Ordinance on the treatment of marital home and household effects
| Basic data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Ordinance on the treatment of marital home and household effects |
| Short title: | Household Ordinance (not official) |
| Abbreviation: | HausratsVO (not official) |
| Type: | Federal Ordinance |
| Scope: | Federal Republic of Germany |
| Legal matter: | Family law |
| References : | 404-3 a. F. |
| Issued on: | October 21, 1944 ( RGBl. I p. 256) |
| Entry into force on: | November 1, 1944 |
| Last change by: |
Art. 12 G of December 11, 2001 ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 3513, 3518 ) |
| Effective date of the last change: |
January 1, 2002 (Art. 13 G of December 11, 2001) |
| Expiry: | September 1, 2009 (Art. 2 G of July 6, 2009, Federal Law Gazette I p. 1696, 1698 ) |
| Please note the note on the applicable legal version. | |
The Regulation on the treatment of the marital home and household goods from 21 October 1944 contained as part of the German family law provisions as to which spouse or partner after divorce , the previous marriage or life partnership apartment is assigned and how the marriage or life partnership household to distribute is. The relevant provisions met the family court at the request of a spouse or partner. The procedure was also regulated in the Household Goods Ordinance. In the regulation, the judge could also transfer property , intervene in the rights of third parties, for example establish a rental relationship and order the payment of a compensation amount. The regulations were to be applied accordingly to life partners .
The regulation was pre-constitutional law . It was based on Section 131 of the Marriage Act , which has now been incorporated into the BGB . The BGB referred in § 1318 in conjunction with §§ 1361a, 1361b to the Household Goods Ordinance.
The HausratsVO came into being during the Nazi era . The legislature in 1944 felt the shortage of housing in the German cities affected by the bombing war prompted them to create opportunities for what they believed to be socially just allocation of scarce living space ( cf.official reasoning , DJZ 1944, 278), by circumventing them the individual property rights and (rental) contractual individual positions traditionally anchored in the law of the German Civil Code. Whether the HausratsVO also contained National Socialist legal ideas in the narrower sense is controversial. As a whole, it was not repealed as unconstitutional (according to BVerfG NJW 1992, 106 constitutional despite the court's concerns). Rather, it was used extremely frequently in family law practice in the Federal Republic of Germany. On the other hand, the central formulations of the HausratsVO (such as Section 1 (1), Section 2, Section 8 (3)) correspond to Nazi legal thinking in that they give the judge almost unlimited discretion to make just and appropriate decisions in individual cases through deliberately vague legal terms . This corresponds to the methodology of Nazi legal practice when dealing with general clauses , which Bernd Rüthers describes as "unlimited interpretation" . Furthermore, in § 2 sentence 2 a special protection of the "requirements of community life" was found as a guiding principle for all decisions "of the judge", whereby here not the family community life, but the "household community" is meant (better integration of the remaining spouse into the rest House community, see BayObLG 55, 205; 56, 159 and 276). Such an overriding of community life over the individual interests of the affected family also corresponds to National Socialist legal theory.
Legislative proposals
With the reorganization of the family court procedure ( FamFG ), the Household Goods Ordinance was largely repealed. Thereafter, the formal legal regulations were incorporated into §§ 200 ff. FamFG with effect from September 1, 2009. Sections 1, 7, 11, 13–17, 18a, 20, 23 Housekeeping Ordinance (Article 62 of the FGG Reform Act) have been repealed. With the reform of the equalization and guardianship law (Art. 2 G BGBl. I p. 1696, 1698 ), the remaining provisions on September 1, 2009 were repealed. The content regulations were adopted in §§ 1568a and 1568b BGB.
