Germany, and they are now, by far, the most populous nation in the E.U. In the immediate post war period, Germany recognized an estimated 8 million ethnic Germans living abroad as its citizesn. After that, Germany has recognized over 4 million foreign born ethnic Germans as citizens since 1950. Unlike Poland, they are given citizenship at the time of repatriation, and there is no requirement that these ethnic Germans can speak German. Many of these were Volga Germans who immigrated to Russia as far back as the late 18th century, long before the creation of a unified German state. In contrast, Poland has been refusing to index its archives, or failing to make archival records available which relate to citizenship by descent from those who remained loyal to the Second Polish Republic and rejected the communist state..
What country automatically assumes people are citizens because of their names or some distant ancestral claim?
Hungary, under Orban, recently granted many foreign born Hungarians citizenship. They are able to acquire citizenship quite easily, and even secretly, which benefits those living in countries like Ukraine that don't permit a second citizenship.
What country automatically assumes people are citizens because of their names or some distant ancestral claim?
Italy has no problem recognizing citizenship from a great-grandfather, etc. Italy is able to quickly get passports for such people so that they can compete on the Italian national teams such as its olympic team. It doesn't take years for this to happen, likely because Italy indexes its passport records in the archives and makes them freely available to genaologists or those cliaming citizenship, and didn't change its laws recently to discriminate against its foreign born citizens.
Poland could learn something from these countries, and so could our trolls.
they have to prove citizenship and the burden of proof is on the applicant, not the state.
When the state refuses to check its own records, fails to index them or make them available for inspection by those claiming rights from them, the state is hiding something. Without a record of military service or its excuse, loss of citizenship for a Polish male living abroad was impossible before January 19, 1951. For such claims the burden is on the state to prove that it was even possible for a citizen to have lost his citizenship. A person was either born a citizen before Tusk's 2009 law, or not. Nothing in that law can retroactively deprive a citizen of his/her rights, such as voting, getting official documents, owning property, etc. under the Polish constitution.