The appellate court acknowledged another part of the claims of the Colloredo-Mansfeld family on the furnishings from Opočno

Pardubice - The appellate court in Pardubice ruled on the return of part of the furnishings from the Opočno Castle owned by the Colloredo-Mansfeld family. It confirmed the judgment of the district court from 2006. The collection includes a valuable carriage, a collection of paintings, and several thousand other items, such as historical weapons or tableware. The value is in the hundreds of millions of crowns.

According to the court, the plaintiffs demonstrated that they are the rightful persons and that the items passed to the state without legal reason. They were originally confiscated under the Beneš decrees as individuals of German nationality, but it was later proven that this reason was not justified, stated the chairwoman of the senate, Alena Pokorná. "It is absurd that the Nazis first seized the property in 1942 and then a so-called democratic state of President Beneš," said Pokorná.

Today's ruling is final. "The National Heritage Institute must familiarize itself with the written version of the ruling and will subsequently decide on the next steps in this matter, including a possible appeal to the Supreme Court," said Miloš Kadlec, director of the heritage institute in Sychrov, to ČTK today.

The court largely upheld the lawsuit today, returning the items to the co-ownership of the plaintiffs, Jerome Colloredo-Mannsfeld and Kristina Colloredo-Mannsfeld, whose fathers were brothers. It did not recognize only a smaller number of items that Kristina Colloredo-Mannsfeld requested as an inheritance from her father.

According to the court, the Gestapo decided to confiscate the furnishings because the Colloredo-Mansfelds were considered enemies of the Reich, not because there were Jews among their ancestors. The aristocratic family declared loyalty to the Czechoslovak state in 1939 when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. Later, it was confiscated by the Czechoslovak state under the Beneš decrees.

"It is true that according to the decrees, individuals from whom property was confiscated could defend themselves by stating they were loyal to the republic, even if they were Germans, or that they helped in the fight against Nazism. However, a decision was necessary because even according to today's jurisprudence, the decrees confiscated property ex lege, that is, by law," Pokorná stated. According to her, it was not proven that the Colloredo-Mansfelds were of German nationality or acted disloyally towards Czechoslovakia.

The lawsuit also attempted to prove that some ancestor of the aristocratic family was of Jewish origin and that this was one of the reasons why the Nazis confiscated the property. According to lawyers, there are historical documents stored in the archive of the Czech National Bank that support this claim.

Last June, the appellate court in Pardubice also recognized the claim of the Colloredo-Mansfelds for the return of part of the furnishings from the Opočno Castle in a different branch of the restitution case. The court thus acknowledged the claims of the descendants of the older Prince Josef Colloredo-Mannsfeld born in 1866. However, it rejected another part of the request for the return of furnishings that previously belonged to Josef Colloredo-Mannsfeld born in 1910.

The district court initially ordered the heritage institute to return a larger portion of the furnishings from the Opočno Castle; subsequently, the higher court rejected the claim. The Constitutional Court later also denied the return. In the autumn of 2017, the Constitutional Court rejected a proposal from Colloredo-Mansfeldová to reopen proceedings on two complaints regarding the furnishings. In January 2018, however, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg published a ruling that supported Colloredo-Mansfeldová's efforts to reopen the proceedings regarding the return of the furnishings; a similar ruling was made by the European court in the case of her cousin. In 2018, the Constitutional Court reopened the proceedings, and in June of the year before last, it ruled that the judiciary must reopen the dispute over the furnishings of the castle.