People sometimes chose statelessness to avoid deportation to unfamiliar homelands

Evidence

Among them, we still find that oldest group of stateless people, the Heimatlosen produced by the Peace Treaties of 1919, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and the establishment of the Baltic states. … Sometimes their real origin could not be determined, especially if at the end of the war they happened not to reside in the city of their birth, sometimes their place of origin changed hands so many times in the turmoil of postwar disputes that the nationality of its inhabitants changed from year to year (as in Vilna which a French official once termed la capitale des apatrides) ; more often than one would imagine, people took refuge in statelessness after the first World War in order to remain where they were and avoid being deported to a “homeland” where they would be strangers (as in the case of many Polish and Rumanian Jews in France and Germany, mercifully helped by the antisemitic attitude of their respective consulates). — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 684

Categorization

• SHARE: A specific person studying Jewish migration or antisemitism in interwar consular practice would savor this detail.