There are moments in this work that have nothing to do with legal strategy or document checklists. In March 2026 I accompanied two clients, a mother and her adult daughter, to the German Consulate General in New York, where they received their citizenship certificates under Article 116 (2) of the German Basic Law.
The Consul General spoke briefly and welcomed them. There was a toast. Their file had been open for years. I have done this work for a long time and I am not going to pretend that a morning like that becomes routine.
I am writing about it without their names, and without the photographs that were originally published with this piece. A restitution file records who a family was persecuted for being, and that is not information to put on a company website, however proud everyone in the room was.
Two provisions, one principle
German law offers two distinct routes to descendants of people persecuted between 1933 and 1945. Both rest on the idea of Wiedergutmachung, making good again, and they apply to different histories.
Article 116 (2) of the Basic Law
This is the constitutional provision, in force since 1949. Former German citizens deprived of citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 on political, racial or religious grounds, and their descendants, have their citizenship restored on application.
Deprivation was sometimes individual, by a decree naming the person. It was also collective: the Eleventh Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, of 25 November 1941, removed the citizenship of German Jews resident abroad automatically, with no individual act at all. For many families, that regulation is the legal event at the centre of the file, and there is no document with their ancestor's name on it to prove it, only the fact of residence abroad on that date.
§ 15 StAG, in force since 20 August 2021
Article 116 (2) requires a deprivation. Many losses connected to persecution were not deprivations in that formal sense. The common case: an ancestor fled Germany and naturalized in the country that took them in, and under the law of the time that voluntary naturalization ended their German citizenship. Nobody took it from them by decree. They lost it in the course of surviving.
§ 15 StAG, introduced by the Fourth Act Amending the Nationality Act, treats that loss as a consequence of persecution and opens naturalization to the person and to their descendants. It is a statutory route rather than a constitutional one. Like Article 116 (2), it requires no residence in Germany, no language examination, and no renunciation of another nationality.
Note that the 2021 reform did not amend Article 116 (2). The two sit side by side, and part of the work in any restitution file is deciding which one the family's history actually fits.
What these files demand
The evidentiary bar is high in both routes. A file normally has to establish, on documents:
- the line of descent from the persecuted ancestor, birth by birth, without a gap;
- the nature of the loss: a formal withdrawal, which points to Article 116 (2), or a loss or exclusion connected to persecution, which points to § 15;
- that the ground was political, racial or religious, which is often proved by context rather than by a single decree;
- authentication of documents that are approaching a century old, held in archives in several countries.
For many families, assembling that file is the first time they have seen those papers together in one place: the emigration record, the birth certificate from a town they have never visited, the notice that took away a grandparent's nationality. It is slow work, and it is a privilege to do it.
Whether your family has a claim
If a German ancestor of yours was persecuted, forced to flee, or denaturalized between 1933 and 1945, there may be a right in your family that nobody has claimed. Whether it arises under Article 116 (2), under § 15 StAG, or not at all, is a question of what the documents show, and it is examined case by case.
Neither right expires. Documents and family memory do. If you think your family may be connected to this history, that is a good reason to look now rather than later.