The Anne Frank Education Center in Frankfurt, Germany, has drawn a parallel between Jews stripped of their German citizenship under Adolf Hitler and Islamic State fighters.
At the center of the citizenship debate in Germany is a proposed government plan for withdrawing German nationality narrowly to dual citizens who join ISIS.
Weighing in on the proposal, the Anne Frank Education Center took to Twitter, writing in German that “there has been a lot of protest, among other things with reference to the Third Reich.”
The center is named after the German Jew who kept a diary while she was in hiding and was murdered at the age of 15 in 1945 at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
It continued: “Indeed, the Nazis made generous use of the means of expatriation. In several waves, a total of over 39,000 people were expatriated — especially Jews. As of November 1941, they automatically lost their citizenship when they the crossed the borders of the Reich regardless of whether ‘voluntarily’ emigrated or deported.”
In a five-part tweet thread, the center continued: “Among other things, Albert Einstein was affected on the grounds that he had violated the duty of loyalty to the Reich and the people.”
It cited the concept popularized by the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, saying that those deprived of citizenship lose “the right to have rights.”
The center concluded: “In democracies, deprivation of citizenship is a means of depriving the sovereign, the citizen, of the opportunity to participate. Therefore, lawyers please be cautious in using this remedy.”
Efraim Zuroff, head of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and expert on the Holocaust, told the Jerusalem Post that this was “another case of totally misinterpreting the lessons and the implications of the Holocaust and applying them erroneously to people who don’t deserve any sympathy at all.”
He added that the center’s stance reminded him of “people in Germany who became pacifists and the lesson of the Holocaust is no wars.” Such people, he continued, fail to understand there are “just wars” and “times when strong measures have to be taken” — combating the Islamic State being an example.
The German government proposal does not apply to people who hold only German citizenship — a departure from the practices of Nazi Germany that rendered millions of Jews who had no other citizenship stateless people.
ISIS has been declared a terrorist group by the German government and a number of countries revoke citizenship after a person joins the armed forces of a named enemy.
The center responded to the Jerusalem Post via Twitter: “No, we did not compare or equate Jewish Holocaust victims to IS terrorists. And we made that very clear after some misinterpreted our tweet in that way. In no way did we defend jihadists. This is simply not true.”
But it added that there was a “historical precedent for withdrawal of citizenship in Germany” that had been ended after World War II. “That is why this is a big issue as it has not been a legal procedure since the Holocaust, hence our tweet about it.”
