Following the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, foreign nationals residing in Germany,
as well as their countries of origin, were confronted with laws, decrees, and practices that
violated customary international law on aliens and bilateral settlement and legal protection
treaties. Based on the principle of "racial inequality," the Nazi regime targeted all "alien"
and "racially inferior" persons, regardless of whether they held German or foreign
citizenship, and reduced their legal status below the minimum standard of international
law. Furthermore, the unequal treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish people violated the
treaty-based equal treatment clauses enshrined in bilateral settlement agreements,
according to which the contracting states were obligated to treat the nationals of the other
party equally regarding certain legal positions as their own citizens. Nazi Germany justified
the inhumane and discriminatory treatment of foreign Jews by claiming that it ensured
they were treated equally to German Jews (but not to non-Jewish Germans).

To protect their own citizens, the respective countries of origin had consular and diplomatic
protection at their disposal. However, as the Swiss legal scholar and diplomat Peter Anton
Feldscher explained as early as 1930, Switzerland had no "obligation to grant protection […]
and responsibility for the proper fulfillment of the protective task exists only towards the
people as a whole and not towards the Swiss citizen as an individual." Thus, according to
the understanding at the time, it was "ultimately a matter of political consideration" how
"the representation of Swiss interests vis-à-vis foreign countries could best be carried out."

In practice, the question of diplomatic protection ultimately took place within the tension
between "higher national interests," such as maintaining proper diplomatic relations, and
the defense of the sense of justice recognized in international law on aliens as well as in
the respective legal system.

The conference "Citizenship and National Socialist Persecution" addresses questions that
have received remarkably little attention in research to date. It mainly focuses on the
analysis of state interventions to protect foreign citizens in Germany and the territories
occupied by Germany during the Second World War. Furthermore, it examines the
reactions of the German bureaucracy as well as collaborationist governments to foreign
interventions and the resulting conflict between "pragmatic foreign policy", the goals of
National Socialist ideology, and the willingness to collaborate.