Background
Templ was born in 1960 in Vienna, Austria and is a resident of Prague, Czechoslovakian Republic.
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Stephan Templ
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As a journalist, he has been the cultural affairs reporter for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Eastern Europe. The book Unser Wien (Our Vienna) revealed long-held secrets about the Nazi era in Austria, and helped launch numerous restitution claims. Templ himself became involved in a restitution case in 2005 which evolved in to ten years of legal entanglement.
In October 2015, Templ received a one-year sentence as punishment for having allegedly omitted the name of an estranged aunt in an application on behalf of his mother, Helene, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, for the return of property seized from his Jewish relatives in 1938.
The British Broadcasting Corporation News notes that critics have suggested that the jailing may be linked to the author’s criticism of the government"s restitution record. At the end of 2015, Templ"s legal team were finally allowed access to documents held by the Austrian state that proved Templ had informed them about the aunt"s existence in 2003.
