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U.S. Family Presses Complex Holocaust Claim
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A32
BERLIN -- Looking at her old home in the exclusive Grunewald neighborhood, which she fled in 1939 at age 6, Barbara Principe said last week that the only thing she could remember was the Christmas tree her father put in a large bay window that jutted out into the front yard.
"I don't have enough memory," said the 70-year-old grandmother from Newfield, N.J., the daughter of a German Jew who converted to Christianity.
Still, Principe's family was part of the fabric of the German capital in the years before World War II, and that legacy has embroiled her in one of the largest and most complex Holocaust claims Germany has faced. It pits Principe and her relatives against one of the country's best-known department store chains, KarstadtQuelle AG.
The family claims it was swindled out of some of the best real estate in Berlin, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets and now by the German company, which wants to hold onto property the family formerly owned, as well as cash from sales of other such land.
Last Wednesday, Principe and a number of other descendants of her grandfather and grand-uncles, the Wertheim brothers, sat among an audience of dignitaries here during ceremonies to open a new parliamentary annex. Like many of central Berlin's new buildings, the annex stands on land that belonged to the Wertheims in the 1930s.
Theirs is a family saga of success, persecution, death, exile, penury and jaw-dropping surprise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Principe and relatives who were raised in the United States as Lutherans made an unexpected discovery: They had been born Jewish and were heirs not just to the property of their South Jersey chicken farmer father, but potentially to prime real estate in Berlin worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The land consists of 100,000 square yards on dozens of plots scattered through the heart of Berlin. Some of the plots are near Potsdamerplatz, the new commercial complex of high-rises built after the formal reunification of the city in 1990.
Ownership of the land has been disputed for years. More than a decade ago, the New York-based Jewish Claims Conference identified some of it as having been Jewish-owned and sued for restitution. The German government contested a judge's decision in the conference's favor for four plots of land, saying the government had legal rights to it through various agreements, including the 1990 accord that reunified Germany, but this month it decided not to continue appealing.
The government is now set to abandon claims on other lots associated with the Wertheims, including the site of the parliamentary annex, which houses the library of the Reichstag, Germany's historic parliament building. The government will now have to agree to a compensation figure for that site, possibly between $20 million and $35 million, according to government officials and lawyers for the Wertheim relatives.
The claims conference, which filed for the properties before Principe and other relatives knew of their own possible claims, says it will share any restitution it gets with the family. The conference has often filed claims on land before it identified the precise heirs.
But the department-store giant Karstadt, which has also dealt in real estate, has not given in. Karstadt continues to "assert its claims to those properties," according to a company statement. The company also argues that it owns the proceeds, close to $200 million, from the sale of Wertheim-related properties it has already sold, including land for a Ritz hotel and the new Canadian Embassy. A company spokesman declined to comment beyond providing a brief prepared statement on the controversy.
Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Wertheim brothers, Georg, Franz and Wilhelm, owned six major department stores, including a flagship outlet on Leipziger Street across from where Hitler would build his chancellery. They also had extensive real estate holdings.
As the Nazis carried out what they called an "Aryanization" of Jewish businesses, family members turned over their shares in the company to Georg's wife, Ursula, a Christian. She, in turn, put the shares in a trust controlled by, among others, the family's legal adviser, Arthur Lindgens, who married Ursula after Georg's death.
Some members of the Wertheim family died in concentration camps. Others fled Germany, including Franz's sons, Guenther, who had become a Lutheran, and Fritz. In Berlin, they had enjoyed the fruits of their parents' success: mansions, hunting lodges, racing cars and yachts. In the United States, Fritz worked in the kitchen of a mental hospital. Guenther, Principe's father, became a chicken farmer in New Jersey.
Guenther stuck with the Lutheran faith and raised his family in it. His children were kept in the dark about their former religion and wealth, according to the family.
But Fritz and Guenther did maneuver to get the wealth back. In 1950, they applied to government authorities to regain their shares in the Wertheim business. But the trustee, Lindgens, came to New York and convinced them that the shares were worthless, noting that the Soviets had seized most of the property in the eastern sector of the then-divided capital, according to Principe's lawyer, Gary Osen of Oradell, N.J.
Moreover, Osen said, Lindgens asserted that what remained of the company in West Berlin would go under unless it received a new line of credit, which he was not prepared to seek unless he controlled all the shares.
Lindgens paid the brothers about $10,000 for the rights to their shares. Within days of the deal, he merged the Wertheim company with another former Jewish-owned company, Hertie Waren-und Kaufhaus GmbH. Lindgens had already made a lucrative deal for the merger when he persuaded the brothers to sell their shares, Osen said.
Karstadt bought out Hertie in 1994 and with it acquired claims to the Wertheim properties in the former East Berlin that Hertie had controlled but lost to Soviet confiscation.
This convoluted history became known to Barbara Principe only after 1998, when the claims conference contacted her over compensation for a house her family had owned outside Berlin. She soon got involved in the litigation.
In April 2000, Karstadt sold five acres near Potsdamerplatz for $150 million. Heirs say the land was theirs, and they want the money.
For Karstadt, "it's hard to give up money that's already in your pocket," said Osen, who has also filed suit seeking compensation in a U.S. federal court, claiming that the court has jurisdiction because the deal between the Wertheims and Lindgens a half-century ago was struck in Manhattan. Karstadt maintains that the dispute must be resolved in Germany through a foundation set up by German businesses to deal with Nazi-era claims.
Principe promised last week to keep fighting the retailer, in both the United States and Germany. "Until Karstadt comes to terms with its legal and moral obligations," she said, "the battle will go on."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...-2003Dec13.html |
Give them the money or not? Technically, I suppose it's theirs... However, I didn't think it was possible to sell someone elses property without their consent if they were still alive? |
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