Interesting article in the New York Times today about German restitution payments worth millions of dollars that will be paid to a 73-year old woman who was raised on a chicken farm in New Jersey. It turns out that Barbara Principe's father owned the A. Wertheim department store chain in Germany, which was appropriated by the Nazi's:
Last month, Germany's restitution court, set up after World War II to provide restitution for property seized during the Nazi regime, validated the claim of the Wertheim heirs, Ms. Principe and about 24 others, to a number of properties owned by her father's department store chain. Those properties are now valued at about $350 million, making her family's restitution award one of the largest since the Holocaust.
A. Wertheim bought the properties in the 1920's and 30's largely in an attempt to block competitors from acquiring sites near its flagship store, near Leipziger Platz in central Berlin.
Acording to the Wikipedia article on the firm, Georg Wertheim transferred all of his assets to his non-Jewish wife Ursula, in an effort to hold on to his stores, but the Nazi court deemed his stores to be "rein jüdisch" (pure Jewish) in 1935. The Wertheim's were penniless when they made their way to the US, but after WWII they started the process to reclaim their lost property. That is where Kardstadt comes into the story:
The brothers were persuaded by a family adviser, Arthur Lindgens, that the business was worth almost nothing. Mr. Lindgens, who has since died, paid each brother $9,200 for the rights to all the Wertheim property.
Mr. Lindgens then merged Wertheim with another former Jewish-owned department store, Hertie. In 1994, KarstadtQuelle bought the merged company, and that purchase was the basis of Karstadt's claim to be the rightful owner of the former Wertheim holdings in East Germany.
Because of the sale of the property to Mr. Lindgens, the Wertheim brothers never pursued a claim to be compensated for property in West Berlin, which includes a large, fashionable store bearing the original Wertheim name, now owned by KarstadtQuelle, that is on the busiest and most valuable stretch of the Kurfürstendamm, the Fifth Avenue of West Berlin.
Karstadt fought the restitution to the Wertheim family in court, since it considered itself the rightful owner of the property. So now, the Wertheim family is claiming that it is owed a equity position in Karstadt, since the Wertheims were defrauded of their stock in in the department store chain. Karstadt could yet pay a price for its greed. Meanwhile, Karstadt's own role in the "aryanization" of German business in the 1930's is coming under scrutiny. I came across this letter dated April 1933 while looking into the case. Here a Karstadt manager is informing an employee that he is fired because he is Jewish:
The language in the penultimate paragraph is almost amusing, in a grotesque sort of way: Sie werden dieser Massnahme sicherlich Gerechtigkeit widerfahren lassen, wenn Sie sich in unsere Situation hineinversetzen. (loose translation: you would do the same, if you were in our shoes.)
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