Reichsheimstätte

The Reichsheimstätte was a German legal institute from 1920, which restricted property rights to real estate . This legal institution was created for social reasons with the Reichsheimstätten Act of May 10, 1920. The Reichsheimstättenamt based in Berlin was responsible for the implementation, implementation and monitoring . With effect from October 1, 1993, the law repealing the Reichsheimstätten Act came into force ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 912 ).

The purpose of the Reichsheimstätten Act was the acquisition and possession of residential property, protected from possible creditors , and the binding of the owner to certain land policy goals. The so-called homesteads were mostly issued by state or municipal institutions. The so-called Heimstätter was able to acquire ownership of a homestead. However, the rights of ownership were restricted in favor of the issuer. These restrictions also served to protect the home owner. Foreclosure was restricted to the property in favor of the homestead. The issuer had a statutory right of first refusal . The consent of the issuer was required for encumbrance or division of a property. In the event of improper use of a homestead, the issuer had a right of repurchase (right to repurchase). In addition, an imperial home was not freely inheritable.

The legal institution of the Heimstätte was also regulated by law in Switzerland , but has not acquired any practical significance there.

Development of the Reichsheimstätten law

The term “homestead” is almost automatically associated with the development that began after the First World War to provide living space for soldiers returning home from the war in the form of so-called “warrior homesteads”. From today's point of view, it is mostly overlooked that the homestead concept has historically much deeper roots and that the practical implementation of this idea did not only take place in the rural area through the warrior homesteads of the early 1920s, but also through modern urban settlements of the New Building style such as the Frankfurters Praunheim settlement as the largest German homestead settlement .

The deeper idea of the homestead lies in the fact that with this special form of socio-politically bound property, regardless of the economic situation of the self-using owner, the land and the residential building on it remain out of the reach of possible creditors under all circumstances: House and yard can be closed by unfortunate circumstances lose or recklessly gamble away, but a home remains permanently as a refuge for the family. The homestead thus has two central functions: On the one hand, through the spatial delimitation of the special right, it ensures the protection of the soil in the sense of a fairer distribution of property; on the other hand, it ensures the protection of people by maintaining a certain minimum requirement for property. The roots of the homestead idea go back to the settlement of North America in the early 19th century; in Texas in 1839 the first homestead extension law was enacted. In Europe in the 19th century, similar laws for the protection of agricultural property in Romania (1864) and Serbia (1865) can be found since the 1960s; At that time there were legislative suggestions in Switzerland (1882), Belgium (1889 and 1893), Germany (1890 and 1905), Italy (1894 and 1910) and France (1894), but for the time being there was no legal codification in any of the states. It was not until the early 20th century that the Swiss Civil Code of 1907 and the French "Loi sur la constitution d'un bien de famille insaisissable" of 1909 were passed as the first legal basis for residential homes tailored to the purely residential function. In the 19th century, the poor living conditions of the working class in Germany led to the housing reform movement and structural considerations for a targeted remedy; The founding of building cooperatives , tenants' associations and politically active associations were indicative of this development . The homestead movement received further impetus when the Bund Deutscher Bodenreformer took up this idea shortly before the beginning of the First World War. After the lost war, the socio-political homestead idea was bracketed with the popular idea of providing permanently secured possession of a limited piece of homeland, especially for those injured in the war.

Reichsheimstätten Act of May 10, 1920

The creation of the Reichsheimstätten Act (RHG) dragged on over a longer period of time. As early as 1916, the German Reichstag asked the Chancellor, by means of a unanimous resolution, to submit a corresponding bill to parliament. However, it took a few more years for the law to become mature at the national level; in the meantime, immediately after the war ended, several smaller states passed state homestead laws. Almost two years after the end of the lost war, the end of the German Empire and the successful course of the revolution of 1918 , uniform framework legislation was passed with the enactment of the “Reichsheimstättengesetz”: After a long phase of development, the National Assembly passed almost everything on April 29, 1920 unanimously the Reichsheimstättengesetz; Article 10, paragraph 4 of the Weimar Constitution (WRV) of August 11, 1919 , provided the constitutional source of law for this legislative proposal. More detailed ideas of the trade unions and the Federation of German Land Reformers on a fundamental land reform policy ended in a resolution passed together with the law.

The Reichsgesetz, which was drawn up on May 10, 1920 and announced eight days later in the Reichsgesetzblatt , was limited as a framework law to regulating the legal form of the “Reichsheimstätte” uniformly throughout the Reich; In addition to the special legal status of a home, in particular "issuer" and "Heimstätter" were defined and their internal relationship was determined under public law: According to § 1 RHG, only the Reich, the states and the municipalities were generally considered as issuers; however, the federal states were able to equip other non-profit companies with the issuer property. As Heimstätter, “war participants, especially war invalids, as well as widows of those killed in the war and families with many children ... should preferably be taken into account”; In principle, however, other groups of people could also be considered when allocating a home.

Regarding the content of a homestead, the RHG only stated that it could be a "dormitory site" (single-family house with a kitchen garden) or a "business home" (property to be managed by a family). The special position of an imperial home consisted of the personal protection of the Heimstätter family and the direct prevention of speculative exploitation by the owners; This resulted in the permanent purpose of the home as a socially bound place of residence. In order to secure the ties, the property was entered in the land register, naming the respective issuer and the corresponding land value; the "Heimstättenvermerk" entered here in Section II was the first priority.

Accordingly, the Reichsheimstätten Act was a basic land policy law and not a financing law. The only substantive provisions in the RHG were the exemption “from all fees, stamp duties and taxes of the Reich, the states and other public bodies”; As a result, around 400 to 500 RM could be saved in the construction of each individual home in the 1920s . This amount, which was quite considerable for the time, roughly corresponded to the Heimstätter's usual contribution to the purchase of the house. Additional general regulations on the material organization of the homestead system, as well as further details on implementation, were left to the state legislation; Of the state laws that followed the RHG some years later, the most important was the Prussian implementation law of January 18, 1924, along with the implementation provisions of the Prussian Minister for People's Welfare of April 25, 1924 and the guidelines of January 18, 1929.

A peculiarity of this implementation law, which was restricted to residential homes, was the designation of "home areas" made possible according to § 4 Pr.AFG; In the areas delimited by a local charter of the municipality responsible for this in their own sphere of activity, only dormitories were then allowed to be built. Independently of such area designations, homesteads could also be outside of the specially designated areas, i.e. H. be justified everywhere. Through the municipal designation of a home area, a special land law and urban planning spatial special right was established in a kind of double strategy in two different ways: On the one hand, the land reserve policy, e.g. B. be facilitated by direct expropriation possibilities. On the other hand, the homestead areas represented a special feature in terms of building law, because the municipal planning authority could be partially revoked in the areas.

To implement the homestead concept

The practical implementation of the homestead idea was unexpectedly long in coming, despite the intensive preparatory work of the aforementioned, and overall did not reach the extent that the operators behind this idea assumed. There are no reliable figures on the total size of all residential buildings newly constructed as Reichsheimstätten during the 1920s. One can roughly assume that during the Weimar Republic a total of around 20,000 newly built small houses in the German Empire were marked with the Reichsheimstätten note. In the Third Reich , the RHG was reformulated by the amending law of November 24, 1937 and published the day after in the new version valid until 1993. With regard to the practical implementation, one can roughly assume that the number of homesteads doubled between 1933 and 1936 to around 40,000 and then doubled again to a roughly estimated total of 80,000 by 1945. These figures, based on a rough estimate, would mean that around 60,000 units and thus around three quarters of the homesteads were not built until the Third Reich.

Role of Reichsheimstättenrecht after 1945

After the Second World War, hardly any new Reichsheimstätten were issued, even if in the early 1950s public funding for private homes and small settlements was made partially dependent on the establishment of Reichsheimstätten status. Through the Second Housing Act of 1956, the binding of public funding to this particular form of property required by the approval authorities was directly prohibited by Section 52 WoBauG. Since then, the legal structure of the Reichsheimstätte for the future, publicly funded housing supply has been practically meaningless. Furthermore, individual paragraphs of the RHG have already been overridden by amendments over time. Nevertheless, the Reichsheimstättengesetz in the Federal Republic of Germany was not fundamentally abolished in terms of the legal system and therefore continued to apply to all homes that were previously founded on this legal basis and not deleted until 1993. The subsequent designation of existing single-family houses as Reichsheimstätten was still possible in the late 1970s, apparently to a greater extent, by buyers of used homes, in order to save the real estate transfer tax, which was then an average of 7% of the purchase price; The court fees for the entry in the land register and the fees of the land registry offices and building authorities were also omitted - notaries also had to grant a fee reduction for the purchase contract. Since then it had become quiet about this special legal construction of socially bound property. After a long period of unchangeable status quo, the first tendencies towards abolition have been apparent since 1988. By decree of August 22, 1988, the Hessian Minister of the Interior, in agreement with the Minister of Finance, instructed the issuers in the State of Hesse to accept applications for annulment without further examination. The fees and taxes saved by the Heimstättern over the decades were not reclaimed contrary to the previous legal situation. As a result of this decree, the homestead memo was deleted from around 180 of the 1,000 or so Reichsheimstätten in the Praunheim settlement in Frankfurt.

As the last development, the Federal Government prepared the repeal of the law since summer 1992. The reason for this was, on the one hand, the general deregulation of housing, and on the other hand, the special situation of homes in the new federal states; Here the home status had already been abolished by the civil code of the GDR and only came into force again through the Unification Treaty of 1990. The law repealing the Reichsheimstätten Act came into force on October 1, 1993.

Well-known Reichsheimstätten manager

Leopold Schmalhorst , German architect

literature

Erich Brockhaus: Dormitories . Dissertation Göttingen 1931
Ronald Kunze: Living with a social connection. The rise and fall of the Reichsheimstätten law . In: Information on modern city history. Living in the city. Issue 2, 1993, ISSN 0340-1774 , pp. 24-29.
Remmer Mauritius: homesteads still interesting? Interpretation of real estate according to the Reichsheimstättengesetz - a way to obtain temporary exemption from real estate transfer tax. In: AIZ - Allgemeine Immobilien-Zeitung. Volume 3, 1977, ISSN 0001-1673 , pp. 46-48.
Mewes: home . In: Josef Brix, Hugo Lindemann, Otto Most, Hugo Preuss, Albert Südekum (eds.): Concise dictionary of communal sciences. Fischer, Jena 1922, pp. 492-495.
Rudolf Meyer: Homestead and other economic laws in the United States of America, Canada, Russia, China, India, Romania, Serbia and England. With previously unprinted letters from Jefferson and a draft for a new agricultural law . Bahr, Berlin 1883.
Heinrich Simon: Home law . In: Hermann Wandersleb (ed.): Concise dictionary of urban development, housing and settlement. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1959, pp. 1248-1250.
Heinrich Zeul: Heimstätten. Legal bases and their significance for Frankfurt . In: The settlement. Issue 8, 1929, ZDB -ID 54351-2 , pp. 5-6 and Issue 9, 1929, pp. 4-6.

Individual evidence

↑ RGBl. Page 962 ; later in the version of the announcement of November 25, 1937 in the RGBl. I on page 1291.
↑ See the second and third deliberations on the draft law (combined with the oral report of the 24th committee on housing, settlement and residential issues) in the minutes of the Reichstag meeting of April 29, 1920 on page 5606 to page 5614 (with overall vote on the law ) in digitized form at the Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library
↑ RGBl. P. 962 to p. 970 (reprint of the Reichsheimstättengesetz in the Reichsgesetzblatt of May 18, 1920)
^ Act to amend the Reichsheimstättengesetz in the Reichsgesetzblatt of November 27, 1937; again at Max Rusch: Land law and land legislation since 1933. Series: Kleinsiedlung - series of publications by the publishing house Siedlung und Wirtschaft GmbH, Berlin 1938
↑ Max Harteck: Damaschke and the land reform. From the life of a folk man . German Book Association, Berlin without a year (1929). Figures can only be found for settlement activities according to the Reich Settlement Act of August 11, 1919 for 1919–1928: 26,343 new settlers positions were created across the country, 82% of them in Prussia. Reach 11,897 of them with an area of less than 2 hectares. In the same period, almost 60,000 small agricultural sites were enlarged by areas according to the same law to become so-called “neighboring settlements”, mainly in Upper and Lower Silesia. This result was considered very unsatisfactory. (Pp. 288–290, compare pp. 353 ff.) In Prussia, the executive authorities were the state cultural and cultural authorities, whose task also included procuring land for lease or property for agricultural workers and homestead applicants and promoting other private settlement movements. In addition, municipal associations or small settlement societies formed with district participation could also act as "non-profit settlement societies" within the meaning of the law. (P. 358) Regarding the Reichsheimstätten Act it says: “The implementation of the law is only possible where honest people in the communities unite for law and justice. Otherwise those interested in the land have a greater influence. ”(P. 342) And:“ Unfortunately, the government has not yet been able to decide to establish a Reichsheimstättenamt ”(p. 336). A land reform law planned since 1920 was not passed. In 1928 a new draft was drawn up under the name of the Dormitories Act, which was drawn up by the Permanent Advisory Council for Homesteads at the Reich Ministry of Labor. (Pp. 336, 338, 371 ff.)

[1] RGBl. Page 962 ; later in the version of the announcement of November 25, 1937 in the RGBl. I on page 1291.

[2] See the second and third deliberations on the draft law (combined with the oral report of the 24th committee on housing, settlement and residential issues) in the minutes of the Reichstag meeting of April 29, 1920 on page 5606 to page 5614 (with overall vote on the law ) in digitized form at the Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library

[3] RGBl. P. 962 to p. 970 (reprint of the Reichsheimstättengesetz in the Reichsgesetzblatt of May 18, 1920)

[4] Act to amend the Reichsheimstättengesetz in the Reichsgesetzblatt of November 27, 1937; again at Max Rusch: Land law and land legislation since 1933. Series: Kleinsiedlung - series of publications by the publishing house Siedlung und Wirtschaft GmbH, Berlin 1938

[5] Max Harteck: Damaschke and the land reform. From the life of a folk man . German Book Association, Berlin without a year (1929). Figures can only be found for settlement activities according to the Reich Settlement Act of August 11, 1919 for 1919–1928: 26,343 new settlers positions were created across the country, 82% of them in Prussia. Reach 11,897 of them with an area of less than 2 hectares. In the same period, almost 60,000 small agricultural sites were enlarged by areas according to the same law to become so-called “neighboring settlements”, mainly in Upper and Lower Silesia. This result was considered very unsatisfactory. (Pp. 288–290, compare pp. 353 ff.) In Prussia, the executive authorities were the state cultural and cultural authorities, whose task also included procuring land for lease or property for agricultural workers and homestead applicants and promoting other private settlement movements. In addition, municipal associations or small settlement societies formed with district participation could also act as "non-profit settlement societies" within the meaning of the law. (P. 358) Regarding the Reichsheimstätten Act it says: “The implementation of the law is only possible where honest people in the communities unite for law and justice. Otherwise those interested in the land have a greater influence. ”(P. 342) And:“ Unfortunately, the government has not yet been able to decide to establish a Reichsheimstättenamt ”(p. 336). A land reform law planned since 1920 was not passed. In 1928 a new draft was drawn up under the name of the Dormitories Act, which was drawn up by the Permanent Advisory Council for Homesteads at the Reich Ministry of Labor. (Pp. 336, 338, 371 ff.)