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

by Steffen Radlmaier

  The last sign of life of the highly-decorated German war veteran Leon Joel and his wife Johanna, whose fate was sealed by their religion, was recorded on September 4, 1942. They were both in the prime of life, Leon 54 years old and Johanna 49. While researching their book Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Holocaust scholars Serge and Beate Klarsfeld found the names and birth dates of Leon and Johanna on the list of deportees for Transport 28 from Drancy to Auschwitz. This train containing 1,013 Jews from various countries left Bourget/Drancy station at precisely 8.55 a.m. According to the meticulous Gestapo records, a certain Master Sergeant Brand was in command. The train arrived at the Polish concentration camp two days later. Upon arrival in Auschwitz on September 6th, 959 of the train’s passengers were immediately gassed; 16 men and 38 women were spared for work purposes. Did the Joels survive the exhausting journey through France, Germany and Poland? Were they immediately murdered in Auschwitz? Or were they drafted for work? The only thing certain is that, when the war ended, they weren’t among the 26 passengers who not only survived that train journey on September 4, 1942, but also managed to survive Auschwitz.

  There’s not a lot to remind us of Leon and Johanna Joel today: an incorrect entry on the Yad Vashem website and the book that the Nazis confiscated, now held in the Nuremberg City Library. The grave of Julius Joel (1830–1916) can be found in the Jewish graveyard in Ansbach. The following is engraved in Hebrew letters on the headstone: “Here lies a sincere and honest man, the honorable Joel, son of Meschullam, peace be with him.” His son Karl had a German inscription added, in memory of his brother and sister-in-law: “In memory of Leon Joel and Johanna Joel née Samuel, deported and killed in a concentration camp.”

  The historical drama of the St. Louis is memorialized on a commemorative plaque on Hamburg harbor. Hollywood director Stuart Rosenberg made a film about the tragedy in 1976. However, despite an international all-star cast (Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Max von Sydow, Maria Schell and Oskar Werner), Voyage of the Damned was not a huge success. Helmut Joel saw the film and was deeply moved: it re-opened old wounds and stirred memories of a painful past.

  Karl, Meta and Helmut Joel didn’t find out about the fate of their relatives until after the Second World War had ended.

  At the Berlin Wannsee Conference in January 1942, party functionaries and department officials had decided upon the ‘final solution to the Jewish problem’. Mass gassings in the Auschwitz and Birkenau extermination camps and deportations to the Theresienstadt ‘old-age’ ghetto began in June of that year.

  In 1933, 197 Jews lived in Ansbach, barely one percent of the town’s population. This number dwindled rapidly over the following years, either because the Jewish residents wished to escape Nazi persecution or because they were forcibly expelled. On November 1, 1942, the National Socialist municipal government proudly announced that Ansbach was ‘Jew-free’.

  Flora Schwab, known to most as ‘Fräulein Schwab’ because she had never married, was Sara Joel’s sister. They shared an apartment in Ansbach and moved to Nuremberg in December 1938. Flora was aboard the first of the deportation trains to leave Nuremberg for the Theresienstadt concentration camp that left on September 10, 1942. Her city registration card was marked with the following laconic note: “Deported to the Protectorate”. The train’s passenger and freight cars were packed with predominantly old and sick people; it departed from Nuremberg stockyard’s ‘feces loading station’. Of 1,000 passengers, 26 survived. Flora Schwab died on November 4, 1942, at the age of 69, circumstances unknown, in the Theresienstadt ‘model’ ghetto – a kind of Potemkin village in the north of Bohemia that was created in order to mislead the rest of the world about true Nazi motives.

  The fate of Meta Joel’s sister, Gertha Samson née Fleischmann, was equally tragic. Gertha was married to Ludwig Samson and together they had two daughters, Hilde and Lotte – as children they often played together with their cousin Helmut Joel. During the difficult economic climate of the 1930s, Ludwig Samson migrated to the USA, in the hope of finding work. However, he died of pneumonia in New York before he had the chance of bringing his family over to join him. Gertha stayed at home in Nuremberg with the children. Her last address was Bucher Strasse 42, where the Nazis had set up a so-called ‘Jew house’. The Nazi ‘Law on Tenancies with Jews’, introduced in 1939, was the basis for concentrating Jewish citizens in one place, in ‘Jew houses’, in order to simplify policing and deportation processes. From September 1941 onwards, all Jews in Germany were obliged to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothes. They had to hand in their radios, were no longer allowed to have telephones and required a permit if they wished to travel on public transport.

  On March 24, 1942, a train left the station of the Nazi rally grounds headed for the Izbica transit camp in Poland. The three Samsons were on board. They had to hand in almost all of their personal possessions before leaving. Each person was allowed one suitcase and a rucksack, and had to pay 50 Reichsmarks (plus 10 Reichsmarks for food) to the Gestapo. The police collected the Samsons from the Bucher Strasse three days before their deportation, and took them to the barracks at the Nazi rally grounds. Surveillance and controls were strict.

  According to records, the long train journey to Poland went smoothly. On the day of arrival, the Gestapo had organized a comrades’ dance and tombola evening in the Izbica camp canteen. The tombola prizes consisted of items that had been taken off of the deportees shortly before.

  Gertha was only just 50 years old, Lotte 20 and Hilde not yet 17. There are two small photos of the daughters in the Nuremberg memorial book: Lotte wearing metal-rimmed glasses and thick, long plaits; Hilde, a pretty, serious looking woman in a ladies’ suit. Their trail disappears in Izbica. The transit camp was merely a squalid, unsanitary stopover on the way to the death camp. It’s very likely the Samsons were murdered in the gas ovens of the nearby Sobibor camp. They were officially declared dead on May 8, 1945. None of the 432 Jews on board that train from Nuremberg survived.

  America at Last

  Of all years, it was in 1942 that luck finally seemed to change for Karl, Meta and Helmut Joel – the year in which the Nazi insanity had brought so much misery and, ultimately, death to their relatives. After a three year wait in Cuba, their registration number came up at last, and they were allowed to enter the USA.

  The Statue of Liberty must have seemed like a welcoming, protective angel as they approached New York. At first they lived in a hotel on Broadway, later moving to an apartment in Manhattan that was to be their home for many years.

  The city was full of emigrants, many of them Germans who had fled from the Nazi Regime, often risking their lives in the process. Around half of the 500,000 Jews who lived in Germany before 1933 were able to save themselves by emigrating; half of these again went to live in the USA. A total of 70,000 refugees lived in New York, where Aufbau, the most popular newspaper for exiles, was published. The German refugee community held on to their native language and beloved traditions. The hubbub of cosmopolitan Manhattan, with its narrow streets and seething traffic, fascinated the liberal-minded exiles; in a way it was a reminder of the exuberant atmosphere Berlin enjoyed during the Weimar Republic. Manhattan was affectionately (and ironically) nicknamed ‘The Fourth Reich’ by the immigrants.

  Author Klaus Mann, who, together with his sister Erika, had already emigrated to the USA in 1936, encapsulated the contradictory feelings of the exile experience in his autobiography Der Wendepunkt (The Turning Point): “You don’t always want to fight, even home-sickness was not always noticeable, and you don’t spend the whole day hating the tyrants; in other words, you’re not a ‘full-time emigrant’. Sometimes you forget you’re in exile. Even during your banishment there are some cheerful times, which you might not even have had at home. Money problems? You’re used to that […] somehow you make it, but of course you worry more than you did at home.”22

  And Hans Sahl, who had emigrated to
New York from Zurich, wrote: “In order to study the atmosphere, the environment in which emigrants lived, exile scholars should also go along the narrow path alongside the Hudson River between 72nd Street West and 101 Street, where we used to meet of an evening when the lights of New Jersey on the opposite shoreline were switched on. We would stand there and gaze down over the low embankment into the flotsam and jetsam of the past day flowing by in the current, in which things that, like us, had lost their value and were drifting on to somewhere where all rivers end – a brassiere, a shoe, a hat, a condom. This is where Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil, and where Hermann Broch wrote his book The Death of Virgil.”23

  To help support the family, Helmut got work as a messenger boy for 12 dollars a week. He was allowed to keep one dollar for himself, with which he’d occasionally splash out on the luxury of a bottle of Coke. He delivered mail and packages for a small firm that made hair ribbons and belonged to a German. This got Karl Joel thinking about a new business idea: these hair ribbons were all the fashion, why not get hold of the materials and start making them himself? So just as he did 15 years before in Nuremberg, he and his wife set up business in their apartment. Sure, it wasn’t going to make them rich, but it was better than nothing.

  Helmut took evening classes at New York’s City College, where he met a pretty young woman from Brooklyn. And it was music that played a significant role in this meeting. Rosalind Nyman (born 1922) came from a poor Jewish family who had emigrated from England before she was born. Like Helmut, she possessed musical and comedic talent, and both of them were involved in City College stage productions. They performed together with the Gilbert & Sullivan Players in The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, and it wasn’t only on-stage that they felt the attraction. As coincidence would have it, Rosalind’s parents, Russian-born Rebecca and Phillip Nyman, had also met under similar circumstances, during a Gilbert & Sullivan production in London’s Royal Albert Hall.

  It was also a good omen for Helmut that his new girlfriend was called Rosalind, just like the central character in the Johann Strauss operetta Die Fledermaus, and Helmut actually once conducted an amateur production of this operetta in New York. It was a happy time for him: he was in love and when on stage he could leave his everyday life behind him. Some old theater photos show Helmut in a couple of the comedy roles he played: in an English policeman’s uniform and in a silk Japanese costume.

  Still an enthusiastic musician, he played piano in a couple of different jazz bands, but – much to his regret – a professional career was out of the question. Not having a piano while in Havana, he was out of practice and besides, performing on stage at City College made him realize that he suffered very badly from stage fright as soon as an audience was watching. Anyway, Karl Joel insisted that his son should learn a serious trade. However, it turned out to be a good thing that Helmut had learned to play saxophone and clarinet at his boarding school in Switzerland. On Saturdays he’d regularly play swing music with a dance band, earning a few extra dollars at balls, weddings and funerals.

  In 1943, Helmut was drafted into the U.S. Army, even though he still didn’t have U.S. citizenship. “I could have gone to a reception camp in Texas, but I wanted to fight the Nazis” is how Helmut explained his choice. After basic training at Camp Upton on Long Island, Helmut went for further training in Virginia, where he learnt to use a pick, shovel and rifle. He was drafted to the Corps of Engineers, who were responsible for building roads and bridges. According to American law, only U.S. citizens were permitted to be deployed overseas. Therefore, the War Department decided to accelerate naturalization proceedings for refugees in the military. A total of 30,000 U.S. soldiers had been born in Germany – among them Henry Kissinger, who was later to become America’s Secretary of State. He was born in the same year as Helmut Joel, and was also drafted to the army in the same year as Helmut. What’s more, Kissinger came from a Jewish family from Nuremberg’s neighboring town of Fürth, and who had emigrated to New York in 1938.

  In 1943, the uniformed U.S. rookie Helmut, who had just turned 20, was sent back across the Atlantic to Europe, where war was raging. They sailed from Newport to Sicily, where transport was waiting to take them to the front at Monte Cassino. Helmut belonged to an infantry battalion of the 5th U.S. Army under General Mark Clark.

  Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, 1943, and the remaining government had agreed a ceasefire with the Allies. In 1943, the main body of the allied troops was forging its way north via Sicily and Calabria. The German army had managed to build the ‘Gustav Line’, which stretched through almost impassable mountain terrain just north of Naples. This prevented the Allies from making swift northward progress. In the winter of 1943–44, fighting solidified into a relentless trench war. The Battle of Monte Cassino has gone down in history as the Second World War’s biggest battle of nations: The graves of more than 107,000 soldiers now cover the former battlefields, a grim reminder of the horrific outcome.

  The Allies began an unsuccessful frontal attack in January 1944. In February, British and American bombers completely destroyed the Benedictine Abbey on Monte Cassino. Helmut Joel looked death in the eye more than once during this time, and suffered many traumatic moments. It often went through his head that his old school pal Rudi Weber might well be fighting on the other side. “I was always careful to shoot over the tops of the German soldiers’ heads – just in case it was Rudi.”

  It wasn’t until the German commander-in-chief Albert Kesseling gave the order for a retreat to the north that the Allies were able to break through and, eventually, take Rome on July 4th.

  Among the soldiers who first entered the ‘Eternal City’ was Klaus Mann, U.S. citizen since 1943, and serving in the Psychological Warfare Branch of the 5th Army. On June 22, 1944, he wrote the following in a letter to his sister Erika, who was in London working as a war correspondent for the USA. “So now I’m one of the first to enter Rome – and it wasn’t all that dangerous. But lovely! The city – by the way, almost undamaged – was looking glorious. What a reception! The people were going crazy. Rejoicing, flowers, music, cheering, tears of emotion, hugging, wherever we went! That’s not how you pay homage to victors, but to liberators. Eviva i liberatori!! Wherever we went, the same shouts … of course, in between you’d hear the question: ‘What took so long? You kept us waiting so long.’”24

  Helmut Joel’s unit was soon after transported to the South of France where, in August, they took part in Operation Dragoon near Saint Raphaël. After that, Helmut’s division headed north via Grenoble in the direction of Germany. The war came to an end for Helmut in May of 1945 on Lake Königsee near Berchtesgarden in Bavaria, where he requisitioned a luxury hotel for the army. Not long after, he had to be treated for hepatitis in the military hospital.

  Returning to Germany meant mixed emotions for Helmut: it was the country of his childhood memories, but also the country that had treated his family so inhumanely and banished them from their home. “I didn’t hate them”, said Helmut, “I knew from my own experience, that not all Germans were Nazis.” But he had lost his homeland forever.

  Nothing but dust and rubble remained of Hitler’s megalomaniacal plans: Germany lay in ruins and the ailing population turned for the most part to the blame game or self-pity. Suddenly, nobody had ever been a Nazi.

  This strange phenomena was described in an ironic article in Collier’s magazine by the famous journalist Martha Gellhorn, third wife of Ernest Hemingway: “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometers away was a real hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially there were a lot of communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighborhood. Two maybe, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s children
hid Jews.) We have nothing against the Jews, we always got on well with them. We have waited for the Americans for a long time. You came and liberated us. You came to befriend us. The Nazis are Schweinehunde. The Wehrmacht wants to give up, but they do not know how. No, I have no relatives in the Army. Nor I. No, I was never in the Army. I worked on the land. I worked in a factory. That boy wasn‘t in the Army either; he was sick. We have had enough of this government. Ah, how we have suffered. The bombs. We lived in the cellars for weeks. We refused to be driven across the Rhine when the S.S. came to evacuate us. Why should we go? We welcome the Americans. We do not fear them; we have no reason to fear. We’ve done nothing wrong; we are not Nazis.

  It should, we feel, be set to music. Then the Germans could sing that refrain and that would make it even better. They all talk like this. One asks oneself how the detested Nazi government, to which no one paid allegiance, managed to carry on this war for five and a half years.”25

  On the other hand, Joel was unable to get the horrific images from his visit to the Dachau concentration camp out of his head: emaciated human beings in prison uniforms who could hardly stand on their spindly legs.

  And like many German cities, Helmut’s home town was now just one big heap of rubble. Author Alfred Kerr wrote in the Neue Zeitung newspaper at the end of the war: “Nuremberg..! It was once a city and is now a pile of debris. It was once homely, middle-class. Now it is a horror. A horror without tragedy; just something unpleasant. A cantankerousness. An ugliness. A desolation. A pile of debris!”