Reclaiming What Was Lost

By Daniel SlifkinMay 3, 2016

Reclaiming What Was Lost

Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin by Dina Gold

SAY YOU LIVE in a town with a thriving Jewish community. People of Jewish heritage run established businesses; they participate in public life; they live with their families in large, comfortable homes; they travel in Europe; some are observant, some are not; some are liberal, some are conservative. The list could go on, describing the Jewish community of current day Los Angeles or New York — or Berlin before 1933. We now know, of course, that the appearance of assimilation was just that for German Jews. The society they believed they were an integral part of rejected them with shocking ferocity, stripping them of their status, their property, and their lives. True to its title, in Stolen Legacy: Nazi Theft and the Quest for Justice at Krausenstrasse 17/18, Berlin, Dina Gold, a former BBC investigative journalist and television producer and currently a co-chair of the Washington Jewish Film Festival, uses the loss of property, and her efforts to reclaim it, as a focus. But this is very much a device for her to tell her own story of discovery and outrage, as she pieces together in detail what the Nazis did to German Jews through the lens of her family, the Wolffs of Berlin.

Divided into three parts, the book is perhaps at its best in the first part of the story, as Gold sets the scene of her family’s prosperous life in Berlin. Victor Wolff, Gold’s great-grandfather, owned a fur company, founded by his father. Having built the company into a commercial success, in 1908 he bought a plot of land in Berlin and built a new headquarters, at Krausenstrasse 17/18. The life of affluence she describes — of English nannies, chauffeurs, and a “magnificent, red-brick mansion” in the Wannsee suburb — quickly falls apart after Hitler’s rise to power. It doesn’t matter that Victor’s oldest son, and Gold’s grandfather, Herbert, fought for Germany in World War I, and was awarded the Iron Cross. He soon leaves for Palestine and we learn of his daughter’s (Gold’s mother’s) life, first in Palestine, then in England. Being reminded of the fragility of civilized existence, and of what the Nazis did, is always worthwhile. But Gold’s description of the veneer of legality that the Nazis used is important. They didn’t just seize her family’s building by brute force. Rather, a series of laws were passed, against the backdrop of the Great Depression, to make business, and life, untenable for Jews in Germany.

The core of the story comes in part two as Gold seeks to reclaim the building on Krausenstrasse. That quest only became possible after the fall of the Berlin Wall because Krausenstrasse 17/18 was in East Berlin and owned and occupied by the state-run railroad. Indeed, the opening chapter of the book describes how, in December 1990, Gold took a taxi from West Berlin to East, passing Checkpoint Charlie, until she arrived at Krausenstrasse 17/18, and announced, “I’ve come to claim my family’s building.” Of course, things are not that easy. Nor could they be. A system based on mere assertions of property rights would be uniquely vulnerable to false claims, and Gold plainly understands that she has to support her claim with evidence.

Nonetheless, her description of that process is laced with frustration and anger.

From a lawyer’s perspective — or at least this lawyer’s perspective — that process seems rather straightforward. So, it is useful to be reminded how, from an individual client’s perspective, the legal process almost always seems Kafkaesque. In the foreword to the book, former Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat, who has been extensively involved in obtaining restitution and compensation for Holocaust victims during both the Clinton and Obama administrations, states that “it is possible for individual cases to succeed on occasion in recovering property. But the legal and cost barriers are almost insurmountable.” Gold’s case, by contrast, demonstrates how perseverance and determination can push those barriers aside.

In a nutshell, Gold learns that the German government has set a deadline for claims for restitution. On behalf of her mother, she retains a firm of solicitors, Pritchard Englefield & Tobin, that had advertised their specialty in that area, and they file the necessary claim. Although it appeared at first that they would charge substantial fees up front, within a few pages we learn that they will work for a 15 percent contingency — a very important development. Documents needed to be collected as evidence in three principal areas: who owned the building before the Nazis came to power, how the building came to be in the hands of the railroad, and Gold’s mother’s link to the original owners. Surprisingly, documentation existed in essentially all these areas — land records, wills, death certificates, and so on. Getting those documents was at times unorthodox, such as paying some unnamed East German lawyer to part with his notarized copy of a land registry document, but at other times very straightforward, such as when Gold’s mother obtained a copy of her grandmother’s will by calling up and asking for a copy to be mailed to her. But the description of the process makes it sound like an emotional roller coaster for Gold, who veers from thinking she is about to succeed to feeling stymied every few pages.

It’s important to distinguish between what Gold learns about prewar Nazi Germany, and the process in modern Germany. To be sure, the story of her discovery of how her family had been treated by the Nazis — notably, the succession of increasingly oppressive laws designed to squeeze Jews to the periphery of business and society — is revolting. But the approach of the German government of the 1990s to restitution is obviously a very different story.

It was not until January 1994 that Gold’s lawyers filed a “formal claim,” as she puts it, setting forth the basis for restitution. There is no real explanation of this delay, other than how long it took to gather all the facts. When presented coherently, however, those facts made for a compelling case, despite the formality of the European legal style. The building had a mortgage on it, held by the Victoria Insurance Company. By 1936, like essentially all large German companies, the Victoria was run by someone with demonstrably close ties to the Nazi party — Dr. Kurt Hamann. And in November 1936, the Victoria suddenly foreclosed on the mortgage, demanding immediate payment, and requiring a forced auction of the property. The building was then bought by the Nazi-run national railroad, which was expanding as Germany geared up for war, and which had “bought” the neighboring building through an identical forced auction process. The evidence was pretty clear that the foreclosure was pretextual, and that the price paid was grossly inadequate. Indeed, after World War II, when the East German state took over the building in 1949 it noted in the land registry: “the Jewish owner was forced by the prevailing political circumstances to sell the property.” And the monies that remained after the mortgage was paid off were not available to the Wolff family in any real sense — the only person paid anything, Fritz Wolff, was murdered in Auschwitz a few years later.

It took the German government two years to agree to compensate the Wolffs for the loss of their building. But in January 1996 they ultimately paid Gold’s mother and her siblings DM 20 million, or approximately $14 million.

According to Gold, this result — in a case that was clearly, as she puts it, “both legally and morally valid” — was achieved despite “years of fierce resistance from German officialdom.” That latter contention seems to me, however, to be unsupported in the book. Annoying petty bureaucrats can be found everywhere, but Gold’s description of her claims process seems to be a relatively evenhanded assessment of the evidence. To be sure, she had to locate and secure a good deal of documentary evidence, and that had to be assembled and presented in a coherent fashion; having competent counsel was essential. The decision makers, however, do not appear to have been fighting her, or have been biased against her, but rather they wanted to see proof of the validity of her claims.

What if the Victoria had not been run by Nazis? What if the reason they foreclosed on the mortgage was for sustained repayment delinquency? What if the price obtained for the building has been a perfectly fair market value? What if Gold’s mother hadn’t actually been descended from the building’s owners? Gold, like many individual litigants I have represented, knows the truth and validity of her claim to a moral certainty, and her frustration that others are not immediately agreeing with her is palpable. Frankly, a more coherent explanation of what the law was with respect to restitutionary claims — both substantively (what do you need to prove) and procedurally (how do you go about doing it) — would have made the reader much better able to decide whether there was, in fact, fierce resistance from German officials or just people doing their jobs. But it isn’t possible to tell whether or not Gold was ever herself given a clear explanation — by which I mean one understandable to a person without legal training — of what was going on and why. And absent that, any legal process can seem Kafkaesque. So, for most readers Gold’s very personal account of her “quest” probably reconfirms preconceptions about the legal process generally. For a lawyer, by contrast, her account leaves one wanting to understand more.

The final, concluding part of the book focuses on additional research Gold conducted, principally about her great-uncle Fritz Wolff, an innocent man who continued a miserable existence in Nazi Germany until his murder at Auschwitz in 1943, and about Kurt Hamann, a vile man who, as far as we know, never had to face justice, and in whose memory a prize is awarded at the University of Mannheim. Although all of the material is interesting, it’s an odd, anticlimactic ending to the story, as if Gold just wanted to put down some other information she had found along the way. It is illustrative, however, of a broader issue with the book: the basic story as told doesn’t really seem to fill the length of a book, even a relatively slim one. Interestingly, as noted above, Gold has been an investigative journalist and television producer, having worked for the BBC. And during the course of her work on her mother’s claim, she told a BBC producer, Nigel Acheson, what was going on. He then developed a BBC Four radio documentary, made in conjunction with the German MDR station, entitled Document: Getting Their Own Back about the Golds’ claim. It was broadcast on October 13, 1994, in the United Kingdom, and in Germany on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Gold believes the program had a “major impact” on getting her mother’s claim approved — although it has to be noted that she offers no support for that assertion. I haven’t heard the program, but would like to. Judging from the style and substance of the book, the story would make for a very good investigative documentary. But the book, by contrast, reads perhaps too much like a series of 60 Minutes pieces — each part very well done, but an unusual format for an almost 250 page book.

Ultimately, Stolen Legacy left this reviewer wanting to understand more about the laws and procedures surrounding the restitution of property in post–Cold War Germany. We all know that the Nazis were thoroughly evil. Whether modern Germany is properly addressing that history, or trying to minimize or mask it, is a separate question — albeit a very important one that deserves to be carefully and thoroughly addressed. In any case, being reminded of the fragility of civil society can never lose its importance, particularly given our current heated political rhetoric. And seeing that justice can be done after civil society collapses, even if it is years later, is in turn a reminder of the enduring quality of the principles that make that society worth preserving. Gold has to be congratulated for having the determination to pursue her mother’s claims through to conclusion. In that regard, she is an example to all those who have been unfairly treated that they need to make their voices heard.

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Daniel Slifkin is a litigation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where he has practiced for his entire 25-year career.

LARB Contributor

Daniel Slifkin is a litigation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where he has practiced for his entire 25-year career. Over that time he has tried cases in state and federal courts throughout the United States, as well as in international and domestic arbitrations. Born and raised in the UK, he was educated at St. John’s College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School. Now a US citizen, he lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife and two children.

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