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

by Steffen Radlmaier

  Officially – at least until ‘Crystal Night’ in 1938 – Aryanization took place on a voluntary basis; however, in the face of the economic and fiscal discrimination of Jewish businesses, this was pure cynicism. Although there were a few attempts to bring about takeovers at good conditions, a degeneration of morals was conspicuously on the increase. Whereas older companies more often showed reservations where Nazi racial policies were concerned, younger businessmen were less inclined to hold back when it came to taking advantage of the plight of Jewish business partners.

  After some tough negotiations, Josef Neckermann and Karl Amson Joel signed the main contract on July 11, 1938 in Tannenbergallee. Neckermann wanted to pay just half of the four million Reichsmarks that the linen goods company was considered worth. This was the first and only time these two very disparate negotiating partners would ever meet personally. There wasn’t much room for maneuver: as far as negotiations were concerned, the experienced businessman was at the mercy of a 26-year-old. Joel made use of the occasion to introduce his most important employees to Neckermann, who took them all on.

  One of the workers Neckermann continued to employ was young Rudi Weber, who had started a commercial apprenticeship at Karl Joel’s company. Weber remembered: “Rumor had it that – immediately after signing the contract – Karl Joel had himself driven to the rail station, because he was worried about the Gestapo.” From there he took a train to Switzerland. Not even his mother knew about his departure.

  The linen goods business opened under Neckermann’s name on September 1st: “I was very impressed by such an imposing enterprise” he wrote.”18 Thanks to his good connections to the Party, complicated authorization procedures at state offices were made easy for Neckermann. The original contract had to be changed, but, of course, not to Joel’s advantage. Stock and equipment initially valued at 200,000 Reichsmarks were now deemed to be worth just 5,300.

  Scruples were not part of Neckermann’s nature, and he later justified his actions with this callous statement: “He who doesn’t go with the times, goes with time.”19

  The department-store mogul and ‘captain’ of the ‘economic miracle’ wrote in his memoirs: “Of the agreed 2.3 million purchase price, I subtracted Joel’s liabilities and accounts payable; then, as agreed, I retained a further 500,000 Reichsmarks as a safeguard against any other existing demands on the Joel company, and I correctly recorded this in all balance sheets up until 1945. I paid the remaining 1.14 million Reichsmarks into a trust account at the bank of Hardy & Co.”20

  Joel, who thought the sale of his company would mean financial security for him and his family, never saw a single penny of this money. “I learned later”, wrote Neckermann, “that on September 6th, Tillmann had to tell the Joels in Switzerland that all their assets had been confiscated.”21

  In the meanwhile, the Neckermann family made themselves comfortable in the villa in Tannenbergalle, even keeping some of the furnishings. They paid the Joels for the fittings of a children’s room, but not for some valuable carpets and the Franz von Lenbach oil painting.

  Josef Neckermann, the new owner, reprinted Joel´s envelopes · © Heimat und Exil. Stiftung Haus der Geschichte, Bonn

  Josef Neckermann in front of Joel´s villa · © Private collection Radlmaier

  The takeover had made Neckermann a big noise in the branch. Spurred on by his limitless ambition and energy, he lost no time, as he confirmed in his memoirs: “On September 1st I immediately sent out a circular to customers, telling them that I had taken over Karl Joel’s linen goods company and would now be running it as the “Josef Neckermann Clothing Production and Textile Mail-Order Company”. This name was intended to suggest that here people would be buying from the manufacturer, extremely cheaply. My motto became ‘good products at cheap prices’ and I gave a guarantee that I would take back and refund fully any product that didn’t stand up to that promise, including postage. I could hardly keep up with my own ideas, but cracked on relentlessly. I expanded the range to include ready-made clothing, charmeuse products (some of which we produced ourselves), carpets, furniture and curtains. I soon had more than one million addresses on my customer list. Being a ‘purely Aryan company’, all ‘national comrades, officials and party members could, without hesitation, take advantage of my extensive, advantageous offers’ and I advertised like crazy so as to expand my trading area, particularly in the south of Germany, in order to snatch market shares off of my competitors. I was on my way to the top.”17

  Escape and Exile in Cuba

  The Joel family met up again in the summer of 1938 in Zurich. The parents had managed to cross the Swiss border using false passports. Carrying just a couple of suitcases, they must have looked like vacationers; but their nerves were very much on edge. It was a matter of life and death. Passport control on the train seemed to take forever. The immigration officers checked their papers with typical Swiss efficiency.

  They weren’t particularly happy about these refugees from Germany. Jews and Gypsies were considered ‘alien and unassimilable elements’. The Swiss feared ‘foreign infiltration and Judaization’ of the country due to the increasing number of refugees from Germany and its occupied territories. On August 19, 1938, the Federal Council decided to close its borders completely. As of October 1938, the Swiss authorities also ruled that German and Austrian Jews should have a ‘J’ in a red circle stamped into their passports, so that they could be more easily recognized (and turned away) – a stamp of ostracism.

  Helmut’s time at the boarding school in St. Gallen was at an end, and he looked forward to his vacations and parents, whom he hadn’t seen for so long. He recalled exactly the surprise phone call he got from his excited mother: “Helmut, we’re in Switzerland and we can’t go back. Not ever! Do you know what that means?”

  The family found modest accommodation in the Mugalto apartment building near Zurich’s uptown Bahnhofstrasse. It was summer, a cosmopolitan crowd strolled along the boulevard and the lakeside – at first glance there was no obvious difference between the Joels and the wealthy tourists.

  However, the Joels were still at the beginning of a journey into the unknown. “Of course we were happy to have left Nazi Germany behind us. But at what a price! Family and friends, the business and the house, the old homeland – all gone at a single stroke. There was no going back”, remembered Helmut Joel. But although his parents were plagued by worries and fear, the dramatic circumstances were a source of diversion and adventure for their teenage son.

  The city was full of emigrants from Germany, many of them actors, writers and artists. Literature Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann was one of the most famous, who later migrated to the USA with his family. The Jewish critic and publisher Hans Sahl lived in exile on Lake Zurich; his choral work “Jemand” was premiered in Zurich in 1938 and featured 800 Swiss workers in the chorus. In his memoirs Das Exil im Exil [Exile in Exile], Sahl wrote: “In autumn of that year a series of performances took place in a specially built, 4,000 capacity tent at Bellevue. The performances were relayed throughout the whole city by loudspeakers. Being a foreigner in exile, a stranger, a refugee without a residence permit, I had the unusual satisfaction of hearing my own words echo through the narrow alleyways of Zurich: ‘Save the people, save the people, save the world from the barbarism.’” To the Joels it must have sounded like a desperate swansong.

  Without doubt, the decision to leave Germany was the right one: the shocking news of ‘Crystal Night’ reached the emigrants in Zurich. The systematic persecution of Jews in Germany reached a new climax with the Pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. Around 100 people were murdered, 101 synagogues burned, and numerous apartments and businesses vandalized. Thousands were arrested and subsequently incarcerated in concentration camps. The Jews were now banned from employment, faced racial laws and were cut off from the economy. The forced Aryanization of businesses continued, special taxes on assets for foreigners were introduced. On top of al
l this, freedom of movement for Jews was reduced even further – cinemas, parks, certain hotels and sleeping coaches on the Reich’s trains were forbidden to Jews.

  Karl Joel didn’t want to simply give up on his life’s work and tried to negotiate with Berlin from the safety of Switzerland. Neckermann sent him this cynical reply: “Just come to Berlin, then you’ll get all that’s due to you!”

  During the next few months, Joel tried to get a visa for the USA and for Cuba. This proved to be more difficult than he imagined: the USA, dream destination for numberless immigrants, had imposed a quota on residence permits. This quota varied from country to country. The heavy demand coming out of Germany meant the waiting list was very long. In 1938 there were ten applications for each quota visa. Every applicant received a register number; the wait for permission to enter the country could take years. The refugees didn’t have that kind of time: “Hitler was quicker than the consulates, upon whose moods we were dependent for the life-saving visas” were the embittered words Jewish exile and writer Alfred Polgar used to describe the situation.

  The strict U.S. immigration policy meant that the authorities let fewer refugees from Nazi Germany enter the country than they really could have allowed in. U.S. laws permitted 27,370 Germans to enter per year, regardless of their religion, beliefs or political convictions. However, it was not until 1939 that this quota was fully exhausted. This was largely due to political power-calculus. Both President Hoover and his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, were very much aware that, at the time, a large portion of the American population was prone to anti-Semitism and xenophobia. The economic crisis and high unemployment also meant people were not exactly happy to welcome the exile-seeking hordes from Europe. From 1933 onwards, the number of applications for U.S. visas had risen dramatically. The State Department successfully prevented the U.S. immigration policy from being changed, arguing that it wasn’t in America’s best interests to admit into the country such a large number of Jewish refugees, most of whom were completely destitute.

  Still, in July of 1938 Roosevelt did at least instigate an international conference, held in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to discuss the refugee problem. However, the invitations sent out to the 32 participating nations informed them beforehand that they wouldn’t be required to change their immigration policies. The results of the conference were correspondingly disappointing: nothing more than expressions of sympathy and regretful declarations that it would be impossible to take in even more refugees. This stance – which was taken by almost every country – was virtually a death sentence for many Jews. It was not just in Switzerland that ‘the boat is full.’

  The Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (Nationalistic Observer) gloated on the situation, writing: “Nobody wants the rabble. Practically none of the government officials are prepared to open the gates to their country for a bunch that have caused Germany’s ruin.”

  In the spring of 1938, shortly after German troops had marched into Austria, Karl Joel had taken the wise precaution of booking a Caribbean cruise that would be departing from Southampton in England (and not from a German port). The plan was to leave the ship when it called at Cuba, and to stay there until an entry permit for the USA. could be obtained. Getting the necessary documents proved to be a nerve-racking, bureaucratic obstacle race: a visa for Cuba and (to be on the safe side) for Panama, as well as the required register numbers for the U.S. Health and employability certificates were also needed, and $500 would have to be paid to enter the country.

  Meanwhile, the Jew-baiting in Germany continued to get worse. On January 3, 1939, an article was published in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) under the title “Jewels-Joel resurfaces”: “Joel, Karl, linen goods manufacturer, no. 65, Utrechter Strasse 25-17, tel. no. 46 42 31, long distance no. 46 76 62. You can find this entry in the Imperial Capital’s telephone directory under the letter ‘J’. But the Jew Karl Joel is no longer to be found in Berlin. On August 18, 1938, he chose to shake the dust of hospitable Germany out of his shiny shoes. For more than three months now he’s been busy attaching himself like a leech to the lifeblood of the Swiss people, just the way he did to us here in Germany. And he took a little ‘memento’ of his time here in hospitable Germany with him: jewels to the value of roughly 400,000 Reichsmarks.” Readers were then made curious about the sequel to this trashy article: “Coming up: Jewels worth 204,000 Reichsmarks* Orgies in Tannenbergallee * The secret safe in the wall.”

  But what the Nazi press didn’t know was that the Joels had left Switzerland by train in January 1939, traveling through France before crossing by ferry to England, which was still possible at the time. In England they boarded a white luxury liner named “Arandora Star”. Just one year later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the ship was in the headlines: on June 2, 1940, on the way from Liverpool to Newfoundland, the ship was sunk by a German submarine. Most of the 1,800 passengers were German and Italian prisoners of war.

  However, after a two-week journey, the Joels did reach Havana in the spring of 1939 – and they were awestruck. The turquoise ocean, the unbelievably blue sky, the white backdrop of the city’s buildings, the dome of the National Capitol, the tropical temperatures – it must have seemed like a dream. Compared to Berlin, it was like arriving in Paradise. They drank in the heady aromas of fish and seafood, black beans, freshly roasted coffee, cigars and flowers. And the unusual noises: the sirens of the ocean liners, the crashing of the surf, the Spanish calling of the street vendors, the rattle of horse carriages, the giggling of exotic beauties – all accompanied by the irresistible rhythms of Cuban music. Salsa, rumba, cha-cha-cha. The Joels had almost forgotten just how carefree and happy life could be.

  At that time Havana was an international playground, particularly for Americans, who enjoyed the city’s bars, casinos, gambling and fast, beautiful women. Thanks to its elegant shops, spacious architecture and French flair, the Cuban metropolis was also known as the ‘Caribbean Paris’. Some of Latin America’s biggest and most famous department stores could be found here, such as El Encanto and El Siglo where, on numerous floors, the latest European fashions could be tried on and bought. European operas were being performed at the Teatro Tacón in the renowned Parque Central, and the latest Hollywood blockbusters were being shown in the city’s movie theaters. With its exciting nightlife and exhilarating cultural scene, Havana was a city that never slept. The atmosphere of the harbor city was amenable; it had always been a place for immigrants from throughout the whole world, a welcoming haven not only for tourists, artist and celebrities, but also for all manner of European exiles hoping for a better life in Cuba.

  Before entering the war in 1941, Cuba had taken in around 8,000 German-Jewish transit refugees; more than 16,000 Jews lived on the island at that time, most of them in Havana. Strict residence regulations and massive public protests prevented an increased wave of immigration into the republic, which was more or less a dictatorship. But behind the scenes, politicians and the military were involved in a bitter power struggle, and the situation was extremely unstable.

  It was also in 1939 that author Ernest Hemingway and his wife Martha Gellhorn bought their Finca Vigia, situated on a hill not far from Havana. Hemingway loved the Caribbean and spent most of his time deep-sea fishing or frequenting the bars of Havana. It was Cuban fishermen who were the inspiration for what is arguably his most famous story, “The Old Man and the Sea”. For a time, Hemingway was obsessed with the idea of searching for German submarines along the Cuban coast in his motor yacht, with the aim of fighting the ‘Krauts’. However, the thought remained very much a writer’s fantasy that eventually found its literary expression in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream.

  Meanwhile, the Joel family was busy with their everyday problems, and found themselves an apartment in the fashionable Vedado district. It was a stuffy attic apartment – and there was no piano. But living in the hilly, tropical green dist
rict had its advantages: blossoming creepers clad the fronts of the houses and tropical plants, lush bushes, palms, pines and guana trees grew in the gardens. The busy main street Calle 23 and the university were very near, and Cuba’s famous Malecón seafront promenade was just a short walk away. In rough weather the onrushing waves would often put the street under water, but at other times this was the place for the city’s couples and teens to meet and enjoy the fantastic view.

  Helmut’s first school in Havana was the American Ruston academy, where he was among both Cuban and American students. The curriculum included three languages: English, Spanish and French, something that would later turn out to be considerably useful. His parents couldn’t really speak any foreign languages and suffered under their communication problems.

  After leaving school, Helmut started studying electrical engineering at the Universidad de La Habana, the buildings of which sat enthroned over the city like an ancient pantheon. However, the university had more in common with a den of thieves than with a temple of learning. The fight for political power dominated student life, and armed assaults were often the order of the day. Police were not allowed to enter the autonomous university campus. In 1945 there was a certain student in the law faculty who was eventually to emerge as the rebellious leader of the students against the corrupt, ruling elite: Fidel Castro Ruz.

  The Joels survived thanks to the valuables and jewelry they’d managed to smuggle out of Europe in their luggage, and which they sold one by one. Although the family had a residence permit, Karl Joel didn’t have authorization to work. They didn’t worry about this at first as, like many others, they were soon going to be leaving for the USA. They couldn’t imagine that this period of waiting would turn out to be seemingly endless years. A kind of forced Caribbean holiday.