Posted on 10/09/2008 2:15:20 PM PDT by lizol
Court rejects Germans' property restitution claims
The Associated Press Published: October 9, 2008
BERLIN: A European court on Thursday threw out a restitution claim by Germans expelled at the end of World War II from what is now Poland — a decision welcomed by the leaders of both countries.
The Prussian Claims Society, which represents a small group of expelled Germans, filed its case seeking restitution for lost property to the European Court of Human Rights in 2006.
It accused Poland of violating the rights of those driven from their prewar homes as borders were redrawn in 1945.
The Strasbourg-based court said it had no jurisdiction to rule on the issue because the events happened before Poland or Germany signed the European Convention on Human Rights, which was drawn up after World War II.
That means Poland has no duty "to enact laws providing for rehabilitation, restitution of confiscated property or compensation for property lost by the individual applicants."
Although the government in Berlin has long made clear that it rejected restitution claims by Germans, threats of such claims have caused anger in neighboring Poland and have weighed on relations.
Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the start of the war in 1939 and subjected it to a brutal occupation. Six million Poles died, half of them Jewish.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
One of the Baltic states did make restitution. I think it was Estonia. The lands in what used to be Prussia were indeed stolen. It’s one thing to redraw a national border. It’s another to sieze individual property and drive the people out. If, as the article says, the number of claimants is small, a one time settlement would be worth it to make the issue go away. Notice the court didn’t rule against the plaintiffs. It just said it had no jurisdiction.
Had the claims been upheld then the Poles would have similar claims against Russia. Hate to say, but it’s best to leave this one be.
That's been the situation ever since the Treaty of Westphalia. Violations of that standard usually end in disaster. Not that I'm saying Westphalia was the be-all, end-all ~ maybe something else would work better, but it did serve to put an end to the Thirty Years War
(That's the war that impoverished most of Europe, let Germany virtually devoid of males, and even put a decades long delay in the European settlement of North America ~ not a good war at all).
You mean Ukraine. The USSR took Galicia from Poland, but Ukraine has it now.
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