- Leo Bretholz

After D day he worked with refugees and eventually moved to the US in 1947

His daughter Denise Harris confirmed his death but said she did not know the cause.

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Mr. Bretholz became a leader among activists who have called for reparations from governments and companies in Europe that aided the Nazi regime during its execution of the Final Solution.

The often-controversial issue of reparations has figured prominently in recent considerations of the planned Purple Line light-rail system to link Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland.

The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais (SNCF), the French railway system that historians say carried 76,000 people to Nazi camps, is the majority owner of Keolis, one of the companies invited to bid on the multi­billion-dollar Purple Line project. Mr. Bretholz was scheduled to testify March 10 before the Maryland General Assembly’s House Ways and Means Committee on a bill that would prevent Keolis from winning the contract if the SNCF does not pay reparations to victims.

Leo Bretholz as a young man in Vienna, Austria. (USHMM, courtesy of Leo Bretholz)

A longtime resident of Baltimore County, Mr. Bretholz had frequently recounted in speeches before lawmakers, schoolchildren and others his story of persecution and survival.

Leo Bretholz was born March 6, 1921, to Polish immigrants in the Austrian capital. His father, a tailor and amateur Yiddish actor, died when Mr. Bretholz was a boy. His mother supported their surviving children by doing embroidery.

At his mother’s insistence, Mr. Bretholz fled Austria after it was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. He recounted traveling by rail to Trier, a city in western Germany, and then swimming across the Sauer River to Luxembourg. There, he said, he was met by refu­gee workers who smuggled him into Belgium.