It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation and Beyond Belief, how evidence shows what really works. There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on.
Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's s-p-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new Books Network.
Hello, my name is Roland Clark, and I'm here today on the New Books Network talking to class book now, who's professor of the history of Southeastern and Eastern Europe at the University of Regensburg. He's a specialist on social linguistics, the history of religions, resource allocation, state distrust and the history of corruption. So, class, this is inviting me. Oh, our pleasure.
This is a book about a corruption scandal in all Yugoslavia, but it's based on a really close reading of archives that are held mostly in Regensburg, where you work. Can you tell us how you can cross these archives and what you've done with them? Yes, for sure. First of all, you must imagine that the Taunantaxes family has its seat in Regensburg.
And Regensburg is a small town and they own a very large castle right in the middle of town. And they are basically the richest and most visible family in town, which is a place, you know, which is very much face-to-face communication. So, people know each other and they have always tried to have good relationships with all the factors among them, also with the university. So, how I came across their archive was that this family, they give stipends to students to visit their archives and do research on the archives.
This is a long tradition has been going on for decades. And a colleague of mine had two doctoral students working on their archives and receiving a stipend from the family. And so there were certain relations between the historians at the university and the family of Taunantaxes. And on one day I just decided to do a seminary right in the archive, which is located in the castle, which is a very beautiful place.
And I found this would be a good experience for the students. And then, you know, we came across these Yugoslav documents and we didn't really know much about it. Though there were some, you know, general books and articles where we knew that the family in the 19th century, they bought vast lands in Eastern Europe, in what's today Poland, Czechoslovakia and also Yugoslavia. But going through these parts on the Yugoslav possessions, we sort of soon understood that there was something with corruption, something going on, but the things were so complicated.
We had one semester in the archive, and then, you know, the seminar was over and the students just had to get their grades and so on. But in the end, I promised them if you could do good work, we're going to write an article on this case as a corruption case. Well, the students really tried hard and then I tried to put it together and tried to combine it also with Yugoslav documents since I'm a historian of Southeastern Europe, went to Belway, went to Zagreb. But they understood the thing, the thing is far too complicated.
It cannot be done like this. It must, I must make a whole study of it just to understand what this was about. This is how I decided to make it a book project in the pandemic started in 2020. I was so lucky to have had the bulk of the research done, so I could just sit down in these eternal lockdowns and write the book.
This is it. Did you ever get the article published? Well, no, but I'm going to publish an article now. After I have published the book, this is the way it usually is done, because if you make articles in connection with book projects, you can do two things.
You just take a very small section of the book issue and write on this article. You can do also in advance prior to publishing the book. But if you want to write an article on the whole thing, you can only do it seriously after having published the book. This is something I understood during the process, because having if I had published the article in 2019, it would have been full of mistakes.
You've got to get the research done first. Yes. The film, Taxi's Family, they're the main drivers of the story. They had large estates in the region that becomes Yugoslavia after the First World War.
But then they suddenly found those estates being taken away from them. So what's the problem they're trying to solve in this book? Well, they're trying to solve the problem of being dispossessed. This disposition was justified by this new state of Yugoslavia, which considered itself a post-imperial national state, which acted on behalf of populations which had been subjugated socially and politically for centuries in the empires.
So Yugoslavia took sort of a revenge on the former imperial elites. The Ternentaxes family was in close connection given to the Habsburgs, which also helped them to acquire these vast lands. So Yugoslavia used like two political themes in order to drive this expropriation. One was the reparations, since Ternentaxes was at least by the Yugoslavs considered to be a German family.
So German individuals could be taken responsible for the war damages caused by Germany and were liable to pay with their own property. There was a lot of legal discussions about this, which I also write about. But expropriation as reparation, this was one issue. And the other issue was expropriation for the cause of a grand reform, because Yugoslavia considered itself to be, as I already said, an emanation or an instrument of the formerly subjugated social groups and ethnic groups.
They had to do something for the Slavic peasants and handing over the landed property of the former imperial elites of the nobles to these peasants was something that was extremely popular and necessary for Yugoslavia to do to legitimate their own rule in front of the populace. So, both things went on simultaneously. They were also frequently intermingled. So acts of expropriation could be justified as reparations or as necessary for the agrarian reform of both.
And in the beginning, it was the Pernentaxes family or the prince of Pernentaxes, Albert, did not accept anything of this. So he remained on the position for years that basically things were, had been well regulated prior to the First World War and that the property rights should not be changed at all. But of course, Prince Albert, he lives in Germany. So he uses agents as intermediaries to negotiate with the Yugoslav authorities.
Why does he need agents and how does he work with them? As you already said, he lived in Germany and Reagan's book and he had never been to Yugoslavia or to Croatia during his whole life, which at a certain point also became like a psychological problem for those who defended his rights or tried to defend his rights in Yugoslavia. So he didn't know anyone there personally. He would not have known how to intervene.
And also, there was always the fear that, you know, if the politician is seen with a noble directly, this would have had repercussions on the reputation of the politician, that he is accepting outright law of inimical elites. And it would also have had repercussions on the reputation of the prince himself. And by the way, also on the dignity. So he was very much of a grandson, who didn't really like to do things himself and it's considered it even indecent to do so.
So the agents were those who possessed the knowledge how to do things and the contacts how to do things. And of course, the family gives money to the agents who think use it to bright people in Yugoslavia, which you detailing in great detail. Was bribery the only thing that they tried? No, it was by far not the only thing.
They basically tried everything they could. They tried to influence public opinion by people who are sympathetic of them in the Yugoslav press. They tried to drive their to to to promote their interests via lawsuits within Yugoslavia. And also via arbitration courts, which were a part of the precise of the Paris treaty system, where in each of these treaties, these arbitration courts were foreseen to deal with cases of conflict.
And they were stuffed with representatives of the two conflicting states and also of third parties. In this case, there was one arbitration court, which was the Yugoslav Austrian one, and there were representatives from Yugoslavia and Austria and also from the Turnentaxes side. And later in the 1930s, there was an arbitration court between Yugoslavia, Germany and the Turnentaxes side. Did I forget anything, which is lawsuits, the bribery and the arbitration court and the press?
I think that's it. Yeah, that's the main ones I remember. One of the most colorful agents that the Turnentaxes used was a lawyer named Jacques Oftacian of Chana Bonavic. How does he use this whole situation to his own advantage?
Like what's in it for the agent? Well, Jacques Oftacian of which was lawyer based in Belgrade, and he was of Jewish descent. Not only of Jewish descent, he also became in the 1930s a Jewish functionary, that is he was elected as the president of the Jewish community in Belgrade, and he was their greatest sponsor. And he came from a rather modest Sephardic family and had made his first connection with the House of Turnentaxes prior to the First World War, where he defended Turnentaxes' interests in connection to a sugar factory located in Serbia.
Or Jacob Chelybone, which promised to Turnentaxes that he could save the property and he promised also a solution how to do this that is, to create a Yugoslav company which was to become the former former, but also real owner of the forest. And within this stock company, the Turnentaxes side would have to own the majority of the stocks and also in this way could keep control over the company. is becoming a national company causing much less provocation and seemingly inscribing to this nationalizing paradigm of the Yugoslav government. And well, his idea was that it was not enough just to create this company, but in order to free this property from the sequestration, because everything was put in the sequestration in 1919.
That is under state administration. The prince still remained the informal owner, but he had lost concrete control. And the sequestration looked just like a transitory state towards the total expropriation. So he was in the 20s afraid that this might happen.
So in Chile Bonavic offered that he will fight for the desecostration, that the property be given back to turn in taxes. And that he will have to do a lot of lobbying. And therefore, they concluded a contract, which promised to a Chile Bonavic honorarium of 25 million diners, which was at that time almost two millions with shranks. But only in case of success, success meant that Jakov-Jell Bonavic reaches the desecostration, but also that he reaches a remuneration and a rep of two other things.
Turn in taxes had in 1919 through a decision of the minister of the agrarian reform, lost already 20% of its property directly to the agrarian reform. But that is not only that the whole property was sequestrated, but out of this property, 20% were directly handed over to peasant communities via the state administration. And this was still a little bit provisional, but it was already something that had been decided on at the very beginning of the Yugoslavia. So also, Chile Bonavic was the one who was expected to reach a house in English.
Oh, I don't know how this is English. That this decision was to be lifted. And then there was one more thing. And this was about railway sleepers.
In this large property, there was an oak forest around Leckenik, which is not so far away from Zagreb. And also, in 1920, the Ministry of Railroad said, OK, we need to repair all these destroyed railroads, which had fallen under the attack of various troops. And let's just take the property of this German who is going to lose anything anyway. So they cut oaks within one year that were supposed to be cut only within 15 years.
So there was a radical destruction of vast oak forest. So for this, turn taxes wanted compensation. And there was also the task of Chile Bonavic, to reach this compensation for the Leckenik oaks. So three things, we reached a dis-acquistration of the whole property to have the decision on the expropriation of 20% for the agrarian reform, lifted, and to reach a monetary compensation for the destroyed Leckenik oaks.
So the honorarium, in case of success, was 25 million diners, which was, I don't know, there is no real scientific information on which honoraria were paid to lawyers at that time. But as one can see from the reactions of the contemporaries who got to know about this honorarium, there was never really widely publicized. But there were lots of people who knew it, and they all considered this to be an anomaly, something that had never happened before, that a lawyer gets such a honorarium. So the idea on both sides who concluded this contract, that is, to turn taxes in Chile Bonavic, was that this was a honorarium which in a way should use in a way so as to reach the goals of the contract.
That is, not put it all in its own pockets, but use it for people doing law beism, and also for people who would use this, are parts of the honorarium to directly bribe members of the Yugoslav government or also higher officials. So what really happened in the story, what I write about is that the Yakov-Tillibonovic constantly says, well, I have already reached success, or I haven't reached full success yet, but I already need parts of the honorarium. There are so many people working for me in various Yugoslav ministries, and they all need to be paid. If we don't pay them, some of the certain bribes cannot be given, and certain decisions will not be taken by the government.
And in reality, many of these claims showed to be false, that bribes will not pay, but rather that parts of the honorarium were given by a Reagan's book to Chile Bonavic and Chile Bonavic took it, or took parts of it, in order to build himself a large villa. Well, this sort of became informally known to the Belgrade public, so that the villa constructed by Chile Bonavic in the late 1920s was called the villa to an attack system. So I find it's really interesting, because bribery is obviously illegal. How did the taxies feel about using bribery?
What sort of risks did giving bribes raised for them as foreigners and Germans? Well, first of all, we must be clear about that they absolutely knew what happened with their money. So they consciously went into bribery, because Chile Bonavic, but later also other agents who followed him in the 1930s, openly told the House of Toronto taxes, we need this or that part of our honorarium, because we need to bribe right now. If we don't do it, we will not be successful.
So first of all, they knew it. And well, they justified themselves, basically in hindsight, because right from those times of the 1920s, when many bribery's happened, we do not have so many sources, but we have them from the 1930s. Well, they said, well, everybody was bribing at that time, and Belgrade is an extremely corrupt place. Everybody does so.
So we are sort of forced. We have no other choice because this state does not respect law. In order to bring back law, we need bribery. So we need to break the law in order to bring back law.
This is basically the way how they justified themselves. And in this way, they were also blaming Balkan culture. Serbian elites as part of Balkan culture as something which had forced them to do so. In the book, you distinguish between corruption's practice and corruption as a label.
What's the difference there? Well, corruption as a practice is something which is a very large part of the book, which is about how to bribe, and how to approach somebody to bribe, how to be discreet. And well, this is the corruption as a practice. The corruption as practice is also about these borders.
Where is the border between, you know, somebody being remunerated for a good service and where does the bribe begin? While corruption as a label, well, this is what appears when the Turntaxus begins to justify itself for what has done. And this is precisely that you use, let's say, labels in order to put things into a moral order. And there you have societies which are sort of developed and are like models for the world.
And then you have these societies which are considered to be less developed, even to be primitive or to need to be in need of education. And these societies which are considered inferior, they are frequently being labeled as corrupt. So using like the difference in development between Germany where Turntaxus is seated and Yugoslavia where the possessions are, they use the label of corruption as something which they ascribe to the general culture in which they have to work. So that their own acts of corruption then become just a mirror of the so-called primitivity of Yugoslav society.
So this corruption as a label is basically a strategy to lift the moral blame from oneself and to shift it to somebody else. So what would be wrong in Germany is not wrong in Yugoslavia? Well, from a theoretical standpoint, it should be wrong everywhere. And this was also something which is present in the Turntaxus sources.
But while in Germany, let's say the reality and the anti-corrupt legislation are more or less, let's say in a relationship, these things like the law and the reality do not have much to do with each other in Yugoslavia. And so what about the Yugoslav officials and politicians who are receiving these bribes? How do they justify themselves? Well, these Yugoslav politicians in many cases, they were never really forced to admit anything.
Because in Yugoslavia, anti-corruptions by our courts was extremely weakly developed. In the 1920s, it was almost in-existent, especially in the cases of the most, biggest corruption scandals, nothing happened at all. And even if newspapers wrote that the son of the prime minister is involved, nothing happened about this, neither to the prime minister nor to the son. And this type of rule, informal rule, also persisted in the 1930s.
Though in the 1930s, Yugoslavia was more of an organized state and it also had an authoritarian rule, a so-called king's dictatorship, which tried to profile itself as an anti-corruption force. And then they started to have the first anti-corruption litigations very widely publicized. And they were basically in the wood industry, which is our issue because the turn on taxes properties were forests basically. But these were clearly instruments of selective justice that is, that they were directed towards certain individuals, which had already fallen off from grace of the ruling circles, and which were punished as an example that Yugoslavia is doing something against corruption.
But they were never directed against everything that the police found out. For example, we have a police report from 1935, which is very well done as a piece of investigation, which involves a lot of Yugoslav politicians, but they were never bought before court and they never came into a situation where they had to recognize anything. The thing is different with higher officials in the forest administration, because these people were brought to court, were punished, or at least in a disciplinary measure, through their own ministry, called forestry. But they did justify themselves and turn on taxes, justify themselves, as not having taken bribes, but as having given their professional expertise.
So this was justified not as corruption, but as service. So what's the role of a forestry expert, because both the Yugoslav government who wants to take the land away and the turn of taxes, people that want to get the back, they're both using forestry experts to testify on their behalf. Yes, the forest experts. First of all, they were a social group of people who had studied forestry as a science.
This is a science which comes into being basically in the 19th century, and one of the first centers of this in central Europe is the University of Munich. And many of the forest experts had either studied directly in Munich, or had been students of people who had received their education in Munich. And they were in the Toronto Taxoticate, they were all Yugoslav citizens. So these forest experts, a large part of them worked in the State Forestry Administration on the state forestry administration.
On the local level in Croatia, and partly also on the central level, but rather in Croatia itself. And then a part of these forestry experts also worked for private people. That is for large professional land owners, forest owners such as Toronto-Taxas. And there were also these people who received their money, first from Toronto-Taxas, and then they changed over to the state administration, or people who simultaneously received a salary from the state, but also on a rare area from Toronto-Taxas.
But also on a rare area from Toronto-Taxas. So these people had to give their professional expertise on the state of the forests. In the 1930s, a new strategy of the state to drive forward the expropriation was that Toronto-Taxas had allegedly started to destroy its own forests because they had allegedly cut much more than they were supposed to, so that the forest could no longer regenerate. And in this case, and this is where the war of the expertise started, because on the one hand, part of the forest experts wrote on behalf of the state showing with measurements and photographs and so on, that the Toronto-Taxas was sort of a destroyer of the U-Slav Forest, and an enemy to ecology and so on.
While on the other hand, other forest experts were showing that Toronto-Taxas had done nothing of what it was criticized for, and that the state expertise were manipulated. So basically, from an outsider's standpoint, what I can state is that, well, who pays for the music, also decided on what is being played. But today we have no possibility to decide on what was really true. So the cases of the forest expertise is something where you can discuss the limits of the term bribery.
And I think this is very interesting, because when you look, for example, at corona policies in various of today's modern states, how it was covered by the press and on the way how various doctors and medical experts acted in public, they can also come to a conclusion that expertise is something that can be which is very malleable, which is very changeable. And when this comes to the, when a public gets conscious of these kind of things, that an expert, or that one expert might say, absolutely different things than another expert, then you look into the personal dependencies of this or that person, then you are back at the theme of corruption in a broader sense that is the conflicts of interest of an expert. This is what makes the forest expertise, in my view, so actual. And then on top of all, this is the peasants, the local people who really wanted access to the land and to use the forest for themselves.
How did they try to negotiate between the forest experts and the threat of taxis and the Yugoslav politicians and the lawyers? Well, you know that the peasants were, first of all, at the end of the first world war, they were agitated, they were angry, nervous, and they no longer wanted to accept the form, the old order that is having the grants in Europe, the noble land owner above themselves, and serving his interests being content with what the noble is willing to give and not charging more. All this absolutely breaks down with the end of the first world war when a whole order tumbles down and when the social pyramid is no longer accepted as such. So the idea that the nobles must simply be driven out and that their lands must be distributed among the peasants is extremely popular.
And the Soviet Union is maybe the main driving force for also the peasants in Central Europe and in South Eastern Europe, that something like this might be possible because the Soviet Union, at least for a certain transitory time, did take the lands of the nobles and just gave them to the peasants. So why not charge the same for yourself? But during, after like two or three years of a rather revolutionary move after the first world war, the situation changes because the peasants start to understand that the total revolution will not come. And they also start to understand that the great idea of the great example for the revolution, the Soviet Union, is beginning to show traits which are not so nice, which are also not in the interests of the peasants.
So then they sit in their villages and they still want to get more access to them, towards, and they suffer from a social situation where, you know, you have an overpopulation of the countryside and you have a very small plots of land and you have problems where to find pastures for the cattle, for the pigs and so on. You have problems where to find wood for construction, of farmhouse buildings or for heating. So the needs are still there. So basically the peasants keep on supporting policies of redistribution.
And they also put pressure on the Yugoslav politicians not to make compromises with tornentaxes. And this is also why so many, why so many bribaries fail that it's not difficult to prove the bribaries of tornentaxes in their agents. But you see that so many bribaries, they come to nothing. That you spend something, but you do not get what you want.
You do not get this decision which you want. Precisely because so many Yugoslav politicians are afraid that acting for a bribe against a peasant, which is the main social group which legitimizes the existence of the very existence of Yugoslavia, is something which makes you lose elections. So the peasants sit in their villages and from time to time they gather around rural intellectuals which try to form them into a political power to articulate their collective interests. But also the various parties of interest, they start to understand that they also need to win over these peasants.
So in the 1920s, tornentaxes does not work with the peasants at all. They consider these revolutionaries in 1980, 1990, to be just dangerous people who threaten the lives of their tornentaxes' foresters. And they'd rather call for something like authoritarian measures in order to put these peasants back in place. But as they understand, as tornentaxes understands that the pre-1918 social order will no longer be reestablished, they also, and as they get more and more disappointed with the result of their bribery in Delgrade, which frequently comes to nothing, they understand that they must work with the peasants.
And so, that to reach compromises, they must be created like a local momentum which is more favorable for the house's turn in taxes. So they also, they send their representatives into the villages to talk to the local peasants and to find out which kind of deal they would also accept. And this is something we see in the 1930s. But at the same time, there is another thing which is also interesting for the position of the peasants.
Because when we talk about expropriations, we must understand that the political goals were never the only factor. But the U.S. state itself was deeply permitted by networks of power and also by monetary interests. So the expropriation of tornentaxes was something extremely interesting for business circles close to the U.S.
government who frequently wanted together with investors from Great Britain or also from Central Europe to get access to these woods, drive-turnentaxes out and then get a possibility to cut their own down. So these representatives of such business networks which sort of hid behind the U.S. state policy, they also went into the villages and made promises to the peasants that they will get this and that if they only give their voice against tornentaxes. So in this sense, the peasants were addressed by various sides by let's say, pro-socialist politicians by Yugoslav and businessmen and also by the tornentaxes side and each of them tried to tell them that if you are on our side, you'll get something good for yourself.
So this story goes backwards and forwards throughout the 1920s and most of the 1930s. But then eventually international geopolitics catches up and completely changes the playing field. What is it that happens in the late 1930s that rewrites the rules of the bribery and corruption in Yugoslavia? Well, basically what resolved the whole case, finally in 1939, is the German influence, the influence of the Third Reich, which finally just uses its economic power and political power, which it has gained during the 1930s over Yugoslavia to press Yugoslav politicians to make a compromise with tornentaxes.
It's interesting to understand how this all came about. That is the Black Friday of 1929 in New York caused, as you know, the world economic crisis, which in southeastern Europe had the effect that they could no longer export any agrarian goods and all these agrarian markets broke down. And many peasants had no other choice than to take more and more credits in order to survive. So this situation deteriorated within a very short period of time.
And the old liberal world order did not function anymore from the point of view of these agrarian societies in Yugoslavia because they are very partners who guaranteed this order, like France, Great Britain, the United States of America, did no longer buy agrarian products or even if they did so in a large, they did so in a smaller amount. So when Hitler comes to power in Germany in 1933, he very soon drafts an idea of what southeastern Europe means for Germany. And since Hitler has thought about making war against both the countries, the world is not only on town powers in the west, but also against Bolshevik Russia, he must think how to make his country fit for such a confrontation. So what he tries to assure himself is to have southeast European states as loyalists of Germany and to create a framework in which southeastern Europe delivers raw materials to Germany.
Since these countries after the world financial crisis have no foreign valuta in order to pay imports with, the Germans invent the so-called clearing trade that is a non-monetary exchange of German industrial products against southeastern European agrarian products. In this way, they draw Yugoslavia absolutely into their own sphere of interest, though Yugoslavia still formally belongs to the small town which was created by France. And in the end Yugoslavia becomes so dependent that they cannot do very much against German will because the whole stability of the economy depends on Germany. So when in 1939 the German side, the Yugoslav side and the turnstacks aside, or they start already in 1938, sit down in order to negotiate a final settlement of the turn on the Texas case, it is absolutely sufficient if the Germans say, well, if we do not find a solution here, this will have very grave consequences for your country as such.
And this is finally what works. And also another important moment is that that very same here in 1939, Yugoslavia sort of federalises that this they create a Banovina Hravatska, a Croatian banovina with a government of its own, and this government is also much more willing to compromise with the Germans. So generally it's macro-politics that helps to resolve the situation. So you say the situation is resolved, but what happens during the second world war and afterwards?
It doesn't last, does it? No, that is, it seems resolved only in the light of the agreement, which comes into being in 1939, which means that turn on taxes can finally keep 65% of their original possessions. That is, besides to the 20% which they have been taken away in the early 20s, they lose somewhat more, but then they get the guarantee that there will no more will be lost, and that they also get a compensation for everything that was taken away. So the compensation is planned for many years ahead, so Yugoslavia does not have to pay this instantly.
But then comes the Second World War, and as you know in the Second World War, Yugoslavia is attacked in 1941 by Hitler, by Germany and Italy, and is dismembered. And on the territory of what is today Croatia, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, the so-called independent state of Croatia is being created with the help of Germany and Italy. So this is the fastest state, which is sort of a close sibling to the Third Reich and to Mussolini. And one could expect that they help turn on taxes further to promote their own interests, because they absolutely depend also on Germany, and they have a similar ideology and so on.
But this doesn't happen at all. And the best turn on taxes try is to use this situation with the new fastest government in a new state, now governing over their possessions, to revise the 1939 agreement to reach better conditions. But the Ustasza government doesn't do anything for turn on taxes. And the Germans also say, well, we have other problems.
We are fighting, the communists were fighting to help the crewies control these territories. This is difficult enough, so there was not much Germany and never also in this case. There is a huge partisan movement of communist partisans, which helps in this independent state of creation. And we also have sources that show that turn on taxes during the Second World War is hampered in doing normal forestry business, because they are simply afraid of going into the forest, where they might enter into conflicts with partisans which hide there, which should have arms.
And when the war ends, the situation doesn't become any better, though the party is a movement, now turns basically into the power structures of a new state, that is of communist Yugoslavia. In the immediate post-war years, turn on taxes forests are completely expropriated, and a part of the personnel of turn on taxes is either killed, repressed, or they become also part of this new power structure, because we have cases of foresters which were in conflict with turn on taxes during the 1930s when it comes to putting these issues with the forest cities. And now they become part of the communist Yugoslav state forestry administration, which is absolutely clear that the rule of turn on taxes is over once and forever. Well, some of the foreign foresters of German nationality or ethnicity, just fleet of Germany, so that already in the 1950s, turn on taxes has nobody to work with, though they also they send an emissary, a certain doctor Fisher, I think it was a 1955 to Yugoslavia, to these possessions, to find out what is still there.
But the picture, this Fisher draws is quite deplorable and gives no hope of having the possibility to return. So even today, the German taxi's family has no access to those lands anymore? Well, I write it in the very end of my book that since the, when it became clear that after the breakup of Yugoslavia and the creation of the new creation state in 1991, the creation takes a turn towards the becoming a member of the European Union, which finally becomes two in 2013. But ours is already prior to that.
In the 2000s, turn on taxes remembers these forests and says, well, if they want to go to Europe, these grow ads. Well, maybe this might be helpful for us to get a compensation for what we have lost. But for the house of turn on taxes, these possessions are quite meaningful. That is, they owe now about 25,000 hectares of land and wood in South Germany.
This is what has remained to them. But they owe almost 40,000 hectares in Croatia. And also very large parts, like 30,000 in something in Poland and another such proportion in Czechoslovakia. That is, they possessed far more in Eastern and Central Europe than they ever had in Germany.
They have no realistic chances to get it back. But having just getting a recognition and a compensation for a part of what was lost is quite meaningful for the house of turn on taxes economically. So what they are basically trying is to get back to get a compensation for these forests. And what they do is they file lawsuits with local courts for compensation.
And they also have a lawyer acting on their behalf in Croatia. But as far as I know, well, there were cases when the local courts found that turn taxes should be compensated. But these local courts only decide on smaller proportions of the land, only on what is within their jurisdiction. But then the higher appellation courts annihilate these decisions.
And I think that the new Croatia is like on the position. Basically the position is not fundamentally different from what was the position of the first Yugoslavia or the Ustasha. And basically also in a certain way of the communists that there should not be something which looks like big compromises with nobles of the imperial period. As a member of the European Union and as a country which is very pro-European ideologically saying that they have always been Europe and so on, they have always been against the communists, they cannot completely ignore legal procedures.
But I think that on the higher political level of Croatia there is no will to take unpopular decisions which are costly for the Croatian state budget in order to accommodate the German noble. And yeah, you can understand where both sides are coming from. That's a bit of what we have time for today. But thank you very much for sharing this really interesting story.
It's not every day you get to see inside corruption scandals from the inside. Well, thank you very much. Roland for having this talk with me, for having read the book and having formulated such well very serious questions which just show that you were really gotten into this book and writing it I sometimes had the impression that I was telling quite complicated stories to my readers and I tried to make it. I was always afraid that it was not accessible enough or that it was just too special to write a book about this.
But what was important for me was that these sources in my view give a unique insight into what bribery really means for those who bribe and for those who take bribes. Because usually this is something that happens in a very hidden manner that is never being written about. There's never been evidence and if it's scandalized, it doesn't mean that it's well described. But here I had the opportunity to find sources of a house which was standing before litigation at the Yugoslav court which started in 1935 and where they wrote their own memorial for themselves about what had happened during the past 15 years.
We're not writing this as a self justification for the public. They were just writing it as something to where they tried to understand what they might be reproached of and what they really knew about what was going on. So these were the typical deep insiders sources which I found so unique because usually people who bribe do not take any notes about it. A good reason.
So thank you very much. Thank you Roland and I hope to hear from you soon. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
And it means there's no need to wear me when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer. That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us.
Learn how at Ontario.ca. Pay for it by the Government of Ontario.