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 -Jewish textile merchant and manufacturer.
The son of a textile merchant founded in 1928 in Nuremberg, a mail order business for household textiles and clothing, 1929, he began with their fabrication. The first shipment he offered also current fashion articles, and soon was his underwear and clothing mail order next source, Witt Weiden and Schöpflin major player in the industry.
After the seizure of power by the Nazis, he was exposed because of his Jewish origin increasingly abstruse accusations and defamatory attacks of the Frankish Gauleiter Julius Streicher in his newspaper Der Stürmer. That's why he moved in 1934 to Berlin, where he 1935 on the Osram site in Wedding anmietete building and anschaffte new equipment for the packaging and transport. Laying his Nuremberg sewing with 150 employees, however, was forbidden him.
As a result of the Nuremberg racial laws, however, the company also took in Berlin disabilities ( eg labeling of packages with " J" ) and boycotts (such as "Aryan" suppliers ) as well as the pressure to " aryanize " becoming. Finally, he had on July 11, 1938 his company sell far below market value to Josef Neckermann, who transformed it into the Neckermann Versand. The originally agreed purchase price of 2.3 million Reichsmarks corrected Neckermann first to 1.14 million down. He pulled off outstanding liabilities of the company, also the inventory was originally supposed to be rated high ( instead of 200,000 only 5,300 RM), and another 500,000 marks he would initially retain as collateral for any still existing receivables.
Neckermann had paid the reduced purchase price ( RM 1,079,960.70 ) into an escrow account with the bank Hardy & Co. in Berlin. Dispose of it, was Josef Neckermann. Karl Joel had fled in July with his wife Meta in Switzerland, where his son Helmut ( later called himself Howard and returned first as a GI at the end of the war back to Germany ) in a boarding school was St. Gallen. There, however, he waited in vain for his money, and a lawsuit against the bank was dismissed on the grounds that it was " non-resident ". While Neckermann with his family Joel's Berlin villa (including a part of the organization) involved, Karl Joel lived with his family penniless in a Zurich studio.
In August 1938 his German citizenship was revoked and a month later expropriated his company. About France and England, he fled to Cuba. Finally, he managed to enter the United States, where he began in New York in 1942 with the manufacturing of hair ribbons.
After restoring the rule of law in Germany after the Second World War succeeded Joel 1957 to erstreiten Neckermann compensation in the amount of DM 2 million for the sale price of his company - a fraction of its original value and no compensation for lost profits. He returned in 1964 with his wife Meta ( † September 10, 1971 ) to Nuremberg.
Joel was the grandfather of musician Billy Joel and his half- brother, the conductor Alexander Joel.
Documentary
In 2001, a meeting of generations of families grandson Joel and Neckermann was arranged, which was held by the documentary filmmaker Beate Thalberg. The meeting remained without result, the hoped-for reconciliation of the families remained, since among other things the descendants of Josef Neckermann, Luke, Julia and Mark, saw no reason to distance themselves from the actions of her grandfather.
- Beate Thalberg: The file Joel. The story of two families. Germany / Austria 2001 Neckermann not possible, review of Daniel Fersch in taz, December 19, 2001
- Program reference on 3Sat, January 18, 2005