Bad Honnef students submit motion renouncing Hitler as honorary citizen

Citizenship and the honorary titles that the cruel dictator Adolf Hitler The criticism he received during his time as German chancellor and Führer has been difficult to approach and deal with for 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 in a 10th grade history class at the Seven Mountains High School 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 inhabitants, reaching the number necessary for the city council to vote on the initiative. According to DWMost of the people the students spoke to had no idea about Hitler’s honorary citizenship, and many signed the petition immediately.

Born in Braunau, Austria, responsible for the Second World War (1939-1945) and the Holocaust, which is attributed to the death of six million Jews and other minorities such as Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, prostitutes and political opponents, Hitler He renounced his Austrian citizenship in 1925.the same year he published his ‘Mein Kampf’ (My Struggle). He obtained this claim by arguing that he had been living in Germany since 1912 and that he had served in the German army during the First World War. For its part, Austria did not object to the request and remained stateless for seven years.

The Führer’s path to citizenship was complicated. Not because it was difficult in itself, but because he was complex. He only had to go and queue up and fill out the forms, but he refused to do so and instead waited for it to be granted to him.

To advance in his political career, however, it was necessary to become a German citizen, since In the Weimar Republic it was a prerequisite for holding political officeSo 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 indicates that this would have automatically made him a German citizen, but since he did not find it attractive to be a village policeman, the idea was soon abandoned.

Instead, he became a naturalised citizen in 1932, when members of the Nazi Party in Braunschweig (a stronghold of the party) found him a job in the topographical office, having previously failed to secure a teaching post at the city’s Technical University. However, as he was eager to stand as a candidate in the soon-to-be-held presidential election, he left his post and was hired by the State Ministry as ‘administrator of the Braunschweig delegation in Berlin’, a position he never held. Spiegel International He notes that when he was congratulated by the locals Hitler responded “It is not me, but Germany that you should congratulate”.

In Bad Honnef, the pupils each wrote an email to the mayor. Together with their history teacher, Thomas RottFive students, representing their class, spoke out against the right-wing ideas that gave rise to the proposal. DW He stressed that they said that because they lived in this city, “of course its history also concerned them.” “And so we asked ourselves whether we could use our influence today to change something about history and Hitler’s honorary citizenship,” they said.

The history of the honorary title in Bad Honnef is one of the oldest. A month after the victory of the Nazi Party in the Reichstag elections in 1933, its city became one of the first to name Hitler an honorary citizen of the country. In 1934, around 4,000 German cities, towns, municipalities and communities Hitler was granted honorary citizenship during his tenure as Führer, as well as several Austrian cities and towns.

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 He also explains that those who have ‘honorary citizenship’ are inferior to ordinary citizens, if they are foreigners, since does not grant them all the rights of citizenship —being the weakest form of citizenship—, and therefore do not have the right to a passport. The status is granted to them solely based on political decisions..

With the end of World War II, Forward indicates that the Allied Control Council in Germany ordered the automatic withdrawal of honorary citizenship from all war criminals legally condemned. In parallel, during 1945 and 1946, there was a wave of renaming of streets and squares, since there was practically no municipality that did not have a street or square that included the name ‘Adolf Hitler’. The anti-Nazi impulse died out between 1948 and 1950, in the immediate post-war period, explains DW historian Tima Schlemmer of the Munich-Berlin Institute for Contemporary History. In 1946, Braunschweig and other cities revoked his honorary citizenship.

Authorities have argued on previous occasions that Removing the honorary citizen distinction is unnecessarysince the ‘honour’ technically expired at the time Hitler committed suicide, and Doing so has since been considered a symbolic act.and valued as such. In this line of thinking, ABC News reports that in 2007, Lanskroun, a former German town now located in the Czech Republic, decided not to revoke Hitler’s honorary citizenship, stating that it “simply reflects the times at that time.”

Many German legislatures are seeking to further distance themselves from their Nazi past, so the controversy over the former Führer’s citizenship was rekindled again in 2007, when lawyers led by Isolde Saalmanna member of the Lower Saxony legislature, doubted that it was possible to strip a dead person of his nationality. German constitutional law prohibits stripping a person of his or her citizenship if he or she later becomes statelesswhich makes it difficult for Berlin to completely revoke his citizenship.

In recent years, since there was a debate about whether Hitler should remain German, several cities have made headlines for removing his honorary title. In 2011, Amstetten—which first granted him citizenship in 1939—and his hometown of Braunau Austria revoked his honorary citizenship. Goslar, Lower Saxony revoked his honorary citizenship in 2013. In 2016, 83 years after his death, the southern city of Tegernsee revoked the title granted in 1933, when he was appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. In the same petition Von Hindenburg’s was also withdrawnborn in Poland.