Sigi Ziering; Tycoon Survived Nazi Camps

• Executive Became a Philanthropy and High-Tech Leader

By: MYRNA OLIVER TIMES STAFF WRITER

Obituaries

Los Angeles Times, Home Edition

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Metro Section: Metro

Page B-6

SEE CORRECTION APPENDED

It must have been the “training” of the Holocaust, the self-described workaholic speculated to Fortune magazine a couple of years ago. “Unless you work,” he said, “you are destined for the gas chamber.”

And work he did — as a teenager relocated to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, then to Fuhlsbuttel prison near Hamburg, Germany, and on to a Kiel concentration camp. He survived the Nazis but never stopped working until about a year ago, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Sigi Ziering, who turned a chemist’s bright idea into Diagnostic Products Corp., one of Los Angeles’ most successful international high-tech companies, died Sunday. He was 72.

[…]

Toward the end of the war, the Zierings were moved to the Fuhlsbuttel prison. Every week, they watched Nazis load 10 or so Jews into a truck destined for Bergen-Belsen and the gas chambers. “With German precision,” Ziering told Fortune in 1998, “the guards went at their job alphabetically — and never got to Z.”

Later, the Zierings were marched to a Kiel concentration camp, where males were routinely murdered if they failed a physical test — running a mile carrying a heavy piece of wood. Ziering and his brother passed.

[…]

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For the Record;

Los Angeles Times Saturday, November 18, 2000 Home Edition; Metro; Part B; Page 6; Metro Desk; 1 inches; 22 words;

Type of Material: Correction

Bergen-Belsen — The obituary of Sigi Ziering in Tuesday’s Times incorrectly stated that there were gas chambers at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

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