Kikes kick 85-year-old German woman out of her house

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German woman who lives in home looted from Jews must give it up, judge rules
The decision comes after a decade of legal wrangling over a restitution claim that is likely to be the last of its kind.
https://www.jta.org/2024/12/31/global/german-woman-who-lives-in-home-looted-from-jews-must-give-it-up-judge-rules

BERLIN — A German court has ruled that an 85-year-old woman and her son who live in a property sold under duress by its Jewish owners in 1939 must give up their home.

The ruling earlier this month capped a decade of legal wrangling over the home, located in Wandlitz, outside Berlin. For many paying attention to the twists and turns, the fight over the lakeside property came to symbolize the pain and turmoil of nearly a century of history — as well as the ways in which German families tell themselves complicated stories about their role during the Holocaust. It has also surfaced lingering resentments, some of them clearly antisemitic, about Germany's efforts to repay Jews for its crimes against them.

The Wandlitz estate is likely one of the last property restitution cases to be adjudicated in Germany, as virtually all looted or "aryanized" property has already gone through the restitution process or been lost to history, with no one left to claim it. The deadline to file property claims passed decades ago.

The case centers on an estate, located in a bucolic area about 20 miles from central Berlin, that functioned in the 1930s as a summer retreat for an orphanage operated by two Jewish women, Alice Donat and Helene Lindenbaum. To comply with Nazi laws meant to expropriate Jewish wealth, they sold the land, complete with a structure in poor condition, to Felix Moegelin in 1939 for 21,100 Reichsmarks, a relative pittance.

Moegelin had to sign the statement "I am Aryan," while the two women had to sign that they were Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

The original house was torn down and eventually replaced, and Moegelin and his family settled in on Wegener Street. Donat and Lindenbaum were deported from Berlin by the Nazis in 1943 and murdered.

Today, Moegelin's granddaughter, Gabriele Lieske, 85, still lives in the house with her son, Thomas Lieske, 61. They dug in their heels after a lower court ruled last year that they must give up the property or pay for it. Located in the suburbs of Berlin, where real estate is hot, the property is worth about $1.6 million today.

Now, the property will be seized by the state and transferred to the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the legal successor to unclaimed Jewish property in the former East Germany. No living heirs to the murdered owners were ever identified.

"I spent my whole life in the house and looked after my parents," Gabriele Lieske said after the ruling, according to local media. "We don't know where to go."

The case drew national attention earlier this year after it was profiled in the prominent German newsmagazine Spiegel just after International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It vaulted back into public view this month when the Lieskes ran out of legal runway to appeal their case.

Seeking compensation, the Lieskes' Munich-based lawyer, Raffael Nath, invoked a legal loophole that allows the German government to provide some payment to current owners who paid for rather than inherited the property from the original buyer who "Aryanized" the property. He argued that Gabriele Lieske actually did not inherit the property from her mother, Luise Moegelin. Instead, he asserted, Lieske purchased it in 1993 through an arrangement in which she would provide care for her aging parent and cover all the upkeep costs. Her mother died in 2012 at the age of 99.

The judge was not persuaded.