Heirs of German Retailer Fighting for Restitution

Barbara Principe has this memory: She is 5 or 6 years old, playing catch across a fence with Nazi soldiers who had seized her grandparents’ home, near Berlin.

Dim and distant, it keeps coming back to her now as she discusses her battle with a German retailing conglomerate that controls most of the assets of the former Wertheim Corp. department store chain founded by her ancestors.

When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, Principe’s father and other Wertheim family members were forced to surrender their shares in the prosperous retail empire for little or no compensation.

Her father, Gunther Wertheim, fled Germany and settled in America, where he was forced to eke out a new life as a chicken farmer in rural southern New Jersey.

“It makes me angry. There’s no other way to put it,” said Principe, a 69-year-old great-grandmother. “My family built this up and it was torn down and taken away. One minute my father was on top of the world, a millionaire. The next he was on a chicken farm, trying to figure out what to do with a chicken besides cook it.”

What happened in between forms the basis for what is believed to be the largest outstanding war-related restitution claim in German history.

The case pits Principe and her nephew Martin Wortham Jr. of Chicago--his family name was Americanized--against the Wertheim company’s corporate successor, KarstadtQuelle, and the estate of Arthur Lindgens, a former Wertheim executive.

The Wertheim family once held a chain of six department stores--including one near Berlin’s recently restored Potsdamer Platz--and owned other valuable downtown Berlin real estate.

It lost the business under anti-Semitic “Aryanization” regulations introduced by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, which banned Jews from owning or operating businesses.

Georg Wertheim, then chairman of the company, and others transferred their ownership stakes to his Gentile wife, Ursula.

But two years after Georg’s death in 1939, Ursula married Lindgens, who had been the Wertheim company’s chief lawyer. He operated Wertheim through World War II and into the late 1940s.

Meanwhile, Principe’s father, Gunther Wertheim, and his brother Fritz--who had fled Germany and ended up in America--began seeking the shares they had lost through Aryanization.

They filed petitions in a West German court in 1950 seeking reparation.

Arthur Lindgens asserted that the shares were worthless because of damage incurred during the war and the Communist takeover of East Germany, where some of the Wertheim properties were.

Not anymore: One of the disputed Berlin parcels formerly owned by Wertheim was sold two years ago by KarstadtQuelle for $150 million. A Ritz Hotel is being built on the site.

Lindgens traveled to New York in 1951 and paid the brothers $9,200 each to drop their claims. They accepted the money, believing their shares were worthless. That, apparently, was the end of it.

For more than 40 years, the Wertheim heirs believed their fortune to have been a victim of history. Principe grew up knowing nothing about the deals. Her father never talked about the past, she said.

One of two children of Gunther Wertheim, she remembers growing up in a household centered on farming, with little time for levity.

Bitter over what he had lost, Wertheim battled colitis until his death in 1954.

“There was a lot of work but not a lot of laughter. Mostly we worked--my father, my mother, my brother and me,” she said.

Principe eventually married, reared seven children and now lives with two dogs in a modest one-story home cluttered with family photos and country knickknacks.

Her restitution case was borne out of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany.

Former Wertheim retailing rival Hertie Warenhaus und Kaufhaus petitioned the Berlin Restitution Authority for permission to take control of former Wertheim property--including some in East Germany--that it said it owned.

The New York-based Jewish Claims Conference intervened on behalf of Wertheim heirs, even though it had made no contact with them. Eventually, the Restitution Authority rejected Hertie’s claim.

The Wertheim heirs’ case, meanwhile, picked up more steam last year when lawyer Gary Osen found what he calls “the smoking gun” in the files of the Restitution Authority.

On Aug. 12, 1951, in New York, Hertie’s chief operating officer, Georg Karg, entered into a “secret sales agreement” with Arthur Lindgens and Ursula Lindgens to buy outstanding Wertheim Corp. shares controlled by the Lindgens.

The handwritten document of the sale outlines the details of the proposed merger of Hertie and Wertheim but omits key information about Wertheim’s ownership. It says Arthur Lindgens’ group, with 50.1% of the stock, would head the new company and that Hertie would acquire the other 49.9%.

It does not mention the names of the shareholders who were selling or the price they were to receive, and it contained none of their signatures, according to Osen.

Equally telling, the document spells out the compensation that shareholders who weren’t selling to Hertie would receive, which was more than four times what Gunther and Fritz received for their shares.

“This was a semi-clandestine agreement to transfer hot merchandise--shares they knew to be subject to legal impediment,” Osen said.

“So my clients’ father and grandfather went to his grave believing the company was in ruins and that he had received a proper settlement, not knowing any of these other details, which were impossible to know at the time.”

Principe and her 43-year-old nephew filed a civil suit in federal court in New York last year asserting that the 1951 deal was a fraud from which Hertie, and later KarstadtQuelle, which acquired it in 1993, continued to benefit.

KarstadtQuelle officials have called the suit groundless.

A lawyer defending the company said the Wertheim heirs should pursue their claims through the Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, which was set up by Germany to repay people forced into slave labor by the Third Reich.

“As far as Karstadt’s position in court, we’d rather say it in court and have you report it then,” said attorney Roger Witten.

In addition to their financial worth, some of Wertheim’s former holdings have historical significance.

Among them is the site of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi equivalent of the White House, with its underground bunkers and Nazi party headquarters.

Osen, Principe and her daughter Terri traveled to Berlin last year to see the remaining Wertheim stores and visit the sites now at issue.

“I saw department stores the size of Macy’s, with our name on them!” Principe said. “I was flabbergasted. I had no knowledge of these things.”

Wortham says the case is simple.

“It boils down to right versus wrong,” he said.

“It’s about accountability and the recognition of responsibility of the past. My grandfather’s stores were part of history.

“It’s important that the wrongs be righted, that the individuals and corporations that still profit from the deception that was perpetrated be corrected.

“It’s been going on for a long time and it’s going on today. That’s not right.”