Czechs demand property back

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PRAGUE -- Czech aristocrats stripped of their palaces, castles and estates during 40 years of dictatorship have won a series of landmark rulings that could cost the country's new democracy billions of dollars.

Scores of descendants of Austro-Hungarian nobility, including members of some of Europe's most powerful families before the emergence of Nazism and communism, are suing the government for the return of everything from castles and art collections to carp farms and breweries confiscated by the Czechoslovak state at the end of World War II.

Under the so-called "Benes Decrees," millions of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians were stripped of their property and expelled.

The Czech government, which is trying equally hard to resist the demands of the country's disinherited aristocrats -- now scattered across the world -- has not concealed its horror at the scale of the restitution claims. These include demands to return some of the country's top tourist attractions and around 600,000 acres.

Among the most vocal of the claimants is Franz Ulrich Kinsky, the main heir to an 800-year-old dynasty of Bohemian nobles. Mr. Kinsky, 67, a Vienna-based investment banker, has said he will fight until his death for his family's property, which has been valued in his 150 legal claims at up to $195 million.

Another family, the von Pezolds, want property estimated to be worth $1.46 billion, including a major tourist attraction, Cesky Krumlov castle in the southwest.

The contested property includes the rococo Kinsky Palace on Prague's Old Town Square, home to part of the Czech National Gallery collection and considered one of the country's cultural gems.

"I'm fighting for peace of mind," Mr. Kinsky said. "My family was chucked out, having been continuous residents of Bohemia since 1200. There's no logic to not allowing us back to our castles."

He says he does not want to turn the gallery out of Kinsky Palace. But the state insists that its arguments against restitution claims are strong, asserting that Mr. Kinsky's parents and most of the other claimants were Nazi sympathizers.

Mr. Kinsky is outraged by this suggestion. "I'm a Bohemian and I grew up in an anti-German environment," he said. "We even have great suspicions that my father was done away with by the Germans."

Mr. Kinsky inherited the palace in the early 1940s when he and his family were living in exile in Argentina. It was confiscated in 1945.

For Mr. Kinsky's attorney, Jaroslav Capek, the cases are a test both of the country's democratic maturity and of the strength and independence of its judicial system, which many critics claim has been bowing to political pressure over the property issue.

"This country does not respect the basic principles of justice that are the norm in other European nations," he said.

The Czech Republic's culture minister, Pavel Dostal, says the families have no case. "According to Czech legislation, Czech nobility does not exist."

The cases were for the courts to decide, he said, but added: "These people collaborated with the Nazis, so you can understand why we don't want to negotiate with them."