The public sector will not conduct any negotiations about an out-of-court settlement with the Hohenzollern family.
This is the result of talks that the Brandenburg Ministry of Finance held with Minister of State for Culture Roth, Brandenburg Minister of Culture Schüle and the Berlin Senators for Culture and Finance.
This means that the proceedings before the Potsdam Administrative Court, which have been dormant since 2018, in which the Hohenzollerns want to enforce compensation of 1.4 million euros for real estate expropriated under Soviet occupation, are about to be resumed.
The Brandenburg Ministry of Finance rejected the claim in 2014, citing the Compensation Benefits Act of 1994, which excludes applicants from compensation whose ancestors made a significant contribution to the rise of National Socialism.
Two reports commissioned by the then Minister of Finance Christian Görke (Die Linke) and commissioned by the historians Stephan Malinowski and Peter Brandt had attested to the former Hohenzoller householder Wilhelm von Prussia (1882 to 1951) such an advance.
An out-of-court solution, which the family is striving for, would also have included permanent loans from the Hohenzollerns and thousands of art objects expropriated by the Soviet occupiers after the war, which are now owned by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation,
The parliamentarian Erhard Grundl, who represents the Greens in the Bundestag's culture committee, explained in a press release that "it was no longer necessary for the back room" to decide, but for a court to decide.
Above all, it is “a question of historical guilt”.
This question was "apparently ignored" in the confidential negotiations led by the former Minister of State for Culture, Monika Grütters.
The disclosure of individual positions of the Hohenzollern family in these talks, such as the demand for a right of use in Cecilienhof Palace or other Potsdam palaces, triggered a public debate in the summer of 2019.