Austria's Newest Citizens Reclaim Birthright Stolen By The Nazis

Even if they rarely speak German and some have never set foot on Austrian soil, nearly 76 years after the Holocaust, descendants of those forced out of Austria by the Nazis are reclaiming the nationality stolen from their ancestors

Vienna (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 3rd May, 2021 ) :Even if they rarely speak German and some have never set foot on Austrian soil, nearly 76 years after the Holocaust, descendants of those forced out of Austria by the Nazis are reclaiming the nationality stolen from their ancestors.

"It was very important for me," says 17-year-old American high school student Maya Hofstetter, who wants to piece together the fragments of her great-grandmother's painful history.

AFP has gathered testimony from new Austrians like Hofstetter who have benefited from a 2019 change in the law which took effect in September, making it possible for Holocaust victims' descendants to gain Austrian citizenship.

The motivations of the applicants -- whose relatives were all Jewish although the law does not concern only Jewish victims -- vary.

From sentimental, to a duty to remember, and for some, a sense of justice, Hofstetter and fellow American Noah Rohrlich, Gal Gershon in Israel, Tomas Diego Haas in Argentina and Robert Anderson in Britain explained in phone and video interviews why they chose to take the step.

- Forced exile - Their stories begin with snippets of history passed down through their family trees.

The forced exile of Maya Hofstetter's great-grandmother Stella Rinde Coburn began in August 1939, the year after Austria's annexation by Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Gershon's grandfather Eric Otto also left.

"He didn't want to leave Austria. It wasn't his decision," says the 46-year-old sales director for Israel's national carrier, El Al.

"When he was 13 years old in 1938, his parents put him on a ship to Palestine," he says.

Only after World War II did Otto learn that his family had died in the Nazi camps.

Austria had a Jewish population of some 200,000 before Nazi German soldiers marched in to annex the country.

More than 65,000 of them were killed in the Holocaust, with the vast majority of the rest having to flee to survive, settling in locations as far flung as Shanghai and Buenos Aires.

The latter was where Tomas Diego Haas's father ended up after bribing an Argentinian diplomat.

Haas, now 63, practises that most Viennese of professions: he is a psychoanalyst.