Sigi Ziering; Tycoon Survived Nazi Camps

It must have been the “training” of the Holocaust, the self-described workaholic speculated to Fortune magazine a couple of years ago. “Unless you work,” he said, “you are destined for the gas chamber.”

And work he did--as a teenager relocated to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, then to Fuhlsbuttel prison near Hamburg, Germany, and on to a Kiel concentration camp. He survived the Nazis but never stopped working until about a year ago, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Sigi Ziering, who turned a chemist’s bright idea into Diagnostic Products Corp., one of Los Angeles’ most successful international high-tech companies, died Sunday. He was 72.

The German boy who became an American tycoon and worldwide Jewish leader and philanthropist died at his Los Angeles home surrounded by his family, said his son, Michael, now head of the publicly traded family business.

Created in the kitchen of chemist Robert Ban in 1971, DPC makes radioimmunoassay kits to diagnose diseases from tiny amounts of drugs and hormones in bodily fluids. In 1973, Ziering invested $50,000, moved DPC into its own small factory and soon bought out Ban for $25,000.

Ziering went on to build a multinational powerhouse, which, with about 1,700 employees, makes more than 400 immunodiagnostic tests and the instruments to read them and markets them to clinics, hospitals and laboratories around the world. Forbes magazine has repeatedly listed DPC, which went public in 1982, as one of the best small companies in the country.

The man who stepped down only last December as chief executive officer, although retaining the title of chairman, indulged himself a little. He did drive a Jaguar. But his license plate, reflecting his heritage and his past, read “K9HORA,” a phonetic rendering of the Yiddish expression kayn aynhoreh, meaning, “Ward off the evil eye.”

Ziering gave more freely to others than to himself. Through his company, he donated thyroid test kits after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, funding and kits for widespread neonatal testing programs and aid for worldwide disaster relief.

He was a major financial supporter of the University of Judaism, served on its board and wrote an autobiographical play rooted in the Holocaust, “The Judgment of Herbert Bierhoff,” performed there last year.

Ziering and his wife, Marilyn, earned the first Laureate of Distinction Award of the Friends of Tel Hashomer in 1991 for their support of the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel.

Locally, Ziering was president of Temple Beth Am in 1979-80.

Ziering’s name is engraved as one of 106 founders who donated at least $1 million to build the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Only a few of them had personal knowledge of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps.

Ziering was in the U.S. Capitol rotunda on May 8, 1997, when museum founders watched a parade of the flags of 32 U.S. Army divisions that had liberated those camps in 1945.

“Today I cried,” the resilient businessman said in a speech then, “because the worst memory of the ghetto and the camps was the feeling of total isolation and total abandonment by the rest of the world. This feeling of utter despair and hopelessness weighed more heavily on us than the constant hunger, the beatings and the imminent death facing us every minute.”

Born Siegfried Ziering on March 20, 1928, in Kassel, Germany, he was the son of clothing merchant Isacc Ziering, a Polish citizen. The father fled to England, expecting his family to follow. But young Ziering, then 11, along with his mother, Cilly, and 12-year-old brother, Herman, was trapped.

In 1941, the three were among 1,000 Jews transported to the ghetto in Riga. Fewer than 20--including all three Zierings--survived the Holocaust.

Toward the end of the war, the Zierings were moved to the Fuhlsbuttel prison. Every week, they watched Nazis load 10 or so Jews into a truck destined for Bergen-Belsen and the gas chambers. “With German precision,” Ziering told Fortune in 1998, “the guards went at their job alphabetically--and never got to Z.”

Later, the Zierings were marched to a Kiel concentration camp, where males were routinely murdered if they failed a physical test--running a mile carrying a heavy piece of wood. Ziering and his brother passed.

On May 1, 1945, dressed in clothing they were forced to strip from corpses in a mortuary, the brothers were taken by the Red Cross to Sweden. And finally, along with their mother, the boys joined their father in London.

In 1949, the family immigrated to New York City, where Sigi earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Brooklyn College. He later earned his master’s and doctoral degrees at Syracuse University.

He worked on nuclear reactors with Raytheon in Boston, and then space projects at Allied Research. In 1961, he helped found and became president of Space Sciences, fulfilling government contracts.

Seven years later, Whittaker Corp. bought Space Sciences for $1.8 million, and sent Ziering to California as a research executive.

Restless, he left the conglomerate and tried unsuccessfully to establish a company to make fish meal. In 1973, he found Ban, DPC, his future and the fortune he enjoyed sharing.

Ziering is survived by his wife and longtime business partner, Marilyn; two sons, Michael and Ira; two daughters, Rosanne and Amy; his mother; his brother; and seven grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for 11 a.m. Wednesday at Temple Beth Am.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be sent to that temple, to the University of Judaism or to the UCLA Brain Center of the Jonsson Cancer Foundation.