Final Report of the Arbitration Panel for In Rem Restitution

The independent Arbitration Panel for In Rem Restitution was established in 2001 at the General Settlement Fund in Vienna on the basis of the Washington Agreement, which was concluded between Austria and the U.S.A. to settle outstanding questions of compensation and restitution for victims of National Socialism. The Panel decided on applications for the restitution of real estate and of movable assets belonging to Jewish community organizations.

For in rem restitution to be granted under the General Settlement Fund Law, the requested property must have been seized during the Nazi era (1938-1945), been publiclyowned on 17 January 2001 and may not have been subject of an earlier decision on restitution, unless the Arbitration Panel found the earlier restitution measure to be “extremely unjust”.

The Arbitration Panel examined a total of 2,307 applications for in rem restitution and issued 1,582 decisions on them. In total, the value of the properties recommended for restitution by the Arbitration Panel amounted to around 48 million euros.

Having completed its task, the Arbitration Panel has now produced this Final Report on its 20 years of work. It documents the circumstances and events leading to the Panel’s establishment, describes the diverse challenges that arose during the historical and legal processing of the applications and compellingly presents the results of this most recent Austrian program seeking to redress material losses from the Nazi era.