The German government on Wednesday agreed on a draft law to deny the nature of some descendants of Nazi victims who were former citizens.
Described by Berlin as a symbolic step, the step helps close legal gaps that have led to the rejection of the citizenship claim of many of the descendants of victims.
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A man walks through the gate of Sachsenhausen’s Nazi death camp with the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (work liberates you) in Oranienburg, Germany
(Photo: AP)
“This is not just about putting things right, it’s about making excuses in great embarrassment,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said.
“It is a great fortune for our country if people want to be Germans, despite the fact that we took everything from their ancestors,” he said in a statement.
While Germany has allowed the persecuted descendants to regain citizenship, the lack of a legal framework means that many applicants were rejected before a rule change came in 2019.
Some were rejected because their ancestors fled Germany and took another nationality before their citizenship was officially restored.
Others were rejected because they were born to a German mother and a non-German father before April 1, 1953.
Passing the 2019 order into law was a way to give them “the value they deserved” while putting beneficiaries on a firmer legal footing, ministerial arguments concerning inside Steve Alter.
The suspicious German Central Council said the previous order had been “inappropriate” and had long campaigned for a legislative right.
“It is a shift of procedure if both the victims and their descendants are able to claim German citizenship for legal reasons,” said council president Josef Schuster.
The difficulties for some in using ancestral claims for citizenship were partly due to the sharp rise in the number of claims from Britons eradicating the Nazi persecution of their ancestors, after the UK voted the Leaving the European Union.
From 43 such applications in 2015, the number had risen to 1,506 in 2018, according to ministry figures.
In 2019, Austria also changed its citizenship law to allow the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fled the Nazis to recover.
Previously, only Holocaust survivors were able to gain Austrian nationality.