Hugo Princz

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Hugo Princz (1992)

Hugo Princz (born on November 22, 1922 in Slivník , Czechoslovakia ; died on July 29, 2001 in Highland Park , New Jersey ), as an American citizen of Jewish origin , was at the mercy of Nazi violence in Auschwitz, among other places , and had to do forced labor . He survived the Holocaust and fought for decades for compensation that German authorities always refused. It was not until 1995, when his lawsuits against Germany and large German companies found support in American politics, that Germany and the defendant companies agreed to a payment.

Origin and youth

Hugo Princz was born in 1922 in Slivník in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia to the married couple Herman and Gisela Princz. Herman Princz emigrated to the United States in 1890 , had been an American citizen since the turn of the century and returned to his homeland in 1905. There he owned two village shops , farmland and forest used for forestry . He and his wife had eight children. Hugo Princz attended the local public school, and he also received private lessons in Hebrew . Like all his siblings, he helped in his parents' businesses. The family was considered to be well-off and integrated in their local environment.

Situation in the Slovak state

From 1939, after the establishment of the pro-German Slovak state under the leadership of Jozef Tiso and the anti-democratic- clerical - fascist Hlinka party , the Princz family was affected by the new laws on discrimination and disenfranchisement of Jews . Non-Jewish neighbors took advantage of the situation and took over parts of their parents' businesses.

Hugo Princz was arrested with one of his brothers and interned for several weeks. They were alleged to have been involved in a murder. The police only suspected Jews and took one person hostage from every Jewish family in the town . The suspicion of murder was not confirmed and all Jews were released.

Against this background, Herman Princz tried to arrange for himself and his family to move to the United States. The loss of his American identity papers was a hindrance here. They had not been reissued by the Austro-Hungarian military authorities at the beginning of the First World War when they wanted to draft him into military service , but Princz was able to use these documents to prove that he was an American citizen.

In order to organize the move, Herman Princz asked the American embassy in Prague to issue a passport . The American mission did not comply with this request, although he testified of his American citizenship in Budapest , where the American embassy had meanwhile been moved. The embassy made the issue of the passport subject to the requirement to present tickets for a ship passage to the USA in advance. Because of this, efforts to leave the country failed.

In March 1942, after the United States entered World War II and Germany declared war on the United States , several dozen local supporters of the Hlinka movement, led by a Slovak policeman, surrounded the family's house and thus initiated their deportation to the General Government . The parents, Hugo Princz, two of his brothers and a sister were affected. This deportation was part of Aktion David , which was carried out between March 25 and October 20, 1942 and affected more than 57,000 Jews residing in Slovakia.

Camp detention and forced labor

Concentration Camp Prisoners During Road Construction Work in the IG Farben Buna Works in Auschwitz (1941)

The deportation train passed via Lublin . Hugo Princz and his brothers were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp there . His parents and sister were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp .

The Princz brothers were taken to Auschwitz from Majdanek. One of the first activities for Hugo Princz (prisoner number 36707) in Auschwitz-Birkenau consisted in the removal of the corpses of those who were starved or slain. This was followed by several months of training as a bricklayer , the background being extensive forced labor projects in preparation for the so-called Ostsiedlung . After this program was broken off, Princz, like one of his brothers, had to do forced labor in the IG Farben Buna works in Auschwitz-Monowitz . Here he worked in the construction of roads, barracks and buildings and served in a cleaning crew.

Another stop on his prisoner odyssey was the Warsaw Ghetto . Here he was used for clean-up work and as a "post tower cleaner". A death march took him to the forest camp near Mühldorf am Inn , a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp . He was one of the forced laborers who built an armaments factory for Messerschmitt ( Weingut I ). When American troops approached shortly before the end of the war , the camp was evacuated . In Poing he witnessed the massacre of fellow prisoners on April 27, 1945 , before being liberated by American soldiers on May 1, 1945.

Moved to the USA

After a very short stay in the Feldafing DP camp , with the help of American troops, he set off for his Slovak homeland. People he knew personally who had directly participated in the deportation of Jews on site were still in their offices. Princz gradually became certain that none of his family members had survived the Holocaust. In 1946 he moved to the USA. From 1949 he lived in New Jersey.

There he married in 1956 and had two daughters and a son with his wife. After working as a butcher in a supermarket , he bought and managed it. Princz died in 2001 as a result of cancer.

Fight for compensation

From the United States, Hugo Princz tried to get compensation for the injustice that had been done against him. He applied for “reparation” under the Federal Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution (BEG). In November 1955 this application was rejected. He did not live within the German borders of 1937 , nor was he a refugee in the sense of the Geneva Convention . American politicians like Edward J. Patten and Bill Bradley , both representatives of Princz's new home, New Jersey, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate , respectively , could do nothing on this matter. The involvement of lawyers was initially unsuccessful. Lawyer Steven Perles took over the case in the mid-1980s.

The legal dispute only gained momentum when the framework conditions around the world had changed significantly: After the end of the East-West conflict at the end of the 1980s and German reunification in 1990, Germany was confronted, primarily from Eastern Europe, with claims for compensation for forced labor, which led to global agreements with states from East and East Central Europe . The globalization of the business of large German companies made them increasingly dependent on their image , also and especially in the United States.

In 1992 Perles sued Germany for payment of USD 17 million on behalf of his client . The public was largely behind the plaintiff. In July 1994, the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit, citing state immunity . In January 1995 the Supreme Court refused to deal with this decision.

With the help of his lawyers, Princz then sued the companies Daimler-Benz as legal successors of Messerschmitt and BASF , Bayer and Hoechst as legal successors of IG Farben. At the same time, they sought help in the US Congress to make such cases negotiable in the United States in the future. Daimler-Benz initially thought that it could legally defend itself against this claim by pointing out that it was not responsible - forced laborers had been assigned by the state, they were not the direct legal successor of Messerschmitt, Princz did not have to do forced labor directly for Messerschmitt, but for someone who worked for the armaments company Construction company. However, under public pressure, the group gave in just like the three chemical companies. The lawyers of the parties to the dispute agreed on a settlement. Princz withdrew his lawsuit, in exchange the companies paid $ 800,000. This sum, declared by the companies as a donation , was not paid directly to Princz, but transferred through the American Jewish Committee .

Because US President Bill Clinton also spoke with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Warren Christopher with his German colleague Klaus Kinkel about the Princz lawsuit, the German government agreed in September 1995 to conclude a global agreement with the United States. It had a volume of 3.1 million DM . This one-time payment was intended for Princz and 10 other persons known by name who were US citizens at the time of their persecution and who had been doing forced labor in concentration camps.

In particular, the agreement with the companies generated broad media coverage, among other things because the sums paid were significantly higher than those for former forced laborers from Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. With a little request that asked PDS - parliamentary group in November 1995 specifically to provide information about why Hugo Princz was "granted compensation amounting to millions" when "Polish forced laborers denied an individual indemnity" will. In its response, the federal government did not specifically address this question, indicating that the distribution of the funds made available was at the discretion of the US government. A second global agreement followed in 1999 between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States, with the help of which another 240 American citizens who had been imprisoned in concentration camps were compensated with around 100,000 dollars each. This agreement is sometimes called the Princz II Agreement.

Going beyond the individual case, the Princz case is one of the factors that contributed to the establishment of the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” foundation in 2000 . “The fact that this fund was still in existence so long after the end of the Second World War was primarily due to the concern of the German government and German companies about the possible effects of claims for damages by former forced laborers in the USA.” Proceedings before US Courts - by the time the foundation initiative was announced on February 16, 1999, the number of ongoing class action lawsuits against German companies had risen to 31 - German companies feared that they would have to reckon with lawsuits worth millions in the future.

Contemporary witness and archive material

On February 17, 1987, Bernard Weinstein conducted an interview with Princz for the Kean College of New Jersey Holocaust Resource Center . The approximately one and a half hour conversation was recorded on video. In 1995 the record became the property of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Today it is available in digitized form on its website. The museum's holdings also contain the documents of Hugo Princz from his trial against the Federal Republic of Germany.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 22, 2018 ( information from the United States Holocaust Memorial on the interview with Princz).
  2. ^ A b c Douglas Martin: Hugo Princz, 78, US Winner Of Holocaust Settlement, Dies. In: The New York Times. July 31, 2001, accessed October 22, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Cynthia Sanz: Blood Debt. In: People . May 15, 1995, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Statements on origin and youth based on: Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed on October 22, 2018 (English, interview statements by Princz).
  5. ^ Statement at the time of the acquisition of the American citizenship according to Hugo Princz, see Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 22, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Henning Borggräfe: compensation for forced laborers. From the dispute over "forgotten victims" to self-reconciliation among Germans . Wallstein. Göttingen 2014, p. 239, ISBN 978-3-8353-1413-9 .
  7. ↑ Sebastian Brünger: History and Profit. How German corporations deal with their Nazi past . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, p. 329, ISBN 978-3-8353-3010-8 .
  8. ↑ Information on the situation of the Prinz family in the Slovak regime after 1939 (property, internment, relocation efforts) according to Hugo Princz. See Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  9. ↑ On the development of discrimination and persecution of Jews in the Slovak state, see Wolf Oschlies : The Slovak Jews in World War II. In: The future needs memories . January 15, 2007, Retrieved February 4, 2019 (article updated August 20, 2018).
  10. ^ A b Norimitsu Onishi: German Government Expected to Compensate Holocaust Survivor. In: The New York Times. September 19, 1995, accessed October 24, 2018 .
  11. ↑ a b c d Endless punishment . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1995, pp. 162-163 ( online ).
  12. ↑ Wolf Oschlies: Aktion David - 65 years ago 60,000 Jews were deported from Slovakia. In: The future needs memories. April 12, 2007, Retrieved October 24, 2018 (article updated August 20, 2018).
  13. ↑ statements after Hugo Princz, see Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  14. ↑ a b c d Ulrich Schiller: Without grace. In: The time . February 24, 1995. Retrieved October 24, 2018 .
  15. ↑ See Jan Erik Schulte : “… in the course of the final solution, the Jews ... are to be put to work” - The Wannsee Conference in the context of SS workforce planning and genocide 1941/42 (lecture on January 20, 2003, in-house the Wannsee Conference) . Published on the memorial website , accessed on October 23, 2018.
  16. ↑ For this complex see Fritz Bauer Institute : Material folder. The Buna-Monowitz concentration camp. Reader to prepare for the exhibition of the Fritz Bauer Institute: IG Farben and the Buna-Monowitz Concentration Camp Economics and Politics under National Socialism . Published on fritz-bauer-institut.de . Accessed October 23, 2018.
  17. ↑ See Michael Haas: Commemoration of the victims of the "death train". In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . April 28, 2015, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Hugo Princz's statement, see Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Associated Press : Hugo Princz; Won Nazi Reparations. In: Los Angeles Times . July 31, 2001, archived from the original on October 22, 2015 ; accessed on February 4, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Jakub Krumrey: The Immunity of the United Nations: Responsibility for Peace Missions , (= Jus Internationale et Europaeum 139), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-16-155863-4 , p. 136
  21. ↑ a b Princz's statement, see Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 23, 2018 .
  22. ^ A b c Nora Frenkiel: The last Holocaust victim. In: The Washington Post . May 18, 1993, accessed October 24, 2018 .
  23. ^ Notes on Perles' biography on the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs website at Harvard Kennedy School , accessed October 24, 2018.
  24. ^ Hans Günter Hockerts : Reparation in Germany 1945–1990. An overview. In: From Politics and Contemporary History . June 7, 2013, accessed October 24, 2018 .
  25. ↑ Sebastian Brünger: History and Profit. How German corporations deal with their Nazi past . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, pp. 327–329, ISBN 978-3-8353-3010-8 .
  26. ^ Philipp Stammler: The claim of war victims for damages. A presentation of the principles of international law as well as the practice of international organizations and various states for the recognition of individual claims for reparation in the event of violations of humanitarian international law ( Writings on International Law, Volume 189 ). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2009, p. 121. ISBN 978-3-428-13047-4 .
  27. ↑ On the Princz case see also Ulrich Adamheit: "Now the German economy is caught up with its history". The discussion about the compensation of former forced laborers at the end of the 20th century . BWV, Berlin 2004, pp. 268-271. ISBN 3-8305-0858-1 .
  28. ↑ a b Henning Borggräfe: forced compensation. From the dispute over "forgotten victims" to self-reconciliation among Germans . Wallstein. Göttingen 2014, p. 240.
  29. ↑ Sebastian Brünger: History and Profit. How German corporations deal with their Nazi past . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, p. 330, ISBN 978-3-8353-3010-8 .
  30. ↑ a b c Sebastian Brünger: History and Profit. How German corporations deal with their Nazi past . Wallstein, Göttingen 2017, p. 330 f, ISBN 978-3-8353-3010-8 .
  31. ↑ Kohl stripped from the hem of history. Conversation with Clinton about a Nazi victim . In: Die Tageszeitung , February 1, 1994.
  32. ↑ Ulrich Adamheit: "Now the German economy is caught up with its history". The discussion about the compensation of former forced laborers at the end of the 20th century . BWV, Berlin 2004, p. 270. ISBN 3-8305-0858-1 .
  33. ↑ Evidence in the Genios press database, query on October 24, 2018.
  34. ↑ See: NS reparation: "The open wound" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1997, pp. 36-43 ( online ).
  35. ↑ Small question from the MPs Dr. Winfried Wolf, Ulla Jelpke and the PDS group of November 10, 1995, German Bundestag, 13th electoral period , printed matter 13/3019. Accessed October 24, 2018.
  36. ↑ See also Ulrich Adamheit: "Now the German economy is overtaken by its history". The discussion about the compensation of former forced laborers at the end of the 20th century . BWV, Berlin 2004, p. 294 f. ISBN 3-8305-0858-1 .
  37. ^ See German Bundestag, 13th electoral term. Printed matter 13/3190. Answer of the Federal Government to the small question of the MPs Dr. Winfried Wolf, Ulla Jelpke and the PDS group (printed matter 13/3019 - compensation payment to the US citizen and concentration camp survivor Mr. Hugo Princz by the Federal Republic of Germany) . The answer is dated December 4, 1995. (Accessed February 1, 2019).
  38. ^ Philip Shenon: Germany to Compensate 240 American Survivors of Nazi Camps. In: The New York Times. January 16, 1999, accessed November 7, 2018 .
  39. ↑ Constantin Goschler : The Federal Republic and the Compensation of Foreigners since 1966 . In: Hans Günter Hockerts , Claudia Moisel, Tobias Winstel: Limits of reparation. Compensation for victims of Nazi persecution in Western and Eastern Europe 1945–2000 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, pp. 94–146, here p. 124 , ISBN 3-8353-0005-9 .
  40. ↑ Henning Borggräfe: compensation for forced laborers. From the dispute over "forgotten victims" to self-reconciliation among Germans . Wallstein. Göttingen 2014, p. 355, ISBN 978-3-8353-1413-9 .
  41. ↑ Henning Borggräfe: compensation for forced laborers. From the dispute over "forgotten victims" to self-reconciliation among Germans . Wallstein. Göttingen 2014, p. 263, ISBN 978-3-8353-1413-9 .
  42. ^ Philipp Stammler: The claim of war victims for damages. A presentation of the principles of international law as well as the practice of international organizations and various states for the recognition of individual claims for reparation in the event of violations of humanitarian international law ( Writings on International Law, Volume 189 ). Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2009, p. 322 (there also the quote). ISBN 978-3-428-13047-4 .
  43. ↑ Henning Borggräfe: compensation for forced laborers. From the dispute over "forgotten victims" to self-reconciliation among Germans . Wallstein. Göttingen 2014, p. 288, ISBN 978-3-8353-1413-9 .
  44. ^ Oral history interview with Hugo Princz. In: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. February 17, 1987, accessed October 22, 2018 .
  45. ↑ Hugo Princz restitution case files. In: collections.ushmm.org. Retrieved October 24, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Princz, Hugo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Slivník
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 2001
Place of death Highland Park, New Jersey
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 11, 2019 in this version .