5 Ex-Slave Laborers Sue German Firm

Five Holocaust survivors who were forced to build a factory for German airplanes during World War II on Friday filed the first lawsuit in California seeking compensation for their toil as slave laborers.

The suit, filed against Philipp Holzmann AG, a multibillion-dollar German construction company that does considerable business in the United States, including California, seeks compensation for the survivors’ unpaid services and for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The five survivors, along with the widow of another slave laborer, filed the case in Los Angeles Superior Court. The former laborers, now ages 68 to 85, allege that Holzmann violated California’s business and professions code by forcing them “to work as slave laborers in 14-hour shifts, seven days a week, under inhuman conditions, and . . . refusing to pay any compensation to those individuals or their heirs, for the value of their services, without justification for doing so.”

Holzmann officials could not be reached for comment.

The lawsuit was announced at a news conference where state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and Assemblyman Wally Knox (D-Los Angeles) also detailed proposed legislation that would make it easier for people forced to perform slave labor during World War II to sue the large corporations that benefited from their services.

The bill would grant victims of World War II slave labor and forced labor legal standing in California to sue companies that used such labor, grant state courts jurisdiction over such claims, and extend the statute of limitations for filing such lawsuits to December 2010.

Si Frumkin, chairman of the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews, said he and his family were forcibly taken from their home in Lithuania in 1944 when he was a teenager and eventually transported to the Dachau concentration camp. Frumkin, who now lives in Studio City, said he was forced to work for Holzmann constructing an aircraft hanger and manufacturing plant for the Nazis until he was liberated on April 27, 1945. He said his father, Nicholas Frumkin, was worked to death just 20 days before liberation.

“I was just 13,” said Frumkin, now 68. “I carried bags of cement. I unloaded brass. I carried metal rods for construction. This company owes me. They owe my father.”

Frumkin, like the other survivors named in the lawsuit, all came from the Lithuanian city of Kovno.

Several other survivors of German slave labor also spoke at the news conference, held at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in the Fairfax area.

Margaret M. Novak said she was forced to make timing devices for German bombs in a Siemens facility in Nuremberg, a center of German munitions manufacturing. Novak said she was 9 when she was imprisoned, lost dozens of relatives in the death camps and still suffers “all kinds of pain” from those horrors.

“California has a moral and public policy interest in assuring that its residents and citizens are given a reasonable opportunity to claim their entitlement to compensation for forced or slave labor performed prior to and during the Second World War,” Hayden said. “The issues of the Holocaust continue. It’s not over.”

Attorneys William M. Shernoff of Claremont and Lisa Stern of Los Angeles, who represent the survivors, said their efforts in court would be considerably more difficult if the proposed legislation does not pass.

Several major class action suits stemming from similar allegations have been filed in federal court in Newark, N.J., against several major German firms, including Volkswagen, BMW and Siemens, as well as U.S. firms such as General Motors and Ford whose subsidiaries operated in Germany during that era.

On Monday, a hearing will be held on Ford’s attempt to get one of those suits dismissed. One of the company’s primary contentions is that the statute of limitations expired years ago for the filing of such lawsuits.

Last year, Knox successfully sponsored similar legislation, which extends the time for filing lawsuits by individuals contending that insurance policies they bought from European companies during World War II have been improperly denied. The measure is now benefiting people with such cases, Shernoff said.

On Friday, Hayden gave a critical review of the performance thus far of an international commission that was created last year in an attempt to resolve the controversy over Holocaust-era insurance claims. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger was selected by California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush and other regulators to head the commission.

Hayden said he recently spoke to commission staff members in London and came away with the impression that they are moving slowly. Meanwhile, Holocaust survivors, many in their 80s, continue to die while their claims are unresolved.

Hayden called on Quackenbush to start enforcing a law that he authored last year that gives the Insurance Commission authority to revoke the licenses of companies or their subsidiaries who fail to honor valid Holocaust-era policies.

“The law is very clear,” Hayden said. “There are no exemptions. There are no excuses.”

Hayden’s move was endorsed by Knox as well as representatives of several Jewish organizations who met with the legislators before the news conference.

In response, attorney William W. Palmer, Quackenbush’s special deputy on Holocaust matters, said his boss agrees with Hayden “that the process seems to be going too slowly.”

“We definitely intend to revoke licenses of companies not complying,” with the new law, Palmer said. “I told Eagleburger two days ago in London that we would begin revoking some licenses,” Palmer said in a telephone interview.

Palmer said some of the companies soon would receive the equivalent of warning letters. Palmer also said he is attempting to persuade insurance regulators from other states to lobby for similar laws because “California should not bear the whole burden.”

Knox stressed Friday that the companies never would have favored the creation of an international commission without the pressure put on them through lawsuits and the California legislation.

“We are one of the few remaining forces that has the clout to bring about an honest solution,” Knox said, “but only if we hang tough.”