FORTUNATE SON: THE JOELS AND THE NECKERMANNS, THEFT AND MUSE OF IN HITLER'S GERMANY, A TALE OF TWO FAMILIES

Before the Holocaust turned into outright murder, German anti-Semitic laws focused on separating its Jewish citizens from their wealth. Jews constituted less than one percent of the country's population but owned more than 40 percent of all businesses. With approval from the government, local officials, the media, and the banks colluded to pressure their Jews neighbors to sell their retail outlets, department stores, and factories to non-Jews for next to nothing.

This process of Aryanization was largely unofficial with ordinary citizens feeling that they were “helping” Jews in their community to dispose of property they were no longer legally allowed to hold. Josef Neckermann, a young man from the provinces whose father was a coalminer, cornered a business that belonged to the paternal grandfather of the legendary American singer Billy Joel.
With roots in southern Germany, the Joels had built up an impressively large mail order business that by the 1930s counted nearly a million customers. Over a period of three years Neckermann pressured Karl Joel to sell, succeeding finally only months before Kristallnacht. How this happened, and how the drama of Jewish economic disenfranchisement played out, is the subject of this deeply researched and engaging nonfiction narrative.
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and a former senior editor at Newsday, Steve Wick has spent years researching the deeply personal story and the theft of the Joel family's wealth and banishment from their native country while Neckermann grew his business through the war, using slave labor from the Lodz ghetto to make his name as a retail magnate effectively becoming an exemplar of the postwar German economic miracle.


Steve Wick is a long-time reporter and editor at Newsday who shared in the paper's winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for coverage of the explosion of TWA Flight 800. He has won dozens of journalism awards, and he is the author of three books, the most recent being The Long Night: William Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.