Germany Quietly Requires Men Aged 17 to 45 to Get Military Approval for Long Stays Abroad

Three months abroad, whether for a university exchange, a work contract, or extended travel, now requires written approval from Germany's armed forces for any male citizen between the ages of 17 and 45. The rule, embedded in Section 3, Paragraph 2 of Germany's amended Conscription Act, entered into force on January 1, 2026, as part of the Military Service Modernization Act. Most of the roughly 20 million men it affects learned about it only on April 3, when the Frankfurter Rundschau became the first outlet to report it, nearly three months after the law had already taken effect. Berliner Zeitung published its own account the same day.

The Bundestag approved the broader reform package on December 5, 2025; the Bundesrat cleared it on December 19. The travel-permit provision attracted no public debate during either vote, folded into a bill that drew attention primarily for its plans to expand the Bundeswehr from its current roughly 184,000 active personnel toward a target of 255,000 to 270,000 by 2035, alongside 200,000 reservists. The Defence Ministry acknowledged the impact is "profound" but confirmed that detailed exemption rules are "currently being drawn up."

Under the new obligation, any German man in the affected age cohort who plans to stay abroad for more than three months, or who seeks to extend a shorter stay beyond that threshold, must first obtain approval from a Bundeswehr Career Center. A Defence Ministry spokesman confirmed that, for now, such approvals are "in principle to be granted" given that compulsory military service remains suspended. The Ministry initially declined to explain to RND why the public had not been clearly informed. A spokeswoman later told IPPEN.MEDIA: "In an emergency we need to know who is potentially staying abroad for a longer period."

That rationale points to what the rule is designed to accomplish: maintaining a real-time registry of draft-age men so that mobilization orders, should parliament ever reactivate conscription, can reach them. Germany suspended mandatory military service on July 1, 2011, but conscription was never legally abolished, preserving parliament's ability to reactivate it by vote. The Military Service Modernization Act introduces a parallel mechanism, with all male citizens turning 18 now required to answer mandatory questionnaires on fitness and willingness to serve, and medical examinations being reintroduced in phases.

What makes the travel-permit provision particularly striking is the legal ground it breaks. Previously, an exit-permission requirement for extended stays abroad did exist in German law, but only during a declared "state of tension" or "state of defense" under Articles 80a and 115a of Germany's Basic Law, triggered by actual or imminent armed attack. The new law extends the obligation to peacetime, for the first time in the postwar Federal Republic.

The practical fallout for students, expatriate workers, and binational families remains largely unsettled. Men who have permanently established their livelihood abroad are exempt under Section 1, Paragraph 2, but the obligation falls squarely on men resident in Germany who plan temporary departures, regardless of purpose. Holding a second passport provides no exemption; under Germany's 2024 citizenship reform, which now permits dual nationality as a general rule, a growing number of men in the affected cohort carry more than one citizenship, yet the requirement follows German nationality. Even men whose conscientious objector status has been formally recognized are not automatically exempt; under Section 24 of the Conscription Act, they remain subject to military oversight and the exit-permission obligation. Applications for conscientious objector status reached more than 3,000 between January and late October 2025, the highest annual count since conscription was suspended.

Civil rights organizations have raised concerns about the regulation's breadth, and legal experts are already preparing proportionality challenges in court. The tension with European Union law is pointed: EU citizens generally hold freedom of movement as a near-absolute right, and a peacetime requirement conditioning departure on a military permit, even a nominally automatic one, sits uneasily alongside that principle.

Germany is not moving alone. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015, Sweden in 2017, Latvia in 2024, and Croatia voted to reinstate mandatory military service in October 2025. Denmark extended conscription to women in 2025. France, Belgium, and Poland are each launching voluntary service programs in 2026. None have publicly debated a peacetime exit-permit rule of the German kind, but the broader pattern of states reasserting accountability over draft-eligible citizens in normal times is accelerating across the continent.

The Defence Ministry says it is still finalizing procedural details and exemption criteria. Until those rules are published, what actually happens to a German man who leaves for a semester abroad without first filing with a Bundeswehr Career Center remains, by the Ministry's own admission, unresolved.