Decision no. 817/2011

In 1938, Vollrath L. owned an entailed estate in Upper Austria comprising approximately 30,000 hectares and an entailed estate in Lower Austria comprising 718 hectares.

The Upper Austrian estate, a hunting and forestry estate, had already been encumbered with large mortgages in the early 1930s. For this reason, sale negotiations had already been carried out from 1934 onward. On 18 March 1938, Vollrath L. concluded a purchase contract with a German industrialist which was approved by the competent entail authority. Shortly after, the Reich Chief of Forestry Hermann Göring registered an interest in purchasing the estate. On 18 March 1938, the approval of the contract with the German industrialist was rescinded by the higher instance. On 4 June 1938, Vollrath L. sold the entailed estate and several properties which he had privately owned to the German Reich. The proceeds from the sale were used for the most part to free the estate of debt; the balance was paid to Vollrath L. and his son Karl Othmar L., the next in line to both entailed estates, in a ratio of 2:1.

The Lower Austrian entailed estate was situated entirely within the site which the German Reich planned to include in the future military training area Döllersheim. A part of the estate was already claimed by the commando of the military training area in autumn 1938, the rest one year later. On 1 February 1940, Vollrath L. sold the entire entailed estate to the German Reich.

After his flight to Germany, Karl Othmar L., who in 1931 had participated in the attempted putsch against the Austrian Federal Government as the adjutant of the Heimwehr (“Home Guard”) leader Walter Pfrimer, joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and settled in Czechoslovakia. In autumn 1940 he was taken into custody by the Gestapo in Prague on suspicion of high treason. In early December 1941, criminal proceedings in this regard took place at the Provincial Court Vienna. Although the proceedings ended with the acquittal of Othmar L., he was subsequently handed over to the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died on 11 July 1942.

In 1956, Vollrath L. filed a restitution application for the Upper Austrian estate with the Financial Directorate for Upper Austria. The Financial Directorate in part dismissed the application because the recorded owners (Reich region Upper Danube and the Municipality of Steyr) were not identical to either the German Reich or any of its establishments. An identical application by Vollrath L. was dismissed by the Provincial Court Linz for the reason that a seizure as defined by the Dritte Rückstellungsgesetz (Third Restitution Act”) had not occurred and Vollrath L. would have had to sell the estate regardless of the National Socialist assumption of power as it had been in dire financial straits.

With regard to the property in Lower Austria, in 1956 Vollrath L. filed an application for restitution with the Financial Directorate for Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland. On 14 December 1961, the application was withdrawn by his legal successor, Johanna L.

On 15 December 1961, the legal successor of Vollrath L., who died in 1958, concluded a settlement before the Restitution Commission in Linz with the Province of Lower Austria and the Republic of Austria. In this settlement, she waived all restitution claims which were still open in exchange for a payment of 800,000 Schilling.

In its juridical appraisal, the Arbitration Panel reached the conclusion that Vollrath L. had not been persecuted as defined by the General Settlement Fund Law. He neither belonged to one of the groups persecuted by the National Socialist regime, nor could evidence of any specific acts of persecution be found. The Arbitration Panel was also not able to determine that the persecution of Vollrath L.’s son, Othmar L., was causally connected to the sale of the two estates. The Upper Austrian estate had to sold due to its poor financial position and the Lower Austrian estate due to its incorporation into the military training area. As the sales of the two entailed estates to the German Reich did not, as such, constitute as persecution-related seizure, the application for restitution had to be rejected.