Haunted house
Peter Koppenheim believes he has a clear cut case for property restitution.
As the descendent of the former Jewish owner of a building on Wrocław’s market square – Rynek 7 – he argues that he should be able to reclaim the building. Koppenheim maintains that his grandfather was illegally forced to sell the property because of anti-Jewish laws imposed by the Nazis.
“Poland should give back whatever can be proved as expropriated properties,” Koppenheim said.
As numerous governments that have tried to sort out the issue of property restitution in Poland have found, though, the issue is not clear cut on a general level or often on an individual case level.
This is a lesson Koppenheim is now learning as well. While he is certain of his right to the building, there are other claimants. First are the descendants of the person who purchased the building in the late 1930s who were recognized as the rightful owners of Rynek 7 and have since sold it. The second is German company Thyssen, which bought the building in 1997 for a reported DM 3 million and turned it into a luxury mall including class-A office space.
Then there is the lack of a restitution law. For nine years various attempts at such a law have died in Parliament as a result of the complexity, sensitivity and cost of the issue. Koppenheim laments the lack of such a law.
“If this were Dusseldorf, I would have gotten the building back,” he said.
Finally, there is the complication that Wrocław wasn’t even Wrocław at the time that the Koppenheim family lost Rynek 7, but was then the German city of Breslau.
Ultimately Koppenheim will have to show that his grandfather was deprived of the building by the Nazis; that the pre-war buyer improperly benefited from this persecution; that the transfer of German property to Poland in 1946 did not apply to his family; that the Polish government’s recognition of the pre-war owner as the rightful owner was wrong; and that Thyssen did not purchase the building from its rightful owner.
The complexity of the challenge facing Kopppenheim, as well as the case around Rynek 7 itself, shows that even if a law is put in place, case-by-case restitution will be far from clear cut.
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INSIDE
Unlike many other Central European countries, Poland has failed in the decade following the fall of communism to pass a law on property restitution. The lack of progress on the issue has stalled development, worried some properties buyers and frustrated owners who lost holdings either to the Nazis in World War II or to nationalization by the communists.
This June, Peter Koppenheim and 10 other Polish Jews or their descendants tried to force the issue. They filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. courts against the Polish government seeking the return of property. The suit alleged that the government conspired to illegally seize the property of Jewish citizens.
While the lawsuit has drawn denunciations from the government, and even the government of Israel, it has brought the issue of restitution to the fore. The government is now expected to present a new, draft restitution law to Parliament this fall.
Peter Koppenheim hopes that such a law will help resolve the case of Rynek 7, an imposing art nouveau structure on Wrocław’s market square that was owned by his grandfather. Koppenheim argues that his grandfather was improperly forced to sell the building by the Third Reich. As a result, he believes the subsequent sale of the building to Heinrich Mikolaschek, an Austrian, should be nullified.
If this claim was recognized, Koppenheim could then argue that the building should not have been transferred to the Polish state and that Mikolaschek’s claim to it in the 1970s should not have been recognized.
Many would counter that the claim of the descendant of a German Jew should not affect Poland, and that the Polish government cannot be held responsible for historic wrongdoings that occurred prior to the recognition of Polish sovereignty over these Western territories.
“That was pre-war history and it didn’t have anything to do with the Polish government,” said Maria Keller, a Wrocław-based lawyer. “It is an issue between the Jews and Germans from a legal point of view.”
As part of the Potsdam agreement and other post-war settlements, Wrocław, which was then Breslau, and other German cities west of the Odra-Nysa became part of Poland. German property and properties abandoned during the war were transferred to the Polish government.
There was an exception, however. The 1946 decree stipulating the terms of the transfer stated that properties to be excluded were those of “individuals of Polish nationality or others who were persecuted by the Germans.”
Koppenheim believes this exception would apply to his family and the property. In addition, he maintains that even if it doesn’t, Mikolaschek’s claim should not have been recognized because he was a German, not an Austrian, citizen when he purchased the property. In this case, the building should have become the property of the Polish, and later the Wrocław city, government.
If Mikolaschek’s claim to the building is overturned in one way or another, such a decision would open the question of whether someone else, either Koppenheim or the city of Wrocław, should have benefited from the sale of Rynek 7 to Thyssen.
Peter Koppenheim
When his mother died in 1991, Peter Koppenheim, a citizen of Manchester, England, found a file related to properties owned by his father and grandfather throughout Germany before the family fled the country in 1939. Among the papers were research and correspondence dating back to the 1950s related to Koppenheim family properties across Germany. Included in the file was information about property owned by the Koppenheim family in Breslau, and information about Rynek 7.
Peter Koppenheim, who is involved in real estate in the U.K., followed a family tradition in his choice of industries. Before World War II, his grandfather, Meyer Koppenheim, in partnership with another German Jew, Fritz Goldschmidt, ran Ostdeutsche Handels-und Industrie Gesellschaft mbh, (OHIG), a Breslau-based real estate company that owned and managed an estimated 12 properties in then Breslau.
Through OHIG, Koppenheim and Goldschmidt purchased Rynek 7 in 1926.
When historians want to trace ownership or find basic information about an individual’s residence and business affiliation in Wrocław/Breslau, they use the adressbuch, an in-depth telephone directory that was published annually in pre-war Breslau. The adressbuch not only gives place of residence, but under specific addresses the book renders information about who owned and managed a given property, who rented the property and what business activities were carried out at that address. At the end of the adressbuch is a list of all companies registered in the city with the identification number given at the registration office.
In the 1938 adressbuch, OHIG is listed as the owner and manager of Rynek 7. There is also a cross-reference to another address, Tauenzienplac 1b, which today is plac Kościuszki in the heart of Wrocław. Under this listing is information that OHIG and Tauenzienplac 1b were owned by Koppenheim and Goldschmidt.
OHIG’s ownership of Rynek 7 is also indicated in the city’s building archives. When OHIG wanted to add central heating to the building in 1928, the company submitted plans to the German construction police for permission. The OHIG company stamp figures on the plans with an illegible signature.
After coming to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis started a campaign eroding Jewish citizens’ participation in mainstream economic and cultural life. In terms of marking Jews in public life, as of September 1938 Jewish men in official documents were branded with the middle name “Israel,” women with the middle name “Sara.”
In terms of businesses and property, after the Nuremberg laws of 1935, many Jewish property owners either lost property through forced sales or bankruptcy that was brought about by extensive boycotts of Jewish businesses.
As a part of bankruptcy settlements, properties were handed over to and later resold by the state.
“(In Germany) when companies (went) broke between 1935-1940, its clear (why)” said Lothar Fremy, a lawyer with the firm Rosbach and Fremy who is Koppenheim’s attorney. “It’s because the Nazis put so much pressure on them. You don’t have to prove it.”
This was the case with Rynek 7, he added.
Evidence that Koppenheim and Goldschmidt were subject to boycott can be found in a December 1936 passport-sized pamphlet entitled, “Jewish Businesses (Judische Geschafte) in Breslau.” According to researchers, this booklet was used by government and party authorities to know which businesses to boycott. Listed in the pages, which are littered with anti-Semitic slogans such as “when you buy from a Jew, you help world Bolshevism,” or “in the battle against the Jews, there is no room for sentiments,” is the company of Koppenheim and Goldschmidt.
The boycott had its impact. OHIG lost Rynek 7 in the late 1930s and the building was resold.
Koppenheim’s family fared better than Rynek 7 and Koppenheim himself, who died in 1940. A melange of serendipity, luck and also a large dose of calculated foresight on the part of Peter Koppenheim’s mother brought the family to England. Pregnant in 1937, Koppenheim’s mother got travel papers to go alone to England. She gave birth there and came home with a sister for Peter. That sister had a British passport in hand that became the key to the family’s escape from Germany two years later.
Heinrich Mikolaschek
The 1940 adressbuch shows the new owner of Rynek 7 to be a certified salesman, H. Mikolaschek, with a cross reference to the then German town of Krappitz, which is now Krapkowice near Opole. When exactly Mikolaschek bought the building is a point of contention and later could be central to determine whose claim if any should be recognized.
According to Katarzyna Hawrylak-Brzezowska, the head of the Wrocław monument protection office, Mikolaschek bought the building in 1938.
“Without a doubt, the sale was somehow forced,” Hawrylak-Brzezowska said.
Keller, the attorney who represented the Mikolasek family in the 1990’s, also contends that the year of purchase was 1938. The family changed its name to the more Austrian spelling of Mikolasek from Mikolaschek.
Peter Koppenheim and his lawyers contend the property was purchased in 1939. According to a copy of the land register from the 1930s, the property was sold by auction on June 19, 1939, and the new ownership of Rynek 7 by “Der Kaufmann Heinrich Mikolaschek” in Krappitz was entered into the title on Dec. 22, 1939, three and a half months after the start of World War II.
What happened to the building in terms of ownership after 1945 is not clear. The building was administered by the Wrocław public property department (WZGK). A 1980 architectural analysis of the building city showed that the WZGK was an investor in planned renovation work. The name Mikolaschek does not appear in any documents or historical studies of the period.
When Mikolaschek reappeared on the scene is also unclear. The impression by many is that while the property was administered by the city, Mikolaschek, who became an Austrian citizen after the war, never lost the rights to the building.
Keller said that Mikolaschek’s claim to the building was based on the fact that as an Austrian citizen, the 1946 decree transferring property ownership to the Polish government did not apply.
According to Keller, it was during the political thaw of the 1960s that Heinrich Mikolasek started the process to reclaim Rynek 7.
Keller researched the land title for Rynek 7 when the Mikolasek descendents became her clients in the 1990s. She said that it contained a written statement from Heinrich that he was an Austrian citizen and not a member of the Nazi party. “On the basis of the German title/deed, a Polish deed was established, at the end of the 1960s or in the early 1970s,” Keller said.
According to Keller, Heinrich did not live to see the actual transfer take place. It was his heirs – his widow and three daughters – who were entered into the title.
The City of Wrocław
From the end of the war until the mid-1990s memory plays a larger role in piecing together the saga of Rynek 7 than documents.
According to Hawrylak-Brzezowska, the house was always known as the “Grubecker house,” the married name of one of Mikolasek’s daughters. It was her husband, Ernst Grubeck, a Vienna-based lawyer who handled much of the correspondence with the city of Wrocław in the 1990s.
Property ownership in Poland only became an issue after the communalization law of 1990 was passed. At this point, commissions were set up throughout the country to determine which properties should be transferred from the Polish state to local authorities or cooperatives that may have claims.
“In 1989, the system changed and people started talking about reprivatization and revindication, said Paweł Skrzywanek, who in the early 1990s was director of the department of culture and sport for the Wrocław voivodship.
When Rynek 7 was considered by the city council inventory commission to determine whether it belonged to the state or not, and whether it should be passed to the city, the ownership issue seemed clear. “This building was privately owned and had its own deed,” said historian Leonard Smołka, who was head of the city council’s inventory commission and today is director of the Wrocław University archives. “The city did not take over that building from the treasury.”
While ownership seemed clear to the city, there was always an aura of controversy surrounding the building and the Mikolasek and Grubeck families. “(T)here were rumors that that property was given back to him in a strange way. That he was an Austrian, but he was a member of the fascist party and that he got that property as a former Jewish property,” Skrzywanek said. “There was a question mark from a legal point of view and from a moral point of view.”
Rafał Eysymontt, who was the then head of the city council’s architectural and spatial planning commission, also said there was a doubt surrounding the Austrian’s claim. “It was always said that the right to ownership by the Austrian is not (clear cut),” Eysymontt said. “But we did not know about the Jewish owner. Who could have known that?”
Unrelated to the ownership controversy, the city of Wrocław in the mid-1990s started proceedings to take the building back from the Mikolasek family. At this time Rynek 7 had become an eyesore and because of structural problems was threatening surrounding buildings.
The city first tried to buy the building from the Mikolasek-Grubeck family. When the offer was refused, the city tried to invoke a 1962 monument’s protection law that states that if a monument is not appropriately cared for, it can be taken over by the government.
The Mikolasek/Grubeck families begged poor and bided time.
“It was about money,” Hawrylak-Brzezowska said. “The owners had the impression that the building was extremely valuable, that they would make a lot of money.”
In the end, the city backed off from plans to take over the property. “The city decided that we didn’t have money and they were afraid of an international court process,” Eysymontt said. “Then someone from the city board said that, ‘He’ll sell it and we will have the problem off our shoulders.’ ”
Thyssen
That proved to be a fortuitous view. In 1996, the Mikolasek/Grubeck families started talks with German giant Thyssen about a possible sale. This possibility was reported to the city board by Keller. To speed the process, Keller said Thyssen was attempting to set up a Polish company to avoid the necessity of receiving permission for the purchase from the Interior Ministry. The law requires foreign companies to seek permission to buy property.
But the city wasn’t the only one that learned of a possible sale to Thyssen at this time. Koppenheim in 1996 also heard of it and approached Thyssen to notify them that he had a claim to the building.
In recent local press reports, spokesmen for both Thyssen and the City of Wrocław were quoted saying that they were unaware there was a claim to the building.
But in documents obtained by the Business Journal, both the city and Thyssen were given long descriptions of the Koppenheim claim.
In 1996, Thyssen responded to an inquiry from Koppenheim’s lawyer Fremy saying that Thyssen is such a large international concern that it could not determine which subsidiary was interested in purchasing the property.
“Thyssen has hundreds of subsidiaries abroad and in Germany,” the letter read. “It is not possible for us to justify the expense involved in establishing which of those subsidiaries intends to buy the property.”
Fremy does not believe that a fight against Thyssen will be successful legally. But he said he believes the company should have thought twice about the purchase.
“It’s all a question of morality,” Fremy said. “On a legal side, I don’t have a chance. The only chance is on the moral side.
“What I did suggest is that (Thyssen) step back from this deal,” he added. “This property was taken away from Jewish people and they shouldn’t do things like this. Especially Thyssen. Thyssen has a bad reputation.”
Bena Phues, a spokeswoman for Thyssen Krupp Immobilien confirmed that its German subsidiary Project Rynek 7 purchased the building in March 1997. However she did not know enough about the transaction or the building to comment on the sale or Koppenheim’s claim by press time.
The city also replied to Fremy, saying that according to the property title the rightful owners are Austrian citizens. Any claim related to events that occurred in 1939 must be settled in German courts, the city added.
In early 1997, Wrocław officials were in the final stages of a chaotic preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit that June. As a result, the Mikolasek-Grubeck families received permission to renovate the building’s facade in February 1997. The families in turn gave Thyssen power to be its representative to do the work until the actual purchase took place.
After buying the building, Thyssen renovated it and turned it into high-end shopping mall that included class-A office space.
Restitution
Sorting through the claims to the property will be no easy task as Koppenheim is finding. According to a property lawyer, who could not comment in detail on the specifics of the case because he is not involved, two questions arise. The first is why the Austrian citizen’s claim was recognized, the second is why it took 50 years for the Koppenheim family to make its claim.
“Austrians were usually German citizens. There is a question as to why (this Austrian) was granted the property after the war,” said Roman Rewald, a partner who specializes in property at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He added that the timing of the Koppenheim claim is also subject to questions. “It doesn’t take 50 years to claim property,” he added. “Poland didn’t have any obligation. It was up to the owner to claim it.”
In addition, the Koppenheim family received a nominal amount in compensation for the building from a West German office set up to compensate those who lost property in Germany or Poland. Koppenheim said that amount was just a “few hundred pounds” and that more importantly it recognized his claim to Rynek 7.
For Fremy, the myriad unresolved questions in relation to the building are overshadowed by the absence of a restitution law in Poland.
“First they have to have a restitution law,” Fremy said. “Still what they did in the 1930s was legal. The Koppenheim family lost their property. It was still legal. But if you have a restitution law, there could be a decision if it was legal or not legal. Then you would have to have this decision to say whether the Polish government was right or wrong.”
As the descendent of the former Jewish owner of a building on Wrocław’s market square – Rynek 7 – he argues that he should be able to reclaim the building. Koppenheim maintains that his grandfather was illegally forced to sell the property because of anti-Jewish laws imposed by the Nazis.
“Poland should give back whatever can be proved as expropriated properties,” Koppenheim said.
As numerous governments that have tried to sort out the issue of property restitution in Poland have found, though, the issue is not clear cut on a general level or often on an individual case level.
This is a lesson Koppenheim is now learning as well. While he is certain of his right to the building, there are other claimants. First are the descendants of the person who purchased the building in the late 1930s who were recognized as the rightful owners of Rynek 7 and have since sold it. The second is German company Thyssen, which bought the building in 1997 for a reported DM 3 million and turned it into a luxury mall including class-A office space.
Then there is the lack of a restitution law. For nine years various attempts at such a law have died in Parliament as a result of the complexity, sensitivity and cost of the issue. Koppenheim laments the lack of such a law.
“If this were Dusseldorf, I would have gotten the building back,” he said.
Finally, there is the complication that Wrocław wasn’t even Wrocław at the time that the Koppenheim family lost Rynek 7, but was then the German city of Breslau.
Ultimately Koppenheim will have to show that his grandfather was deprived of the building by the Nazis; that the pre-war buyer improperly benefited from this persecution; that the transfer of German property to Poland in 1946 did not apply to his family; that the Polish government’s recognition of the pre-war owner as the rightful owner was wrong; and that Thyssen did not purchase the building from its rightful owner.
The complexity of the challenge facing Kopppenheim, as well as the case around Rynek 7 itself, shows that even if a law is put in place, case-by-case restitution will be far from clear cut.
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INSIDE
Unlike many other Central European countries, Poland has failed in the decade following the fall of communism to pass a law on property restitution. The lack of progress on the issue has stalled development, worried some properties buyers and frustrated owners who lost holdings either to the Nazis in World War II or to nationalization by the communists.
This June, Peter Koppenheim and 10 other Polish Jews or their descendants tried to force the issue. They filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. courts against the Polish government seeking the return of property. The suit alleged that the government conspired to illegally seize the property of Jewish citizens.
While the lawsuit has drawn denunciations from the government, and even the government of Israel, it has brought the issue of restitution to the fore. The government is now expected to present a new, draft restitution law to Parliament this fall.
Peter Koppenheim hopes that such a law will help resolve the case of Rynek 7, an imposing art nouveau structure on Wrocław’s market square that was owned by his grandfather. Koppenheim argues that his grandfather was improperly forced to sell the building by the Third Reich. As a result, he believes the subsequent sale of the building to Heinrich Mikolaschek, an Austrian, should be nullified.
If this claim was recognized, Koppenheim could then argue that the building should not have been transferred to the Polish state and that Mikolaschek’s claim to it in the 1970s should not have been recognized.
Many would counter that the claim of the descendant of a German Jew should not affect Poland, and that the Polish government cannot be held responsible for historic wrongdoings that occurred prior to the recognition of Polish sovereignty over these Western territories.
“That was pre-war history and it didn’t have anything to do with the Polish government,” said Maria Keller, a Wrocław-based lawyer. “It is an issue between the Jews and Germans from a legal point of view.”
As part of the Potsdam agreement and other post-war settlements, Wrocław, which was then Breslau, and other German cities west of the Odra-Nysa became part of Poland. German property and properties abandoned during the war were transferred to the Polish government.
There was an exception, however. The 1946 decree stipulating the terms of the transfer stated that properties to be excluded were those of “individuals of Polish nationality or others who were persecuted by the Germans.”
Koppenheim believes this exception would apply to his family and the property. In addition, he maintains that even if it doesn’t, Mikolaschek’s claim should not have been recognized because he was a German, not an Austrian, citizen when he purchased the property. In this case, the building should have become the property of the Polish, and later the Wrocław city, government.
If Mikolaschek’s claim to the building is overturned in one way or another, such a decision would open the question of whether someone else, either Koppenheim or the city of Wrocław, should have benefited from the sale of Rynek 7 to Thyssen.
Peter Koppenheim
When his mother died in 1991, Peter Koppenheim, a citizen of Manchester, England, found a file related to properties owned by his father and grandfather throughout Germany before the family fled the country in 1939. Among the papers were research and correspondence dating back to the 1950s related to Koppenheim family properties across Germany. Included in the file was information about property owned by the Koppenheim family in Breslau, and information about Rynek 7.
Peter Koppenheim, who is involved in real estate in the U.K., followed a family tradition in his choice of industries. Before World War II, his grandfather, Meyer Koppenheim, in partnership with another German Jew, Fritz Goldschmidt, ran Ostdeutsche Handels-und Industrie Gesellschaft mbh, (OHIG), a Breslau-based real estate company that owned and managed an estimated 12 properties in then Breslau.
Through OHIG, Koppenheim and Goldschmidt purchased Rynek 7 in 1926.
When historians want to trace ownership or find basic information about an individual’s residence and business affiliation in Wrocław/Breslau, they use the adressbuch, an in-depth telephone directory that was published annually in pre-war Breslau. The adressbuch not only gives place of residence, but under specific addresses the book renders information about who owned and managed a given property, who rented the property and what business activities were carried out at that address. At the end of the adressbuch is a list of all companies registered in the city with the identification number given at the registration office.
In the 1938 adressbuch, OHIG is listed as the owner and manager of Rynek 7. There is also a cross-reference to another address, Tauenzienplac 1b, which today is plac Kościuszki in the heart of Wrocław. Under this listing is information that OHIG and Tauenzienplac 1b were owned by Koppenheim and Goldschmidt.
OHIG’s ownership of Rynek 7 is also indicated in the city’s building archives. When OHIG wanted to add central heating to the building in 1928, the company submitted plans to the German construction police for permission. The OHIG company stamp figures on the plans with an illegible signature.
After coming to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis started a campaign eroding Jewish citizens’ participation in mainstream economic and cultural life. In terms of marking Jews in public life, as of September 1938 Jewish men in official documents were branded with the middle name “Israel,” women with the middle name “Sara.”
In terms of businesses and property, after the Nuremberg laws of 1935, many Jewish property owners either lost property through forced sales or bankruptcy that was brought about by extensive boycotts of Jewish businesses.
As a part of bankruptcy settlements, properties were handed over to and later resold by the state.
“(In Germany) when companies (went) broke between 1935-1940, its clear (why)” said Lothar Fremy, a lawyer with the firm Rosbach and Fremy who is Koppenheim’s attorney. “It’s because the Nazis put so much pressure on them. You don’t have to prove it.”
This was the case with Rynek 7, he added.
Evidence that Koppenheim and Goldschmidt were subject to boycott can be found in a December 1936 passport-sized pamphlet entitled, “Jewish Businesses (Judische Geschafte) in Breslau.” According to researchers, this booklet was used by government and party authorities to know which businesses to boycott. Listed in the pages, which are littered with anti-Semitic slogans such as “when you buy from a Jew, you help world Bolshevism,” or “in the battle against the Jews, there is no room for sentiments,” is the company of Koppenheim and Goldschmidt.
The boycott had its impact. OHIG lost Rynek 7 in the late 1930s and the building was resold.
Koppenheim’s family fared better than Rynek 7 and Koppenheim himself, who died in 1940. A melange of serendipity, luck and also a large dose of calculated foresight on the part of Peter Koppenheim’s mother brought the family to England. Pregnant in 1937, Koppenheim’s mother got travel papers to go alone to England. She gave birth there and came home with a sister for Peter. That sister had a British passport in hand that became the key to the family’s escape from Germany two years later.
Heinrich Mikolaschek
The 1940 adressbuch shows the new owner of Rynek 7 to be a certified salesman, H. Mikolaschek, with a cross reference to the then German town of Krappitz, which is now Krapkowice near Opole. When exactly Mikolaschek bought the building is a point of contention and later could be central to determine whose claim if any should be recognized.
According to Katarzyna Hawrylak-Brzezowska, the head of the Wrocław monument protection office, Mikolaschek bought the building in 1938.
“Without a doubt, the sale was somehow forced,” Hawrylak-Brzezowska said.
Keller, the attorney who represented the Mikolasek family in the 1990’s, also contends that the year of purchase was 1938. The family changed its name to the more Austrian spelling of Mikolasek from Mikolaschek.
Peter Koppenheim and his lawyers contend the property was purchased in 1939. According to a copy of the land register from the 1930s, the property was sold by auction on June 19, 1939, and the new ownership of Rynek 7 by “Der Kaufmann Heinrich Mikolaschek” in Krappitz was entered into the title on Dec. 22, 1939, three and a half months after the start of World War II.
What happened to the building in terms of ownership after 1945 is not clear. The building was administered by the Wrocław public property department (WZGK). A 1980 architectural analysis of the building city showed that the WZGK was an investor in planned renovation work. The name Mikolaschek does not appear in any documents or historical studies of the period.
When Mikolaschek reappeared on the scene is also unclear. The impression by many is that while the property was administered by the city, Mikolaschek, who became an Austrian citizen after the war, never lost the rights to the building.
Keller said that Mikolaschek’s claim to the building was based on the fact that as an Austrian citizen, the 1946 decree transferring property ownership to the Polish government did not apply.
According to Keller, it was during the political thaw of the 1960s that Heinrich Mikolasek started the process to reclaim Rynek 7.
Keller researched the land title for Rynek 7 when the Mikolasek descendents became her clients in the 1990s. She said that it contained a written statement from Heinrich that he was an Austrian citizen and not a member of the Nazi party. “On the basis of the German title/deed, a Polish deed was established, at the end of the 1960s or in the early 1970s,” Keller said.
According to Keller, Heinrich did not live to see the actual transfer take place. It was his heirs – his widow and three daughters – who were entered into the title.
The City of Wrocław
From the end of the war until the mid-1990s memory plays a larger role in piecing together the saga of Rynek 7 than documents.
According to Hawrylak-Brzezowska, the house was always known as the “Grubecker house,” the married name of one of Mikolasek’s daughters. It was her husband, Ernst Grubeck, a Vienna-based lawyer who handled much of the correspondence with the city of Wrocław in the 1990s.
Property ownership in Poland only became an issue after the communalization law of 1990 was passed. At this point, commissions were set up throughout the country to determine which properties should be transferred from the Polish state to local authorities or cooperatives that may have claims.
“In 1989, the system changed and people started talking about reprivatization and revindication, said Paweł Skrzywanek, who in the early 1990s was director of the department of culture and sport for the Wrocław voivodship.
When Rynek 7 was considered by the city council inventory commission to determine whether it belonged to the state or not, and whether it should be passed to the city, the ownership issue seemed clear. “This building was privately owned and had its own deed,” said historian Leonard Smołka, who was head of the city council’s inventory commission and today is director of the Wrocław University archives. “The city did not take over that building from the treasury.”
While ownership seemed clear to the city, there was always an aura of controversy surrounding the building and the Mikolasek and Grubeck families. “(T)here were rumors that that property was given back to him in a strange way. That he was an Austrian, but he was a member of the fascist party and that he got that property as a former Jewish property,” Skrzywanek said. “There was a question mark from a legal point of view and from a moral point of view.”
Rafał Eysymontt, who was the then head of the city council’s architectural and spatial planning commission, also said there was a doubt surrounding the Austrian’s claim. “It was always said that the right to ownership by the Austrian is not (clear cut),” Eysymontt said. “But we did not know about the Jewish owner. Who could have known that?”
Unrelated to the ownership controversy, the city of Wrocław in the mid-1990s started proceedings to take the building back from the Mikolasek family. At this time Rynek 7 had become an eyesore and because of structural problems was threatening surrounding buildings.
The city first tried to buy the building from the Mikolasek-Grubeck family. When the offer was refused, the city tried to invoke a 1962 monument’s protection law that states that if a monument is not appropriately cared for, it can be taken over by the government.
The Mikolasek/Grubeck families begged poor and bided time.
“It was about money,” Hawrylak-Brzezowska said. “The owners had the impression that the building was extremely valuable, that they would make a lot of money.”
In the end, the city backed off from plans to take over the property. “The city decided that we didn’t have money and they were afraid of an international court process,” Eysymontt said. “Then someone from the city board said that, ‘He’ll sell it and we will have the problem off our shoulders.’ ”
Thyssen
That proved to be a fortuitous view. In 1996, the Mikolasek/Grubeck families started talks with German giant Thyssen about a possible sale. This possibility was reported to the city board by Keller. To speed the process, Keller said Thyssen was attempting to set up a Polish company to avoid the necessity of receiving permission for the purchase from the Interior Ministry. The law requires foreign companies to seek permission to buy property.
But the city wasn’t the only one that learned of a possible sale to Thyssen at this time. Koppenheim in 1996 also heard of it and approached Thyssen to notify them that he had a claim to the building.
In recent local press reports, spokesmen for both Thyssen and the City of Wrocław were quoted saying that they were unaware there was a claim to the building.
But in documents obtained by the Business Journal, both the city and Thyssen were given long descriptions of the Koppenheim claim.
In 1996, Thyssen responded to an inquiry from Koppenheim’s lawyer Fremy saying that Thyssen is such a large international concern that it could not determine which subsidiary was interested in purchasing the property.
“Thyssen has hundreds of subsidiaries abroad and in Germany,” the letter read. “It is not possible for us to justify the expense involved in establishing which of those subsidiaries intends to buy the property.”
Fremy does not believe that a fight against Thyssen will be successful legally. But he said he believes the company should have thought twice about the purchase.
“It’s all a question of morality,” Fremy said. “On a legal side, I don’t have a chance. The only chance is on the moral side.
“What I did suggest is that (Thyssen) step back from this deal,” he added. “This property was taken away from Jewish people and they shouldn’t do things like this. Especially Thyssen. Thyssen has a bad reputation.”
Bena Phues, a spokeswoman for Thyssen Krupp Immobilien confirmed that its German subsidiary Project Rynek 7 purchased the building in March 1997. However she did not know enough about the transaction or the building to comment on the sale or Koppenheim’s claim by press time.
The city also replied to Fremy, saying that according to the property title the rightful owners are Austrian citizens. Any claim related to events that occurred in 1939 must be settled in German courts, the city added.
In early 1997, Wrocław officials were in the final stages of a chaotic preparation for Pope John Paul II’s visit that June. As a result, the Mikolasek-Grubeck families received permission to renovate the building’s facade in February 1997. The families in turn gave Thyssen power to be its representative to do the work until the actual purchase took place.
After buying the building, Thyssen renovated it and turned it into high-end shopping mall that included class-A office space.
Restitution
Sorting through the claims to the property will be no easy task as Koppenheim is finding. According to a property lawyer, who could not comment in detail on the specifics of the case because he is not involved, two questions arise. The first is why the Austrian citizen’s claim was recognized, the second is why it took 50 years for the Koppenheim family to make its claim.
“Austrians were usually German citizens. There is a question as to why (this Austrian) was granted the property after the war,” said Roman Rewald, a partner who specializes in property at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He added that the timing of the Koppenheim claim is also subject to questions. “It doesn’t take 50 years to claim property,” he added. “Poland didn’t have any obligation. It was up to the owner to claim it.”
In addition, the Koppenheim family received a nominal amount in compensation for the building from a West German office set up to compensate those who lost property in Germany or Poland. Koppenheim said that amount was just a “few hundred pounds” and that more importantly it recognized his claim to Rynek 7.
For Fremy, the myriad unresolved questions in relation to the building are overshadowed by the absence of a restitution law in Poland.
“First they have to have a restitution law,” Fremy said. “Still what they did in the 1930s was legal. The Koppenheim family lost their property. It was still legal. But if you have a restitution law, there could be a decision if it was legal or not legal. Then you would have to have this decision to say whether the Polish government was right or wrong.”
