Drawing on materials from German, Polish, and French state archives, Nikolas Weyland's paper examines the peculiar experiences of a group of native-born German citizens who forsook their German nationality between 1920 and 1925 but then sought to reacquire this status during the later years of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship. Between 1920 and 1925, tens-of-thousands of German citizens of Polish descent who lived in the socio-economically and politically unstable industrial Ruhr conurbation took advantage of a 1919 Franco-Polish Labor Agreement and obtained Polish identity documents to emigrate to the coal mining basin of northern France. Many of these individuals, however, regretted this decision and later sought to reacquire their lost German citizenship. Most individuals seeking re-naturalization had their applications rejected, but successful re-acquisitions of German citizenship did occur from 1925 onward, including during the Nazi dictatorship. Undergirding this regime of limited re-naturalization, this paper contends, were visions of the Ruhr's distinct labor regime as a forge of “Germanness” and beliefs about the Gesinnung (national ethos) of individual applicants that prioritized “costly,” proven commitment to German nationalism.
