One of the challenges you are facing when applying for German citizenship, be it via Art. 116 II GG, § 5 or 15 StAG is filling in forms.
Under the rules of the German authority handling naturalization petitions, the petitions must also be filed in the German language.
We are not expecting our clients to be sufficient enough in German to fill in the forms themselves, which is why we will provide you with official English translations of them and once you have filled those in completely, we will transfer your information and data into the German forms which can then be filed to the authorities.
During the process of filling in those German forms for you, we are checking your files for a few things:
- Is all the supporting evidence, mainly personal documentation such as birth and marriage certificates, name change certificates etc. complete?
- Are the forms complete or is information missing?
- Where there are multiple applicants, are there any discrepancies between the forms of the various applicants (one applicant’s father might be another applicant’s grandfather and the details provided for such person must match!).
This is the stage in which we are ironing out any kinks regarding information provided in the forms and/or the supporting documentation.
To enable us to efficiently prepare the German forms for you, we do require you to provide us with all the details asked for in the English draft forms, to the best of your knowledge.
Whilst we can usually take the information regarding the original German citizens either from our research or the documents provided by you for our initial evaluation, the personal information relating to you and your ancestors is something that has to be presented to us by you.
So this is indeed part of the work you will need to put in as the information is requested by the authorities for a reason, often times to speed up their own research and processing times.
If you are struggling to provide exact dates of certain events, approximations will usually suffice so do feel free to ask us if you are encountering any problems when filling in the forms. We will guide you through them and help you find missing information, to ensure smooth processing, first by us and then of course by the German Authorities.
And please remember – those forms are not merely a bureaucratic demand but rather a quick summary of your personal family history.
Hopefully this will make the task less tedious and more interesting!