Helmut grew up in Wiesbaden which was not far from Bad Homburg and photos reveal that he spent a lot of his childhood with his cousins in Bad Homburg. He was blind in his last years but he maintained a photo memory of every street in Wiesbaden and was invited to visit a number of times to speak on the life in the town, pre-war .
Helmut’s mother Flora was sister to Bella (Strauss) who was Ellen’s mother. Helmut’s father Julius was brother or Richard (Rothschild). Bella and Flora were very close and both of them were stranded in Germany after the rest of the families had managed to find refuge out of Germany. Both were taken to Lódź ghetto and did not survive.
Helmut’s life is partly revealed in the articles below. He did interviews for TV and radio in visits to his home city
Helmut – press article – KURIER 1999 “Despite everything, I have never harbored hatred”
Take heed this is a ChatGPT translation from a poor print copy – which looks close to OK to me – an extremely poor German reader.
Interview with Helmut Alexander Rothschild / Fled the Nazis to southern Africa and always thought about returning
Once again this year, the city has invited Jews who had to leave their homeland of Wiesbaden during the Nazi era. The program includes gatherings, excursions to Worms, Heidelberg, and the Rhine Valley, as well as discussions with the association supporting an active museum of German-Jewish history. On Friday, the visitors were guests of the Jewish community. The KURIER spoke with three participants. In the first installment, Annelies Mundus and Hugo Halle shared their memories. Today, Helmut Alexander Rothschild recalls his time in Wiesbaden and his escape to southern Africa.
When the SA men stood in front of his parents’ store with signs reading “Don’t buy from Jews” starting in April 1933, many customers remained loyal to the specialty shop for office self-adhesive supplies at 20 Wellritzstraße, Rothschild recalls. Goebbels had called for a boycott of Jewish businesses. “Anyone who still shopped there was a traitor,” it said.
“I was in the shop,” says Helmut’. He was born on September 15, 1919, in Wiesbaden and is now visiting his hometown for the twelfth time.
This is the first time he’s here as a guest invited by the city. His family, like many others, “did not take the Nazis seriously enough,” says the nearly 80-year-old, who clearly remembers what happened on November 9, 1938, during the so-called Kristallnacht, in his parents’ shop. His father Julius, who suffered from sciatica “and treated it with Kochbrunnen water,” was at home when he learned that the windows had been smashed and the goods thrown into the street. Julius Rothschild went with his son to the store, sought refuge with a tenant on the first floor, and was arrested there by the Gestapo. On November 10, he was taken to police headquarters; an uncle from Frankfurt came to try to help him. Today the son knows that his father died in Buchenwald.
“Under what exact circumstances he died, we never wanted to know.” (Note – he died of a heart attack in the arms of Fritz Rothschild)
His mother moved to Frankfurt. The son fled by ship to Northern Rhodesia. Today he lives in Zimbabwe. His mother, as recorded on the memorial to Nazi victims at Frankfurt’s Börneplatz, was deported to Lódź in 1941. How and when she died remains unclear.
Helmut, who grew up on Bismarckring, originally wanted to become a pharmacist. Since he was not allowed to study as a Jew, he apprenticed with a druggist in Frankfurt. In Wiesbaden, he first attended school on Kastellstraße, then the Oranienschule.
His life remained in what was then British Northern Rhodesia—little more than that.
“Although we were victims of the Nazis, the British considered us enemy aliens.”
That’s why refugees were not allowed to work in the strategically important copper mines. “There was nothing.”
There was absolutely nothing.
No jobs—there was nothing at all.
“We cooked on corrugated iron sheets.”
In 1954, Rothschild returned to Wiesbaden for the first time. “And I would have liked to stay. Because this felt like home.”
But for his wife, who had relatives in South Africa, that was not an option—so he too decided to make a life in what is now Zimbabwe.
Friend Reconnected
Some old friends, classmates, and even a former saleswoman from his father’s shop—he met them again some time ago.
“It was nice to see them again,” he says—one of them was Helmut Meinhöhl, a former classmate, whom he found again.
At the time, cultural affairs officer Margarethe Goldmann organized a celebration for Rothschild, which the Kurier reported on.
“My school friend had written the article, and that’s how we reconnected,” says Rothschild, who repeatedly thought about returning to Wiesbaden.
In Zimbabwe, he and an uncle from Bad Homburg ran a shoe manufacturing business. He later became a manager in a large bakery, and eventually founded a delicatessen.
At the end of the conversation, Helmut Alexander Rothschild adds one last sentence:
“Despite everything that happened, I never harbored hatred. And I have always rejected the idea of collective guilt.”
—Anke Hollingshaus
Helmut – press mention – Spiegel International 2005 ‘Is There a German Melting Pot?‘
This is an extract from an article about Wiesbaden as melting pot city
https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-special-the-germans-is-there-a-german-melting-pot-a-355305.html
Halfway down the block, another bomb shredded buildings on both sides. Several residents lost their lives, dozens their homes. Number 18 was blasted to bits. The destruction had actually begun before the war, namely on November 9, 1938, which went down in history as Reichskristallnacht. Armed with axes and shovels, Hitler’s SA storm troopers had demolished the popular clothing store run by Julius Rothschild. The 56-year-old was beaten up by the Gestapo and shipped off to Buchenwald. Two days before Christmas, his wife received a package containing his ashes. C.O.D.
An explosion in Cologne in a Turkish area of Cologne shocked Germany and led to questions about the commonplace segregation of foreigners within German cities. Foto: DPA
Shortly afterwards, the widow was forced to sell the building to a baker — for a pittance. She was deported to Poland in 1941. Their 19-year-old son, Helmut Rothschild, managed to escape: he quit his apprenticeship and fled to Africa at the end of 1938. Today, 86 years old and nearly blind, he lives in a Jewish retirement home near Johannesburg. He has never forgotten the street where he grew up and has made more than a dozen trips to Wiesbaden since 1945. But he never visited Elisabeth Barneis.
The 92-year-old, who has trouble walking but otherwise bears her age well, is the daughter of the baker who bought the Rothschilds’ shop. After the war, when the building was no more than a heap of debris, Elisabeth Barneis was a Trümmerfrau, one of countless women who cleared the rubble and literally helped rebuild German cities with their own bare hands. She organized transport, drove trucks to the countryside, scavenged for building material, and lugged boards and bricks for the reconstruction process. She still lives on the second floor of the new building, and ran a candy store on the ground floor until 1977.
What about the name Rothschild? Does it ring any bells? Yes, the old lady says, it does remind her of something. Of course: “Shortly after the war, I had to pay 5,000 marks in restitution. That was a lot of money back then. But my lawyer advised me to pay.”
