Yesterday (May 4th), BraveWords posted a link (found here) to the German publication BILD's feature on KISS icon Gene Simmons learning about his mother's experiences in Nazi Germany, which uncovered documentation Simmons had never seen before. BILD followed this up with a similar investigation for KISS frontman Paul Stanley, as his family also escaped from Nazi Germany. 

Following is an excerpt from the feature:

After the interview with Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley (68, real name Stanley Bert Eisen) asks the reporters to come over to him in the hotel lobby.

“I heard what you found out for Gene. Can you help me? My late mother lived in Berlin and fled the Nazis as a child. I know so little.”

BILD am Sonntag also investigated this case and found out that the famous star’s Jewish family barely managed to escape being arrested by the Nazis at the end of 1935. The search leads to the Jewish Cemetery Berlin Weissensee.

When the Nazis seized power, the Jewish family’s persecution began. First, Paul Stanley’s great-uncle Günther fled from the Nazi persecution to Holland and later to the US. According to the files of the Berlin Restitution Office, he had been attacked by the SA several times. Two years later, Paul Stanley’s mother Eva, his grandmother Berthy, and his step-grandfather Joseph narrowly escaped the Nazi henchmen.

“My late mother was denounced to the Gestapo in the year 1935,” Eva Eisen writes after the war in an application for restitution. Joseph Mandl states the details of the dramatic flights in his statement to the Restitution Office in Berlin from 1963:

“In the night of the 5th to the 6th of November of the year 1935, I received a telephone call from a side well-disposed towards me saying that me and my family were scheduled to be arrested the next day for a currency offence. The sleeping child was taken out of bed, the bare essentials were packed into small hand suitcases, the most worn-out clothes were put on in order to attract as little attention as possible. My car stood in front of the house door. We drove to the Anhalter Bahnhof train station, where the car was simply left behind, just like the apartment and everything that was in it. In order to remain inconspicuous, we chose the slowest train via Dresden to the Czech border at Tetschen-Bodenbach. Wife and child were seated in a third-class compartment. I myself sat down in an adjacent compartment.”

Four months after the family had left Rotterdam (Netherlands) for New York on 20 January 1940 with Paul Stanley’s great-grandmother Ida on board the MS Zaandam, the Nazis invaded Holland. The singer was born on 20 January 1952 in New York City.

Read the complete story here.