U.S. Jewish Soldier Sues German Trust for $40,000 Damages

Bruno Ritter, a Jewish ex-DP who is now a sergeant with Headquarters Company of the 4th Infantry Division here, has filed a formal claim for $40, 000 in damages and back pay against the IG-Farben chemical trust, because of slave labor performed and sufferings endured by him in the notorious Nazi synthetic rubber plant of Buna-Monowitz.

When he was thirteen years old, Ritter was torn from his home at Cracow and shipped to the first of a series of labor and concentration camps, in which almost all his family perished. For a year he was employed at Monowitz, an installation established by IG-Farben so as to profit from the unpaid labor of concentration camp inmates, He suffered clubbings, whippings and other tortures, as well as exposure and starvation.

A few days prior to the American occupation of Germany, Ritter escaped from a concentration camp trek. While he was living in the German city of Bamberg as a DP, Lt. Arthur D. Williams of the Quartermaster Corps took an interest in him. They became such good friends that Williams sponsored young Ritter for entry into the United States, where he lived with the Williams family in Kansas City until he joined the U. S. Army in 1949. He recently re-enlisted and wants to make the army his career, but still considers Kansas City his home town.

Ritter’s demand for $40,000 has been submitted to the Registration Office for Creditors’ Claims against IG-Farben and will not be acted upon until a test case for $2,400 in back pay, brought some years ago by Norbert Wollheim, has been finally adjudicated. The suit of Wolheim, a New York resident who served as the foremost leader of German Jews in the British Zone during the first postwar years, was successful in the lower courts, but has been appealed by the IG-Farben combine.