I, too, have applied for restored citizenship (Jewish refugees’ families seek German citizenship, 31 October). It is not a decision taken lightly by me, nor by any Jew who suffered the loss of family members in the Holocaust. My grandparents, believing that the German people would see through Hitler and his thugs, chose to remain in Berlin. They were subsequently transported to Katowice in Poland, where they were slaughtered in a concentration camp.
But that was then. Since that time, I have seen refugees welcomed by the German government when they were being stigmatised and blamed in this country. In my opinion, Ukip and members of the current ruling political rightwing have deliberately fanned the flames of racial hatred in their Brexit propaganda. History repeats.
Those who remember their family’s past look aghast as what is happening in this post-compassionate country. What alarms me most is the complacent acceptance of the same xenophobic rhetoric that was spewed out by the German propaganda machine in the 1930s. We simply cannot stand by and allow our children and grandchildren to be trapped in a country that is embracing an isolationist policy, and turning its back on those fleeing war and persecution.
Carol Hedges
Harpenden, Hertfordshire
• Following Brexit, several hundred Britons are applying for German citizenship under “a constitutional right to claim it for anyone persecuted by the Nazis and their descendants”. Only not if, like me, you’re the descendant of a German Jewish mother who married an Englishman. My mother came to Britain in 1939 after three years as a political prisoner in Nazi prisons, and my grandmother was deported from Berlin to the Bełżec death camp in 1942. But I’ve been told by the German embassy that I’m not eligible to claim under this provision, as until 1953 only a German father could confer German citizenship, and I was born in 1946. My mother, an early feminist, would be torn between outrage, disbelief and hilarity, as am I.
Marlene Rolfe
London
• I am one of the 400 people of German-Jewish origin who applied for German citizenship in the wake of the 23 June referendum. As I wrote to German friends who were appalled at the result, I did so to make an internationalist gesture and to give an expression to my European identity at a time when the majority of the UK was seen to be rejecting one.
Among those friends were two former mayors of the town where my mother grew up prior to her leaving Germany in 1934. They and others have made major efforts to research and commemorate the history of its lost Jewish community and to communicate it across the generations. “Stolpersteine” – small pavement memorials at locations associated with the disappeared Jewish population – have been laid there (including for my family) as they have been in hundreds of locations across Germany.
I am far happier to identify with such acts and the recent German opening up to refugees than with the narrow nationalism and sour lack of humanity on display here since the Brexit decision. Does that make me a “citizen of nowhere”?
Bruce Robinson
Manchester
• You note that while “any descendants of people persecuted by the Nazis are eligible for German citizenship”, under Austrian law only survivors, not their descendants are eligible.
However, after Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria to Germany, all its citizens were made German. I still have my grandmother’s passport, issued when she and my father fled from Vienna in 1939, printed “Deutsches Reich” (and marked with a large red J). Since they were then officially German, not Austrian, nationals, presumably my sons and I could apply for German citizenship?
My father, a proudly naturalised British citizen, would have been disgusted at Brexit, but I doubt he would have claimed the nationality of a state that killed most his maternal family.
Danielle Lowy
Manchester
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