As a lawyer for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Peter Sonnenthal worked on the cases against Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky that eventually sent them to jail.
Now Sonnenthal, a descendant of what was once one of Berlin’s prominent Jewish families, is fighting a very different battle: He is trying to reclaim 207 acres of land–estimated to be worth $170 million–owned by his family before World War II.
The dispute pits him not only against German officials, but against the more than 1,000 people who live on the property, located in the former East Germany. In August, a state agency rejected, for the second time, the most substantial part of his family’s claim. But the family considers the rejection politically motivated because a favorable ruling could have forced evictions. It is appealing the decision in a German state court.
After the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, Jewish land claims such as Sonnenthal’s rage throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Yet for Sonnenthal, 42, one of the most unsettling aspects is how the people of the community believe the family has no right to the property.
Indeed, many residents say the family’s claim is nothing but a mean-spirited attempt to extort money from them.
“It’s got to be something dirty,” says George Wachs, a retired bricklayer who lives in the neighborhood.
The land dispute has a dark undertone. Swastikas have appeared from time to time in the neighborhood, though residents have dismissed them as the work of drunken teenagers or right-wing extremists from nearby Berlin.
But Sonnenthal can’t help but think a note of anti-Semitism–or at least a good measure of revisionist history–has crept into the proceedings, and he blasts the investigators who ruled on the family’s case.
Officials say they were simply applying the law.
“First they said we were slow and anti-Semitic. Now they’re saying we were political,” complains Josefine Ewers, an investigator. “It wasn’t political. We investigated everything thoroughly.”
The disputed land, a neighborhood of cobblestone streets, two large villas and several hundred single-family homes, was built up in the 1930s–after the family says it was coerced to sell the property by the Nazis.
Over the years, the property has become an indistinguishable part of Teltow, a Berlin suburb that is now a focal point for development.
The land was acquired in 1878 by Sonnenthal’s great-grandfather, Albert Sabersky, and his brother Max, both businessmen.
The land, then as now known as Seehof, was maintained as a farm and remained in the family for decades.
In 1933, after the Nazis seized power, they began pressuring Jews to sell their assets–and barred them from farming.
The family says their ancestors were responding to this pressure when they began selling off chunks of the farm, through a Nazi real-estate broker named Friedrich-Wilhelm Gloatz.
At the time, the family received some of the proceeds from the sales, but the heirs now claim that the parcels were sold at bargain rates and that the Nazis confiscated their bank accounts, so they lost most of the cash as well.
By Nov. 9, 1938, the infamous Kristallnacht, when Nazis smashed display windows of Jewish businesses, most Sabersky family members had fled Germany.
As a child growing up in New York, Peter Sonnenthal saw pictures of the ancestral home and the farm. He noticed that furniture and paintings from the villa where his grandfather had lived, the so-called Sonnenthal Villa, had ended up in his own home.
In college, he studied the Holocaust and promised to recover Seehof if he ever got the chance.
He went to law school and then on to the SEC in Washington, where, as a staff attorney, he worked on the Boesky and Milken cases. He was still working on insider-trading matters in 1989 when the Berlin Wall opened.
Sonnenthal and other family members soon began a legal process to recover the property. The claim is divided among 18 family members, but as the only heirs of Albert Sabersky, Peter and sister Valerie Sonnenthal are by far the largest claimants, entitled to half of any recovery.
In 1991, Sonnenthal visited Seehof for the first time. He walked down a street formerly named for a Nazi general and renamed Max Sabersky Avenue by the East German communists. He stood on the steps of the Sonnenthal Villa where his father, who died when Sonnethal was five, stood in the old photographs. Sonnenthal broke down and cried.
Some of the current residents recounted to Sonnenthal their own stories of Nazi persecution.
Sonnenthal had a change of heart and decided that his collegiate vow to recover the property at all costs had been too hasty. After all, more than 50 years of history had intervened.
He told the people of Seehof that he would never drive them from their homes as the Nazis had driven his family from theirs.
To the rest of the Sabersky heirs, scattered around the world, Sonnenthal proposed dropping claims on property where people lived in return for immediate recovery of the undeveloped portions of Seehof, mostly owned by the city of Teltow and worth as much as $70 million.
Other Sabersky heirs objected, arguing that Sonnenthal was giving up too much. After all, the developed property with homes on it is worth as much as $100 million, according to appraisals obtained by the family and local residents.
John Traubner, a Frankfurt lawyer and son of Sabersky heir Ilse Traubner, argued that it was entirely justified to demand compensation from the residents.
“It’s as if someone stole something from you and then sold it at a flea market,” he says. “You are still entitled to get it back.”
Unable to come to terms among themselves, family members decided to take their chances with the German legal system. They met with a small victory at first, then disappointment.
Last year, the German Office for Public Land Claims declared that the Nazis had indeed illegally forced the cut-rate sale of the Sonnenthal Villa and it awarded that small piece of the property back to Sonnenthal and his sister, the largest claimants. They immediately sold it for $4.8 million.
But as for the rest of Seehof, the agency ruled the family had gotten a fair price on the farm property in the 1930s and had no grounds to make a claim at all.
Citing old maps and plans, the agency said the family had intended to sell the property all along, and that the Nazis hadn’t forced the sale.
The agency also considered a 1992 interview its investigators had with Gloatz, the Nazi real estate broker.
Shortly before his death, Gloatz described himself as an Oskar Schindler-like figure who took great risks on behalf of his Jewish friends, among them Max Sabersky’s son Ernst, who remained in Berlin during the war “unhampered by the Nazis” because of Gloatz’s protection.
Gloatz’s statements suggested that the family had hired him freely, rather than having him forced upon them by the Nazis.
The ruling outraged the family, which filed a court appeal. During a visit to Seehof this August, Sonnenthal, now a Denver-based attorney with the National Association of Securities Dealers, held a news conference. He laid out his own maps and other bits of evidence to show the Nazis forced the sale of the entire property.
As for Gloatz’s statements of being a friend of the family rather than a Nazi oppressor, Sonnenthal said there is no evidence to support the claim.
Sonnenthal also offered a new settlement. The family would continue its fight to get back the undeveloped property. But rather than giving up the developed property, the family wanted homeowners to buy back their claim on individual parcels.
For a relatively modest amount–$6,600, for instance, for a parcel worth $250,000–a homeowner could be freed from further legal action. The family would get about $4 million if every resident were to take the offer.
The rest of the Sabersky heirs agreed to the new proposal.
“The offer is fair,” John Traubner says. “We’re asking for very little money.” So far, only about 40 out of some 500 homeowners have accepted the offer.
Sonnenthal has repeatedly told the community that his family intends to pursue the legal battle, even if it means years of appeals.
But most Seehof residents are sitting tight.
Monika Schilling, 56, a retired bookkeeper, bought her house in 1990 from the city of Teltow, which owned the property during the Communist era. She and her husband paid $18,000 for the house and spent another $9,000 on painting the walls, fixing the shingles and remodeling the interior.
Mrs. Schilling doesn’t understand why she is being asked to make amends for events that happened under the Nazis.
“I don’t see why I should pay them anything,” she says. “It’s not fair.” But she is nevertheless considering the offer.
