Not every case unfortunately ends with a happy ending; that an heir is unwilling to accept the inheritance occurred occasionally, but never before in a case with a volume of over 1 million euros.
A German genealogical office had been following the trail of someone who emigrated from Poland to Germany, later to Great Britain and finally to New Zealand for years and notified the heir of the entitlement by mail, whereupon he wrote back that he was not interested.
Our partners assumed that this might possibly be related to any Jewish ancestry of the heir and possibly letters from Germany due to the events in World War II would be understood with great mistrust, which is why they asked us to contact the gentleman, as we have a Jewish employee who might be able to convince the heir in a personal conversation that there is indeed an inheritance case here, to which the New Zealander is entitled.
Another thought was that the heir’s wife had an Italian-sounding maiden name, whereby our selected employee also speaks excellent Italian in addition to Hebrew.
After a 26-hour flight from Vienna via Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, our genealogist finally reached Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and visited the heir, to whom he presented the case. It quickly became clear that the heir was neither of Jewish ancestry, nor did his wife speak Italian; rather, the heir made it unmistakably clear that although he believed in the inheritance case, he had absolutely no interest in so much money, as he feared that his wife would be kidnapped and he would then not know who would cook his food.
Endless attempts at persuasion through engaged local notaries and lawyers failed, so that our employee had to leave again after 5 days.
It should finally be noted that the heir lives in extremely poor economic conditions and his son showed extremely great interest in the assets, especially since he had also been unemployed for some time. A conversation between the son and the father, however, was just as fruitless as the intervention of our sent employee.
