Karl Amson Joel

Karl Amson Joel (born November 20, 1889 in Colmberg , † November 4, 1982 in Vienna , buried in the family grave in Nuremberg ) was a German textile merchant and manufacturer .

Life

The son of a textile merchant founded in 1928 in Nuremberg a mail order for household textiles and clothing, 1929, he began with their production . As the first mail order company, he also offered the latest fashion items, and soon his linen and clothing mail order company was one of the big names in the industry alongside Quelle , Witt Weiden and Schöpflin .

After the National Socialists came to power , he was increasingly exposed to absurd accusations and defamatory attacks by the Frankish Gauleiter Julius Streicher in his newspaper Der Stürmer because of his Jewish descent . That is why he moved to Berlin in 1934 , where he rented buildings on the Osram site in Wedding in 1935 and purchased new equipment for packaging and transport. However, he was forbidden to move his Nuremberg sewing workshop with 150 employees.

As a result of the Nuremberg Race Laws , however, the obstacles (e.g. the packages marked with a "J") and boycott measures (for example by "Aryan" suppliers) as well as the pressure to " Aryanize " the company increased more and more. Finally, on July 11, 1938, he had to sell his company to Josef Neckermann , who turned it into Neckermann-Versand . Neckermann initially unilaterally reduced the originally agreed purchase price of RM 2.3 million to RM 1.14 million. He withdrew the company's outstanding liabilities, and the inventory was allegedly too high originally (instead of 200,000 RM only 5,300 RM), and he wanted to withhold another 500,000 RM as security for any outstanding claims.

Catalog Josef Neckermann - Arisches Versandhaus (note above left) - formerly Karl Joel lingerie manufacture

Neckermann had paid the reduced purchase price (1,079,960.70 RM) to a trust account at Bankhaus Hardy & Co. in Berlin. The person entitled to dispose was Josef Neckermann. Karl Joel fled to Switzerland with his wife Meta in July, where his son Helmut (who later called himself Howard and initially returned to Germany as a GI at the end of World War II ) was in a St. Gallen boarding school. There he waited in vain for his money, and a lawsuit against the bank was dismissed on the grounds that he was a “ non-resident ”. While Neckermann and his family moved into the Berlin villa (including part of the furnishings), Karl Joel and his family lived penniless in a one-room apartment in Zurich .

In August 1938 he was stripped of his German citizenship and a month later his company was expropriated. He fled to Cuba via France and England . Eventually he managed to enter the United States , where he began making hair bows in New York in 1942 .

After the rule of law was restored in Germany after the Second World War, Joel succeeded in 1957 in obtaining compensation from Neckermann in the amount of DM 2 million for the sales price of his company - a fraction of the original value and without compensation for lost profits. He returned to Nuremberg in 1964 with his wife Meta († September 10, 1971).

Joel was the grandfather of the musician Billy Joel and his half-brother, the conductor Alexander Joel .

documentary

In 2001, a meeting of the generations of grandchildren of the Joel and Neckermann families was arranged, which was recorded by the documentary filmmaker Beate Thalberg . The meeting remained without result, the hoped-for reconciliation between the families did not materialize, as the descendants of Josef Neckermann, Lukas, Julia and Markus, among others, saw no reason to distance themselves from the actions of their grandfather.

• Beate Thalberg: The Joel file. The story of two families. Germany / Austria 2001
  • Neckermann, not possible , Daniel Fersch discussed in the taz , December 19, 2001

literature

• Guido Knopp: HISTORY - secrets of the 20th century. Bertelsmann, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-570-00665-4 .
• Steffen Radlmaier: The Joel story. Billy Joel and his German-Jewish family history. Heyne, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-453-15874-0 .
• Steffen Radlmaier: Neckermann and the "laundry Jew". How Karl Joel was deprived of his life's work . In: Matthias Henkel, Eckart Dietzfelbinger (Ed.): Entrechtet. Degraded. Robbed: Aryanization in Nuremberg and Fürth . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2012, ISBN 978-3-86568-871-2 (book accompanying the exhibition of the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds )

Web links

• Steffen Radlmaier: German lesson: Die Chronik der Familie Joel , in the Internet archive ( Memento from January 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Report in Rolling Stone 3/1996; documented on piano-man.de .