Germany Eases Citizenship For Families Who Fled Nazis
German Flag Above Building Image by bluejayphoto
(JTA) — Germany said it will make naturalization easier for some people, including Jews, who fled the Nazi regime because of persecution.
The move Friday is announced in two decrees unveiled by the interior ministry.
They affect several hundred applicants who applied for Germany citizenship but had been rejected because they were born to a German mother and non-German father. Until 1953, German citizenship could only be passed on through the paternal line.
“Germany must live up to its historical responsibilities,” said Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in a statement, adding that he wanted to help people whose parents or grandparents had to flee, Reuters reported Thursday. “With the legal decrees which come into force tomorrow, we will create a swift ruling that is immediately valid for these people to get German citizenship,” he added on Thursday.
Germany received more than 1,500 applications from Britain under Article 116 in both 2017 and 2018 compared with 43 in 2015, before the Brexit referendum. A majority of voters said they supported the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.
The new decrees loosen the conditions needed for citizenship, for example by allowing individuals with a German mother and foreign father to have their citizenship restored, provided they were born before April 1953.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
