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.
