The heirs of the Rothschild family filed a complaint against the Czechia with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg over the Šilhéřovice family estate in the Opava region, annouced Hana Hikelová, the media representative of the Rothschild family in the Czech Republic. The property, which was first confiscated by the Nazis and then by the Communists, was unsuccessfully sought by the heirs first in the general courts. In January this year, the Constitutional Court also rejected their claim. According to the Rothschilds, the Czech Republic thus violated the European Convention on Human Rights.
“The Rothschild family considers the refusal of today’s Czech courts to deal with the matter as legitimizing Nazi anti-Jewish measures from the Holocaust, which is unacceptable and, today, imbued with the ever-deepening loss of historical memory, extremely dangerous,” said Hikelová. She added that the heirs only seek to evict real estate, which is overwhelmingly owned by the state or municipalities, not private individuals. Therefore, they do not ask, for example, for the release of the Šilhéřovice chateau, which is privately owned, as well as for mines and ironworks.
The lawsuit over land in Šilhéřovice concerned forty plots. However, the Constitutional Court ruled on another 11 Rothschild complaints regarding property claims administered by the municipality of Ludgeřovice, the City of Ostrava, the Office for Representation of the State in Property Matters, the Ostrava Physical Education Unit and the Forests of the Czech Republic.
Before World War II, the Rothschilds held large estates in Silesia. In 1939, however, the property was transferred to the German Empire under duress. After 1945, the property was hit by presidential decrees and the property was confiscated by the state.
Through a series of lawsuits, heirs and family trusts demanded that Alphonse Mayer von Rothschild was still the owner of the day of his death in 1942. In practice, this would mean that neither a transfer to the German Empire nor post-war confiscation applies.
The main reason for the failure of the heirs’ efforts to recover the land was that the widow of the last owner of the property after 1945 allegedly did not make full use of the opportunity to claim her property rights. The legal system at the time allowed her to do so.
However, the constitutional complaints indicated that the plaintiff’s legal predecessor had asserted a claim after the war, but that documentation of a possible outcome had not been preserved. The state allegedly took over the property without a legal reason, so it never properly acquired the right of ownership.
“According to official official documents, survivors of the family after the war applied for the state to vacate their estate, but the state protracted the proceedings. After the communists came to power in February 1948, he thwarted the proceedings by the state authorities in the proceedings to evict the estate. they did not intentionally continue, “Hikelová added today.
Source: CTK
