Austria improves nationality law for descendants of victims of Nazism

The Austrian parliament amended the Citizenship Act of 2019 to correct “inequalities” in treatment of the descendants of victims of Nazism who fled the country under the Third Reich.

The legislation, which came into force last September, allows descendants of up to three generations of victims of Nazi persecution to claim an Austrian passport in a simplified process.

However, parliament unanimously approved an amendment on Thursday night to remedy “unacceptable differences in the treatment” of both descendants, MP Sabine Schatz said in a statement.

Inequalities such as the fact that descendants of people killed by the Nazis, for example in the Mauthausen concentration camp, were not eligible to acquire nationality, political expert Barbara Serloth, who participated in the draft amendment, told AFP.

Neither were the descendants of those who committed suicide or had citizenship of a country other than the nations of the former Austro-Hungarian empire.

Deputy Martin Engelberg cited cases of people who did not meet the requirements because their grandmothers lost their Austrian nationality when they married and moved to another country.

The women may have lost their nationality “deliberately,” the deputy said, but it was “to escape persecution.”

The amendment also takes into account the descendants of survivors who decided not to return to Austria after Hitler took power in 1933 for fear of persecution.

The 2019 law allowed some 16,200 people to obtain Austrian nationality in 2021, an increase of 80 percent compared to the previous year. Half of them were descendants of victims of the Nazis.

About 16 percent of naturalizations were from Israelis, 10 percent from Americans, and seven percent from British.

Until 2019, only Holocaust survivors could obtain Austrian nationality.

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