Millionheiress
At 73, Barbara Principe Comes From Old Money -- Which Was News to Her

By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 2, 2006

NEWFIELD, N.J.

When the phone rang that day, everything Barbara Principe thought she knew about her family changed in an instant. The daughter of a chicken farmer, she was a wife and mother who, when her kids were young, had worked the second shift at a box factory to make ends meet.

Then the lawyer on the other end of the phone launched into a fantastic tale; one of purloined wealth, Nazi savagery, a treasure hunt through dusty Communist archives and Berlin's vanished Jewish past. It was her story, the lawyer said. And her father's.

Sitting for an interview in her family room, Principe, 73, is open and friendly, the everymom in flats, khakis and a sweater with embroidered flowers. Her voice has the barest hint of a German accent.

She lives in the small red house where she and her husband raised their seven children in Newfield, a one-stoplight town cut through by railroad tracks in South Jersey farm country.

A small black-and-white picture of her father, Gunther Wortham, sits over her chair. He died 12 years after his arrival in America in 1941, from a heart condition aggravated by stress. She knew him as a man in dirty overalls, prematurely gray and worn by work and pressure, suffering from gout and other maladies.

Just a farmer, in other words.

The truth, she would learn, was that he had once lived a very different kind of life.

* * *

For many years after World War II, the nearby town of Vineland, N.J., was a destination for Holocaust survivors seeking new lives. Since it was founded as a Jewish farming colony in the 1880s, little synagogues with Stars of David cropped up amid the flat land and scrub pines; those that remain stand as a weathered testament to this area's historic past.

Principe knew little of this as she grew up in the rickety farmhouse where she and her brother toted 100-pound feed bags and broke the ice in the water troughs on cold winter mornings so the chickens could drink.

Her father worked seven days a week, struggling to master a trade that he knew nothing about. He struggled to care for the 5,000 chickens on the property, whose eggs yielded precious little cash. He had to quiz his neighbors when he wanted to plant corn. Evenings, he would collapse in a chair in the kitchen, rubbing his aching knees.

Principe's mother, Frieda, kept house and cleaned and graded dozens of eggs daily in their dank basement.

On Sundays, Principe and her little brother walked to the little white Methodist church up the road, with Bible school in the choir loft. The only war deprivation she remembers is the sight of her mother mixing yellow gelatin in margarine to make it look like butter.

"We went to school, we made friends," recalls Principe, who was 8 when her family came to the United States. "I came home from school, turned on the radio and listened to 'The Shadow.' This was what we did. It was a perfectly normal life. You played with friends, rode bikes, went swimming in the lake."

Her parents had anglicized their name from Wertheim to Wortham when they arrived and were for the most part tight-lipped about the past.

Now Barbara Principe sees greater significance in the clues that her parents let slip occasionally, snippets that floated past as gently as milkweed. Gunther Wortham once spoke vaguely about a yacht he owned and made a passing reference to his parents' monthly income of thousands of Deutsch marks. Her mother rarely mentioned her former life in Berlin.

Barbara Principe sits at the kitchen table along with her husband, Dominick, 72, a retired button-factory owner. She pulls out of a shoebox a yellowed photograph of her father in earlier days, before the war, before his fortunes turned. He is smiling in one photo, wearing a leather jacket and sash made of laurel leaves. He is surrounded by friends, after a motorcycle race, being congratulated for his victory. He never looked that happy on the farm.

"He was a tough man to get along with," says Dominick Principe. "He was not easy to talk to. If you told him it was going to rain tomorrow, he'd want to know what the high pressure and what the low pressure was. I was a 17-year-old kid, what did I know about barometric pressure?

"I was a working man," Principe continues. "Maybe he didn't think I was good enough for his daughter, I don't know."

His voice trails away.

"That's not true!" his wife says stoutly.

But before her death, Frieda Wortham would break out of her shell to leave one important clue for her daughter that would begin to reveal the family's hidden story. She told Barbara Principe about a hunting lodge she and Gunther had owned on land that was later shuttered behind the Iron Curtain.

After her mother's death in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall came down, Principe decided to push a reparations claim her mother made with the German government. In 1999, she received a tidy settlement of about $70,000 for the hunting lodge -- still standing in a copse of woods about an hour from Berlin.

She thought that was the end of it. As it happened, it was only the beginning.

A Prosperous Past

A few months later, her attorney, a young New Jersey lawyer named Gary M. Osen, learned that some dusty World War II-era files had been reopened by the German government, which was trying to settle remaining compensation claims from the Nazi era. Perhaps there would be something in them relating to Principe's family, he thought.

What he found, Osen says, were papers showing that the primary shares in one of the most prominent department stores in Berlin had once belonged to Principe's paternal grandfather and great-uncles. The family had owned acres and acres of valuable property that is now in the center of bustling reunified Berlin.

Barbara Principe was one of the main surviving heirs. She could be worth millions.

"It's very difficult to explain exactly how one feels about something like this," Principe says, recalling the day Osen told her. "It is an emotional thing that is hard to describe. You are just overtaken by all these things you never knew existed. All those properties!"

She had known that relatives had once owned a store in Berlin, and her memory held a glittery flash of a visit there one Christmas. But she had no sense of the scope of the business, or that her close family had been involved.

Germans of a certain age remember the Wertheim department store with a sense of wonderment, says Simone Ladwig-Winters, who researched the family as a student and eventually co-wrote a book about the Wertheims in 2004.

Before the war, the Wertheim flagship store in downtown Berlin was one of the largest department stores in Europe, covering almost an entire city block.

Inside, there was an enormous hall of green and gray marble crammed with every imaginable kind of goods -- from ripe goat cheese to sheet music. The walls were covered in murals of children's fables. The ceiling was strung with ropes of chandelier crystals. There was a tearoom and a sitting room trimmed in onyx. Presiding over all in the main hall was an enormous bronze statue of a woman that locals nicknamed "Mrs. Wertheim."

"They were very democratic. They didn't only appeal to the upper classes. They also appealed to the lower classes," Ladwig-Winters says. "Even the dressmaking girl who couldn't afford a fur could afford a tiny flower to put in her hair."

Principe's grandfather and great-uncles had converted to Christianity long before, in 1905, but the Wertheim family's Jewish roots were well-known in Berlin.

When Adolf Hitler began his campaign against Jews during the 1930s, one of his first targets were the major department stores seen as a "symbol of Jewish domination of the German economy," according to David J. Sorkin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Wertheim's was at the top of the list.

Unscrupulous businessmen with Nazi ties pressured Principe's great-uncle Georg, the head of the store, to give the majority of the company shares to his much-younger wife, Ursula, who was not Jewish.

The Nazis seized some of the Wertheim land for themselves, including a city block where Hitler later built the imposing Reich Chancellery, the seat of Nazi government. Hermann Goering, one of Hitler's top lieutenants, intervened to force the store to change its name so it would be "completely Aryanized."

"Please inform the company that I consider the change of the name necessary," Goering said, according to a transcript Ladwig-Winters found in an archive opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In one of Principe's earliest memories, she is 6. She lives in Germany. She plays ball over the fence with some soldiers. She and her brother throw the ball, laugh. The soldiers catch the ball, laugh, throw it back.

She later realizes, while visiting Berlin on a trip arranged by Osen, that they were Nazi soldiers, and that the palatial estate next door to where they stood guard had belonged to her grandparents.

Principe's father and mother fled with the children in the middle of the night in early 1939, after her father had been picked up and held by the Gestapo for three terrifying days.

She remembers nothing of that dark leave-taking from her home, or the overnight voyage on a freighter to Holland. She has a misty child's memory of that new land, marveling at the strange people who ate rolled herring from carts on the street like ice cream.

Letters found later in Frieda Wortham's home show that Gunther grew increasingly desperate as he tried to find ways to get his family out of Europe, begging relatives for help getting to his frozen assets.

"I am so strapped I can barely pay the hotel bill," he wrote in a Jan. 24, 1939 letter to an aunt. "Act quick because otherwise, my Cuba project is in danger."

The family made it to Cuba, where they lived for two years. Gunther Wortham finally got his family to the United States in 1941, landing first in New York.

There were other letters in that dusty box discovered in Frieda Wortham's attic, correspondence emblazoned with swastikas.

Among them is a letter that answers how the family ended up chicken farming in Elmer, N.J.

Gunther's attorney, Alfred Traube, wrote to him in Cuba in 1940, saying, "What you heard about the struggle of life in U.S. is not quite wrong but a little exaggerated. . . . With your name it may even be possible for you to try work in your old line, the department store business. . . . Of course, it will be very difficult. On the other side, I heard that a number of refugees made good experiences with farming near this city, in Connecticut, New Jersey or upstate New York. The capital need is not too big, one told me that 2 or 3000 $ are sufficient to run a poultry or vegetables farm yielding enough to make a modest living."

Cracks in the Wall

Osen's discoveries propelled Principe and other Wertheim heirs, including her nephew, into a quest to seek reparations for her family's losses. For the last six years, Osen has battled on their behalf with one of Germany's largest retailers, KarstadtQuelle. That company acquired the remnants of the Wertheim department store chain years ago and has fought hard to keep the former Wertheim property tied up for years behind the Berlin Wall.

At stake are about 20 acres, estimated to be worth $250 million, that sit in the middle of gleaming, downtown Berlin. Their historic value is incalculable, experts say. One of the parcels was once the entrance to Hitler's infamous bunker, where he holed up in the last days of the war. Today, it is a parking lot. The German parliament built its new library over another parcel.

The Wertheim heirs won a major victory in December when Karstadt withdrew its claim to much of the land in downtown Berlin, paving the way for the Jewish Claims Conference in New York to recover more than $60 million from the German government on behalf of the Wertheim heirs. Of that, she will receive more than $5 million. Two other Wertheim cases, in Germany and New Jersey, have yet to be resolved. Principe and her family could ultimately receive more than $10 million.

Sharing the Wealth

"It's not going to change who I am," says Principe.

In her mind, she is still the same old Barbara, but the discoveries of recent years have caused her to think about her heritage. She has been asked by a German news reporter whether she feels "more Jewish now." South Jersey community leaders are wondering if she'll use some of the money to help other local victims of the Nazi regime. There are about 300 families with Holocaust survivors still in the area, many of them elderly, they say.

In January, she received a call from Miles Lerman, chairman emeritus of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who lives in Vineland and once owned a fuel business that delivered oil to her home.

"Let me tell you something: She grew up on the run and suffered a lot as a young girl. She's entitled to the money," says Lerman. "What she will do with it is up to her. I don't think anybody will hold anything against her."

While Osen calls the revelation of Principe's family history her "Anastasia moment," she has her own blunt way of putting it. She calls her life "the story of Cinderella, ass-backwards."

She says that despite what she has learned about her family's history, she does not consider herself Jewish. She is an occasional churchgoer, though her home is crammed with angel figurines.

"It's hard to try and turn around and visualize being Jewish," she says. "To me there's only one God up there and I believe he belongs to everyone. No matter what church you belong to, even the Jewish faith" -- a religion she is admittedly unfamiliar with.

She has no grand plans for her share of the settlement except to provide for her six surviving children and their families. She also wants to make a donation to the American Cancer Society in memory of a daughter who died of cancer.

"It's going to make us a little more comfortable, but other than that no, we're not changing our lifestyle," she says. "That's just not us."

They might take a trip somewhere, she finally allows. Maybe fly out to Vegas and drive home, see a little bit of the country.

No Going Back

The chicken farm where she grew up is abandoned now, its outbuildings collapsed or disappeared. In the cold sunlight she shows visitors the clapboard house where she lived and the long chicken coop in the pasture that took hours to empty of eggs. Her parents are buried in graves with crosses on them up the road, next to a church they never attended.

She sees her father everywhere on this land. She gets to laughing when she describes how he was the only one on the farm who could milk their goat. She used to help him cull the weak hens from the rest of the flock.

She had never really understood why her parents, especially her father, were so grim and closed, wouldn't let her have her friends come over after school. Her own home to this day is raucous and happy and crowded with her children and their spouses and her 14 grandchildren. They all go out to dinner every Thursday night.

It's strange to be 73 years old and have the full story of a life revealed so late and in such wispy layers. It's now emerged with clarity, like an oil painting wiped clean of so many years of dust and grime. There's a measure of understanding these days, and forgiveness for a man whose mind she could never read.

"I've learned for the first time what my father must have gone through," she says. "I give the man a tremendous amount of credit. I feel badly for him because he suffered so much and he didn't know where he was going or what was happening with his family."

She believes her father would approve of all she has done to keep the Wertheim case alive, working with Osen and giving press interviews and even traveling to Germany three times to shine the spotlight on their quest.

"I think if he were alive, he'd say, 'Go, girl,' " she says as she traverses the muddy grass on her family's old farm. It was sold long ago and the house is vacant, the land unused for years.

She sometimes thinks about how things might have been, if history had unfolded differently and her family hadn't had to flee. But those thoughts quickly pass.

"I may have had a different life," she says. "But then I never would have met my husband or had my children or had the life I do have. Would I give that up to be raised as a millionaire's daughter? Not in a heartbeat."