From Adam LeBor in Budapest
THE Habsburg dynasty has begun a legal battle to recover family assets, using legislation passed to compensate victims of Nazism.
The dynasty is bringing a €200 million (£143 million) claim for 27,000 hectares of Austrian forest and several apartment blocks in Vienna.
The claim has angered Austria’s Jewish community, which accuses the Government of stalling on claims for compensation from within its ranks.
After being confiscated from the Habsburgs at the end of the First World War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, the family holdings were returned in 1935, before being confiscated again by the Nazis after the Anschluss.
Christian Habsburg-Lothringen has brought the claim after a belated admission by the Austrian Government that the country had actively collaborated with the Nazis. An historical commission this year criticised the Austrian State for obstructing restitution to Holocaust victims.
The main thrust of the claim, being pursued under an Act passed in 2001, is aimed at recovering the land and properties, rather than seeking financial compensation, one of the family’s legal team told The Times. Michael Walker, a Munich-based lawyer, said: “These forests were purchased by the Habsburg family over the course of many centuries. They were never Crown holdings, but were private properties.
Austria did not return them after 1945 although Hitler had expropriated them.”
The Habsburgs have a proud anti-Nazi pedigree and several fought in Allied forces during the Second World War. The family head, Otto von Habsburg, enraged Hitler by refusing to meet him in Berlin in the 1930s. Hitler took his revenge by naming the 1938 German annexation of Austria “Operation Otto”.
There is unease that legislation intended to compensate poor and elderly victims of the Nazis is being invoked to reclaim property worth millions of euros. One family of Central European aristocrats has declined to use the same legislation to attempt to reclaim its lost holdings, viewing such a move as inappropriate.
The Habsburg claim has illuminated a dark era of Austrian history, when Jewish businesses and properties were seized by the Nazis. Stephan Templ, co-author of a history of Nazi expropriation, Our Vienna: Aryanisation the Austrian Way, said: “I feel uncomfortable about the Habsburg claim, because there are many elderly Jewish people and Holocaust survivors who have not received any compensation so far. The most they will get is $7,000 (£4,350).
