Defying Long Odds in a Quest for Justice

Given the extraordinary quest he was about to begin, George Gregory felt strangely relaxed as he punched the keypad of his telephone early one morning last April.

After a few rings, a voice crackled on the other end of the line. Gregory, a retired Encino chief executive with an athlete’s instincts and a businessman’s cunning, had decided to be blunt.

“This may come as a shock to you, but I’m sending you a letter about what your company did under Nazi Germany 63 years ago,” Gregory told the man who answered. Gregory explained that his father was a Jew who was forced to sell his factory for a fraction of its value. He wanted to talk.

On the phone, working late in his offices in a nearly deserted factory in western Germany, Hans Kollmeier sat stunned.

The president of a multinational chemicals corporation, Kollmeier was well aware that German companies had a dark history of profiting from Jews’ losses in the Holocaust. But his firm had never been accused of such wrongs.

He wanted to learn more, he told his caller, but had a dinner appointment. He asked Gregory to call back the next day.

In the study of his modest ranch-style home, Gregory felt satisfied. At 82, he was starting one of the most difficult, most personal missions of his life, one that legal experts and Jewish activists describe as rarely successful.

With few exceptions, German companies have traditionally avoided acknowledging or accepting blame for their conduct in World War II. Even now, Jewish agencies are negotiating with a group of German firms to pay compensation to those forced to work as slaves during the war.

But Gregory was going to try to persuade a German company to voluntarily reimburse him for the business his family had lost three-score years earlier.

He would try to do it without a lawsuit, without the help of the formidable Jewish groups devoted to reparation issues, without favorable legal standing, even without concrete proof of what had actually happened so long ago.

Instead, Gregory would rely on what, in today’s society, may seem the flimsiest of things.

In a world of lawsuits and legal contracts, he simply hoped that two men with a sense of honor and fair play could sit down, right a wrong and fashion some good from the horrors of a long-ago war.

Friends told him he had little chance of success. But Gregory was not a man to give up easily.

“I was taking a long shot I really wasn’t sure was going to work” by calling out of the blue, said Gregory, a broad man whose deliberate movements disguise a quick mind. “But like anything else, you can’t get anywhere by speaking softly.”

Firm Attracts Nazis’ Attention

In 1936, Gregory’s father, Max Bergmann, was just beginning to see his business soar.

He had started it with a partner only a few years earlier in Hamburg, developing an improved method for recovering tin and steel from metal scrap.

The company, involved in the production of metal so important to Adolf Hitler’s growing war machine, soon attracted the attention of Nazi functionaries.

Gregory, who changed his surname after he fled Germany, worked as a teenager in his father’s factory. He remembers a Nazi official coming to the plant, insisting that the government had the right to take over its operation.

Soon after that visit, an official from a rival company named Goldschmidt stopped by, offering first a land swap, then outright cash for the property.

“He liked what he saw, and said, ‘Here’s our price,’ ” Gregory said.

Gregory’s father and his partner agreed to sell their factory to a company tied to Goldschmidt for about $50,000, a substantial amount at the time--but, Gregory later came to feel, a fraction of its true value.

Shortly after getting his half of the money, Bergmann’s partner fled Germany for England. At the time, Nazi laws to stop currency flight barred anyone from leaving the country with more than $2.

Bergmann feared that, as the man’s partner, he would be arrested for violating those laws. So the next day, the family fled Germany in haste. Gregory went to Belgium, his parents to England. They left the lights on in their apartment so no one would know they had left.

Although he tried to make a new start in England, Bergmann was never able to match his German company’s promise.

Gregory immigrated to the United States in 1940 after a yearlong odyssey through several countries to obtain a visa, eventually settling in California. Shortly after his arrival he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UCLA, and in 1946 paid for his family to join him.

After working briefly as a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy, Gregory joined Products Research & Chemical Corp., based in Glendale. There, he invented the first sealant resistant to jet fuel, helping pave the way for modern jets. Gregory rose to head the multimillion-dollar company, winning several industry medals for his achievements.

Through the years, he and his father never spoke about what had happened to the family factory. His father, ever the optimist, preferred to look ahead. And the son, consumed with work and family, never pried.

“He never talked about it,” Gregory said.

It wasn’t until years after Max Bergmann’s death in 1978 that Gregory discovered how his father had tried but failed to seek his own measure of justice.

While rummaging through his study one day, Gregory came across a small, gray lockbox his father had left him. Inside, he found a faded court judgment from Germany, dated Jan. 10, 1964. Bergmann had sought restitution for losses stemming from the sale of his company, but the court denied the claim, granting only a pittance for the apartment furniture abandoned when the family fled.

To Gregory, the judgment was an insult. He inquired about reopening the case, but was told there was no hope. Still busy with his own company, Gregory folded the paper, putting it into the back of the box--and the back of his mind.

About five years later, in 1992, Gregory paid a visit to his parents’ homeland of Latvia. The journey, a trip into his past, was the final catalyst to ignite his desire for redress.

A cousin took him to a small grove of trees outside the capital of Riga. In the middle of the trees rose a low mound covered in grass. It was a mass grave for thousands of Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

The cousin waved his hand toward the mound.

“There,” he said, “is your family.”

It was a haunting moment for Gregory and his wife, Gerry.

“It was in the middle of summer. But it was like a cold wind was blowing,” said Gregory, who lost scores of relatives to the Holocaust.

Gregory returned to Los Angeles to make plans. Restitution was reemerging as an issue, with Swiss banks and Eastern European countries under fire for refusing to acknowledge and make reparations for their wartime anti-Semitic activities.

Through a friend, Gregory learned that Goldschmidt’s parent company, Viag, a $26-billion-a-year industrial conglomerate--one of the largest in Europe--was in delicate merger negotiations.

Now, he thought, was the time to take on Goliath.

Gregory got Kollmeier’s phone number through a former business associate in Europe. Then he picked up the phone and dialed. His strategy paid off when he heard the voice at the other end of the line.

“Kollmeier.”

The two began talking.

A German Seeks the Truth

After hearing Gregory’s story, Kollmeier, who speaks English fluently, decided to investigate.

By chance, Goldschmidt had hired a historian to produce a glossy, 191-page history in 1997 to mark the firm’s 150th anniversary. The tome made no mention of a takeover of a Jewish company.

Kollmeier immediately began to worry that past company officials had covered up a shameful chapter of the firm’s history.

At 57, Kollmeier belongs to a new generation of German business leaders, the first not directly connected to the war, who have shown more willingness to acknowledge the sins of the past.

The thought that his company may have participated in anti-Semitic hatred deeply bothered him. Still, he thought, the truth will out. (Separately, Goldschmidt was among 255 companies still doing business that were named this week by the American Jewish Committee as having used slave labor during the Nazi regime.)

“I was born during the war. I believe I know German history well enough,” Kollmeier said. “We, as a younger generation, have a strong awareness of the injustice and terrible behavior of our government at the time.”

Over the summer, Kollmeier and his advisors began investigating municipal archives. They examined their own files. And they corresponded with Gregory and an attorney he had hired in Germany, who constantly pushed the matter.

The investigation turned up a fading court file that confirmed most of the facts. But as Kollmeier examined the documents, he began to think that Goldschmidt had not behaved so badly after all.

For one thing, the price Goldschmidt had paid seemed to be roughly in line with the value of Max Bergmann’s factory, Kollmeier thought. Goldschmidt, in an unusual move, also paid for the factory in cash, instead of transferring the money to a bank account. Then, officials apparently tried to hide records of the sale.

That cash payment gave Bergmann and his partner the liquidity they needed to smuggle the money out of the country. It also got Goldschmidt in trouble with German officials, who later investigated the transaction.

And, finally, there was this: The founders of Goldschmidt were Jews who converted to Christianity.

As a result, Kollmeier began to develop his own theory about the German firm’s long-ago conduct.

He speculated that Goldschmidt officials were doing their best to behave honorably in the worst of times. Rather than cheat Gregory’s father, Kollmeier came to believe, Goldschmidt’s owners had treated him fairly.

In fact, it was possible that Goldschmidt, under pressure from the Nazis to buy the Jewish-owned company, had done all it could to aid Gregory’s father, even supplying him the means to escape Germany with a good deal of cash.

Company attorneys advised Kollmeier that the American who called from California had no legal standing, the statute of limitation on restitution claims having expired long ago.

Kollmeier had conversations with top company officials. Then he agreed to meet Gregory face to face.

Visit to L.A. Clears the Air

In September, Kollmeier took a flight from Atlanta, where he was attending a business conference, to Los Angeles for a brief visit.

Here, for the first time, he met Gregory. The two men made small talk as they drove to a suite that Gregory had rented at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport. Once in the hotel room, Kollmeier got right to the point.

As Kollmeier saw it, Goldschmidt had behaved decently toward Gregory’s father--except on one issue.

Clearly, Kollmeier said, Gregory’s father would never have sold the booming business except for Nazi pressure. And Goldschmidt would never have been able to acquire it but for Gregory’s father being Jewish.

Goldschmidt’s purchase had robbed a man of his dream. It had altered a life. It had changed a family. That, Kollmeier said, cried out for redress.

He suggested a donation to a charity of Gregory’s choice. Gregory agreed, with one final condition: Kollmeier would have to write a letter to set the record straight for Gregory, his children and grandchildren.

Kollmeier agreed, and the two settled on an amount that Gregory’s gut told him was meaningful: $260,000. The money would help finance a new gymnasium at the Jewish Federation’s Ferne Milken Youth & Sports Complex, set to formally open in the San Fernando Valley community of West Hills on Sunday.

The two men shook hands. A 63-year-old debt was laid to rest.

Several experts contacted by The Times described the transaction as extraordinary.

They said that while such one-on-one agreements have occurred since World War II, they are extremely rare. No one could recall an exact parallel, though in some cases museums have voluntarily returned stolen artwork.

“We really have to salute the action and tenacity of . . . Mr. Gregory. Maybe it’ll inspire others to do the same at both ends,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “Many other companies in similar settings involving others who live here in Los Angeles have taken a different approach” by stalling on restitution issues.

In the end, Kollmeier said the debt owed Gregory was obvious.

“We saw a moral obligation,” Kollmeier said. “From our side, it’s a gesture of reconciliation.”

As for his part, Gregory said he never doubted that he would be successful in his quest, which cost him $100,000 in fees for attorneys and researchers. After a lifetime, he has learned one lesson, he said.

“You have to envision what you want in the future,” he said. “Then you have to have the confidence to carry it out.”