California Rejected a Bill to Return Stolen Land. Here's Why It Worked in Germany

On a recent afternoon, Francesca Thomas walked along the edge of the San Francisco Bay in Hayward, trying to picture where Russell City once stood.

The community was demolished before Thomas, 57, was born, but she grew up hearing stories from relatives who lived there.

In the 1930s, Thomas’ great-great-grandmother, Leona Alves, was one of the few Black women who owned and operated a business in Russell City — a restaurant called Ideal Dining. Like the city’s residents, the clientele were mostly Black, Latino and poor white families boxed out of other Bay Area neighborhoods by redlining and the cost of living.

White linen tablecloths and bouquets of fresh-cut flowers adorned the tables; at night, one end of the small dining room became a stage for musicians.

On some evenings, Thomas said her mom and aunt — then just kids and not allowed into the restaurant at night — would slip into the dining room and hide under the tables to watch the performances.

“My aunt says that L.C. Robinson was her favorite artist to listen to,” she said, referring to the Texan-turned-Californian blues legend.

In 1963, Alameda County leveled Russell City’s 24 city blocks using federal urban renewal funds and eminent domain laws, which allow the government to force the sale of private property to make way for infrastructure projects that, they say, serve the public good. The move displaced more than 1,000 people, including Thomas’ family.

Last week, the Legislature approved Assembly Bill 62, which would have allowed people who lost homes and businesses through discriminatory uses of eminent domain to seek compensation — a first-in-the-nation attempt at reparations for this kind of displacement.

On Oct. 13, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed AB 62, among several other proposed laws that would have advanced the cause of reparations for Black descendants of enslaved people. The bill would have allowed people who lost property through the racist use of eminent domain laws to apply for compensation from the state. In his veto statement, Newsom said the plan was too expensive and complicated to implement.

Supporters of California’s reparations movement point to Germany’s decades-long programs for Holocaust survivors as proof that restitution, though imperfect, can restore a measure of dignity and wealth to families torn apart by state-sanctioned injustice.

Racially Motivated Eminent Domain

In 2021, the city of Hayward made a formal apology to former residents, acknowledging that the destruction of Russell City — like the destruction of the Fillmore District across the Bay in San Francisco — was part of a nationwide pattern of uprooting communities of color.

AB 62 would have been the first law in the United States to create a pathway to reparations for victims of these practices. Newsom vetoed a similar bill last year over design flaws.

The law stems from a series of recommendations made by the California reparations task force, designed to end and redress the legacy of anti-Black policies throughout the state’s history.

Last year, California’s Legislative Black Caucus introduced a package of 14 priority reparations bills. Six were enacted, including an official apology to address the role of California officials who promoted slavery at the state’s founding and for persisting racial disparities.

On Oct. 13, however, Newsom vetoed a handful of bills advancing the cause of reparations for Black Californians, dealing the latest blow to the movement to atone for state-inflicted harms from slavery to the present day. This included a series of bills that would give public universities the option to prioritize descendants of enslaved people for admission and would expand access to homebuyer loans and professional licenses.

The vetoes come days after reparations advocates were encouraged by Newsom’s approval of Senate Bill 518, which created a new state agency to oversee restitution for descendants of enslaved people. The law, authored by state Sen. Akilah Weber Pierson, D-San Diego, establishes a bureau within the Civil Rights Department that will verify eligibility, process claims and recommend how the state might deliver tangible repair.

California’s reparations plan is the first of its kind in the nation, but it builds on global precedents. One of the oldest is Germany’s reparations programs for survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants.

“What German Holocaust reparations started,” said Thomas Craemer, a German political scientist who advised the California task force, “was to serve as a historical precedent for systematically addressing past atrocities and to say that a government is responsible for its actions or what actions it allows.”

As California lawmakers consider reparations policies for the second year in a row, KQED spoke with Bay Area residents who received reparations for the Holocaust to hear what the German programs meant to them and what similar proposals in California could mean for us.

‘It could have been lost to history’

On a recent rainy afternoon in Berlin, Sam Hollenbach, 27, sat by the front windows of Cafe Quitte in the city’s Kreuzberg neighborhood. Hollenbach said he’s not much of an art guy but, as he scrolled through photos of lithograph prints on his phone, he had to admit: his great-great-grandfather, Max Rosenfeld, had good taste.

The prints are a series of monochromatic maritime scenes that once belonged to Rosenfeld, a German Jew and art collector. They remind Hollenbach of his early childhood, living on a boat in the San Francisco Bay.

“To see this is what my great-great-grandfather liked and collected?” said Hollenbach, who never met Rosenfeld. “It’s funny to see that appreciation passed down.”

During the Holocaust, Rosenfeld’s children, Sam’s great-grandparents, fled to the U.S. Rosenfeld chose initially to stay behind, and eventually, the Nazis arrested him. According to what his family has been able to uncover, Rosenfeld became sick and died in Nazi custody. His art collection was lost.

Now, the art is slowly making its way to the house in Oakland where Hollenbach grew up.

It began with an email.

“I almost didn’t even open it,” Jill Hollenbach, Sam’s mother, said over Zoom.

Jill Hollenbach, Rosenfeld’s great-granddaughter, grew up in Los Angeles. She remembers hearing the story of her family’s escape from Germany: her grandparents pretending to leave on a short business trip; her mother, a baby, hidden in a laundry basket.

“When I was a young kid and other kids were having nightmares about monsters,” Jill Hollenbach, 60, said, “I was having nightmares about Nazis.”

Even after she’d grown out of childhood fears, she remained wary of the country her grandparents fled. When she met Germans, she couldn’t help but wonder about their grandparents: “Were they smashing out my grandparents’ windows? Were they ratting them out to the SS?”

“The language was the language of people I loved very much. The food is the food [that] people I loved very much made for me,” said Jill Hollenbach, who was close with her German-born grandparents.

In 2021, Hollenbach heard from a cousin that she could apply for German citizenship through a special program for descendants of Holocaust survivors. She began to fill out applications for herself and her two kids. As part of the process, she had to prove her lineage — similar to what the California reparations plan proposes for people hoping to claim benefits earmarked for the descendants of enslaved Africans.

“I reconnected to the idea of the fact that this is our country — my family’s history is in Germany,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we be German citizens? I felt like we were reclaiming something that should have been ours.”

The email that arrived later that year gave her additional reason to believe Germany today might be different from the place her family fled.

The message was from an art historian working in a public museum in Stuttgart and read: “Are you the granddaughter or great-granddaughter of Max Rosenfeld? We have some artwork that we think belonged to him.”

There are hundreds of state-employed researchers examining the origin of art in German collections. If found to be ill-gotten, they facilitate the art’s return to its rightful owners.

After reaching Hollenbach, the Stuttgart Art Museum began sending Rosenfeld’s art to Oakland. The first pieces arrived this year.

To Sam Hollenbach, who is using his new German citizenship to live in Berlin, the return of his great-great-grandfather’s art shows some Germans are dedicated to a meaningful effort to, where possible, do right by the families that lost property during the Holocaust.

“There’s no reason that they needed to return that to us. We had no idea that these art pieces existed … It could have just been lost to history,” Hollenbach said. “But the fact that there was such an effort made to return these pieces goes a long way to make me, now someone who has returned to Germany, feel comfortable being here.”

When Hollenbach thinks about California’s reparations plan, he worries about a possible backlash to some of the recommendations, especially as the Trump administration condemns diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. But generally, he’s supportive of the state’s efforts to atone for its past racist policies.

“There’s no way to undo what happened,” he said. “You can at least kind of ease the pain for the people who were affected by it, and at some point, that’s the best you can do. I hope that we can do more of that in the U.S. in general. I’m glad to hear California is leading the charge.”

“To make good again”

The art return and renaturalization initiatives that the Hollenbachs benefit from are part of a larger commitment Germany made after World War II to address the damage the Holocaust wrought on individual lives.

At the time, post-war Germany sought distance from the Nazis, Israel needed funds to absorb Holocaust refugees, and Jewish groups abroad pushed for financial support. The three interests converged.

The resulting compensation agreements, signed in 1952, became key pillars of what in Germany is known as Wiedergutmachung, or “to make good again.” Since then, the German government has created more than a dozen compensation programs paying out more than $90 billion to Holocaust survivors and their spouses.

Some of those payments are lump sums meant to address specific harms — such as being subjected to slave labor for German businesses or mistreated as a prisoner of war — and others are ongoing monthly pensions.

In addition to compensation, restitution laws, including changes to German property law, have allowed for the return of art, businesses and homes stolen by the Nazis or sold under pressure.

Thousands of stolen artworks and cultural objects have been returned. Still, researchers at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs say less than 20% of assets stolen from Jewish owners by the Nazis and their collaborators have been returned. The return of homes has proven complicated.

In San Anselmo, California, Elissa Eckman knows this firsthand.

“It was our house, my grandmother’s house”

Growing up, Eckman, the mother of KQED reporter Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, was often one of the few Jewish kids in her schools.

“I used to get bullied for being a Jew in Oregon, in Utah, and even in Illinois, where we lived,” said Eckman, 77.

Before the Holocaust, Eckman’s grandmother, Renata Eckmann, lived in the central German town of Eisenach, Germany, in a three-story home. Her husband ran a department store on one of the city’s main drags. The name Eckmann was emblazoned in bold letters above the shop’s second-floor windows.

As the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, Renata’s children left for the U.S. When they arrived, they dropped the second N from their last name. Renata stayed, was arrested, and, along with the other Jewish residents of Eisenach, was imprisoned at Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what was then Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

At the war’s end, she was one of the few survivors. By then, her home was in the hands of new owners. She made her way to the U.S. to join her children.

When Renata heard of the start of restitution programs, she filed a claim with the German government to get her house back. But it was complicated.

“My grandmother supposedly sold the house to some German people, and they owned the house. So that became the issue. Who owned the house?” Eckman recalled.

The ensuing court battle wound on for decades, outlasting Renata. After her death, Elissa, then a young public defender in the Bay Area, sought out a German lawyer to take up the case.

“I felt that I was fighting the Nazis, so to speak,” Eckman said. “This was a wrong that needed to be righted, and it had to be done. I was going to make sure that we got that house back.”

In 1994, a German court ruled that the Nazis pressured Renata to sell the home for less than it was worth. It returned the home to the family. Her descendants sold the house and split the money; Eckman said she received about $30,000.

“It was nice to have the money because I didn’t have a lot of money,” she said, laughing. “But it wasn’t about the money.”

In retrospect, Eckman said the long and complicated process of getting her grandmother’s house back reveals some of the messiness of trying to make things right.

Germany’s programs were and are controversial. Some people were left out, and the claim review processes have been criticized as being overly burdensome and demeaning to victims. Property return, in particular, is considered by some to be woefully incomplete.

Germany’s reparations commitments also include material and political support for Israel, which has come under increased scrutiny as UN officials and some Holocaust scholars accuse Israel of committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Over the last two years, Germans protesting their government’s support for Israel have staged street demonstrations and campus occupations in Berlin, prompting crackdowns.

Even the word Wiedergutmachung has drawn condemnation for its implication that the murder of six million Jews, the mass theft and displacement of families and years of forced labor during the Holocaust could ever be “made good again.”

Eckman said she’d like to see Germany’s property return processes streamlined but thinks the general idea could be applied to other places, including in California: “I think that if people can establish that they had property that was taken from them, they should get it back.”

Russell City

While there are meaningful differences between the theft of Jewish property during the Holocaust and American slavery’s legacy of anti-Black policies, Germany’s Holocaust reparations programs still offer valuable lessons about reconciliation and repair, however imperfect.

Thomas said she finds herself imagining what Russell City would have been like — if Alameda County and Hayward hadn’t destroyed it.

“I think many people would still be here getting the benefit of that generational wealth,” Thomas said. “I think it would have been a thriving community if they had just been given a chance.”

After the neighborhood was bulldozed, Alameda County sold the area for $2.4 million to a developer.

“In an eminent domain situation, normally you have land that is put to public use, like a freeway, like a school,” Thomas said. “When I look around and see that it’s just an industrial park — that you removed people from their businesses and their homes to create an industrial park? I’m sorry, it just makes me ill.”

This summer, Alameda County and Hayward created a $1 million Russell City Redress Fund, which it said will make direct payments to living former Russell City residents who had property seized.

The city of Hayward said the money isn’t compensation or tied to property value, but a way to acknowledge the lasting harm from Russell City’s destruction.

Thomas said local efforts like this are a step in the right direction. Her four surviving relatives, who are former residents of Russell City, are planning to apply.

Until then, Thomas said it’s inspiring to hear that some Californians have already benefited from property return laws, even if they come from another country.

“It’s not a matter of taking a particular model and copying it,” Thomas said of Germany’s efforts. “It would be a matter of taking a particular model and improving on it, right? And taking into account what we’ve experienced in our own country, to do so.”