Austrian hotel owners who took visitor to court for one-star review criticising ‘Nazi grandpa’ photo in hallway are forced to drop the case after guests prove their relative WAS a Nazi
- Austrian hotel owners sued a German guest who left a critical one-star review
- Thomas K complained a photo of a ‘Nazi grandpa’ was hanging in the hallway
- Owners of Alpine Ferienhof Gerlos hotel claimed relatives were just in the army
- But K was able to prove that both pictured relatives joined the Nazi party in WWII
Austrian hotel owners who took a guest to court after he left a one star review because a photo of a ‘Nazi grandpa’ hung in the hallway have been forced to drop the case.
The hoteliers sued the German guest for libel and defamation, alleging that two relatives pictured in the lobby were not in the Nazi party but only in the armed forces, known between 1935 to 1945 as the Wehrmacht.
But the visitor, named in Austrian court documents as Thomas K, was able to prove that both the relatives – a grandfather and an uncle of one of the owners – were both members of the Nazi party during the Second World War, according to the Guardian.
Two framed pictures near the hotel entrance showed a young and an older man wearing uniforms with an eagle and swastika badge.
K complained he and wife felt ‘disgusted’ at the veneration of what appeared to be Nazi relatives at the Ferienhof Gerlos hotel in the Tyrolean Alps in August 2018.
The owners of the Ferienhof Gerlos hotel (pictured) in the Tyrolean Alps in Austria sued one of their guests after he complained they hung pictures of Nazi relatives in the lobby
Using the subject header ‘At the entrance they display a picture of a Nazi grandpa’, K wrote reviews in both English and German on Booking.com and TripAdvisor under a pseudonym.
K wrote: ‘This made us wonder what the hotel owners are trying to tell us with this image. This incident speaks volumes about the current state of affairs in this region of Austria. Sadly, our desire to visit this mountain region has disappeared completely.’
The owners contacted the websites and asked them to take the posts down on the grounds they were libellous and defamatory.
Booking.com, based in the Netherlands, deleted the post, but the US-based TripAdvisor refused to comply with the request.
The hotel owner then contacted K and filed a lawsuit against him with a regional court in Innsbruck.
A court in the Alpine city granted the hotel a gagging order against K on the grounds his review implied the hotel owner shared or sympathised with Nazi ideas.
During the July judgement, the judge also ruled that the hotel owner’s right to protect their reputation took precedence over K’s freedom of speech.
Visitor Thomas K was able to prove both the hotel owner’s relatives had joined the Nazi party during WWII. Pictured (above) are ski huts in the snow-covered Tyrolean Alps near where the Ferienhof Gerlos hotel is based
After researching the identity of the two men in the photographs at the German National Archives in Berlin, K was able to prove both men joined the Nazi party in 1941 and 1943 respectively.
The hotel’s owners said they had not been aware of their relatives’ membership of the National Socialist Party.
Last month, the Innsbruck court lifted the preliminary injunction against K, reportedly saying the owners ‘uncritically venerated a former Nazi family member’ due to the clearly visible swastika and their past membership.
A lawyer representing the owner said the pictures were hung in remembrance of late relatives and the image of an uncle in a Wehrmacht uniform was the only one the family had of him.
The hotel owners could now have to pay their former guests’ legal costs of about €10,000 (£8,350).
In a separate case in Germany, K accused another member of the owner’s family of harassing him during a telephone call about his review, according to the Guardian.
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