Stephan Templ highlighted cases of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis but has now been punished for omitting an aunt’s name in a restitution claim

A historian and vocal critic of the Austrian government’s irresolute attitude towards returning properties stolen from their Jewish owners by the Nazis will be jailed on Monday after being convicted of defrauding the state, in what leading Holocaust historians have condemned as a “deeply troubling overreaction”.

Stephan Templ, the author of Unser Wien (Our Vienna), a book that catalogued hundreds of prominent Jewish-owned properties seized by the Nazis that were never returned, received a one-year sentence as punishment for having omitted the name of an estranged aunt in an application on behalf of his mother for the return of property seized from his Jewish relatives in 1938.

Templ’s book, co-written by the historian Tina Walzer, created a huge stir when it was published in 2001. It included little-known accounts of Viennese landmarks – from the city’s famous ferris wheel to luxury hotels – that had been Aryanised and for which owners or heirs had been either never, or insufficiently, compensated.



The book triggered a wave of legal claims against the Austrian state from around the world.



The property at the centre of Templ’s legal battle with the state is a huge, elegant 19th-century villa near the Ringstrasse in the centre of Vienna that was once a private birth clinic belonging to Lothar Fürth, a cousin of Templ’s grandmother.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater amusement park was revealed by Templ to have been among property seized from Jewish owners by the Nazis. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

A month before the building was expropriated by the Nazis on 3 April 1938, Fürth, the head of the clinic, and his wife, Sue, were forced by a caretaker to clean the pavement in front of the building using toothbrushes in an ultimate act of humiliation. The couple then retreated to the operating room at the top of the hospital and injected themselves with poison.



Fürth wrote in a suicide note: “We have had enough.”

In 2005, Templ filed a restitution claim on behalf of his now 82-year-old mother, Helene, a Holocaust survivor, for her share of the building. He had discovered only by chance through media reports that an arbitration panel – set up as a result of a restitution treaty between the US and Austria to facilitate the return of Nazi-confiscated properties that had remained under Austria’s control for decades – had decided to return the building to heirs in the US, UK and Switzerland.

“The sanatorium had in fact appeared as one of the Aryanised properties listed in my book, but at the time I did the research on it I had not known that my mother had any claim to it,” Templ told the Guardian.

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A first group of heirs had been tracked down by a genealogist and a notary, who was also working for the state, and to whom all the non-Austrian residents were required to pay a 40% contingent fee. Such fees are illegal in Austria, which is why Templ supporters suspect his mother, who lives in Vienna, was never contacted and the family had to find out for themselves that they were among the heirs.

After a lengthy legal process, the building was returned to the heirs – 39 of them in all. When it was sold in 2010 to be turned into luxury apartments, Helene received €1.1m (£800,000) for her share.

In 2011, the same notary contacted Helene’s sister, Elisabeth Kretschmar, who Helene had been estranged from for several decades, telling her she had missed the deadline to claim for her share. A state prosecutor started criminal proceedings against Templ, accusing him of defrauding Austria on the grounds that had his aunt chosen not to claim her share, it could have gone to the state.

A judge ruled that Templ had “damaged the Republic of Austria”, even though Kretschmar, 86, has gone on record in front of a court to say she she would never have relinquished her share to the state.

Templ was sentenced to three years in prison, which was reduced on appeal to one year on the grounds he has not offended before.

But legal experts in Austria have said Templ, 54, a Czech-Austrian who lives in Prague, was never under any legal obligation to contact other heirs. Even the arbitration panel has stated in previous restitution decisions that the responsibility does not lie with restitution applicants to name other potential heirs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nazi leader Adolf Hitler entering Vienna on 14 March 1938. Photograph: AP

Eva Blimlinger, who headed the Austrian Historical Commission’s search for stolen property said: “It’s the duty of the arbitration panel to find out if there are other heirs, not that of Stephan Templ and his mother.”

Templ told the Guardian: “Owing to the fact that the state stole the property from my family, the obligation should be on them to track down the relatives. My only obligation as far as I was concerned was to assure those deciding on the restitution that my mother’s claim was bona fide.”



He has since discovered another heir living in Berlin, who he says the Austrian authorities also failed to contact.

Robert Amsterdam, a leading human rights lawyer from Canada who defended the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is representing Templ on a pro bono basis. He said Templ’s case, which he believed was “inextricably tied to the horrors of the Anschluss” (the 1938 annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany) and the subsequent theft by the Nazis of Jewish-owned property, was “an affront to justice” and full of flaws.

“It is fraught with legal abnormalities from beginning to end,” he said. “Some of the prosecutors have tried to defame Stephan by accusing him of playing a stereotypical greedy Jew, but if there’s a greedy party it’s the state of Austria, who stole the property in the first place.

“It’s an obscenity – akin to a robber suing you because he’s left behind the tools he used to break into your house.

“The fact we’re seeing this 70 years after the end of world war two is a terrible personal tragedy for Stephan, and a crime against personal memory.”

Last month, the Austrian president, Heinz Fischer, rejected a request for clemency, saying the punishment was just because according to the court ruling Templ had “damaged Austria” by his actions.

Seventy-five Holocaust historians from around the world, including Prof Deborah Lipstadt, author of History on Trial, Prof David S Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, and Prof Walter Reich, former executive director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, have signed a letter to the Austrian government urging it to cancel Templ’s prison sentence, which is unprecedented in the history of Austrian restitution law.

Another Templ supporter, Karl Pfeifer, a veteran Austrian journalist and a Holocaust survivor who has followed the case, said: “The only reason Templ was prosecuted is that he touched a nerve with his book, which reminded the Austrians of how they stole Jewish property.”



Stuart Eizenstat, a former deputy secretary of the US Treasury and former US ambassador to the EU, who helped set up Austria’s restitution system, called the prosecution “almost inexplicable”, and said the burden should be on the state to find heirs. “Once an heir brings a claim, the government should publish it and say … are there any more [heirs] out there?” he said.



The general settlement fund, an intergovernmental organisation set up to recommend the return of Nazi-looted property from the state to its former owners or their heirs, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for a statement. Its website states that it “does not wish to comment on the criminal proceedings” and refers inquirers instead “to the publications of the supreme court”.



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The justice ministry said it was unable to comment on the case because it did not want to “create the impression we’re trying to influence the jurisdiction of the independent courts”. But it added that according to the court’s ruling, Templ had “intentionally sought unjust enrichment”.

Templ’s lawyers said that even when he is behind bars they will continue to fight for a reprieve or for the case to be reopened.

Templ said he felt trapped in an “absurd and Kafkaesque” situation. “And imagine the nightmare for my mother as a Holocaust survivor,” he added. “She says it’s as if the Nazi persecution continues for her, because they treat us as if we were profiteering from the anti-Jewish laws and Austria was a victim of the Nazi era.”

In a further blow, two of the stolpersteine, or brass plaques – about 50,000 of which have been set into pavements across the territories of the former Third Reich as reminders of the Jewish citizens who once lived there – have been removed by the new owners of the former sanatorium. They were engraved with the names of Lothar and Sue Fürth and the date of their deaths.

“I suppose it would be too uncomfortable for the new residents to be reminded every time they went through the door of the Jewish citizens who once lived there and the circumstances in which they died,” Templ said.