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This letter concerns Helene’s application for reparations from the German government.
28 October 1955
RE: Reparations
Regarding: Your letter from 28 August 1955With reference to your above-mentioned letter, we inform you of the following: Since you never had your place of residence in the area of application of the law, and especially not in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the eligibility requirements of §8.1 were not fulfilled, and so the state of Rhineland-Palatinate cannot be claimed for compensation.
However, you cannot assert any claims as being persecuted from the displaced areas, as stateless or political refugees or as nationally persecuted.
Stateless persons and political refugees are not entitled to claim under §§71-75 as you are neither a political refugee according to the agreement of July 28, 1951 on the legal status of refugees, nor stateless persons in the sense of §71, because you have Turkish citizenship today, just as you did then.
The prerequisites for making a claim under the Federal Supplementary Act are not met.
On behalf of:
This letter highlights the cruelty and Catch-22 of Helene’s life. Because of her marriage to a Turkish citizen, she lost the citizenship of her birth. Despite what is stated in the letter, Turkey denied her citizenship when she was sent there in 1945. She did not have the correct address, citizenship, or anything else for her request to merit consideration by any entity. This must have felt immensely unfair. She had suffered so much, and her requests ended up in a tangle of a cold bureaucracy that had no interest in helping her or even acknowledging what she had been through. Although by this time she was safe in San Francisco, she felt that she belonged nowhere and that no one cared about her existence.