Austria Rejects Pleas for Jewish Historian in Holocaust Restitution Case
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Austria’s president denied a request by the Anti-Defamation League to pardon a Jewish historian facing jail time for the omission of his aunt from his family’s application for Holocaust restitution.
The denial came in a Sept. 8 letter sent by an employee of Austrian President Heinz Fischer’s office to Andrew Srulevitch, ADL’s assistant director for international affairs, in reply to Srulevitch’s plea to nullify the prison sentence of Stephan Templ before he is to report to prison later this month.
Recalling that Templ had exhausted all avenues of appeal, the letter states: “The judgment is therefore final.”
In May, the Austrian Supreme Court rejected Templ’s appeal over his April 2014 conviction of fraud against Austria, which judges found he committed by failing in his 2006 restitution application to mention his mother’s estranged sister. He was sentenced to three years in jail, but the sentence was later reduced to one year.
Templ is the author of a 2001 book on restitution in which he criticized the Austrian state and society’s theft of Jewish property and failures to offer restitution. Many Austrian Jews, including the anti-fascist campaigner and journalist Karl Pfeifer, said they considered the conviction to be a result of a vendetta against Templ. Austrian officials deny this, saying his conviction is consistent with the law and penal code.
But critics of the original ruling noted that Austria never legally owned the property and therefore cannot be regarded as a victim of Templ’s actions. Others point out that Austria’s laws do not require restitution claimants to list other heirs.
“The extraordinary use of criminal law by the state in the case of Stephan Templ raises some uncomfortable questions,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s national director, wrote to the president in July.
Earlier this month, Templ obtained proof that an Austrian official who was tasked, in his capacity as a public notary, with finding all the heirs to the property relevant to Templ’s claim also omitted Templ’s aunt and another heir from his list.
“The latest twist in this absurd story of injustice is that the Austrian state committed the same act for which its justice system convicted me,” Templ told JTA.
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