The Restitution of "aryanised" property

"Property value can be restituted. But with us it is different, people have been murdered, they cannot be restituted anymore." (Stella Morgenstern)

"Julius and Adele Körner are requested to appear before the undersigned court or to make themselves heard in some other way." Such macabre appeals were normally released by the St. Pöltner Amtsblatt in order to initiate the process of declaration of death of missing Jews and Jewesses. Julius and Adele Körner had probably been deported to Minsk on May 19th, 1942.

On November 14th, 1945, the provincial government of Lower Austria decreed the compilation of aryanised and revoked property. The new owners were obliged to register this property. Survivors or their heirs were returned their property or they found an agreement with the "Ariseure". Many escaped Jews were, however, not prepared to come back to St. Pölten and sold their property. 

In late 1948, most of the buildings had been restituted. Some individual proceedings did, however, take much longer – such as that one on the house of Dr. Julius Fischer and Dr. Paul Kohner on Heidenheimerstraße 32-34. It was only closed in 1958 because the property had devolved from the municipality to the Reichsfiskus Heer and then to the Soviet Army.

Dr. Leo Schinnerl, former consultant for the "Liegenschaftsentjudung" (property dejudaization) was consigned to restitute property in his function as magistrate’s head. He is a symbol for the (not exclusively) Austrian continuity of officials amongst most different political circumstances.??

Some displaced people let themselves be convinced by the (due to the war) impoverished »raisers« and signed quitclaims. Some did not receive their valuables that had been "given for safekeeping", thus the property that had been confiscated (»non-bureaucratically«) during the very first days after the »Anschluss« was lost. Similarly, payments onto frozen accounts such as the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) and other forced dues had vanished.