What documents are necessary?
A declaration under sec. 58c is decided on documents. This page is organised by what a document has to establish rather than by what it is called.
Not every case needs every record below. Which of them your file turns on is decided by which of the six statutory cases you are in — Cases 3 and 5 carry no residence requirement at all, so the registration record that is central to Cases 4 and 6 is simply not asked for. The case pages each carry their own list; this page is the whole set, with a note on who needs what.
These are the same lists the eligibility questionnaire returns with its result.
Which case needs what
| What has to be proved | Case 1 | Case 2 | Case 3 | Case 4 | Case 5 | Case 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The chain of descent | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Citizenship or statelessness | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persecution, or well-founded fear of it | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Departure under persecution | Yes | — | — | — | — | — |
| Deportation | — | — | Yes | Yes | — | — |
| Death under persecution | — | — | — | — | Yes | Yes |
| Absence from Austria across the whole 1933–1945 window | — | Yes | — | — | — | — |
| That the death falls inside the case’s time limit | — | — | — | — | Yes | — |
| Primary residence in Austria | Yes | — | — | Yes | — | Yes |
| That nothing in your own history closes the route | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Read a column down and you have that case's file. Read the “—” cells and you have the reason the six cases are not interchangeable: a limb the Austrian Citizenship Act does not ask for is a document you do not have to find.
The records, by what they establish
That you are descended from him/her in a direct line
- Your birth certificate, and the birth and marriage certificates of every person in the chain between you and him/her.
- Where a surname changed, the marriage certificate that changed it.
- For an adoption, the adoption order — and note that Austria set the age of majority at 21 until 1973 and 19 until 2001, so whether an adoption counts turns on the year.
Needed for every case.
Which citizenship your ancestor held before March 1938
- Old passports and travel papers.
- A citizenship certificate — Heimatschein or Staatsbürgerschaftsnachweis.
- The right-of-domicile record (Heimatrecht / Zuständigkeit) of the home municipality.
- For statelessness, a Nansen passport or an alien’s registration.
Needed for every case.
Why your ancestor was at risk
- IKG Vienna community records; Yad Vashem; the Arolsen Archives.
- Restitution and compensation files — Opferfürsorge, Hilfsfonds, Nationalfonds, Claims Conference.
- The 1938 property declarations (Vermögensanmeldung).
- For the political limb: party, Schutzbund or trade-union records, and police or court files.
Needed for every case.
Why your ancestor left Austria, and when
- Emigration and exit records.
- The immigration file in the country he/she went to; ship or passenger manifests.
- Visa and affidavit papers.
- The IKG emigration department files (Auswanderungsabteilung).
Needed for case 1.
Whether your ancestor was deported out of Austria
- The deportation database of the DÖW.
- The transport lists — Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Maly Trostinec, Riga.
- The Arolsen Archives; Yad Vashem; the IKG files.
Needed for cases 3 and 4.
What happened to your ancestor
- The DÖW victims' database.
- The Yad Vashem Central Database of Shoah Victims; the Arolsen Archives.
- A death certificate, or a declaration of death (Todeserklärung).
Needed for cases 5 and 6.
Where your ancestor was living in the 1930s, and why he/she could not come back
- Residence registration, work permits or the immigration file in the country he/she was living in; passport stamps.
- A point of law to settle with it: sec. 58c(2)(1) requires that he/she had no main home in Austria at any time between 30 January 1933 and 9 May 1945. If he/she still had a home in Austria in, say, 1935, Case 1 is the one to look at instead.
Needed for case 2.
The date of your ancestor’s death
- The same records as above. Case 5 reaches only deaths before 9 May 1945; Case 6 has no date limit.
Needed for case 5.
Where your ancestor had his/her main home, and when
- Vienna or other municipal registration records (Meldezettel).
- The 1938 census of the Jewish community (IKG).
- The 1938 property declarations.
- Address books; school, tax or employment records.
Needed for cases 1, 4 and 6.
Whether you have ever held Austrian citizenship yourself
- Any Austrian passport, citizenship certificate or registration among the family papers — people are sometimes citizens without ever knowing it.
- The naturalisation record of the country whose citizenship you took, and its date.
- Sec. 58c(5) keeps the route open for a person who did not know he/she was an Austrian citizen when he/she acquired the other citizenship, so what was known at the time matters as much as the dates.
Needed for every case.
Translation, certification and apostilles
Documents are accepted in German or in English. Anything else has to be translated into German by a sworn and judicially certified translator — a specific legal standing, not a description of competence. A relative who speaks perfect German cannot do it, and neither can a translation agency that does not hold that standing. For this audience the language most often involved is Hebrew, followed by Spanish and Portuguese.
Separately from translation, a foreign original document may need to be authenticated before an Austrian authority will accept it. Where the country that issued the document is a party to the Hague Apostille Convention, that authentication is an apostille, issued by that country's designated authority — in the United States, usually the Secretary of State of the state that issued the certificate. Where the issuing country is not a party, the older route of consular legalisation applies instead.
Which of your documents need authenticating is a decision for the authority, not a rule you can apply yourself, and apostilles cost money per document. Ask the Austrian representation you will be filing with which ones they want before you pay for any of them.
When a document does not exist
This is the ordinary case for this audience, not the exception. Records were destroyed, communities were dispersed, and a great many families left with what they could carry. A missing certificate is not the end of a file.
Three things are worth knowing before concluding that a record is gone.
- Austrian civil registration is duplicated more than people expect. A birth may appear in a municipal register, in a religious community's register, and again in a registration record or a school file. The absence of one of the three does not mean the fact is unprovable.
- The persecution archives are catalogued and searchable. The DÖW's deportation and victims' databases, the Arolsen Archives, and Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names between them index a very large proportion of the events sec. 58c turns on. A fact your family could not prove in 1960 may be a search result now.
- A death with no death certificate has a legal substitute. A declaration of death (Todeserklärung) does the work of a certificate for someone who did not come back and whose death was never registered anywhere.
Where a fact genuinely cannot be documented, the question becomes whether another of the six cases reaches the same family through a fact that can be. That is not a workaround; it is what a set of six casuistically defined cases is for.
A note on not being sure
Families often stop at the first thing they cannot answer — which citizenship a great-grandmother held, whether a departure in 1939 counts as flight. Not knowing is not a disqualification. It leaves a statutory element open, and an open element is settled by a document rather than by a memory.
The questionnaire is built around exactly this: “I’m not sure” is never a failing answer there. It leaves the element open, and returns it on the result as a named point with the records that would settle it — which is a list of what to look for, rather than a verdict.