Chapter 2. Europe and Statelessness dissolution of the European empires following World War I. This paragraph follows the developments described above and shows how the problems deepened further in the context of World War II. According to Marc Vishniak, “[s]tateless people are restricted in their rights in time of peace, and infinitely more so in time of war”.382 It seems his point is true when reading his account of how stateless people who were born in ‘enemy countries’ were still treated as ‘enemy aliens’, even though they did not possess the nationality of that state anymore during the War.383 That some people had raised this already in the interwar period and may or may not have been recognized as stateless, did not take away from the sentiments that continued to exist. In her famous book written directly after World War II, Arendt discusses the difficulty that stateless people face: “[It] is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality of the law and freedom of opinion – formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities – but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.”384 If we were to describe statelessness during and just after World War II in terms of causes, then “large-scale displacement and denationalisation of people”385 are probably an apt summary of the main challenges that states faced in this regard. It should be noted that many of the causes of statelessness that existed before World War II persisted, because they were not sufficiently addressed by the legal responses designed in the inter-war period, as elaborated in paragraph 2.3. A population that was most affected by denationalization in the context of the (run-up to) World War II, were the Jews and others who were considered enemies – some of the international responses to this practice in the inter-war period were already considered above. Where Germany first resorted to denationalization of German Jews based on individual decisions, it eventually took a collective approach in this regard. This becomes clear from “a series of three laws adopted in 1933, 1935 and 1941”.386 The law of 14 July 1933 made revocations of previous naturalizations (1918–1933) possible if these were considered “undesirable” and made deprivation of nationality possible for citizens abroad who had acted “contrary to the duty of fidelity of the Reich”.387 The ordinance on the execution 382 383 384 385 386 387 Marc Vishniak, ‘The Legal Status of Stateless Persons’ in AG Duker (ed), Pamphlet Series: Jews and the Post-War World (No. 6, American Jewish Committee 1945) 56. Ibid, 56-57. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest Book – Harcourt & Brace Company 1979) 295–296. Laura van Waas, ‘A 100-year (Hi)Story of Statelessness�� (Peace Palace Library Blog, 25 August 2016) <https://peacepalacelibrary.nl/blog/2016/100-year-history-statelessness> accessed 19 September 2021. Lester N Salwin, ‘Uncertain Nationality Status of German Refugees’ (1946) Minnesota Law Review 372. Lawrence Preuss, ‘International Law and Deprivation of Nationality’ (1935) 23 Georgetown Law Journal 250. Intersentia 71