By Steffen Winter Spiegel.de
A German-American lawyer and his family have been fighting for over two decades to reclaim lucrative properties lost under the Nazi regime. But he continues to face legal hurdles in trying to restore their legacy.
Peter Sonnenthal has plenty of experience hunting down the cheats, crooks and cronies who gamble with marked cards at the world’s largest casino: Wall Street. During the 1980s, Sonnenthal worked as a lawyer for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He was feared and loathed by fraudsters who swindled millions of dollars — and ended up catching most of them.
But some opponents can bring even a hard-nosed American prosecutor to his knees — not on the Hudson River in New York, but along the Teltow Canal in the German state of Brandenburg, just outside Berlin. For the past 22 years, Sonnenthal and his relatives have been fighting in German courts for the restitution of property that belonged to their Jewish ancestors. At stake are 84 hectares (250 acres) of prime real estate in the upscale Berlin suburb of Teltow, roughly 1,000 properties in all, worth millions of euros.
Decades of Litigation
The dispute is likely to occupy a prominent place in Germany’s legal annals. It all began in 1991, and the row has since made its way through a maze of German courts, starting with the local and state offices for unresolved property issues. From there, the case was brought before the Brandenburg Higher State Administrative Court, was deliberated five times before the German Federal Administrative Court, then dealt with by the German Finance Ministry, and has been appealed to the German Federal Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest judicial body. Despite minor victories, Sonnenthal has repeatedly run into obstacles over two decades of litigation.
When his ordeal began, Sonnenthal was 37 years old and living in Denver, Colorado. Now he’s 59 and has moved to Berlin, where he occasionally holds a one-man protest at Berlin’s central Brandenburg Gate, waving a sign in his hand that reads, “Justice delayed — is justice denied!”
The battle over the properties in Teltow has pushed Sonnenthal to his limit. “Historical facts are being denied, the law is being abused, and the Nazis of Teltow are being vindicated after the fact,” he says. According to Sonnenthal, everything has to be contested in court and absolutely no concessions are made. “This is offensive to the family,” he says. “Our property was stolen, and now we have to justify ourselves.”
Categories: Europe and Australia, Germany
American (Jewish) lawyers always seem to emphasize ‘selective justice’. When the target were the Swiss banks everyone was pushing.