Austrian citizenship for descendants of victims of Nazism: who qualifies and which documents are needed in 2026

Citizenship without naturalisation: what § 58c gives

In short: § 58c lets you obtain Austrian citizenship without naturalisation. The right belongs to the persecuted themselves and to their direct descendants, with no limit on the number of generations. The applicant keeps their current citizenship, does not move and takes no exams. Applications from people living abroad are usually decided by the Vienna provincial government, and citizenship arises on the date the application reached the authority.

The provision has been in force since 1993 and at first covered only people who had survived persecution personally. From 1 September 2020 their direct descendants gained the right. From 1 May 2022 the circle was widened again: the law expressly named people who were deported or who died as a result of persecution before 9 May 1945, and their descendants.

The mechanism works at scale. In 2025, 9,531 people obtained Austrian citizenship on this ground, and almost all of them live outside the country. Yet the authority checks each application separately: the history of a town or a people does not count; the documents of a specific family are needed.

Which ancestors give the right to citizenship

In short: the ancestor must have lived in Austria and suffered under the Nazi regime or been persecuted for supporting the democratic Republic of Austria. The law names five situations: leaving the country before 15 May 1955, losing citizenship through marriage on departure, being unable to return, deportation, and death before 9 May 1945. The ancestor could have been an Austrian citizen, a citizen of one of the successor states of Austria-Hungary, or stateless.

The successor states of Austria-Hungary matter for families from Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia and South Tyrol. Citing the peace treaties of 1919-1920, the Vienna Administrative Court counts Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary among them. So the ground may apply even if a great-grandfather held a Polish or Romanian passport. What decides it is something else: he lived in Austria and left because of persecution. Families from Bukovina should also check Romanian citizenship by descent: sometimes one family history gives the right to two EU passports at once.

Which histories of persecution qualify

The law does not list the reasons for persecution. Most often these are Jewish families who left Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938. In a 2026 decision the Vienna Administrative Court proceeded from the fact that in 1938 people of Jewish origin left Austria because of the threat of persecution. If the family already holds Israeli citizenship or the right to repatriation to Israel, an Austrian passport is compatible with it.

The ground is wider, though. The Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also includes persecution for supporting the democratic republic during the Austrofascist years, from 1933 to 1938. One time limit applies in every case: descendants of those who left the country before 12 November 1918, that is, before the First Republic was founded, have no right under § 58c.

Families who left for the Soviet Union

For families whose relatives emigrated to the Soviet Union, February 1934 matters. The Republican Schutzbund, the paramilitary wing of the Austrian Social Democrats, rose against the Dollfuss government and was defeated. About 700-800 of its members went to the USSR via Czechoslovakia, and their wives and children followed later. The emigrants were settled in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkiv, Gorky and Rostov-on-Don, and some were later caught up in the purges.

The Schutzbund members defended the democratic republic, so their descendants may fall under § 58c. Such histories need especially careful checking. You have to prove the ancestor’s citizenship and residence in Austria, their part in the events and the reason for leaving, and the documents are often spread across archives in Russia, Ukraine and Austria at once.

The right passes to all direct descendants

In short: any direct descendant of a persecuted person may apply: a son or daughter, grandchild, great-grandchild and later generations. The line may run through the mother or the father, and birth in or out of wedlock does not matter if paternity is established by a document. Adopted children have the right if they were adopted as minors. A descendant’s spouse does not obtain citizenship on this ground.

Every family member, children included, files their own application. Lost birth and marriage certificates can be obtained again in the country that issued them. The documents on the ancestor are gathered once and attached to all relatives’ applications, so families usually prepare applications for several generations at once.

The ancestor did not have to apply under § 58c personally. The Austrian Supreme Administrative Court has clarified that the ground also works when the ancestor has died, regained citizenship earlier by another route or never lost it at all.

When there is no right

• The applicant was an Austrian citizen themselves and lost citizenship by acquiring another. The exception is where they did not know they were Austrian.
• The applicant renounced Austrian citizenship or was deprived of it.
• The ancestor left Austria before 12 November 1918.
• The descendant’s spouse has no family line of their own to the persecuted person.
• The applicant has circumstances that § 10 of the Act treats as an obstacle: a conviction for an intentional crime, a threat to public security, links to extremist organisations.

Do you need to move, pass an exam or give up your passport?

In short: § 58c does not require residence in Austria, knowledge of German, proof of income or renouncing your current citizenship. The application, the decision and the documents are exempt from government fees. The authority checks two things: the applicant’s descent and their good character.

Good character is shown by a police certificate from your country of residence. On the filing date it must be no more than eight months old, or the authority will ask for a new one. Austrian services also check the applicant against their own databases.

The fee exemption covers only Austrian government payments. Translations, apostilles, archive certificates and documents from foreign authorities are paid for separately.

Your current citizenship is kept

Austria does not require you to give up your current citizenship. Check your own country’s law, though: some states end citizenship when another is acquired, and others require you to notify the authorities within a set period. Russia, for example, requires notification of the Interior Ministry; we cover this in the articles on notifying the Interior Ministry and the penalty for failing to notify.

§ 58c has a feature worth considering in advance. The decision confirms citizenship from the date of filing, and that date may be many months before the decision itself. If your country has a notification deadline, discuss how to count it with a lawyer before the decision arrives. A starting point for checking your own law is the list of countries that allow dual citizenship.

More than half of the 2025 decisions went to Israeli citizens and almost a third to US citizens. None of them had to give up their own citizenship for the Austrian one.

Gathering documents on the applicant, the ancestor and the family line

In short: the documents fall into three groups: on the applicant, on the persecuted ancestor and on each link of the family line between them. Documents not in German or English are translated into German by a sworn translator with court certification. Foreign documents need an apostille or consular legalisation, unless a treaty with Austria exempts the issuing country.

If the ancestor was deported or died as a result of persecution, separate documents on the persecution are usually not required, according to the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To assess such histories the law allows the authority to call on the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism as an expert.

The Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website has an online questionnaire that builds a document list for your specific situation from your answers. It is a useful starting point, to be checked against what has actually survived in the family and the archives.

Where to look for information on the ancestor

• Vienna City and Provincial Archives. Holds residents’ registration cards from the first half of the 20th century. They prove the address and main residence, and the authority itself sends requests there during its check.
• Austrian State Archives. The 1938 property declarations that Jewish families were obliged to file.
• Jewish Community of Vienna. Birth and marriage registers, records of emigration.
• Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance. Databases of victims of the Holocaust and political persecution.
• Civil registry offices and state archives in Russia, Ukraine, Israel and other countries. Birth and marriage certificates of later generations are restored there.

No papers at home does not mean there are no documents. Even if the family took only a few documents out of Austria, registration cards and register entries may have survived in Vienna’s archives. Requests to Austrian and other archives can be handed to archive search specialists. Typical mistakes in such searches are covered in the article on restoring EU citizenship by descent.

If the names in the documents do not match

Across three or four generations discrepancies are almost inevitable. A typical case: the great-grandfather appears on a Vienna registration card as Josef Weiss, the grandfather’s Soviet birth certificate gives his patronymic as Iosifovich, and the grandmother changed her surname on marriage in the 1950s. Each such point is proven with a separate document: a change of surname certificate, an archive extract or a court ruling establishing the family relationship. If a document is lost entirely, it is restored through the archives and authorities of the issuing country. Without this the authority will ask for explanations and the review will drag on.

Five steps from family history to passport

Formally, the process starts with a written application. The law calls it an Anzeige, a notification: the applicant informs the authority that they meet the conditions of § 58c and proves it with documents. In practice, the main work comes before filing.

For people born and living outside Austria, the application is decided by Municipal Department 35 (MA 35) of the Vienna provincial government. It can be filed at the Austrian embassy or consulate general in your country of residence, which forwards the documents to Vienna. The law also allows the application to be sent directly to the competent authority. If the person was born in another Austrian province, that province’s government decides.

Most of the time goes on the archives and the family chain, and the speed of the review depends on this work. A complete, consistent set of documents avoids additional requests from the authority, and each such request lengthens the check. Archives, translations and apostilles can be ordered without full support: they are all in the documents for citizenship section.

How long the decision takes

In short: the law sets no separate deadline for § 58c. Under the general rule of Austrian administrative law, the authority must decide within six months of receiving the application. Applications with a complete set of documents go faster; histories with archive checks and disputed points take a year or more. If the authority misses the six-month deadline, the law allows its inaction to be challenged in court.

A telling example is the decision of the Vienna Administrative Court of 8 January 2026. The applicant filed through a consulate general in April 2024, relying on his grandfather. MA 35 examined the registration cards and refused in October 2025: the family had moved its main residence from Vienna to Italy back in 1925, so in 1938 it was no longer fleeing Austria.

During the check the applicant pointed to another link, his great-grandfather, and the court assessed the line through him. The great-grandfather was an Italian citizen, that is, a citizen of a successor state of Austria-Hungary; he lived in Vienna from December 1935 to April 1938 and left because of the threat of persecution. The court held that the applicant had become an Austrian citizen and set the date of acquisition as 11 April 2024, the day the application was filed.

Three conclusions follow from this case. The ancestor’s main residence at the time of departure is checked against documents and decides the outcome. If one line does not work, it is worth checking other branches of the family. Citizenship confirmed by a decision counts from the filing date, however long the check takes.

9,531 people in 2025: what the statistics show

Statistics Austria records every ground for acquiring citizenship. The date in these statistics is the date of the decision, so a year’s figures show how many decisions the authority issued.

The peak came in 2022, when 9,696 people obtained citizenship under § 58c, almost half of all new Austrian citizens. After the dip of 2023 the number of decisions grew again. In the first half of 2026 there were 10% fewer decisions than in the same period of 2025: 3,927 against 4,352. The statistics office does not give a reason. The text of § 58c has not changed since May 2022.

After the decision: passport, EU citizen rights and family

In short: the decision confirms Austrian citizenship and, with it, citizenship of the European Union. With the decision you apply for a passport at an Austrian embassy or consulate. Citizenship alone does not require you to live in Austria or pay tax there: tax obligations depend on where you live.

• Passport. Issued at the Austrian mission where you live after the decision is received.
• EU citizen rights. Live, work and study in any EU country without visas or work permits.
• Children. Children already born file their own applications under § 58c. Children born after a parent becomes a citizen usually acquire Austrian citizenship by birth.
• Spouse. Does not obtain citizenship on this ground but can obtain the right to live with the family under the rules of the EU country where the family settles.

The conditions for different family set-ups, the stages and the cost of support are described on the Austrian citizenship by descent page. If the family has other European roots too, it is worth comparing the grounds: Hungarian citizenship by descent and Greek citizenship by descent work differently. For Jewish families there is also Israel’s Law of Return.

Where families most often go wrong

1. They think only a Jewish ancestor qualifies. The law does not name the reason for persecution. Political, religious and other histories qualify, including participants in the events of 1934.
2. They do not check where the ancestor left from. What decides it is the main residence in Austria at the time of departure. Temporary stays in Vienna do not replace it.
3. They rely on emigration before 1918. Leaving Austria-Hungary before the First Republic was founded gives no ground.
4. They file an expired police certificate. On the filing date it must be no more than eight months old.
5. They order a translation without the required qualification. The authority requires a translation by a court-certified sworn translator.
6. They leave discrepancies in names unexplained. Every mismatch in transliteration or surname is proven with a document.
7. They ignore their own former citizenship. If the applicant was already Austrian and lost citizenship by acquiring another, they may have no right under § 58c.

Common misconceptions about EU citizenship by descent are collected in the article five myths about EU citizenship by descent. How to obtain a second citizenship for a child is covered in the article on a child’s second citizenship.