Germany facilitates citizenship of descendants …

The German government has approved a bill that makes it easier to obtain German citizenship for descendants of victims of Nazism who had to emigrate due to persecution during the Third Reich.

This project, which has not yet been approved by Parliament, formalizes the decrees in this regard published in 2019 to fill the legal loopholes that had led to the rejection of applications for German citizenship from many descendants of Holocaust victims.

“It’s not just about putting things in order, it’s also about apologizing for the deep shame,” Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said in a statement, according to a cable from the AFP agency.

“It is a great chance for our country if people want to take German citizenship even if we will take everything away from their ancestors,” he added.

Although Germany has long allowed descendants of persecuted Jews to claim German citizenship, legal loopholes prevented many applicants from receiving it before the rule change in 2019.

In some cases, they have been denied German citizenship because their ancestors fled Germany and acquired another citizenship before the original was formally revoked, and other applications were rejected because applicants are children of a German mother and a non-German father, born before April 1, 1953.

“It is a gesture of decency that the victims and their descendants can claim German citizenship,” said the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster.

The requirements demanded will be reduced “to the minimum”: it is necessary to have “basic knowledge of German” and “also basic knowledge of the legal and social order in Germany”, according to the German ministry of law. ‘Interior.

Unlike normal citizenship application procedures, applicants will not have to demonstrate that they have sufficient financial means to support themselves if they live in Germany.