EFor a while it had been quiet about the compensation and restitution claims from Georg Friedrich Prince of Prussia, the great-great-grandson of the last German Emperor. Prior to this, his demands for compensation for the expropriations suffered by his great-grandfather, the last German Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, in the Soviet-occupied zone between 1945 and 1949 had sparked a heated debate in the German feature pages for many months, culminating in the the eyes of some even turned into a new dispute among historians. After that, calm returned. Last week, however, there was movement on the subject again: More than thirty years after the corresponding claims were first raised, the Potsdam Administrative Court is now to negotiate orally at least some of the claims next spring. The decisive question in this process will be whether Wilhelm von Prussia “considerably encouraged” National Socialism. Because then the claims of his descendants are legally excluded.
In recent months it has repeatedly been said that a judicial clarification of this question cannot do justice to the matter. The fact that plaintiffs in such proceedings refer to a supposedly far too complicated legal and factual situation is a common litigation strategy. In this way one likes to try to bring the opponent to a comparison, although one’s own position is actually not very promising. In this specific case, however, it is astonishing how willingly some historians and isolated lawyers have continued this story so far, sometimes getting so lost in the historical factual material that the legal standards have been increasingly lost sight of. The story of the difficult, almost impossible decision of the administrative court is essentially based on three central misunderstandings, which on closer inspection turn out to be simply wrong from a legal point of view. From a legal point of view, the case is far less complicated than some historians have made it out to be.
