George Gregory, 87; Won Justice From German Firm for Family

George Gregory, a retired chief executive who at 82 persuaded the president of a German multinational chemical corporation to right a wrong committed against Gregory’s Jewish factory-owner father by the Nazis, has died. He was 87.

Gregory died of natural causes Thursday at his Encino home, said his son, Gordon.

Gregory had been chairman and chief executive of Glendale-based Products Research & Chemical Corp., a leading specialty chemical company that made sealants, adhesives and coatings for aerospace use, marine projects and construction. It’s now part of PPG Industries.

After joining the company in 1948 as vice president and director of research, Gregory invented, among other things, a sealant resistant to jet fuel, which helped pave the way for modern jets. His achievements earned him several industry awards.

In 1999, a decade after retiring, Gregory launched what a Times article called “one of the most difficult, most personal missions of his life.”

In April of that year, he placed a call to Hans Kollmeier in Germany.

“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 Kollmeier, president of T.H. Goldschmidt AG.

Gregory said his father, Max Bergmann, had been forced to sell his factory for a fraction of its value to the company now headed by Kollmeier.

German companies have rarely acknowledged or accepted blame for their conduct under the Nazis.

But Gregory was trying to talk Kollmeier’s company into voluntarily reimbursing him for his family’s lost business: And he was doing it without the aid of Jewish agencies that were involved with reparation issues and without a lawsuit or even concrete proof to support his claim.

He was simply counting on “a sense of honor and fair play” between two men to right a wrong.

“I was taking a long shot I really wasn’t sure was going to work” by calling Kollmeier personally, Gregory told The Times. “But like anything else, you can’t get anywhere by speaking softly.”

Gregory’s father, who died in 1978, and a partner had developed an improved method for recovering tin and steel from scrap metal. In 1936, their booming business drew the attention of the Nazis, who were building their war machine.

Gregory, who worked in his father’s Hamburg factory as a teenager and changed his surname after fleeing Germany, recalled in the Times interview that a Nazi official visited the plant and insisted that the government had the right to take over its operation.

Shortly after the visit, an official from the rival Gold- schmidt company offered cash for the property, and the two partners accepted.

After listening to Gregory’s story, Kollmeier began looking into the matter and discovered that a 1997 history of his firm made no mention of the takeover of a Jewish-owned company.

But the 57-year-old Kollmeier was bothered by the thought that his company might have participated in anti-Semitic activity and covered up that part of its history. In further investigation, he found an old court file that confirmed most of the facts.

But as Kollmeier examined the documents, he came to believe that the firm’s conduct hadn’t been so bad. The approximately $50,000 it paid Bergmann and his partner appeared in line with the value of the factory at the time.

Further, by paying cash instead of transferring the money to a bank account, Goldschmidt had made it possible for Bergmann and his partner to smuggle the money out of the country.

Kollmeier also learned that the founders of Goldschmidt were Jews who converted to Christianity. That led him to speculate, as the Times article noted, that Goldschmidt’s owners had acted as honorably as they could in difficult times. Instead of cheating Gregory’s father, Kollmeier believed, they had treated him fairly.

Attorneys for the firm told Kollmeier that Gregory had no legal standing and that the statute of limitations on restitution claims expired long ago.

But after talking with top company officials -- Viag, Goldschmidt’s parent company, is one of the largest industrial conglomerates in Europe -- Kollmeier agreed to meet Gregory in Los Angeles during a business trip.

He told Gregory he believed Goldschmidt had behaved decently toward his father in 1936. But, he conceded, Bergmann would never have sold his successful factory without the Nazis’ pressure, and Goldschmidt would not have been able to buy the business if Bergmann hadn’t been Jewish.

For that -- and because the purchase altered the life of a man and his family -- Kollmeier felt a wrong should be set right.

Gregory accepted Kollmeier’s suggestion that Goldschmidt make a donation to a charity of Gregory’s choice. They settled on $260,000 to help build a gymnasium at the Jewish Federation’s Ferne Milken Youth & Sports Complex in West Hills.

But Gregory also insisted that Kollmeier write a letter to set the record straight for Gregory and his family.

“I felt a number of things,” Gregory told The Times after the gym’s dedication in December 1999. “Closure, as far as my dad is concerned. And for my grandchildren, a legacy: to understand the trials and tribulations we endured during the period of Hitler.”

Born in Moscow in 1917, Gregory moved with his family to the Latvian capital of Riga, where his parents were from. When he was 7, the family moved to Hamburg, where they lived until leaving Germany in 1936.

His parents went to England and he went to Belgium, where he attended the University of Brussels. He later joined his parents in England and attended Pitman’s Business College and the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.

After coming to the United States in 1940, he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UCLA and in 1946 paid for his family to join him.

In 1984, the Chemical Industry Assn. awarded him the Winthrop-Sears Medal for entrepreneurship in chemistry.

In 1990, he received the Glenn T. Seaborg Medal from UCLA for his contributions to chemistry and biochemistry.

In addition to Gordon, Gregory is survived by his wife of 57 years, Gerry; his son Glenn; and three grandchildren. A funeral will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles.