Anger Persists After German Jet Crash
HALTERN AM SEE, Germany — Weeks before he was supposed to fly to Barcelona, Spain, for a student exchange program with his 10thgrade Spanish class, Steffen Strang realized that he would miss a home game of the soccer team he followed religiously. Maybe, he told his mother, he should stay home.
The response Dagmar Strang gave to her 16-year- old son has echoed in her head since March 24, the day he was supposed to have returned on a Germanwings flight bound for Düsseldorf.
“I told him he wasn’t going to stay home because of a stupid game — I called it that, ‘stupid,’ ” she said, sitting in her dining room beside a display of framed pictures of Steffen, her only child.
“I told him this could be a chance to make a lifelong friend, to go out and experience the world,” Mrs. Strang said, shaking her head, struggling against the thought of “What if?”.
The Strangs are one of the families in this leafy town in western Germany struggling to come to terms with the holes in their lives since a Germanwings co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, sent Flight 9525 into a fatal descent, taking their sons, daughters, siblings and spouses with him.
While some of the families of the 150 onboard the flight have broken Germany’s culture of privacy and discreet suffering to speak to reporters, those in Haltern had stayed silent, closing ranks and their doors while coping with their grief.
But in June, after Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, offered $28,000 each to the families of the 72 German victims onboard — in addition to the $56,000 in immediate financial assistance that was provided to each family after the crash — the Haltern group wrote an open letter to Lufthansa calling the offer “insulting.” And some of the families let a reporter into their homes.
“I feel they are not taking the responsibility, not acknowledging that one of their own employees knowingly did this,” said Oliver, whose wife, Sonja Cercek, 35, a Spanish teacher at the Joseph-König Gymnasium, had organized the exchange with the Llinars del Vallès school near Barcelona. (He asked that his last name, which is different from that of his wife, not be published for privacy reasons.)
Lufthansa and Germanwings have acknowledged Mr. Lubitz had a bout of severe depression in 2009 while training. But they have revealed little about their oversight of him. Under German law, only individuals can be prosecuted, not companies.
Heinz- Joachim Schöttes, a spokesman for Germanwings, said the payments for the victims’ pain and suffering “is just a part” of the compensation offer. Additional commitments include a trust fund valued at up to 15 million euros, or $16.9 million, for educational costs for children orphaned and any other projects proposed by family members.
Nevertheless, the families of the Haltern victims and those of more than 50 other victims are discussing the possibility of filing a lawsuit in the United States, where Mr. Lubitz was training when he was granted a leave for depression. Elmar Giemulla, a German lawyer representing many families here, said he believed that in addition to more compensation allowed under United States tort laws, a suit could help uncover information about the extent of Lufthansa’s knowledge of Mr. Lubitz’s condition and how he could have been considered flight-worthy.
The families say that Lufthansa’s response immediately after the crash was “exemplary,” as Mr. Strang put it. But since then, they say, they have experienced a sense of broken trust.
Several said they felt betrayed by the airline, a company that selects and grooms pilots in a rigorous process that includes medical and psychological assessments.
“They owe us an explanation of how they allowed a sick monster to sit in the cockpit,” Mrs. Strang said, her voice breaking.
Oliver is troubled by thoughts of his wife alone on the plane. Both he and Sonja’s father, Josef Cercek, recalled that she did not like to fly.
But Mr. Cercek, 71, said knowing that Sonja sat on the flight beside a student who adored her, has made his grief bearable. “I like to think that at the end, she wasn’t alone,” he said.
Grieving families say an airline offer is ‘insulting.’