Frank Werner Kussy, electrical engineer who survived Nazis

THE NAZIS wanted to kill every Jew in Europe.

They missed Frank Werner Kussy.

But it wasn't for lack of trying. He was imprisoned in a number of concentration camps, including Auschwitz, one of the more notorious of the Nazi murder camps.

Kussy, an electrical engineer who lived and worked in the Philadelphia area for a number of years, was pushing 100 when he died Friday. He was living in Farmington, Mich.

The Nazis took Kussy's entire family. But after about 50 years of fighting for reparations, he won a substantial settlement in 2005 from the German government for the factories taken from his family by the Nazis and then the communists in postwar East Germany.

Despite the horrors he lived through, Kussy never lost his sense of optimism and zest for living.

"There's no other person like him in the world," said Kenneth Waltzer, Michigan State University director of Jewish studies. "He had an optimistic outlook to the end of his days."

Kussy was born in Dresden, and life was good during the Weimar Republic - the period in Germany that immediately followed World War I. His father founded Rheostadt, a leading German technological company that manufactured sophisticated electrical apparatus.

Kussy earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Vienna. He was running the company with his brother when the Nazis took power in the 1930s.

He was arrested during Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," in November 1938, when Nazi thugs rounded up thousands of Jews in Germany and Austria and sent them to concentration camps.

He was released because of his family's Austro-Hungarian citizenship, and they fled to the Netherlands. After the Germans conquered the Netherlands, however, he was arrested again and imprisoned in concentration camps for three years.

As a refugee in Ukraine in 1945, he returned to Germany to reclaim his father's factory. He married his wife, Adelaide, that year. But in 1953, he got word that the East German government was about to arrest him for the crime of being a Jewish industrialist in a communist country. He and his family fled to America and settled in Detroit.

He took a job with Square D, an electrical-equipment company. He became an American citizen and converted to Catholicism.

In 1968, he and his family moved to Philadelphia, where he was director of engineering for ITE Imperial. They lived in Haverford.

While here, Kussy developed equipment to withstand earthquakes for nuclear-power plants, and produced control equipment in electronics and current-limit circuit breakers.

He was chairman of the Philadelphia chapter of the industry application group of IEEE, a leading technical organization. He held more than 60 patents and authored three technological books.

He was also active in the Philadelphia chapter of Schlaraffia, a German-American club.

In 1976, he transferred to Baltimore and continued to work as a consulting engineer for a decade. In the 1980s, he volunteered with International Service Corps and worked in Egypt and Zimbabwe assisting in the development of electrical equipment.

He is survived by a son, Edward Kussy; a daughter, Henriette Warren; two grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Services: 10 a.m. tomorrow at Our Lady of Fatima Church, Oak Park, Mich.

Contributions may be made to the Frank and Adelaide Kussy Memorial Scholarship for the Study of the Holocaust, University Advancement, Michigan State University, 300 Spartan Way, East Lansing, Mich., 48824-1005.