Does Angela Merkel have Polish citizenship?
According to publicly available information, the grandfather of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Polish. Ludwik Marian Kaźmierczak (1896–1959), because we are talking about him, came from Poznań. He served in the army of General Józef Haller. Possibly in the battles against the Ukrainians and the Bolsheviks. After World War I (before 1923), he emigrated to Germany and settled in Berlin, and in 1930 he decided to change the family name to Kasner. In the 1930s he served in the German police. He married Margarete Pörschke. In 1926 their son Horst Kasner (Angela Merkel's father) was born. In 1954, Angela Merkel was born.
From the point of view of the law on Polish citizenship, the grandfather of the German chancellor obtained Polish citizenship as a result of serving in the Polish army (Haller's blue army was incorporated into the Polish army). Angela Merkel's father, as a wedding child, also acquired Polish citizenship at birth from his father. The same would be true for Angela Merkel, born in 1954, had it not been for her grandfather that her grandfather joined the German police around 1930. This can be treated as the so-called "Accepting a public office in a foreign country", which always resulted in the loss of Polish citizenship. The loss of Polish citizenship by Angela Merkel's grandfather automatically resulted in the loss of Polish citizenship by her father (as a minor), who then could not "transfer" Polish citizenship to the former Chancellor.
Of course, it should be stipulated that the notion of "accepting a public office in a foreign country" from the 1920 Act is vague and is subject to clarification by the judicature of the courts. Therefore, one can imagine an interpretation in which an official is not considered to be a policeman, but an official in the strict sense of the word, i.e. an office employee. Then the road to Polish citizenship would be open for Angela Merkel….
