Citizenship and honorary titles that the cruel dictator Adolf Hitler received during his tenure as German Chancellor and Führer has been difficult to approach and manage over the past eight decades. Now, the town of Bad Honnef in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, near Bonn, has added its name to the list of places that have distanced themselves from Hitler.
A few months ago, students from a 10th grade history class at the Seven Mountains Institute in Bad Honnef They presented a motion officially renouncing Adolf Hitler as one of their honorary citizens.Their petition was signed by more than 5% of the city’s residents, reaching the number needed for the city council to vote on the initiative. According to DWMost of the students’ interlocutors had no idea about Hitler’s honorary citizenship and many immediately signed the petition.
Born in Braunau, Austria, responsible for World War II (1939-1945) and the Holocaust, attributed to the deaths of six million Jews and other minorities such as Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, prostitutes and political opponents, Hitler renounced his Austrian citizenship in 1925In the same year he published his “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). He achieved this by claiming that he had been living in Germany since 1912 and had served in the German army during the First World War. For its part, Austria did not oppose the request and He remained stateless for seven years.
The Führer’s path to citizenship was complicated. Not because it was difficult, but because it was complex. All he had to do was stand in line and fill out the forms, but he refused to do that and instead waited for permission to be granted.
But to advance in his political career, he had to become a German citizen, because In the Weimar Republic it was a prerequisite for holding political office.. So in 1930, a member of the Nazi Party arranged for him to be appointed police chief of Hildburghausen, a town in the Thuringia region of west-central Germany. Spiegel International He says this would have automatically made him a German citizen, but since being a municipal police officer did not appeal to him, the idea was abandoned shortly after.
Instead, he was nationalized in 1932, when Nazi Party members in Braunschweig (a party stronghold) found him a job in the surveying office, after he had failed to obtain a teaching position at the city’s technical university. However, as he was eager to run in the upcoming presidential elections, he left his position and the State Ministry hired him as “Administrator of the Braunschweig Delegation in Berlin”, where he never held this position. Spiegel International points out that when he was congratulated by the local population, Hitler responded “It is not me, but Germany who should be congratulated”.
In Bad Honnef, the students each wrote an email to the mayor. With their history teacher, Thomas RottFive students, representing their class, spoke out against the right-wing ideas that gave rise to the proposal. DW stresses that they said that by living in this city, “of course, its history” also concerned them. “And so we asked ourselves if today we could use our influence to change something in history and in Hitler’s honorary citizenship,” they said.
The history of the honorary title in Bad Honnef is one of the oldest. A month after the Nazi Party won the Reichstag elections, his city became one of the first to appoint Hitler an honorary citizen of the country in 1933. In 1934, around 4,000 German cities, towns, villages and municipalities Hitler was granted honorary citizenship during his term as Führer, as well as in several Austrian cities.
Hitler in the present
What is “honorary citizenship”? Unlike “ordinary citizenship,” it is a status granted by a country to a foreign or native person considered exceptional and worthy of distinction. Best Citizens This also explains that those who have “honorary citizenship” are inferior to ordinary citizens, if they are foreigners, because does not grant them full citizenship rights —being the weakest form of citizenship—, and therefore are not entitled to a passport. The status is granted solely on the basis of political decisions.
With the end of World War II, Before indicates that the Allied Control Council in Germany ordered the automatic withdrawal of honorary citizenship from all war criminals legally condemned. At the same time, during the years 1945 and 1946, there was a wave of renaming of streets and squares, as there was hardly a municipality that did not have a street or square that included “Adolf Hitler” in its name. The anti-Nazi impulse died down between 1948 and 1950, in the immediate post-war period, explains DW historian Tima Schlemmer of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich-Berlin. In 1946, Braunschweig and other cities revoked his honorary citizenship.
The authorities have repeatedly argued that the withdrawal of the distinction of honorary citizen is not necessarysince “honor” technically expired the moment Hitler committed suicide, and This has since been seen as a symbolic actand valued as such. In this line of thought, ABC News reports that in 2007, Lanskroun, a former German town now in the Czech Republic, decided not to revoke Hitler’s honorary citizenship, saying it “simply reflects the times.”
Many German legislatures are seeking to further distance themselves from their Nazi past, which is why the controversy over the former Führer’s citizenship was reignited in 2007, when lawyers led by Isolde SaalmannMember of the Lower Saxony Parliament, doubted whether it was possible to revoke citizenship from a deceased person. German Constitutional Law prohibits the withdrawal of a person’s citizenship if they subsequently become statelesswhich makes it difficult for Berlin to completely withdraw its citizenship.
In recent years, since the debate over whether Hitler should remain German began, several cities have made headlines by revoking his honorary title. In 2011, Amstetten – which first granted him citizenship in 1939 – and his hometown of Braunau, Austria, revoked his honorary citizenship. Goslar, in Lower Saxony, revoked his honorary citizenship in 2013. In 2016, 83 years after his death, the southern town of Tegernsee revoked the title granted in 1933, when he was appointed chancellor by the president. Paul von Hindenburg. In the same request Von Hindenburg’s was also removedborn in Poland.
