I 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, 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 apparent 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, 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, 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 nice if when this injustice was corrected, countries had given women retrospective rights and allowed them to keep their own nationalities.
Olly Cooper
Shudy Camps, Cambridgeshire
• I had the same as experience as Barbara Hanley concerning German citizenship. My grandmother was German and my father was born in Germany and spent the first 20 years of his life there, before being forced to emigrate because he was Jewish. But it turns out that I cannot become a German because my grandfather, who also lived in Germany, retained his Austro-Hungarian citizenship. Germany needs to get its act together. It is 2017, way past the time to stick with patriarchy.
Simon During
Berlin
• Barbara Hanley complains that German law did not permit transmission of citizenship through the mother until 1953. But our law did not permit this until 1984, when the British Nationality Act 1981 came into force. So the Germans were 31 years ahead of us. Not that this is any consolation to Ms Hanley of course, with whose position I sympathise. But I doubt if she will be able to challenge the German ruling if it is based on a clear-cut law.
Jerry Emery
Lewes, East Sussex
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