Half of what makes sec. 58c hard to read is that it uses ordinary words in a technical sense. A reader who guesses at one of them draws the wrong conclusion about his/her own family.
The annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938. It is the event most of the facts a sec. 58c file establishes are dated against — which citizenship an ancestor held "before March 1938", when a family's property was declared, when a departure stopped being a choice.
A standardised certificate that authenticates a public document for use in another country, under the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention. It is issued by a designated authority in the country that issued the document — in the United States, typically the Secretary of State of the issuing state.
Where the issuing country is not a party to the Convention, the older route of consular legalisation applies instead. Which of a file's documents need either is a decision for the Austrian authority, not a rule an applicant can apply in advance.
The international centre on Nazi persecution, holding what was formerly the International Tracing Service collection. Camp records, transport lists and displaced-persons files, indexed and searchable online.
The Austrian document that proves a person holds Austrian citizenship (Staatsbürgerschaftsnachweis). It appears twice in this subject and in two different roles: as the record that may establish what an ancestor held before 1938, and as the document issued to the applicant once a declaration succeeds — the thing an Austrian passport is then applied for on the strength of.
Its older counterpart, the Heimatschein, together with the right-of-domicile record (Heimatrecht or Zuständigkeit) of the home municipality, is what the ancestor's side of the file usually rests on.
The mechanism sec. 58c operates by, and the reason the procedure is short. A declaration (Anzeige) states that a set of facts is true; it is not an application (Antrag) to be granted a discretionary favour. If the facts are established, the citizenship follows, and no authority weighs whether the applicant deserves it.
This is what removes the usual conditions. There is no residence requirement, no language test, no citizenship examination, and no requirement to give up an existing nationality — not because they are waived, but because none of them is a fact about what happened to the ancestor.
A son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, great-grandson, great-granddaughter and onwards, and also an adoptive child who was adopted while still a minor. There is no limit on the number of generations between the persecuted ancestor and the applicant.
The line runs down, not sideways. A niece, a nephew or a cousin of a persecuted person is not a descendant in direct line, however close the family was.
The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes), in Vienna. Its deportation database and its database of victims are, for the Austrian cases specifically, usually the first place a deportation or a death is established.
The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. It is the historical event sec. 58c exists in answer to, and the source of most of the records a file is built from — the community registers, the transport lists, the victims' databases and the restitution files.
The Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien). Its records — the community registers, the 1938 census of the community, and the files of its emigration department (Auswanderungsabteilung) — establish both persecution and departure for a very large number of Viennese families.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). All six cases turn on persecution — suffered or feared — by its organs or by the authorities of the German Reich, or alternatively on persecution for having advocated for the democratic Republic of Austria.
The second limb is easy to miss and is genuinely separate. A file can rest on political persecution alone.
A main home, as opposed to a visit, a posting or a stay (Hauptwohnsitz). It is what the registration record establishes, and it is the limb Cases 1, 4 and 6 turn on — and that Cases 2, 3 and 5 do not ask about at all.
Case 2 uses it in the negative, and that is the harder direction: it requires that the ancestor had no primary residence in Austria at any point between 30 January 1933 and 9 May 1945.
The Austrian municipal record of who lived at an address and when (Meldezettel). For a Viennese family it is usually the document that proves primary residence, and it frequently survives where a birth or marriage certificate does not.
Someone holding no citizenship at all. Statelessness counts equally with Austrian and successor-state citizenship in Cases 1, 4 and 6.
It is also under-recognised in family histories. A great many people lost or never acquired a citizenship in the redrawing of borders after 1918 and were stateless for years without any document ever saying so in those words. A Nansen passport or an alien's registration is often what establishes it.
The group of citizenships the Austrian Citizenship Act treats as equivalent to Austrian for the purposes of Cases 1, 4 and 6. The Austrian Citizenship Act itself does not enumerate them; they are Hungary; Czechoslovakia; the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; Poland; Romania; Italy; and the Ukraine.
This matters more than it looks. A great many families who had lived in Vienna for decades still held Hungarian, Czechoslovak or Polish papers in 1938, and conclude from that alone that the route is closed to them. For three of the six cases it is not.
A translation made by a translator holding a specific legal standing — sworn and judicially certified — rather than by anyone competent in the language. Documents for a sec. 58c file are accepted in German or English; anything else needs this.
The distinction catches people out, because it is not about the quality of the translation. A relative fluent in both languages, or a commercial agency without that standing, cannot produce one.
The day Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and the day the window in Case 2 opens. That case asks whether the ancestor had a primary residence in Austria at any point between this date and 9 May 1945; if he/she did, Case 2 is closed to him/her and Case 1 is the one to read.
The date is five years before the Anschluss, and it is the reason Case 2 reaches families who had already left Austria long before Austria itself came under Nazi rule.
The date the Austrian Citizenship Act uses as the end of the persecution period, and the cut-off in Cases 2, 3, 4 and 5. It is the day after the German surrender took effect.
Two of the six cases do not stop there, and both exceptions run in the applicant's favour. Case 1 reaches to 15 May 1955, the signing of the Austrian State Treaty. And Case 6 sets no date limit on the death at all — the single most important difference between it and Case 5.
The day the Austrian State Treaty was signed, and the cut-off in Case 1 — the only one of the six cases that reaches past the end of the war.
It is the date people misjudge most often. An ancestor who had a primary residence in Austria and left because of persecution is inside Case 1 whether he/she went in 1938 or in 1951, and a family who assume the route closed in 1945 read themselves out of the case that covers them.
The terms above are the ones the statute itself uses or presupposes. For how they combine into the six situations the Austrian Citizenship Act recognises, see the six cases; for what each one has to be proved with, see the documents.