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The Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz reform of June 2024 removed the single biggest historical friction: dual citizenship is now allowed as of right. That change reopens a descent file that was quietly closed for many of the HNWI clients we work with. Here is what actually changed and what the route looks like from the desk.
For thirty years the German descent route came with a caveat that priced most HNWI clients out of the file: to claim, you had to give up your existing passport. The 2024 Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz reform ended that. As of 27 June 2024, dual citizenship is allowed as of right for descent and naturalisation cases, without the retention permit process that previously turned every application into a two-step compliance exercise. The German passport is now available on the merits, and for a certain profile of HNWI file the merits are strong.
German citizenship by descent runs on §4 StAG. A child is German at birth if at least one parent was a German citizen at the time of the child's birth. There is no explicit generation limit, but the practical file requires an unbroken chain of transmission from an ancestor who held German citizenship down to the applicant, with no acquisition break in an intermediate generation.
The most common chain break is a great-grandparent or grandparent who naturalised as a foreign citizen before the next generation was born. Under the pre-2024 rule, taking a foreign citizenship generally meant losing German citizenship, and the descendants born after that loss inherited nothing. For a client whose German-born ancestor emigrated to the US in the 1920s and naturalised as American in the 1930s before the children were born abroad, the chain broke and the descent route was closed.
The 2024 reform is prospective on dual-citizenship policy, but the retroactive question of chain breaks is unchanged. The reform makes it easier for a currently living German or eligible-for-restoration file to acquire a second passport without losing German. It does not restore ancestors whose chain was broken by pre-2024 rules.
The single most powerful route for HNWI clients with German-Jewish or German-political ancestry is Article 116(2) of the Basic Law. Descendants of citizens who were denaturalised under the racial and political laws of 1933-1945 are entitled to restoration on application, with no generation limit and no residency requirement. The Federal Administrative Court has extended this generously over the last decade to cover cases where the ancestor left Germany before formal denaturalisation but where the departure was clearly forced.
The file is documentary. It requires the ancestor's original citizenship record (usually available from the relevant Landesarchiv), evidence of the denaturalisation or forced emigration, and the chain of descent from that ancestor to the applicant. Processing runs six to eighteen months through the Bundesverwaltungsamt (BVA). Fee is negligible.
For clients whose family emigrated between 1933 and 1945 under any duress, this route should be checked before the standard §4 descent route. The eligibility is broader and the file is faster.
Until 1975, German mother, foreign father, child born abroad meant the child took the father's nationality by default. The correction added in 2021 (§5 StAG) lets descendants who lost citizenship on this basis apply to restore. This catches a specific and often forgotten HNWI profile: a client whose grandmother was German, married an American in the 1950s or 1960s, and whose parent was therefore never registered as German. Under the 2021 correction, the parent (and the applicant) can now claim.
Similarly, children born out of wedlock to German fathers before 1993 could not claim through paternal line; a further correction addresses this. The population is smaller but the eligibility is real.
Government fee for the certificate of citizenship (Staatsangehörigkeitsausweis) is EUR 51. Passport application after issuance is around EUR 60. Documentation runs standard for descent files: certified copies of birth, marriage, and death records for each generation in the chain, apostilled where foreign-issued, and translated by a court-recognised translator into German where required.
Processing time varies wildly by jurisdiction. Files handled through a German consulate abroad often take twelve to twenty-four months. Files handled directly through the BVA in Cologne can be faster or slower depending on backlog cycles. Article 116(2) restoration files tend to be faster than standard descent files because the BVA processes them under a specialised unit.
Professional fees to assemble the documentation cleanly run USD 3,000 to 8,000 depending on how complete the family archive is and how many countries the certificates need to be pulled from.
The 2024 reform has an important secondary effect on the standard-track file: German citizens who acquired a foreign citizenship before 27 June 2024 and lost German as a result may not automatically regain it, but many can now re-naturalise more easily under the shortened residency timelines the reform also introduced. The five-year timeline (three for exceptional integration cases) applies to non-descent applicants, but for a former German citizen with genuine ties, the file profile is much stronger than it was.
For HNWI clients who are already resident in Germany on a work or investment basis, the reform makes citizenship reachable inside a normal executive tour. Combined with the descent route where it applies, Germany has moved from being a low-priority second passport option to a serious contender in the EU tier.
Germany is the right descent answer for files where the chain holds through §4, for files where Article 116(2) applies on Nazi-era denaturalisation, and for files where the 2021 gender-line correction opens a previously closed door. It is not the right answer where the chain breaks on pre-2024 dual-citizenship loss and the ancestor's departure was voluntary economic migration, because the retroactive fix is not there.
For that latter profile, Ireland (if a grandparent is Irish-born) or Poland (if the confirmation chain holds under Polish continuity doctrine) is usually the better first stop. We cover both in the sister posts to this one.
If you have German ancestry and want a written read on which of the three routes (§4, Article 116(2), or 2021 correction) actually applies to your file, send the family outline through our contact form. We'll come back the same week with the working determination and paperwork checklist.