Former owners of German property which was confiscated by Israel in 1950 have been asked by the German Federal Ministry of Finance to file a claim for their losses within the next month.
The obligation to pay full compensation for all confiscated German property was assumed by Israel last September in a companion agreement to the Israel reparations agreement. Negotiations to fix the value of property owned by German Catholic institutions will begin in Luxemburg May 19.
The present public announcement, which refers to non-Catholic property, instructs all individual Germans to register their losses with the “delegation of the Templars” in Bonn. The “Templars” are a Protestant German sect from Swabia which in the last century founded prosperous agricultural settlements in the Holy Land. Because most of them turned into Nazis after the advent of Hitler, the British Mandatory authorities deported them to Australia during the war.
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