Optanten contract
The Optanten contract was concluded on January 11, 1907 between the Kingdom of Denmark and the German Empire .
The Vienna Peace Treaty of October 30, 1864, which concluded the German-Danish War for the Duchy of Schleswig (≈ Sønderjylland ), gave Danish Schleswigers in Article 19 the right to opt for Denmark until November 16, 1870, which meant Danish citizenship and move to the kingdom. Your possessions should not be lost in the process. Many chose this option because they hoped that the national referendum promised in Article 5 of the Prague Peace Treaty of 1866 would have a positive outcome for Denmark . After the introduction of the three-year Prussian conscription in 1866, the emigration of Danish optants skyrocketed. After the end of the Franco-Prussian War , the Apenrader Convention ( Aabenraakonvention ) was concluded between Germany and Denmark in 1872 , which enabled 1,046 optants to return to Schleswig unpunished. The agreements concluded in 1869 and 1872 gave Danish optants the opportunity to live permanently in North Schleswig, but with the status of foreigners and without the right to vote .
In 1880 there were finally 25,000 Danish nationals in North Schleswig. Between 1897 and 1901, under the Schleswig-Holstein President Ernst von Köller , there was an increasing number of expulsions of Danish opters (Köllerpolitik). The children of the Danish Optanten presented an increasing problem. The children of these Optanten born before 1898 were considered stateless. In total, this group consisted of over 4,000 people. After secret negotiations, the optant contract was finally concluded in January 1907. It says that the children of Danish optants born in Schleswig between 1871 and 1898 could decide for themselves whether they wanted to take on Danish or German citizenship.
In turn, Denmark recognized the course of the river Königsau as a limit on, making it again the 1864 lost Duchy Schleswig abandoned, and dispensed in particular to the determination of Prager peace of 1866, in which (in paragraph 5, 5) a popular vote on the national affiliation of the population in Schleswig had been promised, which should clarify the connection of Schleswig to Denmark or Germany.
However, this vote took place in 1920 under pressure from the victorious powers of the First World War and led to the cession of North Schleswig to Denmark.
See also: Nordschleswig (history)
literature
- Dieter Gosewinkel: Naturalization and exclusion. The nationalization of citizenship from the German Confederation to the Federal Republic of Germany (= critical studies on historical science . Volume 150). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-35165-8 , pp. 191-210: Chapter V.2: Options in Alsace-Lorraine and North Schleswig .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gyldendals Den Store Danske: Optant Conventions
- ↑ Jan Asmussen: We were like brothers , Hamburg 2000, pp. 361–362
- ↑ Schleswig-Holstein History Society : North Schleswig 1840-1920
- ^ Robert Bohn (Ed.): Germany, Europe and the North , Stuttgart 1993, p. 6