German Citizenship Through Your Great-Grandparent

§25 StAG applied from the Nationality Act's commencement on 1 January 1914, and the 1870 Act it replaced took citizenship a different way, through ten unbroken years abroad rather than through naturalizing. That is the arithmetic behind the 1904 screen the German missions publish: germany.info states that “as most immigrants from Germany were affected by this automatic loss of German citizenship, it is usually not possible to base a claim to German citizenship on ancestors who immigrated to the United States before 1904”.

If you have family records showing continuous German citizenship across three generations — for example, a great-grandparent who obtained a Beibehaltungsgenehmigung before naturalizing — §4 may still apply.

The text of §25 in each era, in German with our translation, is quoted on the dual-citizenship reform page, and the free eligibility check asks the facts it turned on. Start the free eligibility check →

§5 StAG is your most likely path if any generation in your chain was blocked by pre-1975 gender rules. The two scenarios that open it at great-grandparent level are:

• •Your German great-grandmother married a foreign man before April 1, 1953 (losing citizenship on marriage), OR
• •Your German grandmother had children in wedlock before January 1, 1975 with a foreign father (children inherited only the father's citizenship under the rules in force at the time).

§5 StAG has no generation cap, and descendants of the affected ancestor can file under item 4 without the parent or grandparent having filed first. There is one threshold that does not spare descendants, and it is the one most often stated wrongly: every §5(1) claimant, item 4 included, must have been born after May 23, 1949. The chapeau of §5(1) — “die nach dem Inkrafttreten des Grundgesetzes geborenen” — governs all four items, and BVA's item 4 checklist row repeats it. Expect to document the generation above you as well: the BVA first tests whether the parent you derive the claim from is itself entitled under items 1 to 3, using the details of that parent's own parents — so a descendant's file has to carry the grandparents' records too. The filing window closes August 19, 2031, and what counts is receipt at the Bundesverwaltungsamt — not the postmark, and not lodgement at a consulate.

See our §5 StAG declaration guide for the four statutory categories and the declaration process.

If your great-grandparent had German citizenship taken from them between January 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945 on political, racial or religious grounds, Art. 116(2) of the Basic Law provides a constitutional right to restoration for that ancestor “und ihre Abkömmlinge” — and their descendants.

Read “taken from them” strictly, because this is the fork most families land on. Art. 116(2) is about deprivation — entzogen, the word the constitutional text uses. An ancestor who was persecuted and emigrated, but whose citizenship was never formally withdrawn, is not inside Art. 116(2); their route is §15 StAG, the restitution route for people persecuted on the same grounds but not formally deprived. It has FOUR limbs, and only the fourth is about residence: Nr. 1 gave up or lost German citizenship BEFORE 26 FEBRUARY 1955; Nr. 2 were excluded from acquiring it by marriage, legitimation or collective naturalisation; Nr. 3 were refused naturalisation after applying, or were generally excluded from it; Nr. 4 gave up or lost a habitual residence in Germany, whether established before 30 January 1933 or, as a child, after that date too. Nr. 2 and Nr. 3 reach people who never held German citizenship at all, so ‘never formally taken away’ is too narrow a summary of the route. §15's fourth limb covers precisely the person who gave up or lost a German residence, held before 30 January 1933, in connection with persecution. Read that limb to its end, because it has a second half that is routinely dropped: the residence counts if it was established before 30 January 1933 “oder als Kind auch nach diesem Zeitpunkt” — or, for someone who was a child, after that date as well. An ancestor born in Germany in 1935 and taken out in 1938 is inside §15 Nr. 4; the 1933 date does not shut them out. The BVA keeps the two procedures apart, so it is worth knowing which one you are in before you file.

And Nr. 4 is one of four. §15 Satz 1 also reaches people who gave up or lost German citizenship before 26 February 1955 (Nr. 1), who were shut out of a legal acquisition by marriage, legitimation or a collective naturalisation of ethnic Germans (Nr. 2), and who applied for naturalisation and were refused — or were generally excluded from a naturalisation that would otherwise have been possible (Nr. 3). Then Satz 3 rescues the case people assume is hopeless: a German citizenship acquired after 8 May 1945 and then lost by marrying a foreigner, or by a foreigner's legitimation, does not defeat the §15 claim, even though Satz 2 bars other post-1945 losses.

Either way the claim bypasses the §4 chain analysis entirely: it is not descent through an unbroken chain but a remedy for a loss the state inflicted. Two different subsections do that work — §4(4) Satz 4 for an Art. 116(2) Basic Law claim and a §15 StAG claim — §4(4) Satz 4 disapplies it for those two claims themselves, and §4(5) separately disapplies it for the descendants of a German who acquired citizenship under Art. 116(2) or §15 — and, under Nr. 2, for the descendants of someone who would have had such a claim even if they never made it, which is the limb that matters on a great-grandparent page. Neither route has a deadline and neither carries a fee (§38(3) Nr. 1 StAG and §38(3) Nr. 2 StAG). What we cannot tell you is how long either takes: not officially published.

See our Art. 116(2) guide for the evidence of persecution and the Arolsen Archives and Bundesarchiv research starting points.