Broadcaster Nick Ross has said that becoming a German citizen – 85 years after his family fled the Nazis – has allowed him to "reclaim my post".

Amid a post-Brexit surge of British Jews whose family were refugees applying for German passports, Mr Ross, whose father was Jewish, wrote in the Times on Thursday that he decided to apply for German citizenship not due to Brexit, but out of a desire to “reclaim my past”.

German law says former citizens who were deprived of their citizenship on political, racial and religious grounds between 1933 and 1945 – as well as their descendants – are entitled to a German passport.

Mr Ross, who is best known for presenting Crimewatch, said that his father and grandmother left Berlin for London in 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany.

He wrote: “Immediately after Hitler was appointed my grandmother Annie Rosenbluth, who was then a 42-year-old Berlin goldsmith and artist, sent her teenage son, Hans — my father — to buy train tickets to London.

“She locked up the family’s summer house outside the city, returned to her home near the Tiergarten and quietly packed what could be carried, then closed up the apartment. Together with Hans and her daughter, Dina, she left her country, never to return.”

The presenter added that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had “resolved to go back and learn” of his family’s German roots.

He wrote: “I know there are some descendants of Nazi victims who can never forgive what happened in Germany’s darkest times, but I also know that virulent antisemitism was rife in many other countries too.

“I know the Germans perfected industrial mass murder, but throughout recorded history humankind has indulged in terrible bouts of slaughter, torture and wiping out whole populations.

“Yet I know of no other country whose people have faced up to their terrible deeds as have the vast majority of Germans.”