Hermann’s war service
Hermann Ringel in uniform
I don’t have in my possession any kind of German nationality document for Hermann Ringel, but there is ample evidence that he enjoyed both the rights and responsibilities of German citizenship during the following 30 years, until the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped away those rights.
Hermann served the German Reich honorably in the Great War. War service in the German military by itself did not confer citizenship, however. Witness the well-known difficulties in obtaining German citizenship after the war encountered by a certain Austrian corporal in the German Army. That corporal’s name was Hitler, and he did not become a German citizen until obtaining a special decree in 1932. But Hermann’s situation was different because he served as a German citizen, not a foreign national.
In 2012, when Joanne applied for restored German citizenship based only on our Ringel documentation (we had not traced the Wohlgemuth history at that time), the [State Citizenship Office] readily approved her citizenship claim. Thus, the ultimate arbiter of German nationality confirmed in 2012 that Hermann Ringel was a full German citizen after 1906, despite his Austrian parentage.
