Decision no. 508/2008

In 1938, the property, on which a residential building stood, was owned by Chana P., a Jew resident in Vienna. She and her husband Leopold P. had two children. The seventeen-year-old daughter was able to flee to England; the son was also able to leave Austria aboard a Kindertransport headed to England in 1939. Chana P. and her husband were deported to the ghetto Riga ("Reich Commissionership Ostland") in 1942, where they perished. Upon the instigation of their son, both were declared legally dead in 1956, where it was pronounced that they had not survived the 8 May 1945. As it was assumed that no assets had existed, no disquisition into the estate took place in either case.

Chana P. had not submitted a property notice to the Property Transaction Office in 1938. Consequently, in 1940 she had been sentenced to two months in prison in line with para. 8 of the Ordinance on the Registration of Jewish Property of 26 April 1938. Additionally, the unregistered property, i.e. the property in Vienna 8., was confiscated as a punitive penalty and the German Reich had been recorded in the land register as its owner.

After the end of National Socialist rule, the Republic of Austria initially assumed the administration of the seized property. By the time the deadline for restitution claims had expired in 1956, no legal successor to Chana P. had laid claim to the property. Hence the restitution claim fell to the Collection Points A and B, which had been established in 1957 by the Republic of Austria in implementation of the State Treaty of 1955, to assert claims which had thus far not been raised. The proceeds raised by the collection agencies through the utilization of heirless or unclaimed property was used for the benefit of victims of National Socialism. In the case in question, the transferral of ownership to the collection agencies took place through the Receiving Organisations Act amendment 1958. The property transfer was determined by means of a ruling by the Financial Directorate for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland. In 1960, the collection agencies sold the property to a non-profit cooperative for construction, housing and development. In 1963, this co-operative sold the property on to the City of Vienna, which demolished the building and built a municipal residential building on the property.

The widow of Chana P.'s son has now requested the Arbitration Panel for the restitution of the property.

In a continuation of its decision making practice thus far, the Arbitration Panel, in its juridical appraisal, affirmed the existence of "prior proceedings" in the meaning of the General Settlement Fund Law, as the collection agencies were considered - as far as restitution claims were concerned - the sole legal successors to the owners aggrieved in the National Socialist period. As the property at issue had also been transferred to the collection agencies in practice, the restitution claims were fulfilled in their entirety. As the Arbitration Panel has already pronounced, for these reasons it is prevented from deciding on the renewed restitution of the property.