Croatia: Jews still fighting for compensation after 80 years

Marko Ivanovic points to a large building his father bought in the Old Quarter of the Croatian capital, Zagreb, before the Second World War.

"I should have been born in this house in 1948," says the bearded, gray-haired man, struggling to keep his composure.

The pale-yellow house with the broad, dark green double door and decorative entrance stands beside a number of other beautiful old houses on a narrow street. Some have been renovated; others are not in such good condition. The whole area is evidently well-to-do.

Ivanovic's parents survived the Second World War. His father, a Croatian Jew, twice narrowly escaped deportation to a concentration camp. However, almost all his assets were seized by the fascist Ustasha regime, which controlled Croatia from 1941 to 1945.

Today, the building that once belonged to his family now houses private apartments and a municipal institution. "I don't know exactly what it's all worth today," says the physicist and writer. "But the real estate prices for this part of Zagreb are breathtaking."

Expropriated for the second time after the war

In 1947 — by which time the Communists had taken over from the Fascists — Ivanovic's parents were sentenced by a Yugoslav court to a year of forced labor for being capitalists. Their remaining assets were also seized.

His father was 67 at the time; his wife much younger. "He saw that he could not go on living in his native country anymore," Ivanovic told DW. "He and my mother, who was five months pregnant with me at the time, fled on foot to Italy, and then from Trieste to Genoa, where I was born."

His father died just a few months after Marko was born. In 1998, Marko Ivanovic applied to have his father posthumously rehabilitated by the courts. Nevertheless, not all assets were returned to his father's heirs.

Jewish architects' influence on modern Zagreb

In 1941, there were about 12,000 Jews in Zagreb and 25,000 in Croatia. At the end of the war, only about 3,000 remained in Zagreb, half of whom emigrated to Palestine, which would later become Israel.

Most of them had the same experience as Ivanovic's parents: The Ustasha fascists confiscated their property. Then, what little they had been allowed to keep was taken away from them after the war in communist Yugoslavia.

Hardly anyone today knows what the assets of the Jewish population were worth, says holocaust survivor Mira Wolf, who is head of the Jewish Museum in Zagreb and a documentary filmmaker.

One of her films is about the Jewish people who commissioned houses and the Jewish architects and engineers who built modern Zagreb. "In the period between the two world wars, Zagreb blossomed into a major European city. It flourished because of the contributions of Jewish architects, who built much of the city center," she said.

Real estate worth about $300 million

Naida-Mihal Brandl, chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Zagreb, lists these buildings in her 2022 book, the title of which translates as The Theft of Jewish Property in Croatia.

Brandl spent two years studying the records of the Ustasha regime. During that period of Croatian history, Jews were obliged to provide exact information about their family members and their assets.

"While I was doing this research, it was difficult for me to walk through the city. It felt like I was walking through a graveyard," she told DW.

She focused exclusively on Zagreb in her research. Based on the information in the records, she calculated how much the seized real estate would be worth today: "It's about $300 million (€279 million). But that's just real estate in Zagreb and just real estate that was identified as formerly being Jewish property and for which a value had been given."

Most of this property was never returned to its owners, even though Croatia passed a law in 1996 on the restitution of or compensation for property that was expropriated under Yugoslav communist rule.

Property not returned to pre-communist era owners

However, this law only applied to property that was expropriated after May 15, 1945 and not to real estate seized by the Ustasha regime during World War II.

This is why property was sometimes returned to people who illegally purchased buildings from their original Jewish owners during the Nazi period. "It happened that such people got back property that they were either given or had allegedly purchased," Brandl told DW.

She went on to say that many Jewish owners who were able to assert their rights did not get back their property, but only received compensation that didn't correspond to the actual value of the building.

The Croatian government did not respond to a DW request for information about the number of applications submitted and the number of restitutions to date.

Only heirs allowed to apply for restitution

The 1996 law was problematic in other respects, too. For example, only direct heirs — in other words spouses, children and grandchildren — could apply for restitution.

Given that entire Jewish families were wiped out during the Holocaust, this meant in practice that in many cases, there were no longer any heirs according to the law.

This aspect of the law has also impacted Marko's case: his father had transferred ownership of the building to Marko's brother in the hope that it would remain in the family. Marko's brother, who has since died, did not get the building back and now, because Marko is not his brother's direct heir, he is not able to apply for the return of his father's building.

Heirs determined to fight on

But it was not just the building in Zagreb that was confiscated. Ivanovic received no compensation for his father's refinery in Osijek, which is now part of the INA oil company. He should have received INA shares for his part of the business, but the company took legal action to prevent that.

He also received only partial compensation for the aluminum factory his father built in Sibenik in 1937 — the first such factory in the Balkans. The factory was seized first by the Ustasha regime and later by communist Yugoslavia. Today, the company that was built on the foundation of his father's firm, is trading successfully.

Ivanovic's story is similar to that of many other Croatian Jews. "In this context," said Naida-Mihal Brandl, "the Jews suffered many injustices, first in 1941, then in 1945 and then in the 1990s."

This article was originally published in German.