New York ? When Helen Springut was growing up, her parents wouldn’t vacation in Germany or buy a German car. The legacy of the Holocaust was too bitter.

But Springut, 26, has been to Germany several times and doesn’t think “all Germans are Nazis.”

Now she is applying for German citizenship under a law that allows Jews who fled Hitler, and their children and grandchildren, to become naturalized Germans. For many people, that means receiving a European Union passport that can pave the way for living and working in Europe.

The German law, which has been on the books since the 1950s, applies to Jews who were stripped of German citizenship during the Nazi era and their descendants. It can also apply to communists and others driven from Hitler’s Germany for political reasons.

The German consulate in New York handles up to 30 such applications a month, and one law firm here says it has 120 Jewish clients seeking German citizenship.

Most of those taking advantage of the law are from regions of the former Soviet Union, but there are also applicants from the United States, Canada and Australia. More than 4,000 Israelis also received German citizenship in 2006, a 50 percent increase over 2005.

According to the German government, there are now some 200,000 Jews living in Germany, up from 25,000 before the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Springut, a Harvard graduate who works in film production in Hollywood, has no immediate plans to move to Germany and will not lose her U.S. citizenship if her application is approved.

Springut learned she might be eligible from someone in the German consulate in Los Angeles. She then began gathering documents to prove that her paternal grandfather, who was born in Germany and left in the 1930s, was a German citizen.

It hasn’t been easy. “As the Allies approached, the Nazis just burned everything,” she said. “Documentation doesn’t really exist.”

In New York, the Fridman Law Group offers to help applicants through the process and advertises its services in local papers.

Nathalie Tauchner, who runs the group’s German Citizenship Project, said the law can be complicated. For example, an American Jew might think his or her grandfather was a German citizen because he was born in Germany in 1925.

But if he was the son of Polish immigrants to Germany, he might not have been a German citizen under the laws in effect at the time.

“It’s one thing to say ‘My grandfather was a German citizen and therefore I’m eligible,'” she said. “It’s another thing to have proof of that.”