Prime Minister battles to win support before crunch in the Commons
home had been smashed up by Nazi neighbours and a friend warned them not to return. During the war, Georg was sent to internment in Australia, like many other German immigrants.
Bob said: “He volunteered to join the Pioneer Corps, fearing that if he was captured in the battlefield in Europe he would be shot on the spot when the Germans found out he was Jewish and German.”
The family later came to Scotland where Georg got a job with an industrial company in Dunfermline.
“They opened a factory in Fife and dad managed it,” said Bob Bob’s grandmother was not Jewish and with the religion following the maternal line, the family are not officially Jewish. But German law says that anyone who lost their citizenship between 1933 and 1945 on racial, religious, or political grounds can have it restored, as can their descendants.
The Leisers got their German citizenship restored after finding family documents going back to Bob’s great-grandparents.
The Leisers are just one family to apply to restore their German citizenship, but thousands more have done the same since Brexit. Before the Brexit vote, about 28 people a year applied to become German again.
But since the vote, 3,481 Brits have applied to become German citizens.