As noted by "Russkaya Germaniya", the current figure was also affected by the coronavirus pandemic, which caused agencies responsible for deciding on and processing citizenship to take longer to handle applications.
In 2020, citizens of 173 countries received German passports. A quarter of them are from the other 27 EU countries (the most, about 5,900, are from Romania; in the three previous years, the UK, still in the EU, held the lead, and earlier Poland was in first place).
However, when looking at individual countries, as before, German passports were most often issued to Turkish citizens, although even in this case there is a decline (16,200 people in 2019 versus 11,600 in 2020). Conversely, the number of Syrian-born German citizens increased to 6,700 (in 2019 – 3,900). As before, the number of Ukrainian citizens naturalized in Germany is higher than that of former residents of Russia: 2,260 versus 1,950 (in 2019: 4,260 versus 2,125).
In 2019 and 2020, only the number of citizens of British Overseas Territories who obtained German citizenship remained unchanged – 5 people each.