To what extent should Germany and other countries recognize the descendants of the expellees of the Nazi regime as citizens? Austria has expanded its regulation – and there is great interest.
New York / Vienna – When Melissa Hacker visited Vienna with her mother Ruth Morley in 1990, she had a special instruction for her daughter: “She told me not to pay for the subway in order not to support a fascist state”.
The pain was deeply rooted in the Jewish woman Morley, who had meanwhile died, who had to flee the Nazis from her home country Austria on a Kindertransport in 1939 and finally found refuge in the USA.
Due to a change in the law for the descendants of Nazi victims, daughter Hacker, a US filmmaker, has now been granted Austrian citizenship by Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in New York. For the 59-year-old, a decade-long injustice comes to an end with the “long overdue recognition”. A similar regulation was recently expanded in Germany.
New regulation makes naturalization easier
Since September, a new regulation has made it easier for descendants of victims of Nazi persecution in Austria to be naturalized. Until then, descendants of Jews, political opponents of National Socialism and other groups such as the Roma and Sinti could only receive citizenship if they were descended from a male victim.
But now children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can also become Austrians in the female line. In addition, the rule also applies to those who had to flee Austria, but possessed the passport of another successor state of the Habsburg Monarchy – for example Hungary – or were stateless.
Until Austria was annexed to the German Reich, around 200,000 Jews lived in Austria. 65,500 of them fell victim to the Shoah – only a little more than half managed to escape. The new regulation arouses great interest among their descendants. Almost 13,700 applications were received between September and the end of June – most of them from Israel, the USA and Great Britain. Around 7,900 people have already been granted citizenship, only 138 applications have been rejected, according to the City of Vienna, which is handling the proceedings.
Doubt about intentions
“Many say:” I want to do this in memory of my parents or grandparents, “reports Hannah Lessing, General Secretary of the Austrian National Fund. American Hacker believes her mother – who became a world-famous costume designer in the United States – would have mixed feelings about knowing that her daughter would be granted citizenship of her country of birth.
And Hacker himself had reservations – against the award ceremony in a festive setting by Chancellor Kurz. “Some think that this is a PR campaign to show that Austria is no longer an anti-Semitic country,” she explains. In the Alpine country, as in many other countries, there are still many attacks against Jews.
She also disagrees with Austria’s restrictive migration policy. If Kurz would still rule with the right-wing FPÖ, says Hacker, they would not have agreed to the award at the consulate. In fact, the easing of the NS rules on descendants is in contrast to Austria’s citizenship law, which is one of the most limited in the world.
With a view to a failed left push to make naturalization easier for migrants, Kurz recently said that his conservative ÖVP was a guarantee that citizenship would not be devalued by non-integrated people. However, when it came to the new regulation on NS descendants, the parties were in agreement – the memory of Nazi crimes and good relations with Israel are important political issues for Kurz.
Germany adapts regulation
In Germany, too, a corresponding regulation was recently made more generous. Previously, easier naturalization for descendants of victims of Nazi persecution was only possible if at least one parent was born before January 1, 2000, the restriction will no longer apply. The reform, which the Bundestag passed at the end of June, also introduced a statutory right to a German passport. Before that, the regulations were based on decrees.
92-year-old Evelyn Konrad is among the six Americans who Kurz also makes Austrians. She is not a descendant, but a victim herself: in the 1930s, the native Viennese fled with her parents, first to Budapest, then to France and via Spain to Portugal, where we finally received a visa for the USA.
In America the Jew was able to develop freely, studied at Stanford, made a career as a lawyer, among other things, and started a family. Vienna always stayed in her heart as a city, even if she remembers how she and her mother were treated as second-class people under the Nazi regime, how her mother was pushed on the street, how acquaintances turned away.
To be Austrian again at the end of her life is therefore a special concern of the New Yorker. However, Konrad would only move back to Europe in one case: “If Trump becomes president again – Vienna is better than Canada,” she says. Otherwise, she is planning the next trip with her granddaughter in the coming year, this time as a citizen: “I am an eternal Viennese – and now also an Austrian”. dpa
