Article 116(2) German Citizenship Restitution

These are two separate entitlements, not one statute implementing the other, and the BVA lists them side by side under near-identical names. Art. 116(2) covers citizenship that was actually taken away. §15 StAG covers citizenship that was lost some other way — or never acquired at all — because of Nazi persecution. Filing on the wrong one is the most consequential mistake available on this route, because the two use different forms.

Descendants qualify on both routes. If your family fled and the ancestor was never formally denaturalized, read the §15 column first: that is the fact pattern this page's route does not cover, and BVA names it as the §15 one.

Art. 116(2) applies to former German citizens stripped of citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 on political, racial or religious grounds — and to all of their descendants. The communities those three grounds reach include:

• •Jewish families denaturalized under the 1933 and 1941 laws stripping German Jews of citizenship.
• •Political opponents of the Nazi regime — Social Democrats, Communists, trade unionists, and others — who were individually denaturalized.
• •Roma and Sinti, persecuted on the racial grounds Art. 116(2) names. Whether a given family was deprived of citizenship, rather than persecuted in other ways, is the question the two-limb test below decides — and if the answer is no, the §15 route is still open.
• •Religious dissenters — including Jehovah's Witnesses and other groups — persecuted for their faith.
• •Forced-emigration cases go to §15, not here. BVA names a family that emigrated under duress and then naturalized abroad as the §15 pattern: the provision “benefits in particular persons who lost their German citizenship after their flight pursuant to the general provisions, for instance, by virtue of the acquisition of a foreign citizenship or through marriage with a foreign national.” It is the same free BVA procedure, with a different form. For a loss by acquiring a foreign citizenship, the rule of the day was §25 StAG — its text in each era, in German with our translation, is quoted on the dual-citizenship reform page — and it is worth being precise about its tense: §25 has been repealed — the consolidated statute now prints nothing under that number but § 25 (weggefallen), and §17(1) StAG today lists only three ways to lose German citizenship, none of them foreign naturalisation. Repeal is prospective, so it does not undo a loss that already happened; it is why the historical §25 belongs in the past tense.

An Art. 116(2) application must establish that the original ancestor was deprived of German citizenship between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 on one of the protected grounds. Forced emigration on its own is not deprivation — that is the §15 StAG route above, and it needs a different form. Common types of evidence:

• •Denaturalization records — the Reichsanzeiger published lists of individually denaturalized persons throughout the 1930s. They are the published record of the case-by-case withdrawals, which is what the second limb of BVA's deprivation test asks you to show.
• •Flight and emigration records — passenger manifests, HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) files, Joint Distribution Committee records, and visa records showing emigration during the persecution period.
• •Property confiscation records — Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) records, forced-sale documents (Judenvermögensabgabe), and restitution case files showing loss of property under the Nuremberg Laws.
• •Concentration camp and internment records — records showing persecution, deportation, or internment.
• •Post-war restitution claims — successful Wiedergutmachung (restitution) case files can serve as strong corroborating evidence that the German government has already recognized the loss.

Art. 116(2) is a separate BVA procedure with its own forms and its own Merkblatt, not a variant of the §4 Feststellung application: BVA calls it Wiedergutmachungseinbürgerung nach Entzug and gives it a dedicated citizenship service line. Use Antrag A (age 16+) or Antrag AK (under 16), plus one Anlage VA per generation above your grandparents. You may file with the Bundesverwaltungsamt (BVA) directly, hand the package to your nearest German mission to forward, or apply online through the federal Bundesportal. BVA also accepts an informal application — its Merkblatt says “you may file an informal application” and only recommends the forms, though its step-by-step page then asks you to use them so that nothing has to be chased later.

This is the route for applicants living abroad. BVA is the citizenship authority for people resident outside Germany; if you live in Germany, the competent authority is the local Staatsangehörigkeitsbehörde where you live, and the Art. 116(2) Merkblatt is headed “for persons living abroad” for that reason. BVA also says what happens if you move mid-procedure: it stops being competent and hands your file to the German authority for your new address.

BVA publishes two addresses, and the axis is the CARRIER, not where you are posting from. Ordinary post — including from abroad — goes to Bundesverwaltungsamt, 50728 Köln, which BVA calls its «allgemeine Postadresse» and prints on its own Vollmacht form followed by the word “Germany”. Use Bundesverwaltungsamt, Barbarastr. 1, 50735 Köln, Germany only for a private courier such as FedEx or UPS, or for hand delivery. One warning BVA gives that is easy to miss: declare no value on the parcel — if customs charges fall due on delivery BVA refuses the package outright and it goes back to the sender.

• •Fee: Free under §38(3) Nr. 1 StAG (Art. 116(2)); the §15 route is §38(3) Nr. 2 StAG. BVA's fee page for this procedure says only “Das Verfahren ist gebührenfrei”; the §15 Merkblatt words it “Das Verfahren ist für Sie gebührenfrei”. The harder half is in the Merkblatt rather than on the fee page: your own outlay on records, translations and certifications “cannot be reimbursed neither in the case of naturalization nor in the case of a refusal decision”.
• •BVA publishes the Art. 116(2) forms and Merkblatt in English as well as German, offered «Ausnahmsweise stehen aufgrund des Wiedergutmachungsgedankens …» — but the form must still be completed in German, and further correspondence with BVA is in GermanLanguage: BVA publishes the Art. 116(2) application forms and Merkblatt in English as well as German, which it explains by the reparative purpose of the article itself. It does the same for the §15 and §5 packs; the one route with no English edition is the §4 Feststellung. The English is a reading aid only — BVA still requires the form to be completed in German, and says the whole procedure, including all later correspondence, is conducted in German.
• •No citizenship test: the language and citizenship-test requirements sit in §10 StAG, which governs ordinary naturalisation. Art. 116(2) is a constitutional entitlement rather than a §10 case, and §15 StAG sets out its own conditions without importing §10's.
• •Deadline: None. Art. 116(2) is a constitutional right with no time bar.
• •Processing time: Not officially published. No BVA page carries a figure for this route. The Federal Foreign Office's guidance says the processing time is “sehr unterschiedlich” because of the different life stories behind each application, that the BVA often has to request further records from German authorities, and that applications are worked in the order they arrive. Where an individual German mission does publish numbers, they are that mission's own caseload rather than a national figure — which is exactly why a single global range cannot be published, and why any specific range you see quoted elsewhere, including one we previously published here, is anecdote rather than an official figure.
• •Documents: Long-form birth certificates for every generation from you back to the ancestor who lost citizenship, plus evidence of the deprivation. Records go in as originals or as copies certified by a notary, by the registrar who made the entry, or by a German authority — certifications by other bodies are, in BVA's words, “generally not accepted”, and a certification that only attests the translator's signature does not count. Copies must show both sides of the certificate. And as a rule, foreign public documents must be legalised or carry a Hague apostille, and every foreign-language document needs a translation by a sworn translator; US civil-status documents are not among the exemptions, which cover EU and Swiss records and a short list of multilingual certificates.
• •Send copies, not originals. BVA recommends sending certified copies only, and warns that original certificates come back “upon special request only after the procedure has been completed” — a request you have to make when you file, not later. If it genuinely needs an original, it will ask for that document specifically.
• •Missing paperwork is not a bar. BVA publishes this as its own guidance: an application is still possible when the certificates no longer exist, because it runs its own enquiries. Give it every detail you do have — birth and marriage dates, former addresses in Germany — and say plainly what is missing.
• •After filing: BVA sends an Eingangsbestätigung that carries your Aktenzeichen (file reference), and asks you to quote that reference in all later correspondence. The Einbürgerungsurkunde is sent to your German mission, which arranges the hand-over.

Art. 116(2) is often described online as a subset of German citizenship by descent. In practice it is better understood as its own constitutional remedy — with its own basis (Art. 116(2) Basic Law, not §4 or §5 StAG), its own form set, its own Merkblatt, its own fee exemption and its own evidentiary standards. It also reaches people §4 and §5 cannot: it does not ask for an unbroken chain, and it does not depend on a gender rule having caused the loss.

If your family history involves Nazi-era persecution, Art. 116(2) should be explored first — not as a fallback after §4 and §5, but as a primary constitutional right.