Hello wise EF friends,
I'm German and I have 3-yr-old twins who were born in Canada, but have the right to German citizenship by birth. We haven't got them German passports yet because they require us to go in person to the embassy which is 5 hours away and just haven't managed to get around to that yet.

Now suddenly our moving date back to CH is upon us and we are wondering what we need for them. It would be easiest if we knew we could just fly over with their birth certificates and their Canadian passports, but if we need to have a D-permit or their German passports, we need to apply for those ASAP....

Anyone been through this recently and have any thoughts?

Thanks!!!

Get the kids their german passports organised asap.

Here it takes 6-8 weeks after visiting the embassy, as the passport needs to be sent to Berlin & returned.

On the other hand, you could probably arrange one through the Bern embassy once you are here.

There is a list of everything you need somewhere on this site:
http://www.bern.diplo.de/passstelle

My hunch, admittedly uninformed with regard to your specific situation, is that the 15 or 48 hours it'd take you to do the round trip to the German embassy and back home to where you live now, will save you heaps of time and paperwork in trying to enter and to register once here. If you have everything all done, things will go much more smoothly.
I second Ragantiranui: "asap".

just curious, how did it work out? i thought it would have been enough for you to have german passport as kids travel as dependents, but what did you end up doing?