Buried In The Past

Brothers Discover Long-Lost Family In Austria

(CBS)  So how did our country end up in their building? The story begins with a Viennese genealogist and consultant to the Hoerner Bank named Herbert Gruber.

Gruber is in the business of finding long-lost heirs to properties that were seized by the Nazis. Gruber, acting on a hunch that Schmidgasse 14 might be one of those properties, set about finding the original title-holder.

"I discovered that the owner was a physician, Dr. Lothar Furth. The building used to be a hospital," says Gruber.

But it wasn't just a hospital. The Sanitorium Furth was one of Europe's toniest clinics. Sigmund Freud studied medicine with its founder, and luminaries like the Maharaja of India went there for treatment.

So how did Gruber track down its heirs after all these years?

"Piece by piece, like a puzzle, the information came together," says Gruber. "I found out that most of the family had survived the Holocaust."

It turned out that Dr. Lothar Furth was the cousin of Chris and Rich Andrews. He was part of a prominent Jewish family that lived in Vienna before World War II. Because of the rise of anti-Semitism there, some had converted to Christianity.

Chris says he wasn't raised with any religion, but he remembers going to Sunday school a few times as a child.

On March 13, 1938, Adolf Hitler entered Austria. "As Führer and Chancellor of the German nation," Hitler said that day, "I witness for history the entry of my homeland, Austria, into the German Reich."

The 'Anschluss,' as it was known, whipped Austrian citizens into a frenzy of delirium, and a frenzy of anti-Semitism. Jews were mocked, threatened, and publicly humiliated – and among them was Dr. Furth, the owner of Sanitorium Furth. According to a relative, he and his wife were forced to clean the sidewalk outside Schmidgasse 14 with their tongues.

Shortly after that awful day, just three weeks after the Nazis had marched into Vienna, Furth and his wife killed themselves. They injected themselves with poison inside Schmidgasse 14. Furth left a suicide note that said simply, "We have had enough. It is my fault, but I am just tired. I kiss everyone who loves me."

"It changed our lives," says Rich. "For some reason, we really didn't know that our family was Jewish."

They also were not aware that Furth was their mother's cousin, one of the many secrets she took with her when she fled Europe as a teenage girl with her parents shortly before Hitler entered Austria. Among those secrets was the story of Schmidgasse 14, where their mother was born.

Schmidgasse 14 was seized by the Nazis, who occupied it until the end of the war. The wholesale seizure of Jewish property is something Ariel Muzicant knows a lot about. He's head of Vienna's Jewish community and one of the biggest realtors in Vienna.

"Since the Nazis left, all the German property became Austrian property. And it became official Austrian property," says Muzicant. "They just kept it and rented it out."

In the case of Schmidgasse 14, they rented it out as office space to the United States of America in 1958. More than 40 years later, in 2001, the U.S. spearheaded a restitution agreement between itself and Austria that gave Holocaust victims and their heirs the chance to reclaim stolen property.

Are there other Furth properties that Gruber discovered?

"Many family members lost relatively high valuables, such as a chemical plant, significant bank accounts, other items of value," says Gruber. "The total value would be around 20 million euros."

That's about $25.3 million, most of which will never be returned because of the limited amount of money provided by the restitution agreement and the large number of people applying for it.

But to Chris and Rich Andrews, the money was never the point.

"We found out that our great grandfather owned the match monopoly in the Hapsburg empire. Our grandfather owned a brewery. They owned all kinds of other things," says Chris. "But it wasn't so much the wealth. It was, oh, they were people of conviction. They were people who went out and did things. And that, and I started to say to myself, 'Well my family helped build Vienna.'"