In 2005, we were made aware of an apartment in the best Viennese villa location, which would fall to the state after the death of its owner, should no legitimate heirs be found within a certain period.
We soon found out that the last owner was a lady named Ludmilla N., who allegedly came from Mannheim.
Only when we received negative information from the German registry offices about the deceased, we could determine after further research that her place of birth was not in Germany, but in Ukraine – it was Mannheim near Odessa, a former German “colony” in Bessarabia.
One of our employees then pursued the trail of the lady together with an engaged partner office and since we knew that most “ethnic Germans” had to leave their homeland after World War II, the suspicion was that the family emigrated to Germany or Austria.
With the help of the Association of Expelled Bessarabian Germans, the lady’s birth register was found relatively quickly and we learned that she had 2 brothers and a sister, whose whereabouts were unknown.
However, we also found other relatives of the deceased with the help of the association, namely cousins of the same, who were “bought free” by the Federal Republic of Germany from the Soviet Union in the 60s of the last century.
This one reported of a sister who was also supposed to have lived in Germany. We were able to determine her after laborious research work, but she had already died about 20 years ago, so we had to search for descendants of the same, whom we finally found in Belgium.
We thus had one heiress, but what had happened to the brothers of the deceased? Through the support of the partner office, we were able to find out that only the deceased succeeded in fleeing west from the Red Army with the withdrawal of the German Wehrmacht. Her brothers were, because of German origin, suspected of collaboration with the Nazis and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in Siberia.
These 25 years were later reduced to 15 and after they were over, they settled in eastern Kazakhstan, on the border with China, where they also died a few years ago. The deceased had tried throughout her life and also with the help of the Red Cross to make contact with her brothers, which unfortunately she could no longer succeed in doing.
After about 3 months of intensive research in Kazakhstan, we received the message from our partner office that the descendants of the brothers of the deceased who died in Kazakhstan now live in Russia under the poorest conditions; we found these and so they can now rejoice together with their cousin in Belgium over an apartment in Vienna including cash.
