerk of the 1st Division struck their numbers off an index card and took the deceased prisoner's manacles to be put on new arrivals to the prison.


title: Unit 731

text: There is at least one recorded instance of "friendly" social interaction between prisoners and Unit 731 staff. Technician Naokata Ishibashi interacted with two female prisoners. One prisoner was a 21-year-old Chinese woman, the other a Soviet girl who was 19 years of age. Ishibashi asked where she came from and learned that she was from Ukraine. The two prisoners told Ishibashi that they had not seen their faces in a mirror since being captured and begged him to get one. Ishibashi sneaked a mirror to them through a hole in the cell door. Prisoners were repeatedly reused for experiments as long as they were healthy enough. The average life expectancy of a prisoner once they had entered the Unit was two months. Some prisoners were alive in the Unit for over 12 months, and many female prisoners gave birth in the Unit.


title: Unit 731

text: The prison cells had wooden floors and a squat toilet in each. There was space between the outer walls of the cells and the outer walls of the prison, enabling the guards to walk behind the cells. Each cell door had a small window in it. Chief of the Personnel Division of the Kwantung Army Headquarters Tamura Tadashi testified that, when he was shown the inner-prison, he looked into the cells and saw living people in chains, some moved around, others were lying on the bare floor and were in a very sick and helpless condition. Former Unit 731 Youth Corps member Yoshio Shinozuka testified that the windows in these prison doors were so small that it was difficult to see in. The inner-prison was a highly secured building complete with cast iron doors. No one could enter without special permits and an ID pass with a photograph, and the entry/exit times were recorded. The "special team" worked in these two inner-prison buildings. This team wore white overall suits, army hats, rubber boots, and pistols strapped to their sides.


title: Unit 731

text: A former member of the Special Team (who insisted on anonymity) recalled in 1995 his first vivisection conducted at the Unit:


title: Unit 731

text: Other sources suggest that it was the usual practice in the Unit for surgeons to stuff a rag (or medical gauze) into the mouth of prisoners before commencing vivisection in order to stifle any screaming.


title: Unit 731

text: Despite the prison's status as a highly secure building, at least one unsuccessful escape attempt did occur. Corporal Kikuchi Norimitsu testified that he was told by another unit member that a prisoner "had shown violence and had struck the experimenter with a door handle" and then "jumped out of the cell and ran down the corridor, seized the keys and opened the iron doors and some of the cells. Some of the prisoners managed to jump out but these were only the bold ones. These bold ones were shot". Seiichi Morimura in his book "The Devil's Feast" went into some greater detail regarding this escape attempt. Two Russian male prisoners were in a cell with handcuffs on, one of them lay flat on the floor pretending to be sick. This got the attention of a staff member who saw it as an unusual condition. That staff member decided to enter the cell. The Russian lying on the floor suddenly sprang up and knocked the guard down. The two Russians opened their handcuffs, took the keys, and opened some other cells while yelling. Some prisoners, including Russian and Chinese, were frantically roaming the corridors and kept yelling and shouting. One Russian shouted to the members of Unit 731, demanding to be shot rather than used as an experimental object. This Russian was shot to death. One staff member, who was an eyewitness at this escape attempt, recalled: "spiritually we were all lost in front of the 'marutas' who had no freedom and no weapons. At that time we understood in our hearts that justice was not on our side". Unfortunately for the prisoners of Unit 731, escape was an impossibility. Even if they had managed to escape the quadrangle (itself a heavily fortified building full of staff), they would have had to get over a brick wall surrounding the complex, and then across a dry moat filled with electrified wire running around the perimeter of the complex (which can be seen in aerial pictures of the Unit).


title: Unit 731

text: Members of Unit 731 were not immune from being subjects of experiments. Yoshio Tamura, an assistant in the Special Team, recalled that Yoshio Sudō, an employee of the first division at Unit 731, became infected with bubonic plague as a result of the production of plague bacteria. The Special Team was then ordered to vivisect Sudō. Tamura recalled:


title: Unit 731

text: Additionally, Unit 731 Youth Corps member Yoshio Shinozuka testified that his friend junior assistant Mitsuo Hirakawa was vivisected as a result of being accidentally infected with plague.


title: Unit 731

text: There are unit members who were known to be interned at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre and Taiyuan War Criminals Management Centre after the war, who then went on to be repatriated to Japan and founded the Association of Returnees from China and testified about Unit 731 and the crimes perpetrated there.


title: Unit 731

text: In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan disclosed a nearly complete list of 3,607 members of Unit 731 to Katsuo Nishiyama, a professor at Shiga University of Medical Science. Nishiyama reportedly intended to publish the list online to encourage further study into the unit.


title: Unit 731

text: There were also twelve members who were formally tried and sentenced in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials.


title: Unit 731

text: Other suspected Japanese war criminals who were never indicted include three postwar prime ministers: Hatoyama Ichirō (1954–1956), Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960), and Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964).


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 had other units underneath it in the chain of command; there were several other units under the auspice of Japan's biological weapons programs. Most or all Units had branch offices, which were also often referred to as "Units". The term Unit 731 can refer to the Harbin complex itself, or it can refer to the organization and its branches, sub-Units and their branches.


title: Unit 731

text: The Unit 731 complex covered and consisted of more than 150 buildings. The design of the facilities made them hard to destroy by bombing. The complex contained various factories. It had around 4,500 containers to be used to raise fleas, six cauldrons to produce various chemicals, and around 1,800 containers to produce biological agents. Approximately of bubonic plague bacteria could be produced in a few days.


title: Unit 731

text: Some of Unit 731's satellite (branch) facilities are still in use by various Chinese industrial companies. A portion has been preserved and is open to visitors as a War Crimes Museum.


title: Unit 731

text: Unit 731 had branches in Linkou (Branch 162), Mudanjiang, Hailin (Branch 643), Sunwu (Branch 673), Toan, and Hailar (Branch 543).


title: Unit 731

text: A medical school and research facility belonging to Unit 731 operated in the Shinjuku District of Tokyo during World War II. In 2006, Toyo Ishii—a nurse who worked at the school during the war—revealed that she had helped bury bodies and pieces of bodies on the school's grounds shortly after Japan's surrender in 1945. In response, in February 2011 the Ministry of Health began to excavate the site.


title: Unit 731

text: While Tokyo courts acknowledged in 2002 that Unit 731 has been involved in biological warfare research, the Japanese government had made no official acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against test subjects and rejected the Chinese government's requests for DNA samples to identify human remains (including skulls and bones) found near an army medical school.


title: Unit 731

text: At Tokyo's Kyushu Imperial University in 1945, US POWs from a shot down B-29 were subjected to fatal medical experimentation.


title: Unit 731

text: Operations and experiments continued until the end of the war. Ishii had wanted to use biological weapons in the Pacific War since May 1944, but his attempts were repeatedly snubbed.


title: Unit 731

text: With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste. Ministries in Tokyo ordered the destruction of all incriminating materials, including those in Pingfang. Potential witnesses, such as the 300 remaining prisoners, were either gassed or fed poison while the 600 Chinese and Manchurian laborers were shot. Ishii ordered every member of the group to disappear and "take the secret to the grave". Potassium cyanide vials were issued for use in case the remaining personnel were captured.


title: Unit 731

text: Skeleton crews of Ishii's Japanese troops blew up the compound in the final days of the war to destroy evidence of their activities, but many were sturdy enough to remain somewhat intact.


title: Unit 731

text: Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship "Sturgess" in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America's military center for biological weapons. Sanders' duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan, he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was. Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so, the morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare. Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers and responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants: he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America, but not the other wartime allies, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation. American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail. The Americans believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.


title: Unit 731

text: The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental.


title: Unit 731

text: While German physicians were brought to trial and had their crimes publicized, the U.S. concealed information about Japanese biological warfare experiments and secured immunity for the perpetrators. Critics argue that racism led to the double standard in the American postwar responses to the experiments conducted on different nationalities. Whereas the perpetrators of Unit 731 were exempt from prosecution, the U.S. held a tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 that indicted nine Japanese physician professors and medical students for conducting vivisection upon captured American pilots; two professors were sentenced to death and others to 15–20 years' imprisonment.


title: Unit 731

text: Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted 12 top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 100 in Changchun in the Khabarovsk war crimes trials. Among those accused of war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otozō Yamada, commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.


title: Unit 731

text: The trial of the Japanese perpetrators was held in Khabarovsk in December 1949; a lengthy partial transcript of trial proceedings was published in different languages the following year by the Moscow foreign languages press, including an English-language edition. The lead prosecuting attorney at the Khabarovsk trial was Lev Smirnov, who had been one of the top Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials. The Japanese doctors and army commanders who had perpetrated the Unit 731 experiments received sentences from the Khabarovsk court ranging from 2 to 25 years in a Siberian labor camp. The United States refused to acknowledge the trials, branding them communist propaganda. The sentences doled out to the Japanese perpetrators were unusually lenient by Soviet standards, and all but two of the defendants returned to Japan by the 1950s (with one prisoner dying in prison and the other committing suicide inside his cell). In addition to the accusations of propaganda, the US also asserted that the trials were to only serve as a distraction from the Soviet treatment of several hundred thousand Japanese prisoners of war; meanwhile, the USSR asserted that the US had given the Japanese diplomatic leniency in exchange for information regarding their human experimentation. The accusations of both the US and the USSR were true, and it is believed that the Japanese had also given information to the Soviets regarding their biological experimentation for judicial leniency. This was evidenced by the Soviet Union building a biological weapons facility in Sverdlovsk using documentation captured from Unit 731 in Manchuria.


title: Unit 731

text: As above, during the United States occupation of Japan, the members of Unit 731 and the members of other experimental units were allowed to go free. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington in order to inform it that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes' evidence".


title: Unit 731

text: One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to perform experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956. He performed his experiments while he was working for Japan's National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and infected mentally-ill patients with typhus. As the chief of the unit, Shiro Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the American occupation authorities, because he had provided human experimentation research materials to them. From 1948 to 1958, less than five percent of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the US National Archives before they were shipped back to Japan.


title: Unit 731

text: Japanese discussions of Unit 731's activity began in the 1950s, after the end of the American occupation of Japan. In 1952, human experiments carried out in Nagoya City Pediatric Hospital, which resulted in one death, were publicly tied to former members of Unit 731. Later in that decade, journalists suspected that the murders attributed by the government to Sadamichi Hirasawa were actually carried out by members of Unit 731. In 1958, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō published the book "The Sea and Poison" about human experimentation in Fukuoka, which is thought to have been based on a real incident.


title: Unit 731

text: The author Seiichi Morimura published "" (悪魔の飽食) in 1981, followed by "The Devil's Gluttony: A Sequel" in 1983. These books purported to reveal the "true" operations of Unit 731, but falsely attributed unrelated photos to the Unit, which raised questions about their accuracy.


title: Unit 731

text: Also in 1981, the first direct testimony of human vivisection in China was given by Ken Yuasa. Since then, much more in depth testimony has been given in Japan. The 2001 documentary "Japanese Devils" largely consists of interviews with fourteen Unit 731 staff members taken prisoner by China and later released.


title: Unit 731

text: Japanese Biological Warfare operations were by far the largest during WWII, and "possibly with more people and resources than the BW producing nations of "France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the Soviet Union" combined, between the world wars.


title: Unit 731

text: Although the dissemination methods of delivering plague infected fleas by aircraft were crude, the method, among others, allowed the Japanese to "conduct the most extensive employment of biological weapons during WWII." However, the amount of effort devoted to BW was not matched by its results. Ultimately, inadequate scientific and engineering foundations limited the effectiveness of the Japanese program. Harris speculates that US scientists generally wanted to acquire it due to the concept of forbidden fruit, believing that lawful and ethical prohibitions could affect the outcomes of their research.


title: Unit 731

text: In 2018, Japan disclosed the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731. The information was from the country's national archives. The Japanese government hesistantly acknowledged the unit’s existence in the late 1990s, but has refused to discuss its activities.


title: Unit 731

text: Japanese history textbooks usually contain references to Unit 731, but do not go into detail about allegations, in accordance with this principle. Saburō Ienaga's "New History of Japan" included a detailed description, based on officers' testimony. The Ministry for Education attempted to remove this passage from his textbook before it was taught in public schools, on the basis that the testimony was insufficient. The Supreme Court of Japan ruled in 1997 that the testimony was indeed sufficient and that requiring it to be removed was an illegal violation of freedom of speech.


title: Unit 731

text: In 1997, international lawyer Kōnen Tsuchiya filed a class action suit against the Japanese government, demanding reparations for the actions of Unit 731, using evidence filed by Professor Makoto Ueda of Rikkyo University. All levels of the Japanese court system found the suit baseless. No findings of fact were made about the existence of human experimentation, but the courts' ruling was that reparations are determined by international treaties, not national courts.


title: Unit 731

text: In August 2002, the Tokyo district court ruled for the first time that Japan had engaged in biological warfare. Presiding judge Koji Iwata ruled that Unit 731, on the orders of the Imperial Japanese Army headquarters, used bacteriological weapons on Chinese civilians between 1940 and 1942, spreading diseases, including plague and typhoid, in the cities of Quzhou, Ningbo, and Changde. However, he rejected victims' compensation claims on the grounds that they had already been settled by international peace treaties.


title: Unit 731

text: In October 2003, a member of Japan's House of Representatives filed an inquiry. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi responded that the Japanese government did not then possess any records related to Unit 731, but recognized the gravity of the matter and would publicize any records located in the future. In April 2018, the National Archives of Japan released the names of 3,607 members of Unit 731, in response to a request by Professor Katsuo Nishiyama of the Shiga University of Medical Science.


title: Unit 731

text: After World War II, the Office of Special Investigations created a watchlist of suspected Axis collaborators and persecutors who are banned from entering the United States. While they have added over 60,000 names to the watchlist, they have only been able to identify under 100 Japanese participants. In a 1998 correspondence letter between the DOJ and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Eli Rosenbaum, director of OSI, stated that this was due to two factors:


title: Rothschild family

text: The Rothschild family ( , ) is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire, who established his banking business in the 1760s. Unlike most previous court factors, Rothschild managed to bequeath his wealth and established an international banking family through his five sons, who established businesses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples. The family was elevated to noble rank in the Holy Roman Empire and the United Kingdom. The family's documented history starts in 16th century Frankfurt; its name is derived from the family house, Rothschild, built by Isaak Elchanan Bacharach in Frankfurt in 1567.


title: Rothschild family

text: During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world, as well as in modern world history. The family's wealth declined over the 20th century, and was divided among many descendants. Today, their interests cover a diverse range of fields, including financial services, real estate, mining, energy, agriculture, winemaking, and nonprofits. Many examples of the family's rural architecture exist across northwestern Europe. The Rothschild family has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories, many of which have antisemitic origins.


title: Rothschild family

text: The first member of the family who was known to use the name "Rothschild" was Izaak Elchanan Rothschild, born in 1577. The name is derived from the German "zum rothen Schild" (with the old spelling "th"), meaning "at the red shield", in reference to the house where the family lived for many generations (in those days, houses were designated not by numbers, but by signs displaying different symbols or colours). A red shield can still be seen at the centre of the Rothschild coat of arms. The family's ascent to international prominence began in 1744, with the birth of Mayer Amschel Rothschild in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was the son of Amschel Moses Rothschild (born circa 1710), a money changer who had traded with the Prince of Hesse. Born in the "Judengasse", the ghetto of Frankfurt, Mayer developed a finance house and spread his empire by installing each of his five sons in the five main European financial centres to conduct business. The Rothschild coat of arms contains a clenched fist with five arrows symbolising the five dynasties established by the five sons of Mayer Rothschild, in a reference to Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth." The family motto appears below the shield: "Concordia, Integritas, Industria" (Unity, Integrity, Industry).


title: Rothschild family

text: Paul Johnson writes "[T]he Rothschilds are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them... A woman who planned to write a book entitled "Lies about the Rothschilds" abandoned it, saying: 'It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but it proved impossible to find out the truth.'" Johnson writes that, unlike the court factors of earlier centuries, who had financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new kind of international bank created by the Rothschilds was impervious to local attacks. Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts. Changes made by the Rothschilds allowed them to insulate their property from local violence: "Henceforth their real wealth was beyond the reach of the mob, almost beyond the reach of greedy monarchs." Johnson argued that their fortune was generated to the greatest extent by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in London; however, more recent research by Niall Ferguson indicates that greater and equal profits also were realised by the other Rothschild dynasties, including James Mayer de Rothschild in Paris, Carl Mayer von Rothschild in Naples and Amschel Mayer Rothschild in Frankfurt.


title: Rothschild family

text: Another essential part of Mayer Rothschild's strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands, allowing them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes. In about 1906, the Jewish Encyclopedia noted: "The practice initiated by the Rothschilds of having several brothers of a firm establish branches in the different financial centres was followed by other Jewish financiers, like the Bischoffsheims, Pereires, Seligmans, Lazards and others, and these financiers by their integrity and financial skill obtained credit not alone with their Jewish confrères, but with the banking fraternity in general. By this means, Jewish financiers obtained an increasing share of international finance during the middle and last quarter of the 19th century. The head of the whole group was the Rothschild family..." It also says: "Of more recent years, non-Jewish financiers have learned the same cosmopolitan method, and, on the whole, the control is now rather less than more in Jewish hands than formerly."


title: Rothschild family

text: Mayer Rothschild successfully kept the fortune in the family with carefully arranged marriages, often between first- or second-cousins (similar to royal intermarriage). By the late 19th century, however, almost all Rothschilds had started to marry outside the family, usually into the aristocracy or other financial dynasties.


title: Rothschild family

text: The German family name "Rothschild" is pronounced in German, unlike in English. The surname "Rothschild" is rare in Germany.


title: Rothschild family

text: The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild were elevated to the Austrian nobility by Emperor Francis I of Austria, and they were all granted the Austrian hereditary title of "Freiherr" (baron) on 29 September 1822. The British branch of the family was elevated by Queen Victoria, who granted the hereditary title of baronet (1847) and later the hereditary peerage title of Baron Rothschild (1885).


title: Rothschild family

text: The Rothschilds already possessed a significant fortune before the start of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), and the family had gained preeminence in the bullion trade by this time. From London in 1813 to 1815, Nathan Mayer Rothschild was instrumental in almost single-handedly financing the British war effort, organising the shipment of bullion to the Duke of Wellington's armies across Europe, as well as arranging the payment of British financial subsidies to their continental allies. In 1815 alone, the Rothschilds provided £9.8 million (in 1815 currency, which is about £566 million, €717 million or US$869 million today, when using the retail price index, and £6.58 billion, €8.34 billion or US$10.1 billion when using average earnings) in subsidy loans to Britain's continental allies.


title: Rothschild family

text: The brothers helped coordinate Rothschild activities across the continent, and the family developed a network of agents, shippers and couriers to transport gold across war-torn Europe. The family network was also to provide Nathan Rothschild time and again with political and financial information ahead of his peers, giving him an advantage in the markets and rendering the house of Rothschild still more invaluable to the British government.


title: Rothschild family

text: In one instance, the family network enabled Nathan to receive in London the news of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo a full day ahead of the government's official messengers. Rothschild's first concern on this occasion was not to the potential financial advantage on the market which the knowledge would have given him; he and his courier immediately took the news to the government. That he used the news for financial advantage was a fiction then repeated in later popular accounts, such as that of Morton. The basis for the Rothschilds' most famously profitable move was made after the news of British victory had been made public. Nathan Rothschild calculated that the future reduction in government borrowing brought about by the peace would create a bounce in British government bonds after a two-year stabilisation, which would finalise the post-war restructuring of the domestic economy. In what has been described as one of the most audacious moves in financial history, Nathan immediately bought up the government bond market, for what at the time seemed an excessively high price, before waiting two years, then selling the bonds on the crest of a short bounce in the market in 1817 for a 40% profit. Given the sheer power of leverage the Rothschild family had at their disposal, this profit was an enormous sum.


title: Rothschild family

text: Nathan Mayer Rothschild started his business in Manchester in 1806 and gradually moved it to London, where in 1809 he acquired the location at 2 New Court in St. Swithin's Lane, City of London, where it operates today; he established N M Rothschild & Sons in 1811. In 1818, he arranged a £5 million (equal to £ million in 2021) loan to the Prussian government, and the issuing of bonds for government loans formed a mainstay of his bank's business. He gained a position of such power in the City of London that by 1825–26 he was able to supply enough coin to the Bank of England to enable it to avert a market liquidity crisis.


title: Rothschild family

text: Rothschild family banking businesses pioneered international high finance during the industrialisation of Europe and were instrumental in supporting railway systems across the world and in complex government financing for projects such as the Suez Canal. From 1895 through 1907 they loaned nearly $450,000,000 () to European governments. During the 19th century, the family bought up a large proportion of the property in Mayfair, London.


title: Rothschild family

text: The Rothschild family was directly involved in the independence of Brazil from Portugal in the early 19th century. Upon an agreement, the Brazilian government should pay a compensation of two million pounds sterling to the Kingdom of Portugal to accept Brazil's independence. N M Rothschild & Sons was pre-eminent in raising this capital for the government of the newly formed Empire of Brazil on the London market. In 1825, Nathan Rothschild raised £2,000,000, and indeed was probably discreetly involved in the earlier tranche of this loan which raised £1,000,000 in 1824. Part of the price of Portuguese recognition of Brazilian independence, secured in 1825, was that Brazil should take over repayment of the principal and interest on a £1,500,000 loan made to the Portuguese government in 1823 by N M Rothschild & Sons. A correspondence from Samuel Phillips & Co. in 1824 suggests the close involvement of the Rothschilds in the occasion.


title: Rothschild family

text: The family funded Cecil Rhodes in the creation of the African colony of Rhodesia. From the late 1880s onwards, the family took over control of the Rio Tinto mining company.


title: Rothschild family

text: The Japanese government approached the London and Paris families for funding during the Russo-Japanese War. The London consortium's issue of Japanese war bonds would total £11.5 million (at 1907 currency rates; £ in 2012 currency terms).


title: Rothschild family

text: The name of Rothschild became synonymous with extravagance and great wealth; and the family was renowned for its art collecting, for its palaces, as well as for its philanthropy. By the end of the century, the family owned, or had built, at the lowest estimates, over 41 palaces, of a scale and luxury perhaps unparalleled even by the richest royal families. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George claimed, in 1909, that Nathan, Lord Rothschild was the most powerful man in Britain.


title: Rothschild family

text: "Niles' Weekly Register", Volume 49 had the following to say about the Rothschilds influence on international high finance in 1836:


title: Rothschild family

text: The Neapolitan Rothschilds was the first branch of the family to decline when revolution broke out and Giuseppe Garibaldi captured Naples on 7 September 1860 and set up a provisional Italian government. Because of the family's close political connections with Austria and France, was caught in a delicate position. He chose to take temporary sanctuary in Gaeta with the last Neapolitan king, Francis II of the Two Sicilies. However, the Rothschild branches in London, Paris, and Vienna were not prepared nor willing to financially support the deposed king. With the ensuing unification of Italy, and the mounting tension between Adolph and the rest of the family, the Naples house closed in 1863 after forty-two years in business.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1901, the German branch closed its doors after more than a century in business following the death of Wilhelm Rothschild with no male heirs. It was not until 1989 that the family returned, when N. M. Rothschild & Sons, the British branch, plus Bank Rothschild AG, the Swiss branch, set up a representative banking office in Frankfurt.


title: Rothschild family

text: By the start of the 20th century, the introduction of national taxation systems had ended the Rothschilds' policy of operating with a single set of commercial account records which resulted in the various branches gradually going their own separate ways as independent banks. The system of the five brothers and their successor sons would all but disappear by World War I.


title: Rothschild family

text: The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s led to a precarious situation for the Austrian Rothschilds under the annexation of Austria in 1937 when the family was pressured to sell its banking operations at a fraction of its real worth. While other Rothschilds had escaped the Nazis, Louis Rothschild was imprisoned for a year and only released after a substantial ransom was paid by his family. After Louis was allowed to leave the country in March 1939, the Nazis placed the firm of S M von Rothschild under compulsory administration. Nazi officers and senior staff from Austrian museums also emptied the Rothschild family estates of all their valuables. Following the war, the Austrian Rothschilds were unable to reclaim much of their former assets and properties.


title: Rothschild family

text: Later, the fall of France during the Second World War led to the seizure of the property of the French Rothschilds under German occupation. Despite having their bank restored to them at the end of the war, the French Rothschilds were powerless in 1982 as the family business was nationalised by the socialist government of newly elected President François Mitterrand.


title: Rothschild family

text: In addition, "The New York Times" wrote that the Rothschilds "grossly misjudged the opportunities directly across the Atlantic" and quoted Evelyn Robert de Rothschild as saying that despite the accomplishments made by the various branches of the family in international high finance for over 200 years, "we never seized the initiative in America and that was one of the mistakes my family made."


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1816, four of the five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild were elevated to the Austrian nobility by Emperor Francis I of Austria. The remaining son, Nathan, was elevated in 1818. All of them were granted the Austrian hereditary title of "Freiherr" (baron) on 29 September 1822. As such, some members of the family used the nobiliary particle "de" or "von" before their surname to acknowledge the grant of nobility.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1847, Anthony de Rothschild was made a hereditary baronet of the United Kingdom. In 1885, Sir Nathan Rothschild, 2nd Baronet, was granted the hereditary peerage title of Baron Rothschild in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. This title is currently held by the 4th Baron Rothschild.


title: Rothschild family

text: The Rothschild banking family of England was founded in 1798 by Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), who first settled in Manchester but then moved to London. Nathan Mayer von Rothschild, the third son of Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744–1812), first established a textile jobbing business in Manchester and from there went on to establish N M Rothschild & Sons bank in London.


title: Rothschild family

text: During the early part of the 19th century, the Rothschild family's London bank took a leading part in managing and financing the subsidies that the British government transferred to its allies during the Napoleonic Wars. Through the creation of a network of agents, couriers and shippers, the bank was able to provide funds to the armies of the Duke of Wellington in Portugal and Spain, therefore funding the war. The providing of other innovative and complex financing for government projects formed a mainstay of the bank's business for the better part of the century. N. M. Rothschild & Sons' financial strength in the City of London became such that, by 1825–26, the bank was able to supply enough coin to the Bank of England to enable it to avert a liquidity crisis.


title: Rothschild family

text: Nathan Mayer's eldest son, Lionel de Rothschild (1808–1879), succeeded him as head of the London branch. Under Lionel, the bank financed the British government's 1875 purchase of Egypt's interest in the Suez Canal. The Rothschild bank also funded Cecil Rhodes in the development of the British South Africa Company. Leopold de Rothschild (1845–1917) administered Rhodes's estate after his death in 1902 and helped to set up the Rhodes Scholarship scheme at the University of Oxford. In 1873, de Rothschild Frères in France and N. M. Rothschild & Sons of London joined with other investors to acquire the Spanish government's money-losing Rio Tinto copper mines. The new owners restructured the company and turned it into a profitable business. By 1905, the Rothschild interest in Rio Tinto amounted to more than 30 percent. In 1887, the French and British Rothschild banking houses loaned money to, and invested in, the De Beers diamond mines in South Africa, becoming its largest shareholders.


title: Rothschild family

text: The London banking house continued under the management of Lionel Nathan de Rothschild (1882–1942) and his brother Anthony Gustav de Rothschild (1887–1961), and then to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild (b. 1931). In 2003, following Sir Evelyn's retirement as head of N. M. Rothschild & Sons of London, the British and French financial firms merged under the leadership of David René de Rothschild.


title: Rothschild family

text: The first was the branch of James Mayer de Rothschild (1792–1868), known as "James", who established de Rothschild Frères in Paris; he married his niece Betty von Rothschild. Following the Napoleonic Wars, he played a major role in financing the construction of railways and the mining business that helped make France an industrial power. By 1980, the Paris business employed about 2,000 people and had an annual turnover of 26 billion francs (€4.13 billion or $5 billion in the currency rates of 1980).


title: Rothschild family

text: However, the Paris business suffered a near death blow in 1982, when the socialist government of François Mitterrand nationalised and renamed it as Compagnie Européenne de Banque. Baron David de Rothschild, then 39, decided to stay and rebuild, creating a new entity named Rothschild & Cie Banque, with just three employees and €830,000 (US$1 million) in capital. Today, the Paris operation has 22 partners and accounts for a significant part of the global business.


title: Rothschild family

text: Ensuing generations of the Paris Rothschild family remained involved in the family business, becoming a major force in international investment banking. The Paris Rothschilds have since led the Thomson Financial League Tables in Investment Banking Merger and Acquisition deals in the UK, France and Italy.


title: Rothschild family

text: James Mayer de Rothschild's other son, Edmond James de Rothschild (1845–1934), was very much engaged in philanthropy and the arts, and he was a leading proponent of Zionism. His grandson, Baron Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild, founded in 1953 the LCF Rothschild Group, a private bank. Since 1997, Baron Benjamin de Rothschild chairs the group. The group has €100bn of assets in 2008 and owns many wine properties in France (Château Clarke, Château des Laurets), in Australia or in South Africa. In 1961, the 35-year-old Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild purchased the company Club Med, after he had visited a resort and enjoyed his stay. His interest in Club Med was sold off by the 1990s. In 1973, he bought out the Bank of California, selling his interests in 1984 before it was sold to Mitsubishi Bank in 1985.


title: Rothschild family

text: The second French branch was founded by Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812–1870). Born in London, he was the fourth child of the founder of the British branch of the family, Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836). In 1850 Nathaniel Rothschild moved to Paris to work with his uncle James Mayer Rothschild. In 1853 Nathaniel acquired Château Brane Mouton, a vineyard in Pauillac in the Gironde "département". Nathaniel Rothschild renamed the estate Château Mouton Rothschild, and it would become one of the best known labels in the world. In 1868, Nathaniel's uncle, James Mayer de Rothschild, acquired the neighbouring Château Lafite vineyard.


title: Rothschild family

text: In Vienna, Salomon Mayer Rothschild established a bank in the 1820s and the Austrian family had vast wealth and position. The crash of 1929 brought problems, and Baron Louis von Rothschild attempted to shore up the Creditanstalt, Austria's largest bank, to prevent its collapse. Nevertheless, during the Second World War they had to surrender their bank to the Nazis and flee the country. Their Rothschild palaces, a collection of vast palaces in Vienna built and owned by the family, were confiscated, plundered and destroyed by the Nazis. The palaces were famous for their sheer size and for their huge collections of paintings, armour, tapestries and statues (some of which were restored to the Rothschilds by the Austrian government in 1999). All family members escaped the Holocaust, some of them moving to the United States, and returning to Europe only after the war. In 1999, the government of Austria agreed to return to the Rothschild family some 250 art treasures looted by the Nazis and absorbed into state museums after the war.


title: Rothschild family

text: The C M de Rothschild & Figli bank arranged substantial loans to the Papal States and to various Kings of Naples plus the Duchy of Parma and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. However, in the 1830s, Naples followed Spain with a gradual shift away from conventional bond issues that began to affect the bank's growth and profitability. The Unification of Italy in 1861, with the ensuing decline of the Italian aristocracy who had been the Rothschild's primary clients, eventually brought about the closure of their Naples bank, due to a forecasted decline in the sustainability of the business over the long-term. However, in the early 19th century, the Rothschild family of Naples built up close relations with the Holy See, and the association between the family and the Vatican continued into the 20th century. In 1832, when Pope Gregory XVI was seen meeting Carl von Rothschild to arrange the 1832 Rothschild loan to the Holy See (for £400,000, worth €43,000,000 in 2014), observers were shocked that Rothschild was not required to kiss the Pope's feet, as was then required for all other visitors to the Pope, including monarchs. The 1906 "Jewish Encyclopedia" described the Rothschilds as "the guardians of the papal treasure".


title: Rothschild family

text: Jewish solidarity in the family was not homogeneous. Many Rothschilds were supporters of Zionism, while other members of the family opposed the creation of the Jewish state. In 1917 Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild was the addressee of the Balfour Declaration to the Zionist Federation, which committed the British government to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. His nephew, Victor, Lord Rothschild was against granting asylum or helping Jewish refugees in 1938.


title: Rothschild family

text: After the death of James Jacob de Rothschild in 1868, his eldest son Alphonse Rothschild took over the management of the family bank and was the most active in support for Eretz Israel. The Rothschild family archives show that during the 1870s the family contributed nearly 500,000 francs per year on behalf of Eastern Jewry to the Alliance Israélite Universelle.


title: Rothschild family

text: Baron Edmond James de Rothschild (known in Israel simply as "the Baron Rothschild" or "the Benefactor" (Hebrew: "HaNadiv"), youngest son of James Jacob de Rothschild, was a patron of the first permanent settlement in Palestine at Rishon-LeZion (1882). He also provided funding for the establishment of Petah Tikva as a permanent settlement (1883). Overall, he bought from Ottoman landlords 2–3% of the land which now makes up present-day Israel. After Baron de Hirsch died in 1896, the Hirsch-founded Jewish Colonisation Association (ICA) started supporting the settlement of Palestine (1896), and Baron Rothschild took an active role in the organization and transferred his Palestinian land holdings as well as 15 million francs to it. In 1924, he reorganized the Palestinian branch of the ICA into the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA), which acquired more than of land and set up business ventures. In Tel Aviv, the Rothschild Boulevard is named after him, as are a number of localities throughout Israel which he assisted in founding, including Metulla, Zikhron Ya'akov, Rishon Lezion and Rosh Pina. A park in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, the "Parc Edmond de Rothschild" (Edmond de Rothschild Park), is also named after its founder. The Rothschilds also played a significant part in the funding of Israel's governmental infrastructure. James A. de Rothschild financed the Knesset building as a gift to the State of Israel and the Supreme Court of Israel building was donated to Israel by Dorothy de Rothschild. Outside the President's Chamber is displayed the letter Dorothy de Rothschild wrote to then Prime Minister Shimon Peres expressing her intention to donate a new building for the Supreme Court.


title: Rothschild family

text: Interviewed by "Haaretz" in 2010, Baron Benjamin Rothschild, a Swiss-based member of the banking family, said that he supported the Israeli–Palestinian peace process: "I understand that it is a complicated business, mainly because of the fanatics and extremists – and I am talking about both sides. I think you have fanatics in Israel. ... In general I am not in contact with politicians. I spoke once with Netanyahu. I met once with an Israeli finance minister, but the less I mingle with politicians the better I feel." Due to a dispute with the Israeli tax authorities, the baron refuses to visit Israel. But his wife Ariane de Rothschild often visits Israel where she manages the Caesarea Foundation. She says: "It is insulting that the state [Israel] casts doubt on us. If there is a family that does not have to prove its commitment to Israel, it's ours."


title: Rothschild family

text: Primarily due to the generosity and influence of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, HaNadiv (the Benefactor), on the history of the Land of Israel and the State of Israel, a tradition exists of naming cities, towns and other settlements in Israel in honor of members of the Rothschild family. Six of these places are grouped in the same vicinity, on the Sharon plain, while the others are scattered throughout the country. They are, listed in order of founding:


title: Rothschild family

text: Since the late 19th century, the family has taken a low-key public profile, donating many famous estates, as well as vast quantities of art, to charity, and generally eschewing conspicuous displays of wealth. Today, Rothschild businesses are on a smaller scale than they were throughout the 19th century, although they encompass a diverse range of fields, including: real estate, financial services, mixed farming, energy, mining, winemaking and nonprofits.


title: Rothschild family

text: Since 2003, a group of Rothschild banks have been controlled by Rothschild Continuation Holdings, a Swiss-registered holding company (under the chairmanship of Baron David René de Rothschild). Rothschild Continuation Holdings is in turn controlled by Concordia BV, a Dutch-registered master holding company. Concordia BV is managed by Paris Orléans S.A., a French-registered holding company. Paris Orléans S.A. is ultimately controlled by Rothschild Concordia SAS, a Rothschild's family holding company. Rothschild & Cie Banque controls Rothschild banking businesses in France and continental Europe, while Rothschilds Continuation Holdings AG controls a number of Rothschild banks elsewhere, including N M Rothschild & Sons in London. Twenty percent of Rothschild Continuation Holdings AG was sold in 2005 to Jardine Strategic, which is a subsidiary of Jardine, Matheson & Co. of Hong Kong. In November 2008, Rabobank Group, the leading investment and private bank in the Netherlands, acquired 7.5% of Rothschild Continuation Holdings AG, and Rabobank and Rothschild entered into a co-operation agreement in the fields of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory and equity capital markets advisory in the food and agribusiness sectors. It was believed that the move was intended to help Rothschild Continuation Holdings AG gain access to a wider capital pool, enlarging its presence in East Asian markets.


title: Rothschild family

text: Paris Orléans S.A. is a financial holding company listed on Euronext Paris and controlled by the French and English branch of the Rothschild family. Paris Orléans is the flagship of the Rothschild banking Group and controls the Rothschild Group's banking activities including N M Rothschild & Sons and Rothschild & Cie Banque. It has over 2,000 employees. Directors of the company include Eric de Rothschild, Robert de Rothschild and Count Philippe de Nicolay.


title: Rothschild family

text: N M Rothschild & Sons, an English investment bank, does most of its business as an advisor for mergers and acquisitions. In 2004, the investment bank withdrew from the gold market, a commodity the Rothschild bankers had traded in for two centuries. In 2006, it ranked second in UK M&A with deals totalling $104.9 billion. In 2006, the bank recorded a pre-tax annual profit of £83.2 million with assets of £5.5 billion.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1953, one Swiss member of the family, Edmond Adolphe de Rothschild (1926–1997), founded the LCF Rothschild Group (now Edmond de Rothschild Group) which is based in Geneva, which today extends to 15 countries across the world. Although this Group is primarily a financial entity, specializing in asset management and private banking, its activities also cover mixed farming, luxury hotels and yacht racing. Edmond de Rothschild Group's committee is currently being chaired by Benjamin de Rothschild, Baron Edmond's son.


title: Rothschild family

text: In late 2010, Baron Benjamin Rothschild said that the family had been unaffected by the financial crisis of 2007–2010, due to their conservative business practices: "We came through it well, because our investment managers did not want to put money into crazy things." He added that the Rothschilds were still a small-scale, traditional family business and took greater care over their clients' investments than American companies, adding: "The client knows we will not speculate with his money".


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1980, Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild resigned from N M Rothschild & Sons and took independent control of Rothschild Investment Trust (now RIT Capital Partners, a British investment trust), which has reported assets of $3.4 billion in 2008. It is listed on London Stock Exchange. Lord Rothschild is also one of the major investors behind BullionVault, a gold trading platform.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 2010 RIT Capital Partners stored a significant proportion of its assets in the form of physical gold. Other assets included oil and energy-related investments.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 2012, RIT Capital Partners announced it is to buy a 37 per cent stake in a Rockefeller family wealth advisory and asset management group. Commenting on the deal, David Rockefeller, a former patriarch of the Rockefeller family, said: "The connection between our two families remains very strong."


title: Rothschild family

text: In 1991, Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild founded J. Rothschild Assurance Group (now St. James's Place Wealth Management) with Sir Mark Weinberg. It is also listed on London Stock Exchange.


title: Rothschild family

text: In 2001, the Rothschild mansion located at 18 Kensington Palace Gardens, London, was on sale for £85 million, at that time (2001) the most expensive residential property ever to go on sale in the world. It was built in marble, at 9,000 sq ft, with underground parking for 20 cars.


title: Rothschild family

text: In December 2009, Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild invested $200 million of his own money in a North Sea oil company.


title: Rothschild family

text: In January 2010, Nathaniel Philip Rothschild bought a substantial share of the Glencore mining and oil company's market capitalisation. He also bought a large share of the aluminium mining company United Company RUSAL.


title: Rothschild family

text: During the 19th century, the Rothschilds controlled the Rio Tinto mining corporation, and to this day, Rothschild and Rio Tinto maintain a close business relationship.


title: Rothschild family

text: The Rothschild family has been in the winemaking industry for 150 years. In 1853, Nathaniel de Rothschild purchased Château Brane-Mouton and renamed it Château Mouton Rothschild. In 1868, James Mayer de Rothschild purchased the neighbouring Château Lafite and renamed it Château Lafite Rothschild.


title: Rothschild family

text: Today, the Rothschild family owns many wine estates: their estates in France include Château Clarke, Château de Malengin, Château Clerc-Milon, Château d'Armailhac, Château Duhart-Milon, Château Lafite Rothschild, Château de Laversine, Château des Laurets, Château L'Évangile, Château Malmaison, Château de Montvillargenne, Château Mouton Rothschild, Château de la Muette, Château Rieussec and Château Rothschild d'Armainvilliers. They also own wine estates across North America, South America, South Africa and Australia.


title: Rothschild family

text: Especially, Château Mouton Rothschild and Château Lafite Rothschild are classified as Premier Cru Classé—i.e., First Growth, the status referring to a classification of wines from the Bordeaux region of France.


title: Rothschild family

text: Saskia de Rothschild was named Chairwoman of Château Lafite Rothschild in 2018, succeeding her father, Éric de Rothschild. Château Mouton Rothschild was managed by Philippine de Rothschild until her death in 2014. It is now under the direction of her son Philippe Sereys de Rothschild.


title: Rothschild family

text: The family once had one of the largest private art collections in the world, and a significant proportion of the art in the world's public museums are Rothschild donations which were sometimes, in the family tradition of discretion, donated anonymously.


title: Rothschild family

text: Hannah Mary Rothschild was appointed in December 2014 as chair of the Board of the National Gallery of London.


title: Rothschild family

text: In the words of "The Daily Telegraph": "This multinational banking family is a byword for wealth, power – and discretion... The Rothschild name has become synonymous with money and power to a degree that perhaps no other family has ever matched."


title: Rothschild family

text: Writing of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, Harry Mount writes: "That is what makes these two dynasties so exceptional – not just their dizzying wealth, but the fact that they have held on to it for so long: and not just the loot, but also their family companies."


title: Rothschild family

text: The story of the Rothschild family has been featured in a number of films. The 1934 Hollywood film titled "The House of Rothschild", starring George Arliss and Loretta Young, recounted the life of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Nathan Mayer Rothschild (both played by Arliss). Excerpts from this film were incorporated into the Nazi propaganda film "Der ewige Jude" ("The Eternal Jew") without the permission of the copyright holder. Another Nazi film, "Die Rothschilds" (also called "Aktien auf Waterloo"), was directed by Erich Waschneck in 1940. A Broadway musical entitled "The Rothschilds", covering the history of the family up to 1818, was nominated for a Tony Award in 1971. Nathaniel Mayer ("Natty") Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild appears as a minor character in the historical-mystery novel "Stone's Fall", by Iain Pears. Mayer Rothschild is featured in Diana Gabaldon's novel "Voyager" as a coin seller summoned to Le Havre by Jamie Fraser to appraise coins, prior to the establishment of the Rothschild dynasty, when Mayer is in his early 20s. The Rothschild name is mentioned by Aldous Huxley in his novel "Brave New World", among many names of historically affluent persons, scientific innovators and others. The character, named Morgana Rothschild, played a relatively minor role in the story. The name Rothschild used as a synonym for extreme wealth inspired the song "If I Were a Rich Man", which is based on a song from the Tevye the Dairyman stories, written in the Yiddish as "Ven ikh bin Rotshild", meaning "If I were a Rothschild".


title: Rothschild family

text: In France, the word "Rothschild" was throughout the 19th and 20th centuries a synonym for seemingly endless wealth, neo-Gothic styles, and epicurean glamour. The family also has lent its name to "," a suffocatingly glamorous style of interior decoration whose elements include neo-Renaissance palaces, extravagant use of velvet and gilding, vast collections of armour and sculpture, a sense of Victorian horror vacui, and the highest masterworks of art. Le goût Rothschild has much influenced designers such as Robert Denning, Yves Saint Laurent, Vincent Fourcade and others.


title: Rothschild family

text: Over more than two centuries, the Rothschild family has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories. These theories take differing forms, such as claiming that the family controls the world's wealth and financial institutions or encouraged or discouraged wars between governments. Discussing this and similar views, the historian Niall Ferguson wrote,


title: Rothschild family

text: Many conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family arise from anti-Semitic prejudice and various antisemitic canards.


title: Lana Del Rey

text: Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. Her music is noted for its cinematic quality and exploration of tragic romance, glamour, and melancholia, with frequent references to contemporary pop culture and 1950s–1960s Americana. She is the recipient of various accolades, including two Brit Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards, and a Satellite Award, in addition to nominations for six Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. "Variety" honored her at their Hitmakers Awards for being "one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 21st century."


title: Lana Del Rey

text: Raised in upstate New York, Del Rey moved to New York City in 2005 to pursue a music career. After numerous projects, including her self-titled debut studio album, Del Rey's breakthrough came in 2011 with the viral success of her single "Video Games"; she subsequently signed a recording contract with Polydor and Interscope. She achieved critical and commercial success with her second album, "Born to Die" (2012), which contained the sleeper hit "Summertime Sadness". Del Rey's third album, "Ultraviolence" (2014), featured greater use of guitar-driven instrumentation and debuted atop the U.S. "Billboard" 200. Her fourth and fifth albums, "Honeymoon" (2015) and "Lust for Life" (2017), saw a return to the stylistic traditions of her earlier releases, while her critically acclaimed sixth album, "Norman Fucking Rockwell!" (2019), explored soft rock. Her next studio albums, "Chemtrails over the Country Club" and "Blue Banisters", followed in 2021.


title: Lana Del Rey

text: Del Rey has collaborated on soundtracks for visual media; in 2013, she wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed musical short "Tropico" and released "Young and Beautiful" for the romantic drama "The Great Gatsby". In 2014, she recorded "Once Upon a Dream" for the dark fantasy adventure film "Maleficent" and the self-titled theme song for the biopic "Big Eyes". Del Rey collaborated with Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus on "Don't Call Me Angel" for the action comedy "Charlie's Angels" (2019), which peaked at number 13 on the U.S. "Billboard" Hot 100. Additionally, Del Rey published the poetry and photography collection "Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass" (2020).


title: Lana Del Rey

text: Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born on June 21, 1985, in Manhattan, New York City, to Robert England Grant Jr., a Grey Group copywriter, and Patricia Ann "Pat" (née Hill), an account executive at Grey Group. She has a younger sister, Caroline "Chuck" Grant, and a younger brother, Charlie Grant. She was raised Roman Catholic and is of Scottish descent. Her ancestors were from Lanarkshire. When she was one year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York. In Lake Placid, her father worked for a furniture company before becoming an entrepreneurial domain investor; her mother worked as a schoolteacher. There, she attended St. Agnes School in her elementary years and began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor.