Volksdeutsche
In Nazi German terminology, Volksdeutsche were "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship." The term is the nominalised plural of volksdeutsch, with Volksdeutsche denoting a singular female, and Volksdeutscher, a singular male. The words Volk and völkisch conveyed the meanings of "folk".
Ethnic Germans living outside Germany shed their identity as Auslandsdeutsche, and morphed into the Volksdeutsche in a process of self-radicalisation. This process gave the Nazi regime the nucleus around which the new Volksgemeinschaft was established across the German borders.
Volksdeutsche were further divided into "racial" groupsminorities within a state minoritybased on special cultural, social, and historic criteria elaborated by the Nazis.
Origin of the term ''Volksdeutsche''
According to the historian Doris Bergen, Adolf Hitler coined the definition of Volksdeutsche which appeared in a 1938 memorandum of the German Reich Chancellery. That document defined Volksdeutsche as "people whose language and culture had German origins but who did not hold German citizenship". After 1945, the Nazi citizenship laws of 1935 and the associated regulations that referred to the National Socialist concepts of blood and race in connection with the concept of volksdeutschwere rescinded in Germany.For Adolf Hitler and the other ethnic Germans of his time, the term "Volksdeutsche" also carried overtones of blood and race not captured in the common English translation "ethnic Germans". According to German estimates in the 1930s, about 30 million Volksdeutsche and Auslandsdeutsche lived outside the Reich. A significant proportion of them were in Eastern Europe – i.e., Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, where many were located in villages along the Danube and in Russia.
The Nazi goal of expansion assigned the Volksdeutsche a special role in German plans, to bring them back to German citizenship and to elevate them to power over the native populations in those areas. The Nazis detailed such goals in Generalplan Ost.
In some areas, such as in Poland, Nazi authorities compiled specific lists and registered people as ethnic Germans in the "Deutsche Volksliste".
Historical background
In the sixteenth century Vasili III invited small numbers of craftsmen, traders and professionals to settle in Russia from areas that would later become Germany so that Muscovy could exploit their skills. These settlers were generally confined to the German Quarter in Moscow. They were only gradually allowed in other cities, so as to prevent the spread of alien ideas to the general population.In his youth, Peter the Great spent much time in the 'German' quarter. When he became Tsar, he brought more German experts into Russia, and particularly into government service, in his attempts to westernise the empire. He also brought in German engineers to supervise the construction of the new city of Saint Petersburg. Catherine the Great, herself ethnically German, invited Germanic farmers to immigrate and settle in Russian lands along the Volga River. She guaranteed them the right to retain their language, religion and culture.
Also in other areas with an ethnic German minority people of other than German descent assimilated with the ethnic German culture and formed then a part of the minority. Examples are people of Baltic and Scandinavian descent, who assimilated into the minority of the Baltic Germans. Jews of Posen province, Galicia, Bukovina and Bohemia, with their Yiddish culture derived in part from their German heritage, often mingled into the ethnic German culture, thus forming part of the various ethnic German minorities. But anti-Semitic Nazis later rejected Jewish ethnic Germans and all Jewish German citizens as "racially" German.
Ethnic Germans were also sent in organised colonisation attempts aiming at Germanisation of conquered Polish areas. Frederick the Great settled around 300,000 colonists in the eastern provinces of Prussia, acquired in the First Partition of Poland of 1772, with the intention of replacing the Polish nobility. He treated the Poles with contempt and likened the "slovenly Polish trash" in newly occupied West Prussia to Iroquois, the historic Native American confederacy based in what is now the state of New York.
Prussia encouraged a second round of colonisation with the goal of Germanisation after 1832. Prussia passed laws to encourage Germanisation of the Prussian Partition including the provinces of Posen and West Prussia in the late 19th century. The Prussian Settlement Commission relocated 154,000 colonists, including locals.
Treaty of Versailles
The reconstitution of Poland following the Treaty of Versailles made ethnic German minorities of some Prussian provinces of the German Empire citizens of the Polish nation state. Ethnic German inhabitants of provinces of the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as Bukovina Germans, Danube Swabians, Sudeten Germans and Transylvanian Saxons, became citizens of newly established Slavic or Magyar nation-states and of Romania. Tensions between the new administration and the ethnic German minority arose in the Polish Corridor. The Austrian Germans also found themselves not allowed to join Germany as German Austria was strictly forbidden to join Germany as well as the name "German Austria" was forbidden so the name was changed back to just "Austria" and the First Austrian Republic was created in 1919.The Nazi era before World War II
During the Nazi years, the German Nazis used the term "Volksdeutsche", by which they meant racially German since they believed in a German 'race' or 'Volk', to refer to foreign nationals of some German ethnicity living in countries newly occupied by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Prior to World War II, more than 10 million ethnic Germans lived in Central and Eastern Europe. They constituted an important minority far into Russia. Because of widespread assimilation some people whom the Nazis called Volksdeutsche could no longer speak German and in fact were culturally regionalized as Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, etc.Pre-war relations with the Nazis
In 1931, prior to its rise to power, the Nazi party established the Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP/AO, whose task it was to disseminate Nazi propaganda among the ethnic German minorities viewed as Volksdeutsche in Nazi ideology. In 1936, the government set up the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, commonly known as VoMi, under the jurisdiction of the SS as the liaison bureau. It was headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz.According to the historian Valdis Lumans,
Internal propaganda
Nazi propaganda used the existence of ethnic Germans who they called Volksdeutsche in foreign lands before and during the war, to help justify the aggression of Nazi Germany. The annexation of Poland was presented as necessary to protect the ethnic German minorities there. Massacres of ethnic Germans, such as Bloody Sunday, or alleged atrocities, were used in such propaganda, and the film Heimkehr drew on such putative events as the rescue of Volksdeutsche by the arrival of German tanks. Heimkehr's introduction explicitly states that hundreds of thousands of Poles of German ethnicity suffered as the characters in the film did.Menschen im Sturm reprised "Heimkehr"'s effort to justify the invasion of Slavonia, using many of the same atrocities. In The Red Terror, a Baltic German is able to avenge her family's deaths, but commits suicide after, unable to live with meaning in the Soviet Union. Flüchtlinge depicted the sufferings of Volga German refugees in Manchuria, and how a heroic blond leader saved them; it was the first movie to win the state prize. Frisians in Peril depicted the suffering of a village of Volga Germans in the Soviet Union; it also depicted the murder of a young woman for an affair with a Russianin accordance with Nazi principle of Rassenschandeas an ancient German custom.
Sexual contact between what the Nazis viewed as different 'races' followed by remorse and guilt was also featured in Die goldene Stadt, where the Sudeten German heroine faces not persecution but the allure of the big city; when she succumbs, in defiance of blood and soil, she is seduced and abandoned by a Czech, and such a relationship leads to her drowning herself.
Collaboration with the Nazis
Before and during World War II, some ethnic Germans gathered around local Nazi organizations, actively supported the Nazis in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. During the social and economic tensions of the Great Depression, some had begun to feel aggrieved with their minority status. They participated in espionage, sabotage and other fifth column means in their countries of origin, trained and commanded by Abwehr. In November 1938 Nazi Germany organized German paramilitary units made out German minority members in Polish Pomerania that were to engage in diversion, sabotage as well as political murder and ethnic cleansing upon German invasion of Poland.Reich intelligence actively recruited ethnic Germans, and the Nazi secret service "SicherheitsDienst" formed them as early as October 1938 into armed unit that were to serve Nazi Germany.
Historian Matthias Fiedler typified ethnic German collaborationists as former "nobodies" whose major occupation was the expropriation of Jewish property. Heinrich Himmler remarked that whatever objections ethnic Germans might have against serving in the Waffen-SS, they would be conscripted in any case. According to head of recruitment for the Waffen SS, Gottlob Berger, no one in Germany or elsewhere cared for what happened to the ethnic Germans anyway, which made recruitment easy forced upon ethnic German communities.
Among the indigenous populations in the Nazi-occupied lands, Volksdeutsche became a term of ignominy.
During the early years of the Second World War, before the US entered the war, a small number of Americans of German origin returned to Germany; generally they were immigrants or children of immigrants, rather than descendants of migrations more distant in time. Some of these enlisted and fought in the German army.