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TwitterHigh honour for Ambassador Erich Kussbach
On 5 December 2025, Erich Kussbach, retired ambassador and long-standing member of the Arbitration Panel for In Rem Restitution, was presented with the Golden Medal of Honour for Services to the Province of Vienna in the Coat of Arms Hall of Vienna City Hall.
The award was presented by Christian Meidlinger, First President of the Vienna Provincial Parliament. The ceremony was attended by numerous prominent figures from the fields of politics and culture, friends, family members and associates. The laudatory speech for Kussbach was given by Hannah Lessing, Managing Director of the National Fund. The Atmos Quartet provided musical accompaniment for the ceremony.
When Austria undertook in 2001 to resolve outstanding issues of compensation and restitution of property confiscated during the Nazi era, one of the measures taken was to establish an independent three-member Arbitration Panel for In Rem Restitution to examine applications for the return of seized property in public ownership. Ambassador Erich Kussbach was the Member of the Arbitration Panel nominated by Austria. He performed this role on a voluntary basis for 20 years until the Arbitration Panel was dissolved in 2021.
Erich Kussbach can look back on an eventful family history. His father, Dr. Franz Kussbach, was a lawyer in Hungary during the interwar period. During the Nazi occupation of Hungary, he helped many Jewish colleagues and friends to flee and was deported to Dachau concentration camp in 1944 by the Gestapo. It was sheer luck that he escaped being murdered on a death march.
Erich Kussbach himself escaped the Soviet occupiers in spectacular fashion during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Posing as a member of a team of Red Cross aid workers, he was able to flee by rescue plane. It was only later that he realised that the flight had not only taken him out of the danger zone, but also across the border to Austria. He was thus one of the first refugees to arrive from Hungary in 1956.
In 1963, Kussbach entered the Austrian diplomatic service, most recently serving as ambassador to Hungary and, until 1996, as permanent representative to the International Danube Commission. He was an honorary professor of humanitarian international law at the University of Linz and professor of international law at the Catholic Pázmány Péter University in Budapest.
You can find out more about the stories from Erich Kussbach’s eventful life in an interview he gave to Arbitration Panel staff in Laxenburg in 2022:
