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Volksdeutsche ("ethnic Germans") is a historical term which arose in the early 20th century and was used by the Nazis to describe ethnic Germans, without German citizenship, living outside of Nazi Germany, although many had been in other areas for centuries.
The English term Germans is derived from the ethnonym Germani, which was used for Germanic peoples in ancient times. [7] [8] Since the early modern period, it has been the most common name for the Germans in English, being applied to any citizens, natives or inhabitants of Germany, regardless of whether they are considered to have German ethnicity.
Most ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from European countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary) under the Potsdam Agreement from 1945 to 1948 towards the end and after the war. Those who became ethnic Germans, by registering in the Deutsche Volksliste and Reichsdeutsche, retained German citizenship during the years of Allied military ...
Prussia (green) within the German Empire 1871–1918. A map of Austria-Hungary, showing areas inhabited by ethnic Germans in red according to the 1910 census. By the 19th century, every city of even modest size as far east as Russia had a German quarter and a Jewish quarter.
The accommodation and integration of these Heimatvertriebene in the remaining part of Germany, in which many cities and millions of apartments had been destroyed, was a major effort in the post-war occupation zones and later states of Germany. Since the 1960s, ethnic Germans from the People's Republic of Poland and Soviet Union (especially from ...
The beginnings of ethnic geography as an academic subdiscipline lie in the period following World War I, in the context of nationalism, and in the 1930s exploitation for the purposes of fascist and Nazi propaganda, so that it was only in the 1960s that ethnic geography began to thrive as a bona fide academic subdiscipline.
The territorial evolution of Germany in this article include all changes in the modern territory of Germany from its unification making it a country on 1 January 1871 to the present although the history of "Germany" as a territorial polity concept and the history of the ethnic Germans are much longer and much more complex.
Russia Germans can receive a more specific name according to where and when they settled. For example, an ethnic German born in a village in Odesa is a Ukraine German, a Black Sea German and a Russia German (the former Russian Empire). Alternatively, the Germans of Odesa belong to the group of the Germans of Ukraine, of the Black Sea, of Russia ...