Wolf: Persecution—Escape—Survival—Triumph

By Wolfgang Mueller

A few months after the end of World War I, Wolfgang Mueller was born in Germany to two Jewish, college-educated parents. As he grew up in a happy, erudite environment, Mueller could never have known that the celebration of his Bar-Mizwa in 1932, coinciding with the rise the Nazis, would mark a very important turning point in his life.

As Adolf Hitler assumed the role of chancellor, Mueller was filled with fear and foreboding, as were his parentsfeelings that instigated a subsequent decision to send Mueller to boarding school in England. After being recruited to work at an American company while still in school, Mueller details how he embarked on a journey in 1936 that carried him through life-changing experiences as an American soldier during World War II to a return to civilian life, during which he eventually married, started a family, and realized professional success.

Wolf shares the inspirational story of one mans remarkable lifelong experiences as he escaped from Nazi terror to build a life in America and learned to appreciate his good fortune.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781458211422

Wolfgang Mueller

Wolfgang Mueller is a self-made man with a passion for literature, travel, and fine arts. He is a longtime resident of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, where he raised his family and pursued a career in the wholesale food industry. This is his first book.

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Copyright © 2013 Wolfgang Mueller.

Cover Artwork: Robert T. Cole

Cover Graphic Work: Susan Cole

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ISBN: 978-1-4582-1144-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1143-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1142-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013916075

Abbott Press rev. date: 09/17/2013

Contents

Prologue

The Mueller, Rosenthal, Schuster, and Schueler Families in Westphalia

My Parents’ Wedding Banquet, July 6, 1913

My Parents’ First Years in Hannover and Starting a Family

Growing Up, Bar-Mizwa, the Nazis, and School in England

Immigration to America

WWII and US Citizenship

Resumption of Civilian Life in Washington

Marriage and Entering into Business

Queens Manor, Chillum Place to Woodsdale Drive

On My Own

The Farm

Art Collection

From Wholesale Meat Products to Real Estate

From Real Estate to the Seafood Industry (1991-2009)

The Aaronsons and the Dieners

The Kilsheimers and the Kolkers

My Grandson, Jeffrey Pearlman

The Two Pearlman Girls

Jonathan, My Oldest Grandson

Monique’s Daughters, Dana and Tali

My Grandson, Joshua Mueller

Gilmar Amaya

The Beginning of Retirement

Acknowledgments

For Michelle and Sonya for motivating me and putting up with me

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Prologue

Westphalia is a region in Germany in an area frequently referred to as Lower Saxony. It is roughly between the Rhine and the Weser Rivers. Scenically, the countryside has beautiful wooded areas and rolling fields and is well suited to agriculture. That has been its main industry for many centuries. Jews started to settle in Germany and Westphalia when the Roman Legions came to conquer and colonize.

From its earliest days this region was beset with turmoil, ruled by feudal landowners. Around 1000 CE Charlemagne pacified the Saxons and converted them to Christianity. Already at that time there were Jewish folk settled in some of the farming communities engaged in commerce and trade. Since Jewish religious practices required literacy, they prospered when permitted to exist as minorities in their environment.

Unfortunately, that relatively peaceful existence was shattered just two centuries later with the Crusades, a development that ignited major attacks on Jews all over western Europe. Thousands were slain and driven from their homes, setting off major migrations of German Ashkenazi Jews into eastern Europe. However, as in all periods of great turmoil, it was possible even then for a few families to survive these catastrophic events. About one hundred years later, the Inquisition in Spain set off another exodus, causing many Sephardic Jews to flee into western Europe. During that period, some of the settlements had grown into larger towns where refugees were herded into enclaves called ghettos, as in Muenster, then the capital of Westphalia.

I have chosen to include this brief historical overview in my biography because I have found well-established evidence that my ancestry actually extends far back in these lands. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, well-known writer and poet Else Lasker-Schueler, a niece of my paternal grandmother, wrote a poem in hexameter she named Arthur Aronymous. The story, originally in Low German, the local country dialect, traces the story of her family in a farming community named Geseke. She writes about how her great-grandfather went to the Holy Land and became a rabbi in the ghetto in Muenster. He then befriended the ruling bishop in that town and met with him regularly at the Golden Rooster at midnight to play chess and talk. She tells how the bishop arranged for two of the rabbi’s children to settle in the countryside and thus escape the ghetto. In those days the ruling clergy could issue a special permit that granted Jews protection and settlement privileges in some communities. Well, my grandmother’s father was a man with a huge family in a large house in Geseke. His name was Moses Schueler, and he was a very prosperous merchant banker. One of my uncles, Heinrich Rosenthal, became a lawyer in Dortmund, another Westphalian town; as late as 1933 he produced a detailed family tree as a professional legal document. He spent several years carefully researching the material by visiting courthouses and church record books and visiting many Jewish cemeteries to study the inscriptions in Hebrew and German. He also uncovered information that our family names appear as far back as the fourteenth century. For example, he found out that before my mother’s and his name was Rosenthal, their forebears referred to themselves as Emanuel, and on even older tombstones the name Emanuel was Menachem.

From this sort of actual data, as well as from my own research, which included repeated trips to the area and discussions with officials and professional historians, it is not too far-fetched to deduce that my ancestry in those areas of Westphalia has very deep roots.

However, during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even early nineteenth centuries, many itinerant, impoverished Jews still roamed the countryside, sometimes finding employment and settling in these places, and sometimes succeeding in becoming members of the community.

Hitler unleashed the Holocaust seventy some years ago to exterminate the Jews not only of Germany, but also of all of Europe, and I here bear evidence with thousands of others that even he could not prevail.

The Mueller, Rosenthal, Schuster, and Schueler Families in Westphalia

My maternal grandfather, Louis Rosenthal, died in 1912. He left his wife, Emilie Schuster Rosenthal, with a great deal of property, a huge business, and six teenagers, three boys and three girls. He was only fifty-five years old, and he loved his family and his business and enjoyed a good life. His father, Abraham Rosenthal, had settled in the Paderborn area from Erwitte, where he had grown up as one of the sons of Levi Rosenthal, a prosperous merchant and farmer in the early nineteenth century, a period when the Jewish people in Germany were battling for freedom and citizenship. At that time, Jews had barely obtained the right to move from one place to another, and Paderborn especially was still frowning on having more Jews settle there. Very few were able to obtain that permission from the authorities. Abraham and his brother were among those few. At first they started a feed and grain business in Paderborn; this led to Abraham acquiring a small flour mill close to the main road leading out of town toward Neuhaus, a nearby village, the onetime residence of the local bishop who ruled there from a four-sided castle fortress with a moat as protection from the local peasantry. That castle had been turned into the garrison of a Prussian-mounted Husaren regiment during the nineteenth century.

Abraham was able to acquire a large, water-driven flour mill situated along the road leading to that castle. This became the firm A. Rosenthal & Son, a successful enterprise producing flour for civilian and military consumption

His son Louis, my grandfather, continued in that business and expanded it by building a modern, larger, seven-story mill at the edge of the village. Across from that mill he was able to acquire a wonderful site to build a beautiful mansion surrounded by a large flower garden with stables, outbuildings, and even a tennis court.

Many of the people in Neuhaus were employed at his mills. Because my grandfather was rich, affable, and a good horseman, he enjoyed very good relations with the commander of that regiment. At the beginning of the First World War, his sons, Charles and Heinrich, served in that regiment. Charles volunteered at age sixteen, received a battlefield commission, and was discharged as a decorated lieutenant at the end of the First World War.

My grandmother Emilie’s maiden name was Schuster, the German word for shoemaker, and she was one of ten siblings from an equally prosperous family in Luegde, another Westphalian rural community. This family also lived in that town for centuries. She was one of ten siblings, and she was related to the Staabs and Nordhauses in New Mexico. One of her brothers, Bernard, lived in El Paso, Texas.

Since the eighteenth century, my paternal grandfather’s grandfather, whose name was Calmon Mueller, the same as my grandfather, lived in the Westphalian village Stoermede. My great-grandfather Isaac Mueller still lived there in the nineteenth century but later moved to another little town, Geseke, where my grandfather was born into a large family. My grandfather Calmon Mueller established himself in the feed and grain business in Paderborn in the nineteenth century and married Paula, maiden name Schueler, whose father was a banker in Geseke. The Schueler family was one of the oldest Jewish families in that region. They were related to a famous rabbi who was instrumental in legislative proceedings to improve the living conditions for Jewish families in Germany in the ginning of the nineteenth century. None of these families exist in that area, as their descendants either fled to other countries or were slaughtered by the Nazis.

A brief explanation of these family names: It was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that Jews were permitted to have surnames recorded at the courthouses. Mueller and Schuster are unusual names for Jews, as at that time it was prohibited to assume names that conflicted with the guilds. A few people were able to avoid that regulation because their names had been used prior to the promulgation of those rules. In my case, the first Mueller went to the village priest to have his sons’ name recorded, and when asked what his name was, he must have responded Mueller because that was his nickname at the time. In the case of the Schusters, it must have been similar. Rosenthal was