If you willingly applied for a foreign citizenship and obtained it before the most recent change of the German nationality law, entered into force on June 27, 2024, your German citizenship was automatically lost. Loss of German citizenship could be avoided by obtaining a retention permit. If you obtained a foreign citizenship without an application for naturalization, you remained a German citizen.

As of 27 June 2024, German nationals may apply for any foreign nationality without relinquishing their German nationality. It is therefore no longer necessary to seek permission to retain a nationality.

Since January 1st, 2000, German citizens who voluntarily join the armed forces of a country other than Germany, of which they are also a citizen, without receiving prior permission from the Federal Ministry for Defense (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung), automatically lose their German citizenship according to paragraph 28 of the German citizenship act.

Since July 6th, 2011 permission is considered to be automatically given among others to citizens of another NATO-member state if the join the armed Forces of this Country.

German citizens who had their permanent residence abroad for more than 10 years before the year 1914 automatically lost their German citizenship unless they registered themselves in the “Konsulatsmatrikel” (consular register) of the German consulate.

This reason for loss of German citizenship is particularly important in case you wish to trace back German citizenship to ancestors who emigrated Germany before 1904. If this is the case, they would have lost German citizenship after 10 years and could not have passed it on by descent to future Generations.

Between January 30, 1933, and May 8, 1945, there were essentially two laws that deprived Germans of their citizenship. Under the “Law on the Revocation of Naturalizations and the Deprivation of the German Citizenship” of July 14, 1933, some Germans lost their citizenship after their names were listed and published in the Reich Law Gazette (“Reichsgesetzblatt”).

The vast majority of former German citizens affected, however, lost their citizenship when the “Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich” came into effect on November 25, 1941. This law stated that Jews living outside Germany could not be German citizens, and mainly affected Jews who had left Germany in the years before or shortly after the beginning of the Second World War.

If you lost your German citizenship because of either one of these two regulations, you are entitled to apply for re-naturalization according to German law. This also applies in most cases to your descendants.