Eugenie – an informative AI compiled summary from a range of supplied references

Anna Eugenie (“Eugenia”) Philippi grew up an orphan amid the farms and orchards of the Taunus highlands in the tiny Taunus village of Pfaffenwiesbach, where her aunt and uncle, the Fischers, took her in after her parents died. The village’s Catholic rhythm shaped her early life, yet the warm memories she later shared with the Jewish Rothschild children—trips to church bells, berry-picking and graveyard rambles—hint at the easy crossing of confessional lines that would define her adult loyalties.

Eugenie entered domestic service through her cousin Eva Amendt. Eva had been a maid to Jacob Strauss (Bella Rothschild’s father); when Eva married, she recommended her younger cousin “Eugenie Anna Philippi,” who then stayed with the Strauss-Rothschild household for more than twenty years. For Richard and Bella Rothschild in Bad Homburg she was everything—cook, housekeeper, nurse and, above all, the steady mother-figure to Edith, Fritz and Ellen. Long after the children were grown, Ellen recalled that “Eugenie … was the one stable factor in our home” and “a constant factor in our lives”. At night the devout Catholic would still sit on the edge of Fritz’s bed to say the Hebrew bedtime “Shema” with him, a small gesture that captured her quiet fusion of faiths.

The Nazi years tested that devotion. Bad Homburg neighbours spat “Judenhure” at her; new racial-service decrees threatened to dismiss any “Aryan” under forty from Jewish households. Eugenie had just crossed the age line—first 40, then 45—so the family could keep her, a reprieve Ellen greeted with “jubilation”. Through boycotts, the forced sale of the Rothschild shoe shop and the family’s flight to Frankfurt, Eugenie stayed, sharing the attic room with ten-year-old Ellen while drunken Brownshirts shouted “Kill the Rothschilds!” in the street below.

Bella never forgot that loyalty. Foreseeing calamity, she went to a Frankfurt notary in January 1941 and executed a formal deed of gift bequeathing every stick of household furniture to Eugenie “for her more than twenty years of faithful service.” Nine months later, on 19 October 1941, Gestapo agents burst into the flat to deport Bella and her sister Flora in the first Frankfurt transport to the Łódź (Litzmannstadt) ghetto. As she was marched away, Bella pressed a copy of the deed into the officer’s hand—a last, improvised will, knowing she might never return. After the sisters were gone, Eugenie tried to claim the bequest, but the Gestapo-appointed liquidator brushed her aside—“A Jew has nothing to give away”—and sold most of the furniture out of hand.

Eugenie herself survived the war in Germany. On 19 March 1948 she filed a detailed witness statement with the U.S. Military Government, signing “Eugenie Philippi” and recounting both the deed and the sisters’ deportation—her last firmly dated appearance in the archives.

In the post-war years she returned to the familiar streets of Bad Homburg. Family recollection places her sharing a home with Käthe König and Anni Dinges—daughters of her cousin Eva Amendt—where “Tante Eugenie” remained the quiet centre of a new, reconstructed household. She was certainly alive in 1971; the exact date of her death is still unknown.

What is clear is the arc of her life: an orphan who became the beloved guardian of another family; a Catholic village girl who taught Jewish lullabies; a servant who outlived her employers and, by a stroke of courage and affection, became their chosen heir. In a story filled with separations and deportations, Eugenie Philippi stands out as the thread of everyday fidelity that never broke.