Hannah Arendt made a particularly disturbing claim in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism: the status as a stateless person was so undesirable that it would have been better to commit a petty theft. As Arendt put it, “As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal”.  This problem arose from the very conditions required for a nation-state to be truly considered a nation-state. In a world where states required “homogeneity of population and rootedness in the soil”, there was no space for minorities.  When the era of Nazi anti-Semitism arrived, states found themselves following Germany’s example. After all, the “Jewish question… was indeed solved” by driving the German Jews out of Germany itself with systematic exterminations following suit. Because of Germany’s success in persecuting German Jews, “all the minority countries began to think in terms of expatriating their minorities”.  In these countries, “the nation had conquered the state”.  Thus, a population of both de jure and de facto stateless peoples was created. These stateless people created by the political instability of two world wars had several problems in common. First, they were people who had become “undeportable” because “there was no country on earth in which they enjoyed the right to residence”.  Whether if this had occurred because their home state found them undesirable and had their citizenships stripped or because their home state had dissolved into nonexistence, these people did not have a place they could go “without the severest restrictions”.  The second issue was that these rightless people lost government protection. Not only did they lose their right to legal protection in the land they had been tied to, they lost the ability to take “[their] legal status with [them]”.  With this, the stateless and rightless people of the postwar era found themselves “out of legality altogether”.  Lastly, countries that received a large number of stateless refugees began “reverting to the status of statelessness” and the general quality of life for “all aliens markedly deteriorated”.  Combined with the Holocaust and the mass devastation that had spread throughout Europe, leaders of the world banded together in 1948 and brought the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into existence with the hope “never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again”.  It seemed like mankind was determined to learn from the mistakes of the past.