Billy and the Joels--The American rock star and his German family story

by Steffen Radlmaier

  The class of Helmut Joel and Rudi Weber at Uhlandschule, Nuremberg.

  Helmut Joel (first row, second from left) and his classmates at elementary school in Nuremberg · © Private collection Radlmaier

  “Helmut was a very good student and a funny guy with quick powers of comprehension,” remembered Rudi Weber, who has now passed away. “He was among the best in all subjects, especially interested in math and music.” Rudi Weber’s father had lost a fortune as a real estate investor during the global economic crisis. He had married a second time and was living with his large family under modest circumstances. The Webers were to the left politically, and the brazen National Socialists looked upon them with deep mistrust.

  On their way to school, the two buddies often passed display cases containing newspaper articles. “The Jews are our misfortune,” the boys read slowly, laughing about the caricatures of ugly, hook-nosed men. Even most adults did not at first take the propaganda displayed in those cases seriously, which the Nuremberg publisher of the Stürmer [The Attacker] newspaper, Julius Streicher, used to spread his hateful ideas.

  Ever since 1923, this bald-headed ‘Franconian Führer’ had been publishing the anti-Semitic weekly paper, which was now gaining an increasing number of subscribers and being distributed throughout the whole of Germany. The Joels would never have dreamed that they themselves one day would be part of the headlines of such a publication, for the times were extremely prosperous for the young Jewish entrepreneur and self-made man.

  The business flourished, even during the global economic crisis at the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties, the effects of which could be felt throughout Germany. The economic crisis abetted the polarization of society, just as did political radicalization. Unemployment became rampant, with over six million Germans out of work in February 1933 – and soon the struggling Weimar Republic would hit crisis point.

  Thanks to their thriving business, the Joels could soon afford to rent a villa in the southern part of Nuremberg. Helmut had to change schools, but Rudi Weber still visited his friend regularly. Meta Joel was happy that her reserved son had found a true friend. “She was a warmhearted, generous woman who held the family together,” said Rudi Weber. Her husband worked from early until late; he was often out of the house and had very little time for family life.

  As was common in bourgeois circles at that time, the Joels had a piano. In the evenings, Karl, who was passionate about the music of Richard Wagner, would relax at the piano. He made sure that his son took early music lessons from a Frau Hoffmann. In addition, Karl’s sister, the cheerful Aunt Litti, was a piano teacher and was able to teach the young Helmut a few things. The Joels cultivated their love of classical music. Occasionally the family would go to the Nuremberg Opera House to see operas and operettas. Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus [The Bat] would play a particularly important role in the family history. A waltz-like melody in this operetta, thematizing dissimulation, life malaise, and joie de vivre just as it does the magic of music, appears as a leitmotif again and again. It climaxes with a refrain, the maxim “He is happy who forgets what can’t be changed.” This popular song, Alfred’s drinking song, can be traced to an aphorism by Seneca (“It is glorious to forget injustice.”).

  The Joel family in Nuremberg, 1927 · © Private collection Audrey und Helmut Joel

  Within a few years Karl Joel had gained prestige and prosperity in Nuremberg. He had a car with a chauffeur at his disposal, and at home at Sigenastrasse 4 were a telephone and a gramophone, at that time not so usual. Yet despite the increasing affluence, the Joels remained quite down to earth, possessing an unassuming Franconian manner as a natural virtue.

  On weekends they traveled to the country with the car as often as they could, preferably to the hills of Franconia’s ‘Little Switzerland’ region, gladly taking friends and relatives with them.

  Leon Joel and his brother Karl in the Bavarian mountains · © Private collection Audrey und Helmut Joel

  “We were a very normal Nuremberg family,” remembered Helmut Joel, who spoke four languages with the Franconian accent he was never able to lose. “It only occurred to me with time that we as Jews were something different.” The Joels were not especially religious. They readily ate the Franconian cuisine, such as roast pork with dumplings or bratwurst with sauerkraut. Like everyone else they celebrated the Christmas season with a Christmas tree.

  Sometimes on Sundays Uncle Leon, Karl’s brother, who had a lingerie store in Ansbach, came to visit. His shop was on the ground floor of a two-storey house, the family living on the upper level. Leon had fought in the First World War and was proud of his Iron Cross. Sometimes he told of the horrendous fighting at the front, of the gangrene and clouds of gas. Like his brother Karl, who had not been inducted into the military because of a suspected case of Graves’ disease, he felt himself to be a German first and a Jew second. He was certain that as a staunch patriot and decorated war veteran he had nothing to fear from a Nazi regime. “Nothing can happen to us,” he always said when talk was about Hitler and his fanatic followers.

  Advertisement for Leon Joel’s shop in the Fränkische Zeitung, March 1933

  Leon Joel’s business at Nürnberger Strasse 22, near the castle, was a favorite of the Ansbach people because of the low prices. In his newspaper adverts he enticed customers with “unbelievably low exceptional prices”: Aprons for 2.25 marks, blue suit fabric for 4.20 per meter, men’s socks for 75 pfennigs, flannel sports shirts for 2 marks.

  The problems started with Hitler’s seizure of power early in 1933. A majority of the population enthusiastically accepted the seemingly inexorable rise of the ardent anti-Semite and nationalist to omnipotent dictator. It was the beginning of the end of a once admired nation of culture, a break with civilization that would transform Germany into an empire of evil. The discrimination of the Jews and their expulsion from economic life became a professed political goal. The first step was the boycotting of Jewish businesses. With an unparalleled propaganda campaign, the National Socialists turned public opinion against Jewish citizens. On March 31, 1933, the Völkische Beobachter newspaper placed on the front page an appeal by the fanatical anti-Semite Julius Streicher, in which Jews were criticized as being war profiteers, convicts, deserters, and Marxist traitors. The tirade climaxed with the words: “Pan-Jewry shall be battled until victory is ours! National Socialists! Smite the world’s enemy! And even if the world be filled with devils, we must succeed!”

  On April 1 the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany began with a boycott of Jewish businesses. The organizer of this audacious action was Julius Streicher. In Nuremberg that Saturday, flyers fell from the sky. “All Jews! Your power is at an end! The time has come! Productive Germans! Today at 10 o’clock begins the German boycott against the abhorrent propaganda of international Jewry…no German will from now on buy from Jews!” In many cities the SA Brownshirts intimidated customers and blocked entrances. Department stores, owned mostly by Jews, were especially affected. The boycott was at first a one-off action; because of the negative response outside the country, it was broken off after three days. Yet the Nazi slogan “Don’t buy from Jews!” was soon to become a rallying cry. As a result, along with the harassments, the loss of business made the lives of many merchants, including Leon Joel, difficult. Der Stürmer listed the Jewish businesses in Ansbach, among which was the lingerie store of Leon Joel, and denounced customers as ‘traitors to the fatherland.’

  In Ansbach, where on Rosenbadstrasse one of the most significant Baroque synagogues in southern Germany was located, the anti-Semitic speeches of the Nazis found eager listeners very early on. In the fall of 1922, in the Hofgarten, Julius Streicher first held a diatribe against the Jews. As early as 1923, red labels with the words “The Jews are our misfortune!” were being pasted on Jewish shops. In 1927 the Jewish cemetery was vandalized for the first time; it happened again in 1932. The National Socialist party a
lways had excellent voting returns in the small governmental and military city, far above average compared with the rest of the country. Even before Hitler’s rise to power, Ansbach was a city filled with hate for Jews.

  The Jewish professor Victor Klemperer clairvoyantly noted in his journal on April 20, 1933: “Is it the suggestion of the prodigious propaganda – film, radio, newspapers, banners, new holidays (today the national holiday, Adolf the Führer’s birthday)? Or is it the trembling slavish anxiety all around? I now almost believe that I will not live to see the end of this tyranny. And I have nearly grown used to the condition of losing rights. I am no German or Aryan, rather a Jew, and I must be grateful that I am left alive. They understand how to be resourceful with promotions. We saw (and heard) the day before yesterday in a film how Hitler made his great appeal: The mass of Brownshirts in front of him, the half dozen microphones that will transfer his words to the 600,000 SA people throughout the whole Third Reich – we can see his omnipotence and we have to cower. And always the Horst Wessel song. And everyone complies.”6

  The political climate in Nuremberg, the City of the National Party Congress, whose medieval scenery with the castle and timbered houses elated Hitler, transformed rapidly.

  During the night of May 10, 1933, the National Socialists held a book burning in Nuremberg and many other cities in Germany. This took place on the historical main market, where Frau Joel and her son liked to buy fruit and vegetables, and which was suddenly renamed Adolf Hitler Square. Books of disapproved authors, among them many of Jewish ancestry, were burned in large bonfires – the Manns (Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich), Kurt Tucholsky, Bert Brecht, Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, and many more. “When the Jew writes in German, he lies” is what the Nazis had been disseminating for weeks. A large crowd attended this spectacle at the main market without any sign of protest.

  In that year Helmut Joel entered the local high school, today Willstätter High School. There he met Arno Hamburger (1923–2013), a student of his age, also the only child of a Jewish family. In the class there were only four Jews, who would soon serve as whipping boys. Jewish children were now made to sit apart from their Aryan classmates. In the lessons, a teacher would speak of blood and soil, of the ‘Master Race’ and inferior races – but the children did not truly understand much of that. Yet the atmosphere had changed. For example, the Nazi salute was introduced in all Nuremberg schools in the autumn of 1933. At the beginning and end of each session the students had to stand and salute their teacher by raising the right arm.

  “They cut us off and bullied us,” told Arno Hamburger, who in later years became chairman of the Jewish Community in Nuremberg. “We were suddenly stigmatized, and some of our classmates would no longer play with us. I remember a sports teacher, an Oberscharführer [Technical Sergeant] of the SS, who always wanted to prove that Jews were flabby. He made me do so many chin-ups on the bar that I fell to the ground in exhaustion. If you kept a low profile you were mostly left in peace, but if you reacted to any provocation, there was big trouble. When I beat up a classmate who had called me a ‘pig-Jew’, I was suspended from school.” Hamburger’s father had already lost his slaughterhouse business as early as April 1933. A regulation forbade Jews from doing business in municipal buildings, and so Hamburger was simply no longer allowed to enter his slaughterhouse. With his business property confiscated, he was forced to make ends meet with odd jobs.

  Karl Joel´s garment factory in Nuremberg · © Private collection Radlmaier

  Arno Hamburger enjoyed visiting the affluent Joels. The boys played with Helmut’s electric train or his technical construction set, toys that most children could only dream of. Helmut’s mother, who was always a little concerned that her son was not eating enough, served marble cake and cocoa. When the weather was good, the friends would visit the nearby zoo and the Luitpoldhain park. The elephants and the talking parrots in particular were hits with the boys.

  One day a gang of boys lurked in ambush in the overgrown garden next door and threatened to beat the friends. “You’re Jews. We can see that!” They meant Rudi in particular, who in fact was not Jewish. “We can’t!” responded Helmut before the two of them left in haste. Karl Joel had once said in fun: “You just need to put a hat on that Rudi and then he could come with us to the synagogue.” Fortunately nothing ever happened, but the feelings of constant threat and the constraint of never wanting to draw attention to oneself were always there. On the way to and from school, Helmut Joel used to pass by the grounds of the Jew-hater and ‘Franconian Führer’ Julius Streicher on Holzgartenstrasse. “That’s where Streicher lives!” his friends would say with a pleasurable horror, as if they were talking about Count Dracula in person. A new regulation in Nuremberg ruined that fine summer for the boys: In 1933 Jews in the city were forbidden from using public swimming facilities.

  More than 70 years later, Arno Hamburger remembered a couple of traumatic experiences: “I will never forget how at the end of 1933 male Jews in Nuremberg were rounded up by SS men on the square of the ASV South, on the Old Canal. There the men were forced to do things, which included ripping up the grass with their teeth. My mother and I saw this harassment with our own eyes as we had followed the group to see what would happen to our people. In the middle of April, my Uncle Siegfried was taken in my grandparents’ apartment by an SA gang. They forced him to undress and lie on a table. The Brownshirts beat him with chair legs until he was unconscious and then threw him out into the street. My father and I visited Uncle Siegfried in the hospital. His face had black marks all over it and was so swollen that I couldn’t recognize him.”

  The adults could also sense the growing danger in the City of the National Party Congress, but they were hoping that the brown spook would soon be over. The linen business had in the meantime found space in an industrial building on Singerstrasse, with a store outlet on Landgrabenstrasse and its own sewing production on Muggenhofer Strasse. In the modern factory space, 200 sewing machines and assembly lines created a smooth production process. This clothing factory complemented the linen-goods mail order division, making for an efficient textile production and therefore lower retail prices for the finished goods.

  Karl Joel’s stockroom in Nuremberg · © Private collection Radlmaier

  Karl Joel was not only a clever businessman but also a socially engaged boss who paid his workers well and was beloved as a result. Even sixty years later, a group of former Joel employees met regularly in Nuremberg. They raved about their former boss. “He was generous. There were some who could have taken a leaf out of his book,” told one-time employee Katja Betzold as an elderly woman. “He was an elegant fellow and his wife was a warm-hearted, gentle person.” The boss regularly invited the personnel out on company outings and sometimes played on the company’s soccer team.

  This Jewish success story was a festering thorn in the flesh of one person in particular: The Franconian Nazi district administrator and Hitler confidante Julius Streicher knew precisely how to stoke social jealousy and create scandal by means of contrived stories. At first Karl Joel tried to defend himself legally against this slander. In vain. In 1934, many articles on the “Nuremberg Linen-Jew Joel” were published in Der Stürmer. One typical example: “The owner is the full-blooded Jew Joel. It seems he has ordered his representatives to lie to the world that the Karl Joel Company is a German business. And credulous Germans fall for this. Thus the Jew Joel does a good business. Every week he sends thousands of packages throughout all of Germany, among them many for Party members, SA people, administrators, etc. The Jew Joel laughs about this, scoffing and jeering about the fact that he is making a killing from the money of national-socialistic Germans. He uses his profits in a Jewish way, putting carousing with non-Jewish women and girls…we hope and wish that the Jew Joel will soon lose any opportunity to laugh and scoff about the ‘goyim’. If there be any representative portraying the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company as a German or Aryan business, we are to be
informed.”

  Article from the “Stürmer”, March 1934

  Karl Joel reacted with dark humor to the defamations. “Der Stürmer has written about me. I’m famous at last!” he told the family. But if he had not already done so, he recognized then that it was time to leave Nuremberg. His family and his business were in great danger. But he was still convinced that National Socialism was a temporary phenomenon. In the cosmopolitan city of Berlin, so he thought, he would be safe from the personal attacks by Streicher. With his legal advisor Dr. Loeb, he traveled to the capital city early in 1934 to evaluate the situation. He received information about the possibility of moving his company to Berlin from the textile manufacturer Fritz Tillmann, head of the economic advisory board and Nazi party member.

  The political climate there was more moderate, with the NSDAP having not yet received a majority of the votes in an election. On Oranienburgstrasse a lawyer collective committed to the rights of Jews was located. It had good connections to the ministries and even had direct contact to Hermann Göring, who, however, was playing a diabolical game by portraying himself as supporting the existence of Jewish businesses. Such businesses were in fact bogged down by regulations, one stating that an Aryan partner had to be part of the management – but at least they were allowed to continue on under their Jewish owners. These deceptive maneuvers lulled even the Jewish jurists into a feeling of security, who were of the opinion that “after resolving formal difficulties, cooperation with Hitler is quite possible.”