"The German House Lived in for Generations Must Be Given Free to Jews... Because of the Original Sin of This"

Must Transfer Residence Worth 2.17 Billion Won for Free
"Could the Contract Have Been Made Without Nazi Rule?"

A German family is facing the risk of losing a house that has been passed down for over 80 years. This house was forcibly taken from Jews by the Nazis.

A scene from the film "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," which depicts the activities of the non-violent group White Rose that resisted the Nazi German regime. The photo is not directly related to the content of the article. [Image source=Naver Movies]

On the 28th (local time), the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported the story of Gabriele Liske (83) and her family having to hand over their house in Vandalietz, a suburb of Berlin, to a Jewish organization free of charge. The lawsuit surrounding Liske's house was filed in 1992 and took more than 20 years until a verdict was delivered. The price of the house was 200,000 euros (about 290 million KRW) right after reunification, but now it is around 1.5 million euros (about 2.17 billion KRW).

The house was purchased in 1939 by Felix Moegelin, a relative on Liske’s maternal side. The previous owners, Alice Donath and Helene Lindenbaum, ran a kindergarten there. However, as Jews, they were forced by the Nazis to hand over the house and were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp, where they lost their lives. A copy of the contract made at the time recorded the 'race' of the parties involved, and it is said that the document included the Nazi symbol of the swastika along with the phrase "Heil Hitler."

After World War II, the Allied powers introduced laws to return property forcibly taken by Nazi Germany from Jewish victims. Properties without heirs to reclaim them were recovered by the nonprofit Jewish Claims Conference (JCC), established in 1951, and used to support Holocaust survivors. However, in East Germany, where Allied influence was limited, such restitution procedures were only implemented after reunification in 1990. Even so, the JCC filed 16,800 restitution claims in East Germany alone, collecting 2.4 billion euros (about 3.47 trillion KRW). Der Spiegel cited a research paper on Jewish reparations, stating, "West Germany’s reparations were fast but insufficient, while East Germany’s were late but thorough."

Liske’s house was one of thousands of former Jewish properties involved in lawsuits. Liske, who was three years old when she moved into the house, only learned about the history of the house after receiving a document from the Ministry of Finance in 2015 ordering her to hand over the property. She filed a lawsuit against the federal government to keep the house but lost. The court ruled, "Prove that the transaction would have occurred in the same way even without the rule of National Socialism."

There was also a proposal to allow the Liske family to stay temporarily in the house while they were still alive. Liske argued that there were Jews in her family who were also victims of the Nazis, but she lost again. She appealed to the Federal Administrative Court. Despite this, she said that what happened to her was a kind of 'original sin' and that it was now time for repentance. If she could stay longer in the house, she wanted to continue tending the rose garden.

In September last year, seven masterpieces by Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, looted by the Nazis during World War II, were returned to the heirs of the original owners. The returned works included "The Prostitute" (1912) and "Girl Putting on Her Shoe" (1910), which are part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The value of the returned artworks is estimated to be between 780,000 and 2.75 million dollars (about 1 billion to 3.6 billion KRW). One of the heirs, Timothy Reif, said, "Descendants of Holocaust victims have been striving to recover property looted during World War II for nearly 80 years since the war ended."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.