German citizenship passes by descent, and the law sets no limit on how many generations back the ancestor may be. What decides a case is whether nationality was transmitted at every birth in the line, and whether the records still exist to prove it. That is the question we work on.
Cologne on the Rhine. Citizenship files are decided in this city, by the Bundesverwaltungsamt.
Who does what
Hannover German Citizenship, LLC is a document company. We find records, prepare and translate them, assemble the application in the form the German authority requires, file it and follow it through.
Questions of German nationality law in your file are examined by Fabio Werlang, a European lawyer admitted in Portugal and Brazil, from outside the United States.
How the two fit togetherGerman nationality law is not one rule but a stack of them, each in force on a different date. A family that fails under one provision often succeeds under another.
§ 4 StAG
German nationality passes by descent, and there is no fixed generational limit. What decides a case is whether citizenship was actually transmitted at each birth in the line, under the law in force on that date.
Read moreArt. 116 (2) GG
Those deprived of German citizenship between 1933 and 1945 on political, racial or religious grounds, and their descendants, may have it restored on application. No residence in Germany and no language examination.
Read more§ 5 and § 15 StAG
Two routes created in August 2021 for people excluded by earlier discriminatory rules, or by losses connected to persecution that Article 116 (2) does not reach. The declaration under § 5 has a deadline: 19 August 2031.
Read more
Under § 21 of the 1870 nationality act, a German who spent ten uninterrupted years abroad lost citizenship. Registration in the consular register interrupted that period. The provision was repealed with effect from 1914.
This is why the emigration date matters so much, and why a consular registration found in an archive can decide an entire family line.
Under § 4 (4) StAG, a child born abroad does not acquire German citizenship at birth where the German parent was also born abroad after 31 December 1999 and is habitually resident abroad, unless the birth is reported to a German mission within one year.
Note the date belongs to the birth of the German parent, not of the child. It is the detail most often reported incorrectly, and getting it wrong changes the answer for a whole generation.
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We search German and American archives for the documents your line requires: civil registers, church books, emigration and naturalization files, consular registers.
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Certified translations, apostilles and legalizations, and the application assembled in the form the Bundesverwaltungsamt requires, with the lineage documented certificate by certificate.
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We file with the Bundesverwaltungsamt in Cologne, pay the German fees, keep the file under watch, and answer the authority's requests for further documents.
Tell us about your German ancestor. We will look at what records your family line would require and whether those records can be reconstructed, and we will tell you what the next step would be.
The form opens on an external service (ClickUp), which is where our case files are kept. There is no charge for the document review.
