Areas of Focus

Real Estate

Activities of the IKG Vienna

A team of historians from the IKG Vienna's then Information and Support Center completed the examination of over 2,700 real estate properties owned by the Republic of Austria in January 2004 and the examination of nearly 2,000 properties owned by the City of Vienna in December 2004. As a consequence of this examination, the IKG Vienna submitted around 60 claims for in rem restitution of real estate on behalf of the entitled parties today. In a number of cases, the legal successors had already been identified, or are being identified in an ongoing manner by today's Department for Restitution Affairs. The legal successorship documents drawn up in this context were submitted to the Arbitration Panel for In Rem Restitution.

The claims for in rem restitution submitted by the IKG Vienna 2004 are being comprehensively tracked by the experts from the Department for Restitution Affairs. In the proceedings before the Arbitration Panel, in-depth historical and legal research is carried out in the individual cases, the claims applications are supplemented and opinions on each case are rendered.

On April 16, 2007, the IKG Vienna, together with the Institute for Roman Law and Ancient History Law of the University of Vienna organized a symposium at the Vienna University Law School with a subsequent panel discussion focusing on the issue of "In Rem Restitution for Victims of National-Socialism". One key issue was the critical examination of the term "extreme injustice" in the Settlement Fund Act.

On the initiative of the IKG Vienna, requests to extend the application deadline applicable to publicly owned real estate were granted on a number of occasions. The deadline was extended to December 31, 2009 for real estate owned by the federal provinces of Vienna and Vorarlberg, as well as by the cities of Bad Ischl and Mattersburg. Just as it had done for the last deadline extension 2007, in the first half of 2009 the IKG Vienna initiated a mailing on behalf of the Association of Austrian Cities (Städtebund) and the Association of Austrian Municipalities (Gemeindebund) to inform cities and municipalities of the possibility of "opting in" pursuant to Section 38 of the settlement fund act (Legal Foundations).