Decision no. 534/2009

In 1938, the requested property in the 2nd municipal district of Vienna on which a three storey tenanted apartment building from 1873 was situated, was solely owned by Zipa S., who was Jewish. Zipa S. also lived at this address with her grandchildren Kitty and Harry B. While Kitty B. was able to flee to England, Zipa S. and Harry B. were deported to a Jewish ghetto in the General Government, created by the German Reich after the defeat of Poland. Nothing is known of their further fate.

Shortly before the deportation, Zipa S.’s property was extorted from her by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, an establishment with close links to the SS. In 1941, this Office sold the property for around 33,000 Reichsmark to the E. spouses. The majority of the proceeds from the sale were used to pay Zipa S.’s debts secured by lien on the property, which for the most part had existed since before the Anschluss. The balance was seized by the German Reich.

In 1952 and 1953, Kitty B. (by this time F.), who was in the meantime residing in New York and the sole heir of her grandmother Zipa S., who had been declared dead, commenced restitution proceedings against the E. spouses. They were concluded with a settlement in 1953. In this settlement, Kitty F., represented by a Viennese lawyer, waived the restitution of the property in exchange for a payment of 16,500 Schilling. The E. spouses remained the owners of the property.  After a change of ownership in the 1960s, in 1982 the Republic of Austria acquired the property and had the house demolished in 1996.

In the proceedings before the Arbitration Panel, Kitty F. (now W.) asserted that the settlement she had concluded in 1953 had been extremely unjust. At the time, the property had been worth significantly more that the money she had received for it. However, the Arbitration Panel was not able to follow this approach, as the sale prices of neighboring properties drawn on by the applicant could not be applied to the property in question. The Arbitration Panel was unable to obtain any further information regarding the restitution proceedings. As no other sufficient indications of an extreme injustice could be found, the Arbitration Panel had to reject the application for restitution.