Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 16, 1991 TAG: 9104160204
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: PAUL RECER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
He's still practicing medicine, still charging some of his original U.S. patients $5 for an office visit.
But he's far from penniless.
Tauber, the only practicing physician on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest people in the United States, has built a real estate fortune estimated at $500 million.
"Medicine is still my life," said Tauber, sitting in the modest office in the Alexandria hospital he built. "I spend 5 percent of my time on real estate and 95 percent on medicine. That's the most important to me."
Tauber owns more than 7 million square feet of office space. He has buildings all over the Washington area, four properties in New York City, one in Nashville and one in Houston.
He's the federal government's biggest landlord, leasing more than 4 million square feet to U.S. agencies.
The 76-year-old physician keeps office hours and regularly performs surgery, but makes no pretense of making a living in medicine.
"I don't make enough in medicine to pay the overhead," he says with a smile. "That's the way I like it."
Tauber is a man of small stature, with glasses and steel-gray hair. His office at Jefferson Memorial Hospital is decorated with certificates, diplomas and signed photos from such people as famed Houston heart surgeon Denton Cooley, a close friend.
A phone on his neat desk rings frequently.
He discusses medicine with a fellow doctor and moments later gives orders that affect a multimillion-dollar office lease.
When asked about his personal history, the answers to the questions he chooses to answer are precise.
"My memory is very good," Tauber said. "I remember everything."
Then he sighs.
"Sometimes I remember too much. There are a lot of bad, bad memories."
Most of those are from his life as a Jew during the German occupation of his native Hungary.
Tauber was born in Budapest in 1915, just months after his father was killed in World War I. He was an excellent student and a talented gymnast, winning Hungary's "best sport student" award at 14.
He earned a medical degree from the University of Budapest in 1938 and was a resident in general surgery when the Nazis occupied the country. He began working at what had been called the Jewish Hospital.
"It [the name] was changed to the International Red Cross Hospital," Tauber recalls. "When the Germans on the street saw the name, they left it alone. I worked there until liberation."
In the fall of 1944, when Nazis started a special operation to liquidate Hungarian Jews, Tauber helped organize a makeshift hospital in his former high school and often performed surgery there day and night, treating the war-wounded from the Jewish ghetto.
Asked for details of that period, the doctor shakes his head and changes the subject.
In 1946, as the Soviets tightened their control over Hungary, Tauber secured a fellowship to a neurosurgical clinic at the University of Stockholm.
His wife, a German Jew, was pregnant with their son.
Because the United States allowed virtually unlimited immigration by German Jews, Tauber said the couple decided she should go to America to have the child.
"We wanted him to be born a native American," Tauber said.
Alfred Tauber was born in 1947. Later that year, Tauber joined his family in Washington, D.C.
Alfred Tauber is a professor of medicine at Boston University. A daughter, Ingrid Tauber, is a psychologist in San Francisco. Tauber and his first wife divorced in 1964, and he remarried in 1973.
After passing a series of difficult tests to become certified as a surgeon in the United States, Tauber found work in a Washington hospital and later decided to open his own practice. It was the first step to a real estate empire.
"I was looking for an office," he recalls. "That was when I got acquainted with the U.S. system of real estate finance."
In Europe, Tauber said, the tradition was that real estate was sold for cash, but he found that U.S. banks were willing to make mortgages. He scraped together $1,500 and made a down payment on his first property, a four-unit apartment house in Washington.
Since then, Tauber has bought and sold hundreds of properties. But his best tenant is the federal government, with the Postal Service and Food and Drug Administration among the agencies renting space in Tauber's buildings.
But real estate remains a part-time activity.
Tauber still performs surgery regularly and still accepts new patients, though he does it for the love of medicine not the money.
"I charge $20 an office visit for a new patient," Tauber said. "That's enough."
by CNB