Topic summary

German citizenship

German citizenship

Extracted from the Wikipedia article German nationality law.

Between 1933 and 1945, any person considered "undesirable" by the state (particularly Jews and political dissidents) was stripped of their civil and political rights and targeted for denaturalisation. Any person deprived of their German citizenship during this time based on political, racial, or religious grounds, as well as their direct descendants, are eligible to reclaim German citizenship at any time. Following the end of the Second World War, Germany was split into West Germany and East Germany. While West Germany continued to enforce existing pre-war nationality legislation and claimed all East Germans as its citizens, East Germany adopted a separate nationality law in 1967 which remained in force until German reunification in 1990.