WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress tried yesterday to pressure German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to offer payment to an American Holocaust survivor in compensation for Nazi atrocities against him and his family, but initial indications were that the effort would be rebuffed.
Hugo Princz, 72 and now a custodian at a Jewish community centerin Highland Park, N.J., has been turned aside repeatedly by the German government despite a series of requests over the past 12 years by three U.S. administrations. The German Embassy remains under instructions from Bonn not to discuss the issue.
It was not known whether President Clinton brought it up when he met with Mr. Kohl yesterday.
Mr. Kohl, in a round of visits to members of Congress, was asked to do something by the Senate majority leader, Bob Dole of Kansas, and by other members. Sources familiar with Mr. Kohl's meetings on Capitol Hill said there was no sign the chancellor would change his government's long-term opposition.
In an unusual gesture, a New Jersey Democrat, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, handed the chancellor a personal letter from the survivor vowing: "I will never give up."
A separate letter from Mr. Lautenberg and his fellow New Jersey Democrats Sen. Bill Bradley and Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. asked Mr. Kohl for "justice" for Mr. Princz.
Members of the New Jersey congressional delegation have talked of pushing for legislation that would make the German government subject to a damage lawsuit in U.S. courts. Mr. Princz referred to that in his letter, warning that he would use such a lawsuit to stage "the first Holocaust trial ever conducted in an American courtroom."
The man who spent years in Nazi death camps and in slave labor inGerman factories, even though he was a U.S. citizen, told Mr. Kohl in the three-page letter: "Believe me, Mr. Chancellor, I would welcome the chance to tell the world what Germany did to me and my family."
He signed the letter with his name and his prison number at the Auschwitz death camp, 36707.
Arguing that his U.S. citizenship should have protected him and his family after they were taken prisoner in Europe in 1942, Mr. Princz said that Germany "for 40 years now" has used that citizenship as "an excuse to exclude me from its Holocaust reparations program."
The legislation now being readied in Congress would end Germany's legal immunity to a lawsuit in U.S. courts, but only for claims by U.S. citizens who were held in Nazi camps -- a group that Mr. Princz's lawyer, Steven R. Perles, said may be only one, two or three persons, including Mr. Princz. Mr. Princz's parents, two brothers and a sister did not survive the Holocaust.