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The naturalization of Adolf Hitler took seven years, from April 1925 to February 1932, [1] when Hitler finally became a German citizen and was able to run for political office. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary (now in modern-day Austria) in 1889. Although an Austrian citizen, he served in the Imperial German Army on the Western Front during World War I. In 1919, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party (DAP) which would subsequently become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). He gained national notoriety with a failed putsch (armed insurgency) in Munich in November 1923, which led to a trial for high treason and prison for nine months in 1924. The Bavarian authorities attempted several times to deport Hitler afterwards, but Austria refused to take him back.
The court explained why it rejected the deportation of Hitler under the terms of the Protection of the Republic Act:
Hitler is a German-Austrian. He considered himself to be a German. In the opinion of the court, the meaning and the terms of section 9, para II of the Law for the Protection of the Republic cannot apply to a man who thinks and feels as German as Hitler, who voluntarily served for four and a half years in the German army at war, who attained high military honours through outstanding bravery in the face of the enemy, was wounded, suffered other damage to his health, and was released from the military into the control of the district Command Munich I“. [7]
Thus, since the court refused to deport Hitler, he was allowed to remain in Germany. [8]
When Hitler's legal status became a matter of public discussion in 1924, he made a public declaration which was printed on 16 October 1924 that stated:
The loss of my Austrian citizenship is not painful to me, as I never felt as an Austrian citizen but always as a German only. ... It was this mentality that made me draw the ultimate conclusion and do military service in the German Army. [9]
On April 7, 1925, Hitler applied to the High Magistrate of Linz in order to be released from his Austrian citizenship: [10]
I request that I be released from my Austrian citizenship. Reasons: I have been in Germany since 1912, served in the German army for almost 6 years, including 4½ years at the front, and now intend to acquire German citizenship.
As I currently do not know whether my Austrian citizenship has already expired, but entry to Austrian soil has been rejected by an order from the federal government, I ask for a favorable decision on my application.
After some weeks, the request was granted and Hitler became stateless, stating it clearly and officially wherever he went. [11]
At this point Hitler began trying to acquire German citizenship in various ways, while also being involved in the rebuilding of the Nazi Party from the ground up.
The easier way to become a German citizen was to become a Beamter , a German civil servant, because it automatically resulted in naturalization, in accordance to the 1913 Reich and Nationality Act.
Wilhelm Frick, the first Nazi minister in a local German cabinet and a member of the national Reichstag in 1924, tried to force the Bavarian government to grant citizenship to Hitler in 1929 and then to nominate him professor of art at Bauhaus University in Weimar, but failed, as the government was not willing to hire anyone new in that position.
Another attempt was made only a few months later, in July 1930: the Thuringian state parliament was in summer recess and Frick thus gained power over political affairs for a time, as prescribed by the parliament's rules. Frick found no objections to his plan to make Hitler a gendarmerie commissioner in the Thuringian district town of Hildburghausen. Everything was done in secret and the task was accomplished, but Hitler ultimately refused, because that job did not suit him even from a purely formal point of view, thus canceling the naturalization process attempt. [6]
The next attempt was made at the Free State of Brunswick in 1931, where some Nazis were part of the local government: in particular interior minister Dietrich Klagges, who received the order to naturalize Hitler quickly. Klagges had the idea of appointing him professor for Organic Social Studies and Politics, made possible by making a professorship vacant: SPD member August Riekel was fired for this purpose. [12] But these shenanigans came to be fiercely debated in the Braunschweig state parliament and thus impossible to carry out.
In January 1932, the scheme was uncovered, leading to the establishment of a parliamentary committee of inquiry. Hitler and several other Nazi politicians were called to testify, though Hitler largely failed to remember most facts and no further legal action was pursued.
Hitler wanted to run in the 1932 presidential election and needed to obtain German citizenship quickly in order to do so. After the scheme was uncovered in January, Klagges had to involve the DVP in order to act with more discretion. Following some debate, which also involved Hans Frank and Ernst Zörner (President of the Braunschweig State Parliament and a friend of Hitler), a solution was found: Hitler was to be placed in the Braunschweig legation to the Reichsrat in Berlin.
To meet legal requirements, Hitler had to be a resident of Braunschweig and became Zörner's subtenant, officially reporting to him from February 26, 1932, to September 16, 1933.
On February 26, 1932, Hitler was sworn in during a ceremony at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, [13] [14] receiving citizenship from both the Free State of Braunschweig and the Reich. The naturalization process was officially completed on March 1, 1932.
Hitler said as a personal note to the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in the 1938 Anschluss :
I, myself, as Führer and Chancellor, will be happy to walk on the soil of the country that is my home as a free German citizen." [15] [16]
An attempt was made to revoke Hitler's German citizenship in 2007, but this effort failed. [17] [18] [19]
Braunschweig or Brunswick is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the North Sea via the rivers Aller and Weser. In 2024, it has a population of 272,417. The urban agglomeration of Braunschweig has an estimate population 476,000 during the year 2024.
Wilhelm Frick was a convicted war criminal and prominent German politician of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) who served as Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 and as the last governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Führer is a German word meaning "leader" or "guide". As a political title, it is strongly associated with Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Hitler officially styled himself der Führer und Reichskanzler after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934 and the subsequent merging of the offices of Reichspräsident and Reichskanzler.
The coat of arms of Germany, also known as Bundesrepublik Deutschland displays a black eagle with a red beak, a red tongue and red feet on a golden field, which is blazoned: Or, an eagle displayed sable beaked langued and membered gules. This is the Bundesadler, formerly known as Reichsadler. It is one of the oldest coats of arms in the world, and today the oldest national symbol used in Europe.
Konstantin Hierl was a German career military officer who became a major figure in the administration of Nazi Germany. An associate of Adolf Hitler before he came to national power, Hierl became the head of the Reich Labour Service and a Reichsleiter of the Nazi Party. Following the end of the Second World War, he was tried, found guilty of major offenses and sentenced to five years in a labour camp.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Dietrich Klagges was a Nazi Party politician and from 1933 to 1945 the appointed premier (Ministerpräsident) of the now abolished Free State of Brunswick. He also went by the pseudonym Rudolf Berg.
Hartmann Paul Johann Lauterbacher was the German Stabsführer of the Hitler Youth, the Gauleiter of Gau Southern Hanover-Brunswick (Südhannover-Braunschweig), the Oberpräsident of the Province of Hanover and an Obergruppenführer of both the SS and the SA in Nazi Germany. Tried and acquitted of war crimes after the Second World War, he lived a shadowy existence, was recruited by the West German spy agency and was involved in many underground intelligence operations.
The Free State of Brunswick was a state of the German Reich in the time of the Weimar Republic. It was formed after the abolition of the Duchy of Brunswick in the course of the German revolution of 1918–1919. Its capital was Braunschweig (Brunswick). In 1933 it was de facto abolished by Nazi Germany. The free state was disestablished after the Second World War in November 1946.
The government of Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship governed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party according to the Führerprinzip. Nazi Germany was established in January 1933 with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, followed by suspension of basic rights with the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act which gave Hitler's regime the power to pass and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or German president, and de facto ended with Germany's surrender in World War II on 8 May 1945 and de jure ended with the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945.
Anti-Jewish legislation in pre-war Nazi Germany comprised several laws that segregated the Jews from German society and restricted Jewish people's political, legal and civil rights. Major legislative initiatives included a series of restrictive laws passed in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and a final wave of legislation preceding Germany's entry into World War II.
The military career of Adolf Hitler, who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until 1945, can be divided into two distinct portions of his life. Mainly, the period during World War I when Hitler served as a Gefreiter in the Bavarian Army, and the era of World War II when he served as the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht through his position as Führer of Nazi Germany.
The Academy for Youth Leadership was a Hitler Youth (HJ) leadership school in Braunschweig. It was the highest Nazi training facility for the training of full-time junior executives for Hitler Youth during the Nazi era. It was built between 1937 and 1939. Today, the Braunschweig College for Adult Education and the Abendgymnasium Braunschwieig are housed in this building.
Nazi architecture is the architecture promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime from 1933 until its fall in 1945, connected with urban planning in Nazi Germany. It is characterized by three forms: a stripped neoclassicism, typified by the designs of Albert Speer; a vernacular style that drew inspiration from traditional rural architecture, especially alpine; and a utilitarian style followed for major infrastructure projects and industrial or military complexes. Nazi ideology took a pluralist attitude to architecture; however, Hitler himself believed that form follows function and wrote against "stupid imitations of the past".
Werner Küchenthal was a German jurist and public official who became a leading politician in what was then the Free State of Brunswick .
Adolf Hitler's cult of personality was a prominent feature of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), which began in the 1920s during the early days of the Nazi Party. Based on the Führerprinzip ideology, that the leader is always right, spread by incessant Nazi propaganda, and reinforced by Adolf Hitler's success in fixing Germany's economic and unemployment problems by remilitarising during the global Great Depression, his bloodless triumphs in foreign policy prior to World War II, and the rapid military defeat of the Second Polish Republic and the French Third Republic in the early part of the war, it eventually became a central aspect of the Nazi control over the German people.
Johannes (Hans) Pfundtner was a German lawyer and civil servant whose career spanned the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. During the Nazi era, he was the senior State Secretary in the Reich Interior Ministry and was involved in drafting the Nuremberg Laws. He committed suicide towards the end of the Second World War in Europe.
Anton Leonhard Franzen was a German lawyer and politician of the Nazi Party. On 1 October 1930, he became the first Nazi to serve as a state government minister in the Free State of Brunswick. During his tenure as Minister of the Interior and Public Education, he attempted to remove the Party's political opponents and to pack the police and educational systems with Nazis. He resigned on 27 July 1931 and left politics, returning to the practice of law.
Nationality: "Stateless"
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