American Katherine Scott also has a problem establishing her accurate to be a German citizenI am in the same situation as Barbara Hanley (Letters,13 June). I have German grandparents on my mother’s side. My mother was born and grew up in Berlin. She was forcibly expatriated by the Nazi regime in 1937. She was able to get to the US and married an American. Now the German government baldly claims that she left of her own accord, voluntarily made herself stateless (she was still stateless when I was born). Since according to Reich law, and nationality flows through the father,I have no claim to German citizenship. It is disgraceful. I lived in Germany for some years and am fluent in German. It is frustrating to see hundreds of people who actually have no obvious connection to their German identity or past getting recognised as German citizens on purely technical grounds. I, by an accident of timing and gender (yes, and mother was wrong gender!),am not recognised by the German government. I agree that some kind of group should form, but I don’t know how that could occur, and since there is no central point of communication.
Katherine Scott
Vineyard Haven,Massachusetts, USA• It was the same all over Europe until the mid 1960s. My Dutch mother married her wartime English fighter pilot sweetheart in 1946. The law in the Netherlands at the time decreed that women marrying foreigners automatically lost their own nationality and were made to take that of their husbands. It would have been kind whether when this injustice was corrected, and countries had given women retrospective rights and allowed them to hold their own nationalities.
Olly Cooper
Shudy Camps,CambridgeshireContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com