BRAUNSCHWEIG, Germany, March 12 (UPI) -- Six decades after his death, the most notorious German of all times, Adolf Hitler, may be stripped of his German citizenship.
Deutsche Welle Online reported Monday that a low-ranking official in the state of Lower Saxony, Isolde Saalmann, had convinced her colleagues from the governing Social Democratic Party to file a request to check whether the German citizenship given to Austrian-born Hitler in 1932 can be rescinded.
Hitler's application to become a German national was granted in Braunschweig, the city where he had lived since 1912 and fought for Germany in World War I, a move that enabled his notorious future career in German politics.
Saalmann told a German newspaper it would be a strong symbolic signal if the state would take posthumous action.
"If the state of Lower Saxony, as the legal successor of the then-free state of Braunschweig, distances itself from it, it could be helpful," she told the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. "We want to clear this up once and for all."
She added, however, that she didn't want to whitewash history. "This should never serve to play down history along the lines of 'Look, he wasn't a German at all,'" she said. "That would never be my intention as a Social Democrat."
