It wasn’t until Brexit happened that Bradford, West Yorkshire-born Rabbi Walter Rothschild reclaimed the German citizenship taken by the Nazis from his family in 1939. When then British prime minister Theresa May sent the final departure letter to Brussels, Rothschild was finally angry enough to get active.
“Brexit gave me a feeling that my homeland had been stolen from me,” says Rothschild, who came to Germany in the late 1990s with his Dutch wife and three children.
Rather than stay angry, the 70-year-old dove into the family archive for papers that traced his family lineage back to May 1939, when his grandparents passed a train station on the German border on their way to Basle in Switzerland.
Rothschild is named after his grandfather, Walter, a respected county court judge in Hannover. He was dismissed, simply for being Jewish, and in 1938 was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. His grandmother, Charlotte, got her husband out and they crossed the border into Basle in May 1939. Through friends they sent their son, Walter’s father, to boarding school in the UK in August 1939 – just before war broke out.
The moment they left their homeland, Nazi Germany stripped the Rothschilds of their citizenship and recorded the fact in the Nazi state gazette.
In his Berlin sittingroom, Rothschild produces photocopied pages of the list containing his grandparents’ names. They were among an estimated 90,000 people, including German Jews and political opponents, the Nazi regime named and shamed as stateless.
It was postwar (West) Germany’s Basic Law that offered a way back in Article 116 (2): “Former German citizens who, between January 30th, 1933 and May 8th, 1945, were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial or religious grounds and their descendants shall, on application, have their citizenship restored.”
Rothschild’s grandfather never returned to Germany nor did he reclaim his citizenship. Because of the beatings he received in Dachau his health declined rapidly in Switzerland. In 1950, after battling the German state to receive his pension, he received a letter offering him his old job back in the Hannover court. A short time later he died, still stateless.
If you don’t have a passport, you’re nobody. As a Jew you want the ability to be mobile as you never know when the next stupidity is going to come
— Walter Rothschild
Four years later, in 1954, Walter Rothschild was born in Bradford – his father stayed on in the UK after school. Growing up, Rothschild says he always felt “on the fringe”.“There was always a feeling we were a German family in Bradford and with a name like Walter Rothschild you were not a John Smith or Terry Robinson,” he says.
A job offer in Berlin saw him move to the city in 1998. It was an emotional return, he says, but he had never thought of a German passport until Brexit narrowed his work and travel options across the Continent.
His two younger sisters also applied and the process was completed in 2017 after about nine months. Walter feels ambivalent about living in Germany today as a German citizenship. He is “grateful for this particular window of history and the nice people making the naturalisation laws”.
Yet he feels the German response to the October 7th Hamas massacre in Israel was not wholehearted enough – a feeling many of his Jewish friends share, he says.
From his jacket pocket he produces his slightly tatty, well-used German passport. A few months back, he recalls a talk with other rabbis about adding modern symbols to the Seder feast table. Alongside the flat bread, salt water and bitter herbs, Rothschild suggested they should add a passport, a quiet tribute to his grandparents and today’s uncertain times.
“If you don’t have a passport, you’re nobody, no one will let you anywhere,” he says. “As a Jew you want the ability to be mobile as you never know when the next stupidity is going to come.”
Elana
Elana, a 42-year-old medical doctor from Maryland in the United States, who did not wish to give her full name, grew up hearing about Fritz, her German grandfather, and his pre-war life in Bielefeld, Lower Saxony.
“When my mom spoke of him she would imitate him with German accent speaking to her in Yiddish and using German words,” says Elana. “He stayed as long as he could but left rather late, right after Kristallnacht.”
Fritz, his sister Annaliese and brother Ernest were among the tens of thousands of people who fled Germany after the 1938 pogrom against Jewish homes, business and places of worship. Millions more were unable or unwilling to get out – until it was too late.
It is a right that was violently taken away and deserves to be re-established in these next generations
— Elana
Growing up, Elana says she was always aware of the injustice done to her family, in particular how their citizenship was taken away. It was Elana’s mother who had the idea of applying for restoration of citizenship around 16 years ago.
“She was interested in having German citizenship, as was my grand-uncle Ernest, who felt it had been stolen from him,” Elana says.
Both her mother and Ernest died before their wish was realised. But two years ago Elana applied, submitted considerable paperwork, and on a rainy day last June drove to the German embassy in Washington DC. There, two young men presented her with her naturalisation certificate and spoke some words about the injustice inflicted on her grandfather and his siblings.
“They were lovely, saying they can’t right the wrongs of the past and that this is a horrible history, but this is one of the things we can do,” she recalls.
In the unremarkable Washington embassy room, Elana found her mind drifting back to her family and their escape. Though they were lucky to survive, unlike millions of others, but the violent break with Germany thwarted their life plans forever.
Fritz, who died in the 1970s, ran a linoleum store. Ernest, who she knew better, never completed his medical training and ran a watch business instead.
Among Elana’s three siblings, one other sister has also secured citizenship. Others in her family feel Germany can never right past wrongs.
“I don’t feel this way,” says Elana. “It is a right that was violently taken away and deserves to be re-established in these next generations.”
After the re-election of US president Donald Trump, and in a world of rising authoritarian leaders, does she view her German citizenship any differently now? Elana, who was already a dual US-Israel citizen, still puts her German citizenship in the “nice to have” category. It allows her children to live, work or study on this side of the Atlantic should they so wish in the future.
“My husband is very fond of being American and his family is all here, so it would take something of huge magnitude to extract him,” she says.
She says the aftershocks of the October 7th, 2023 attacks, in particular anti-Israel demonstrations on US college campuses, make her happy to have another option.
“With a recent family history of the Holocaust and the growing anti-Semitism,” she says, “I feel it is never a bad idea to have another passport for a Jewish person these days.”
![Adam Berry: 'There has been a sweeping generalisation and monolithisation in Germany of how "we" [Jews] are supposed to feel about Israel.' Photograph: Gil Holten](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/SUMGHCJNXNH2VAYMSTRMCTUMKE.jpg?auth=35ceb7a11f8b24d92f9f6e6e1c62226335e8bfd5980e5df344c370f18ffc32c5&width=800&height=602)
Adam Berry
Adam Berry, a photographer and television producer from South Carolina, has lived in Berlin for 20 years and secured his citizenship on the basis of residency rather than the constitutional provision in Article 116.
His family is of Lithuanian/Polish/Bessarabian descent and his great-grandfather was a subject of Tsar Nicolas II before he left for America some time before 1918.
“His brother, a local religious leader in Alytus, stayed behind,” says, “and was either shot in a forest or burned alive in a locked synagogue with his family and others.”
Berry says he didn’t have a single motivation for applying for German citizenship. In September he secured his “Certification of Krautdom”, as he jokingly calls it, mostly for pragmatic and practical reasons: ease of travel and the right to work in 26 other European countries.
What sealed the deal for him was a German citizenship law change earlier this year allowing him retain, rather than relinquish, his US citizenship. Another motivation was a wish for political representation to match his German taxation.
Berry doesn’t remember talk of the Holocaust or the Nazis when he grew up. After 20 years away from the US, he feels too far away for Trump’s second term to have been a motivating factor.
Like Rothschild, being a Jewish German citizen has been chastening experience since October 7th last year – but for very different reasons. What preoccupies Berry is what he sees as a problematic and emotional debate in Germany over Israel’s military response in Gaza.
Historic feelings of obligation to Germany’s murdered Jewish population, he says, has left many of his fellow Germans less sensitive now to diverse views on Israel among “its living Jewish population”.
[ Who speaks for Jews in Germany?Opens in new window ]
“There has been a sweeping generalisation and monolithisation here of how ‘we’ [Jews] are supposed to feel about Israel,” he says.
For him, Germans criticising him and other Jewish friends’ critical stance on Israeli policies in Gaza and Lebanon constitutes “its own form of anti-Semitism”.
“The pendulum has swung so far that it’s slammed the clock in the face and knocked all sense out of it,” he says. “That said, like any country, Germany is imperfect.”
Applications for German citizenship on the rise
German authorities point out that Article 116(2) is open to all whose ancestors were stripped of their German citizenship, not just Jewish people. Others targeted include communists, union and religious leaders. Since 2014, the interior ministry says some 41,449 people living abroad have been awarded citizenship under Article 116 (2) - and it does not collate how many involved Jewish people. Recent shocks - from Brexit to October 7th - have triggered an apparent spike among people seeking naturalisation under the special provisions.
Last year the number of applications from Israeli citizens under article 116 nearly doubled to 9,100, while the 14,000 applications from the rest of the world marked a rise of 23 per cent. Another rise in applications came three years ago when German updated its provisions to allow such article 116 applications via the maternal line.
Before German ambassador David Gill moved to Dublin, he was consul general in New York. One of the privileges of his job, he says, was to meet people attending naturalisation ceremonies three times a year. The high Jewish population of New York, he suggests, was a factor in enough applications for ceremonies up to three times a year. At his last ceremony in June around 80 people were naturalised, a step he said was never transactional or bureaucratic act for them.
“Behind every person is a family story and in previous years we often had three generations of people being naturalised,” he says. “The oldest person I had was a woman aged 94 who came from Hamburg, via the UK, to the US. She told me that, despite everything, she had always remained German.”
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