Jewish World Review Feb. 23, 2000 / 17 Adar I, 5760
IF YOU WERE CONCERNED about the inclusion of an extreme
right-wing party in the new Austrian government, try this
one on for size. While Freedom Party leader Joerg
Haider has been busily trying to waltz away from
previous statements praising parts of Austria's Nazi past
-- and has even spoken of the need to make amends for
what was stolen from Austria's Jews -- the fact is that his
own personal fortune, and much of the financing of his
racist party, is based on profits from a prime timber
forest in southern Austria that Haider's family coerced
out of a Jewish family during the Nazi reign of terror.
The lush Baerental (Valley of the Bears) forest extends
over more than 4,000 acres in southern Austria.
Originally the property of an Italian Jew named Giorgio
Roifer, it was grabbed by Haider's great, great uncle,
Joseph Webhofer, a leading Austrian Nazi, shortly after
the Nazis took control of Austria during the Anschluss of
1938. The Nuremberg Racial Laws, which were as
warmly welcomed by many Austrians as the Nazis were,
forbade Jews from owning property in the extended
Reich. Land, homes, art and anything else of value was
simply "Aryanized."
The Roifers were Italian -- ostensibly allies of the Third
Reich. While their land could not be expropriated in
1938, they were forced to sell the forest for a pittance in
a murky and certainly immoral deal involving blocked
bank accounts and scandalous arm-twisting. Even that
amount was denied them and kept in Nazi banks. The
Roifers fled to Palestine -- and their descendants have
been seeking compensation ever since. In 1954,
Roifer's widow, Mathilde, did receive what is now worth
about $120,000. Austrian press reports say the forest is
worth about $16 million today.
Haider himself was "given" the forest by his great uncle,
Wilhelm Webhofer, in 1986. The Freedom Party fuhrer
insists to this day that his family obtained it legally, and
once even claimed that the Roifers "must have done
well" in the deal, because it was brokered by "the Jew
Loew from Villach." The fact was, reports Peter Green of
the International Herald Tribune, that Loew was a
Catholic -- and the Roifers certainly didn't do well.
Roifers' 73-year-old granddaughter, Naomi Merhav, a
retired Israeli museum director, now insists that the 1938
so- called sale was "invalid." Haider, she says, should
either pay a reasonable sum, or return the forest to her
family. "Haider got rich selling my family's wood, and he
is in power now with the help of my money," she recently
told an interviewer.
Haider, whose party is racist and harshly anti-immigrant,
once praised Hitler's labor policies and referred to SS
veterans as "decent people." In recent weeks, he has
been trying desperately to disassociate himself from
those statements. Unfortunately, many of his neo-Nazi
followers don't. Part of his new pitch has been to urge
that Austria take "pertinent measures" in cases where
Austria "inflicted great injustice on our Jewish fellow
citizens or wiped out their families." Thus far, there have
been no signs that that includes either the Roifers or the
Forest of the Valley of the Bears.
Austria, which has traditionally tried to perpetuate a myth
that it was a victim of Nazism, not an active collaborator,
has one of the worst restitution records of any country in
Europe. While Germany has largely settled claims for
property stolen from its Jews, Austria has returned only a
tiny part of the art, books, land, bank accounts and other
assets stolen by Austrian Nazis. Sixty-five thousand
Austrian Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust. About 21,000
Austrian Holocaust survivors still live around the world.
And there are literally tens of thousands of outstanding
claims for confiscated property that is now in the hands
of either the Austrian state or Austrian citizens -- such as
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His latest book is Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe
Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History.
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