Orphan brothers escaped to Joplin from Nazi Germany

Jan. 27—Learn more Fred Taucher's oral history for the Holocaust Center for Humanity archives can be found online at https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/survivor-voices/25-survivor-encyclopedia/443-fred-taucher.

Two orphaned Jewish boys who managed to hide from Nazi arrest and survive the Holocaust during World War II were able to make a dash to the safety of the U.S. and a home with Joplin relatives.

Details of the lives of Henri and Horst Taucher have been compiled by local researchers Mary Anne Phillips, Paula Callihan and Paul Teverow. They discussed their findings in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, being observed Saturday.

Phillips is secretary of Historic Murphysburg Preservation, an organization that involves residents and friends of the city's only designated historic residential district. Callihan is treasurer. Teverow is a retired Missouri Southern State University history professor and a community volunteer involved in a number of organizations that include the Joplin Interfaith Coalition. He is a congregant at the United Hebrew Congregation, which borders the Murphysburg neighborhood, and assists members of the Murphysburg organization with local history projects.

Teverow told Phillips about the story of the two orphaned boys, which he found in book published in 2011, "Saved by the Enemy," by Craig Ledbetter.

Henri, who went by Henry or Hank, and Horst, who was nicknamed Fred, were the sons of Julius and Therese (Gerstel) Taucher. The boys were born in Berlin — Henri on Jan. 3, 1932, and Fred on Jan. 29, 1933. Their father had been born in New York but he moved with his parents back to their ancestral home in Germany when he was 19.

As an adult, Julius established a tailor shop in Berlin.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power as German chancellor in 1933, he instituted a one-party dictatorship enforced by his Nazi followers and the Secret State Police (the Gestapo). They instituted radical changes in the country through political, racial and social policies.

In those initial years of Hitler's regime, German Jews were affected by legislation that deprived them of their roles as citizens and made them outcasts, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. They were driven from their homes and into Berlin's ghettos, some managing to escape into the underground to flee the escalating persecution and mortal danger.

Kristallnacht

The Tauchers had lived a peaceful life in Berlin. Even as there were overt acts of violence against Jews, Julius Taucher was left alone because he was an American citizen, according to the recorded interviews provided by Fred Taucher for the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Holocaust Center For Humanity in Seattle.

As attacks against Jews escalated, the young boys would find some relief from the day-to-day danger by taking off the yellow paper stars that marked them as Jews so they could get into a theater to see movies.

On Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi regime launched waves of antisemitic terrorism in Germany and other European countries. They raided Jewish businesses and homes and killed and arrested many. The Nazis stole what they wanted and smashed or vandalized the rest during what is known today as Kristallnacht, meaning "the night of the broken glass."

Julius Taucher's business was one of those destroyed in the Berlin violence. He became a forced laborer, which continued until he was finally arrested in 1943. His son Fred said in the recorded interviews that his father was one of the last of the Berlin Jews to be taken because he had been listed as an American. A few days later, Julius was deported to Auschwitz, where he was killed.

The boys' older stepbrother jumped from a third-floor staircase landing to his death during that time when the Nazis came to arrest him because he knew he would be taken to a death camp.

After that, the boys and their mother went into hiding and assumed the names of people who had perished during previous air raids of the city. Ironically, the mother and two boys were helped by a dedicated Nazi party member, Gertrude Nölting, who had been the midwife who delivered Fred.

Shortly before the end of the war, on April 15, 1945, Fred was picked up by the Gestapo and was being sent by train to Dachau outside Munich. The midwife had supplied the boys with Hitler Youth identification cards in case they were arrested or detained, but he did not have the ID with him, so Fred was thrown in a truck to be taken to the camp.

But there was an air raid and he escaped. In the nearby woods, a gunbattle erupted between Nazi and Russian soldiers, and he hid. Afterward, there were numerous dead soldiers and Hitler Youth, so he took one of the Hitler Youth uniforms off a body and wore it to make his way back to Berlin.

Mother killed

Fred rejoined his family at a train station in Berlin, a place they were to meet if they became separated. After that, his mother was killed when she was caught in crossfire between German and Russian troops on the streets of Berlin.

For the next year the Taucher boys lived with Nölting, who had never renounced her Nazi Party beliefs but believed that Hitler was not part of the Final Solution, the Nazi program for killing all Jews in German-controlled lands.

With the assistance of Werner Nathan, an American Jewish soldier who was stationed in Berlin, arrangements were made for the boys to find homes by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish humanitarian organization, in 1946.

Teverow said that Jewish residents in Joplin and the Tri-State Area raised about $30,000 during World War II to assist organizations that arranged for the relocation of displaced war victims to come to the U.S. He said a Christian organization was established by a Joplin doctor that raised about $10,000 for that purpose, as well.

At that time, there was a larger Jewish population in Joplin and there many Jewish soldiers stationed at Camp Crowder. There also were numerous German immigrants or their descendants in Joplin. They had a social club that held events such as concerts and balls in their meeting place, Germania Hall, in downtown Joplin.

"You just look at the names in Joplin then and now and you can tell a lot were German," Teverow said. Early entrepreneurs and businessmen including Charles Schifferdecker and Edward Zelleken are among those German immigrants who made their fortunes here, Phillips said.

She likens what happened to the Taucher family to what's happening now in Ukraine.

"History repeats itself and we haven't learned anything," she said. "We don't have a Hitler anymore but we sure have a Putin. It still goes on."

Joplin relatives

Late in 1946, the boys received their visas to immigrate to the U.S. The Jewish aid organization that paid for tickets on a ship to get them to the U.S. also searched for relatives of the boys in the U.S. by placing an ad in a worldwide newspaper, Der Aufban.

A pair of Joplin brothers who came here years earlier were told by friends in St. Louis that someone was looking for relatives of two German orphans. The brothers called the committee and asked for the names of the people in Joplin who were being sought. It was Felix and Alfred Taucher.

"Why they came here I do not know," Phillips said of the older Taucher brothers already living here. "They may have known they could get a job here or there was a connection here or a sponsor."

Those Taucher brothers told the Jewish relocation committee they would be happy to take in their young cousins, ages 13 and 14. But Felix and Alfred's excitement would soon turn to disappointment as they were rejected because they were single men with no women in the household. Henry and Fred were placed in a Kansas City foster home with a rabbi, his wife and two children.

But Alfred and Felix were not giving up on their young relatives. Alfred, who was sales manager at Newman's Department Store in downtown Joplin, would take a bus every other weekend to Kansas City to visit the boys.

Felix was employed at local clothing operation, Miller Manufacturing.

They looked for other relatives overseas to find a woman who could come and be part of what they intended to be the growing Taucher family once they could obtain custody of the boys. That plan came together when they found an aunt, Tante Taucher, in Israel, who wanted to move to the U.S.

Felix and Alfred sponsored her immigration here and soon they were united with the boys. When they arrived, Henry and Fred were enrolled as sophomores at Joplin High School. It was finally the security their father meant for them to have.

After graduation, Alfred got jobs for both of them at Newman's. Then Fred joined the U.S. Army and served in the Korean War. He received computer training in the military and after discharge he engaged in a career in the evolving field of that technology in Olympus, Washington.

Henry also joined the Army and was a career military man before going to work for an airplane manufacturer.

Fred said in recorded oral histories for Holocaust museum archives that as 6- and 7-year-old children in 1940, they would listen with their parents to Hitler's ranting speeches on the radio.

"Our father always told us how great the United States are and, 'Someday we're all going to move the U.S. after the war is over,'" he said, recounting his father's words. "The U.S. will win ... and we're all going to go to New York."

The U.S., Fred said, represented freedom "and that is the best country in the world to grow up."

After coming here, Fred never spoke German again.