Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 4, 1993 TAG: 9304040024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT YANCEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
AMERICAN VICTIM BATTLING GERMANY OVER HOLOCAUST
Recurring headaches, insomnia, stomach disorders and occasionally acute depression have only strengthened Hugo Princz's resolve to make Germany atone 50 years later for the Nazi atrocities inflicted upon him and his family.One of only two Holocaust survivors who were American civilians at the time of their capture, Princz still has nightmares remembering how the SS forced him to watch as his younger brothers, Arthur, 19, and Alex, 15, were intentionally starved to death at Auschwitz.
His father, mother and sister, he believes, were all murdered in fall 1942 at Maidanek, a concentration camp in Poland.
Germany has paid out billions of dollars in war-crime pensions to other Holocaust survivors. But for 38 years, rejecting repeated U.S. diplomatic appeals, it has refused to provide a dime to Princz. Why? Because from the very beginning Princz was an American citizen.
The Bonn government is now trying to block a trial in what Princz, a retired grocery store clerk, calls his "forum of last resort" for seeking the $500-a-month pension.
Claiming sovereign immunity, Germany has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals here to dismiss the suit before a trial set for May.
"The German government very much regrets what happened to Mr. Princz . . . and after the war passed various laws compensating individuals like Mr. Princz for the wrongs they suffered," said Peter Heidenberger, the German embassy's attorney in the case.
But the original law compensating Holocaust victims covered only refugees and not U.S. citizens, Heidenberger said. And Princz missed a 1969 deadline for filing a claim under a 1965 law that did hold the possibility of some relief, Heidenberger said.
Princz, 71, and his wife live in Highland Park, N.J., where he works part time at a Jewish community center. He declined to be interviewed in advance of the trial.
Princz is alive today only because an American armored corps advancing across southern Germany intercepted a train carrying slave laborers from the Messerschmitt airplane factory to the Alps on April 29, 1945 - a week before the Third Reich's surrender.
Evidence in the Nuremberg trials showed that the SS planned to exterminate tens of thousands like Princz in the Alps to prevent them from testifying.
U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Sporkin believes Princz deserves a pension.
"We're going to try the Holocaust here," Sporkin said in setting a trial to begin May 26. The judge called Germany's claim to immunity "outrageous" and commented that "American citizenship isn't worth the paper it's written on" if this case is dismissed.
"Where did you ever think of taking an American citizen and throwing him in a concentration camp?" Sporkin bristled at Heidenberger at a hearing in December. "This man was going to be killed. He was going to be butchered. He was going to be made into lampshades."
"And where they go do that to an American citizen . . . simply because he is Jewish, that American citizen has every right to seek vindication in the courts of his own land."
Princz's attorney, Steven Perles, said he is prepared to put Germany through a new Holocaust trial if that's what the judge wants.
"You can't describe what this man went through, staring at death day to day without showing how prisoners were housed at Auschwitz, the extermination facilities at Maidanek, where his family was killed," Perles said.
According to court documents undisputed by the German government, Princz, his parents, two brothers and sister became trapped in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. His father, an American, leased combines to farmers at harvest time.
Ninety days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they were arrested by the Slovak Fascist police as enemy aliens and turned over to the German SS. Instead of being swapped in a Red Cross-sponsored exchange of prisoners as were other American civilians, the family was taken to Maidanek.
"Presumably, he was put in because he was Jewish American," said Perles.
In Poland, the family was separated. Based on historical accounts of the Holocaust, Perles believes the SS concluded that Herman Princz, his wife and daughter would be of no use as slave laborers and executed them. Hugo and his brothers, however, were healthy, strong teen-agers.
A month after their arrest, Hugo, Arthur and Alex were taken to Auschwitz. There, Hugo was tattooed on his chest and left forearm - Prisoner No. 36 707 - and leased by the SS to one of Germany's largest industrial cartels, I.G. Farben, as a bricklayer.
I.G. Farben paid the government 4 marks a day for Princz's services as a skilled laborer in the construction of a chemical plant.
Arthur and Alex Princz also were leased to I.G. Farben. But they were injured and taken to a hospital where they were denied adequate food and water, Princz says in his suit. Housed and assigned to work near the hospital, he watched them starve.
Two years later, Princz was forced to march from Warsaw to Dachau to become a slave laborer at the Messerschmitt factory.
At Dachau, Princz was one of thousands of concrete workers assigned to repairing the underground aircraft factory after almost daily Allied bombing raids in the final days of the war.
Upon his release from a U.S. military hospital, Princz went back to Czechoslovakia seeking evidence that someone in his family might have survived. There was none. Their farm was still there, but it had been confiscated by the new communist government.
To get around Germany's claim of sovereign immunity, Princz alleges that his enslavement was a commercial enterprise exempt under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.
His suit notes that civilian directors of I.G. Farben and Messerschmitt were later tried and convicted at Nuremberg for slavery and mass murder.