For 53-year-old Christian Mahne, receiving his German naturalization certificate in 2025 felt like the final piece of a lifelong puzzle. Living in West Sussex, England, Mahne spent 18 years navigating a labyrinth of administrative hurdles to reclaim the citizenship his family was forced to abandon under the Nazi regime. He describes the process as a long-fought battle, noting that the breakthrough provided a profound sense of completeness after years of feeling disconnected from his roots. Mahne shared his story to encourage others in similar positions not to give up when reclaiming their German identity, noting that the hard-fought victory was an incredibly rewarding moment.
Mahne’s ancestral ties to Germany are deep and storied. His grandmother’s family, the Meinhardts, were prominent industrialists. His great-grandfather, Willi Meinhardt, was one of the co-founders of Osram, the German lighting and electronics company. Mahne recalls stories of the family’s "lovely life" in Berlin, including photographs of his grandmother Lotte driving a sports car in her 20s. The family home in central Berlin was described by Mahne as "absolutely huge" and is now the site of the Georgian embassy. The Meinhardts were connected to some of the leading scientific figures of the time, including Albert Einstein, who they occasionally spent holidays with. However, the family’s Jewish heritage made life dangerous as the Nazis grew in power. "Willi Meinhardt, and the Meinhardt's generally, were Jewish. And so the rot started to set in," Mahne says. In the early 1930s, his great-grandfather was forced out of his firm and told he could no longer run the company. The family "did everything they could" to remain in Germany, including Lotte’s attempt to get baptized to claim she was not Jewish, but the net continued to close in.
By the mid-1930s, the family realized they had to leave. They first went to Switzerland, where they stayed with Einstein, before making the journey to Britain. Lotte, her husband Curt Mähne, and their two sons eventually settled in London. Mahne’s father, born in 1932, was a young child when they left and later adopted the name Peter instead of his first name, Claus, because it was more anglicized. The move also meant a gradual loss of the German language and the umlaut from their original name. Mahne regrets that he did not hold onto the German language his grandmother taught him, noting that as soon as he could communicate in English, he stopped wanting to speak German. Looking back, Mahne says it is clear that his family's Jewish heritage was the reason they left, as persecution intensified and being Jewish became the biggest problem for them at the time.
The path to reclaiming citizenship began in 2008 at the German Embassy in London. Mahne initially believed his historical evidence would make the application straightforward, but he was met with repeated rejections. The decision was tied to the fact that his father had only two Jewish grandparents, which did not meet the requirements at the time. Authorities also considered the family to have left Germany voluntarily and chosen British citizenship, rather than having been forced out by Nazi persecution. However, Lotte had been stripped of her German citizenship under Nazi rules, leaving her technically stateless until she acquired British citizenship. Mahne's father was also treated as having lost his German nationality through naturalization rather than persecution.
By 2010, Mahne hired a lawyer, who he describes as "brilliant," to start another application, but progress remained painfully slow. Rather than formally rejecting the application, authorities seemed to stall the paperwork. "They just put it into endless changes of caseworker and administrative spin cycle hell, where they wouldn't turn it down, but they wouldn't progress," he says. The situation changed when the government expanded restitution laws in 2021 to clarify the circumstances in which people who were stripped of their German citizenship by the Nazi regime, as well as their descendants, could reclaim it. After watching a discussion between German officials and British comedians David Baddiel and Matt Lucas about their own journeys to citizenship, Mahne contacted the German Ambassador in London to describe his experience. That led to his case being referred to the restitution unit in Cologne in late 2024, and he received his certificate in January 2025.
A spokesperson from the Bundesverwaltungsamt (BVA), the central federal service agency headquartered in Cologne, said it could not comment on individual cases. When asked how long an application for German citizenship through restoration generally takes, the spokesperson could not give an estimate, stating that applications under Section 15 of the German Nationality Act (StAG) are processed in the order in which they are received. The duration depends on the completeness and quality of the documents submitted and the complexity of the individual case. It is therefore not possible to make a general statement regarding the duration of the procedure.
For Mahne, holding a German passport means much more than easier travel; it has given him a connection to history and his roots that had previously felt distant. "It shows the foundation of who I think I am, in a way that wasn't before," he says. He is now enjoying getting to know Germany as a naturalized citizen, taking annual trips with his partner to explore places connected to his family. For anyone in a similar position, Mahne advises not giving up when the going gets tough. "I wanted to be able to say this can be done and that you can challenge the system," he says. "If your case is strong, you can win. I just wasn't going to let it beat me." He suggests that hiring a lawyer to get an application in shape is a good idea, but ultimately, "just don't take no for an answer."
Yet Mahne, who runs a video production business, refused to give up.
'Important part of where I've come from'
