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Czech and their land
http://www.canada.com/national/nati...3e-5efa4e82c37e
| quote: | Czech Republic fights claims to titled lands
Disinherited aristocracy: Nobles reject claim they collaborated with Nazis
Kate Connolly
The Daily Telegraph
December 31, 2003
PRAGUE - Czech aristocrats stripped of their palaces, castles and estates during 40 years of communist dictatorship are seeking redress in the courts, which could cost the country's new democracy billions of dollars.
Scores of descendants of Austro-Hungarian nobility, including members of some of Europe's most powerful families before the emergence of Nazism and communism, are suing the government for the return of everything from castles and art collections to carp farms and breweries confiscated by the Czechoslovak state at the end of the Second World War.
Under the Benes Decrees, millions of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians were stripped of their property and expelled.
The Czech government, which is trying equally hard to resist the demands of the country's disinherited aristocrats, now scattered across the world, has not concealed its horror at the scale of the restitution claims. These include demands to return some of the Czech Republic's top tourist attractions and about 240,000 hectares of land.
Among the most vocal of the claimants is Franz Ulrich Kinsky, the main heir to an 800-year-old dynasty of Bohemian nobles. Mr. Kinsky, 67, a Vienna-based investment banker, has said he will fight until his death for his family's property, which has been valued in his 150 legal claims at up to $240-million.
It includes the rococo Kinsky Palace on Prague's Old Town Square, home to part of the Czech National Gallery collection and considered one of the country's cultural gems.
"I'm fighting for peace of mind," he said. "My family were chucked out having been continuous residents of Bohemia since 1200. There's no logic to not allowing us back to our castles."
He says he does not want to turn the gallery out of Kinsky Palace. But the state insists its arguments against restitution claims are strong, asserting that Mr. Kinsky's parents and most of the other claimants were Nazi sympathizers.
Mr. Kinsky is outraged by this suggestion. "I'm a Bohemian and I grew up in an anti-German environment," he said. "We even have great suspicions that my father was done away with by the Germans."
He inherited the palace in the early 1940s when he and his family were living in exile in Argentina. It was confiscated in 1945.
For Mr. Kinsky's lawyer, Jaroslav Capek, the cases are a test both of the country's democratic maturity and of the strength and independence of its judicial system, which many critics claim has been bowing to political pressure over the property issue.
"This country does not respect the basic principles of justice that are the norm in other European nations," he said.
The von Pezolds, descendants of the Hluboka-Schwarzenberg family, are also fighting claims of Nazi collaboration and for property estimated to be worth almost $2-billion, including a major tourist attraction, Cesky Krumlov castle in the southwest.
The constitutional court initially agreed to honour the family's restitution claims, then unexpectedly reneged on them.
"Our battle has turned into a game of cat and mouse, with the courts changing the goalposts every five minutes," said Georg Philipp von Pezold, 28, the grandson of Prince Adolf von Schwarzenberg.
"My grandfather was neither a German nor a collaborator, but the state refuses to acknowledge this as it doesn't want to relinquish the property."
Pavel Dostal, the Czech Republic's Culture Minister, says the families have no case. "According to Czech legislation, Czech nobility does not exist."
The cases were for the courts to decide, he said, but added, "These people collaborated with the Nazis, so you can understand why we don't want to negotiate with them." |
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