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...other prime real estate in the heart of Berlin that belonged to Wertheim - has been the object of one of the biggest restitution battles in post-reunification Germany. Four groups are involved in a tangled legal fight over approximately 65,000 sq m of Berlin's best locations: the German government; German retailer KarstadtQuelle, which acquired Hertie in 1999 and claims to be the corporate successor to Wertheim; the Jewish Claims Conference, an official body that acts on behalf of Jewish Holocaust survivors and the heirs of victims; and some descendants of the Wertheim family led by Barbara Principe...
...documents obtained by TIME show that, even as courts were trying to sort out the ownership issues, German authorities made several deals with Karstadt or firms now owned by it, handing over at least €200 million in Wertheim property and cash. Among the transactions: Berlin authorities gave a triangle of land in central Berlin next to Potsdamer Platz to the retailer for free, on the understanding that it would build a corporate headquarters on it. The company promptly sold the land for about €150 million. The federal government allowed Karstadt to keep for almost a decade about...
...government is writing checks." If the government isn't talking, Osen and his client Barbara Principe are. She's a 70-year-old mother of seven children who grew up on a chicken farm in New Jersey, barely aware that her grandfather Franz Wertheim was co-owner of a German retail legend. In 1951 a German lawyer named Arthur Lindgens, a distant relative by marriage of the Wertheim family, bought out Principe's father's and uncle's share for the equivalent of about $5,100 at the time. That enabled Lindgens to get majority control of Wertheim...
...main battle over who owns the Berlin properties; it rather focuses on the alleged 1951 fraud. But Principe does stand to gain if the Jewish Claims Conference wins, as it usually gives a percentage of any settlement to surviving relatives. This sort of legal morass was exactly what the Germans hoped to avoid after reunification. The government deliberately decoupled unresolved ownership questions from use of the property itself, which enabled large swaths of eastern Germany to be developed even as title to the real estate remained contested. And in a move to protect German companies from U.S. lawsuits relating...
...animist, recording in his autobiography a lifelong sense of the spirit of place. After the outbreak of World War II, he set up an Arts Bureau for War Service, and in 1940 again became an official war artist, initially attached to the Air Ministry. His sketches of wrecked German planes became the painting Totes Meer (Dead Sea, 1940-41). As in the earlier The Shore, the land is on the right, holding back "waves" made up of wings and fuselage. The metal sea, in his characteristic icy green, stretches to low, dark-red hills. In a verdant sky hangs...