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The study on Article 38 of the Act of 2 April 2009 on Polish Citizenship^[1]discussed the possibility of restoring Polish citizenship to individuals who lost it before 1 January 1999 in the circumstances specified therein.

However, this Act does not address the problems arising from the deprivation of Polish citizenship from entire groups of individuals as a result of intended legislative or factual actions by the Polish authorities. Such actions were closely linked to migration processes involving Polish citizens (residing abroad, displacement, voluntary and forced emigration from Poland, nationality verification). They predominantly affected individuals whom the Polish authorities denied the attribute of being Polish. Formally, the adopted regulations affected individuals of Jewish, German, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian national origin. In practice, their impact was felt most acutely by individuals of Jewish, German, and Ukrainian origin.

In this study we will deal with the Act of 31 March 1938 on Deprivation of Citizenship^[2].

Article 1 of the aforementioned Act stipulated that a Polish citizens residing abroad could be deprived of Polish citizenship if: a) they acted abroad to the detriment of the Polish State, or b) they lost all connection with Polish statehood after residing abroad for at least five years after the establishment of the Polish State, or c) while residing abroad, they failed to return to Poland within the specified period upon request of a foreign office of the Republic of Poland. The decision to deprive Polish citizenship was issued by the Minister of Internal Affairs at the request of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, requiring no justification and being immediately enforceable. Interestingly, however, it could be appealed to the Supreme Administrative Tribunal. Individuals deprived of Polish citizenship for acting abroad to the detriment of the Polish State, even after obtaining foreign citizenship, could only temporarily stay in Poland with the prior consent of the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Considering the justification for the bill, it should be clarified that its actual author was Wiktor Tomir Drymmer, Director of the Consular Department of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs^[3]. During a conference held on May 24-25, 1938, at the Polish Embassy in Berlin, W.T. Drymmer said that the bill was “[…] general in nature, so as not to reveal significant tendencies in writing. […] The blade of the law is directed primarily against Jews, although in some areas, e.g., France, it will also apply to communists^[4].” He defined the goal of the bill as “raising the dignity of the Polish citizen by excluding all those who are not worthy, and above all, getting rid of the dangerous element (minorities, and especially Jews, as a destructive element).”^[5] In 1968, he explained the reasons for passing the law even more precisely: “The alienation of Jews residing outside [emphasis in original ] Poland was even greater than within the country, a Jew abroad was linked to Poland only by a passport. A Jew did not belong to Polish organizations abroad, did not participate in national holidays and celebrations. […] Polish Jews abroad alienated themselves not only from Polish society, but also from their own. They were often involved (I do not want to generalize) in arms trafficking, drug trafficking, prostitution, and human trafficking. These Polish citizens were encountered by our foreign missions across all latitudes and longitudes. Their link to Poland, as I have already said, was a passport, often of dubious authenticity. […] According to rough calculations by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there were tens of thousands of Polish citizens worldwide about whom we had reasonable suspicions that they were not born in Poland, had not been to Poland, and did not speak Polish.”^[6]

S. Zabiełło writes that “before the war, the number of Polish citizens permanently residing in France was estimated at around 600,000, of whom up to 100,000 were of Jewish origin, primarily in the Paris region. The situation with these Jews was quite complicated. Most of them had fled illegally from Russia after the October Revolution, during the shifting fronts during the 1917-1920 civil war^[7], and after a usually very short stay in Poland, they were sent to France, among other places, by Jewish charitable organizations (JOINT). They lived there for years without valid identity cards (they handled family matters in the kahals), but they were listed in French registers as coming from Poland, because they had legally arrived from there, even though they often didn’t know our language. Their nationality was always a subject of dispute between Polish consulates and the French authorities […].”^[8] W. Skóra, on the other hand, based on consular reports, states that in the 1930s 115,553 Jews – Polish citizens – resided permanently in Germany.^[9]

The intention to deprive Jews living in Germany of Polish citizenship was based on an attempt to prevent their mass return to Poland^[10] and a desire to improve Polish-German relations, which had been suffering due to the constant interventions of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on behalf of this group of citizens and the related activities of Polish consuls in Germany.^[11] This was also influenced by the Anschluss of Austria, which resulted in thousands of Jews seeking to come to Poland.^[12] The Act of March 31, 1938 on Deprivation of Citizenship was passed at lightning speed and came into effect on the date of its announcement, April 1, 1938. On October 6, 1938, the Minister of Internal Affairs, citing Article 26 of the Passport Act of July 14, 1936^[13], which stated nothing more than that “the execution of this Act shall be entrusted to the Minister of Internal Affairs in consultation with the ministers concerned,” issued a regulation on conducting a one-time inspection of Polish foreign passports abroad^[14]. According to its provisions:

1. Foreign passports issued by Polish consuls before the date of entry into force of the regulation had to be submitted for a one-time inspection, which was carried out by the territorially competent consuls.
2. The consul confirmed that the passport had been checked by placing the following note in it: “checked in accordance with the regulation of the Minister of Internal Affairs of 6 October 1938.”
3. The above annotation could not be included if: a) there was a suspicion as to the authenticity or validity of the passport, or b) there were circumstances justifying the deprivation of citizenship or the determination of the loss of citizenship of the passport holder.
4. The above-mentioned foreign passports, which did not contain the required annotation, did not authorize crossing the border of the Polish State.

On October 28, 1938, the Germans responded to the above actions of the Polish authorities by “deporting approximately 17,000 Jews – Polish citizens – to Poland, as part of the so-called Polish Action (Polenaktion ). Only those who were absent from their place of residence or who had taken refuge in Polish diplomatic missions were spared from deportation. The deportation itself was often accompanied by brutal treatment (e.g., being driven across the so-called green border), but most of the displaced were brought to assembly points and transported by trains to the border crossings. This resulted in approximately 9,000 of them ending up in Zbąszyń. The decision to detain approximately 6,000 people in [the transit camp in Zbąszyń] was connected with unsuccessful attempts by the Polish authorities to exert pressure on [German authorities] to recover at least some of the property of the expelled. Fortunately, at the last minute, the Polish authorities abandoned their retaliatory expulsion of the Jews – German citizens. […] The case became a major international scandal; as early as November, consideration was being given to ways of closing [the camp]. Even though the Jews detained there were formally barred from further travel into the country, the camp slowly emptied (in January 1939, there were fewer than 5,000 detainees, and the last of them left Zbąszyń before September 1, 1939).”^[15]

Statistical data indicate that by mid-April 1939, using the Act on deprivation of citizenship, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had submitted 30,133 applications for deprivation of citizenship, covering approximately 75,000 people, including 88.1% of Jewish nationality.^[16]

Poland’s defeat in September 1939 encouraged Polish political circles to take a different view of the legal solutions adopted by the defeated Sanation party. This also applied to the 1938 Deprivation of Citizenship Act. It was repealed by a decree of the President of the Republic of Poland of November 28, 1941.^[17] The authorities in exile justified the repeal of the act by citing its high detrimental impact on Polish opinion, its impossibility of implementation due to opposition from Great Britain and reluctance from the United States^[18], and the fact that its application could cause friction between states, because a state “recognizing its citizen as undesirable […] and depriving him of citizenship, in a way imposes him on the state in which he resides”, thus leading to “an unfriendly act towards that […] state.” Moreover, [the act] contained many norms allowing for an arbitrary and “excessively flexible” interpretation, which allowed for a unilateral decision by the authority, without giving the person concerned any legal tools to defend their rights.^[19]

Due to the political and legal changes that affected Poland after 1945, the Act of March 31 1938 on Deprivation of Citizenship was “repealed again” in 1951.^[20] The motives of the communist authorities fully reflected the times in which the Act of January 8, 1951, was drafted: “The provisions of the 1938 Act were clearly fascist in nature. Under these provisions, a decision to deprive one of citizenship did not require justification and fell within the competence of the Minister of Internal Affairs, i.e., the Minister of the Sanation “Dwójka” and the Blue Police. The provisions of the Sanation Act were directed against economic emigrants who went abroad in search of work and bread, which the then bourgeois Poland did not provide, and above all against political emigrants, against anti-fascist activists, the best sons of the Polish nation, who, for example, in the years 1936-1938 went to Spain to defend the freedom of the Spanish people and, at the same time, the freedom of their own nation in international brigades.^[21]

In fact, Article 15, Section 1 of the said Act stated that “Decisions issued before 1 September 1939 on the basis of the provisions of the Act of 31 March 1938 on Deprivation of Citizenship […] shall not have legal effect against persons who, on the date of entry into force of this Act, are domiciled in Poland.” In accordance with Section 2 of Article 15, “The Council of State may restore Polish citizenship to persons residing abroad, of which they have been deprived in the procedure specified in the preceding section, if Polish citizenship was not restored to them before the entry into force of this Act.”

The dual actions of the emigration and communist authorities essentially caused confusion as to the scope of the effects of the Act of 1938. The matter of restoring Polish citizenship to persons and their descendants deprived of citizenship under the Act, residing outside Poland at the time the Act of 8 January 1951 on Polish Citizenship came into force, i.e. 19 January 1951, has not been clearly regulated in Polish law to this day.

[1]Dz.U.2023.1989 t.j. z dnia 2023.09.25.

[2]Dz.U. Nr 22, poz. 191.

[3] W. Skóra, Żydzi polscy w międzywojennym Szczecinie, “Przegląd Zachodniopomorski” 2002, z. 1, [s. 79-104], p. 18.

[4]AAN, AB, sygn. 3278, Protokół z konferencji konsularnej poświęconej realizacji ustawy o pozbawianiu obywatelstwa polskiego, Berlin 24-25 V 1938 r., cyt. za: W. Skóra, Żydzi polscy w międzywojennym Szczecinie, op. cit., s. 19, przyp. 57.

[5]Source: http://www.zbaszyn.fora.pl/historia,28/rok-1938,545.html ; source: http://www.gatago.org/pl/sci/historia/58523754.html

[6]W.T. Drymmer, Zagadnienie żydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935 – 1939, „Zeszyty Historyczne” 1968, nr 13, pp. 64-65.

[7]W.T. Drymmer claims that in the years 1918–1920 Poland accepted 700,000 Jews who fled from Russia to escape the pogroms and persecution of the Red Army (W. T. Drymmer, Zagadnienie żydowskie w Polsce…, op. cit., s. 59 – 60).

[8]S. Zabiełło, Na posterunku we Francji, PAX, Warszawa 1967, wyd. I, p. 158.

[9] W. Skóra, Żydzi polscy w międzywojennym Szczecinie, op. cit., p. 3.

[10]Source: http://www.jhi.pl/psj/oboz_przejsciowy_w_Zbaszyniu

[11] Ibidem , p. 18.

[12] Ibidem , p. 19.

[13]Dz.U. Nr 56, poz.

[14]Rozporządzenie Ministra Spraw Wewnętrznych z dnia 6 października 1938 r. wydane w porozumieniu z Ministrem Spraw Zagranicznych w sprawie przeprowadzenia za granicą jednorazowej kontroli paszportów zagranicznych polskich (Dz.U. Nr 80, poz. 543; weszło w życie 30.10.1938 r.; uchylone z dniem 2.09.1954 r.).

[15] Source: http://www.jhi.pl/psj/oboz_przejsciowy_w_Zbaszyniu

[16]G. Kulka, Nadawanie, pozbawianie i przywracanie obywatelstwa polskiego w czasie II wojny światowej, „Czasopismo Prawno – Historyczne”, Tom LXIII, 2011, Zeszyt 1, p. 150.

[17]Dz. U. Nr 8, poz. 22.

[18]G. Kulka, Nadawanie, pozbawianie i przywracanie…, op. cit., pp. 152-153.

[19] Ibid ., p. 153.

[20]Art. 17 ust. 2 pkt 3 Ustawy z dnia 8 stycznia 1951 r. o obywatelstwie polskim, Dz.U. Nr 4, poz. 25.

[21]Przemówienie posła sprawozdawcy Jerzego Morawskiego, Sprawozdanie z 88 posiedzenia Sejmu z dnia 8 stycznia 1951 r., s. 12-13.

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