List of terms used for Germans

There are many terms for the German people; in English, the demonym, or noun, is German. During the early Renaissance, "German" implied that the person spoke German as a native language. Until the German unification, people living in the Germany to come were named for the region in which they lived: Examples are Bavarians and Brandenburgers.
Some terms are humorous or pejorative slang, and used mainly by people from other countries, although they can be used in a self-deprecating way by German people themselves. Other terms are serious or tongue-in-cheek attempts to coin words as alternatives to the ambiguous standard terms.
Many pejorative terms for Germans in various countries originated during the two World Wars.

English

Hun (pejorative)

Hun is a term that originally refers to the nomadic Huns of the Migration Period. Beginning in World War I it became an often used pejorative seen on war posters by Western Allied powers and the basis for a characterization of the Germans as barbaric criminals with no respect for civilization and humanitarian values. Although the common English association of the term is with the First World War, the term had been used throughout the preceding decades, with instances dating to the Franco-Prussian War, and some referring to British actions in the Second Boer War.
The wartime association of the term with Germans is believed to have been inspired by an earlier address to Imperial German troops by Kaiser Wilhelm II. What is dubbed the "Hun speech" was delivered on 27 July 1900, when he bade farewell to the German expeditionary corps sailing from the port of Bremerhaven to take part in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion. The relevant part of the speech was:
The theme of Hunnic savagery was then developed in a speech of August Bebel in the Reichstag in which he recounted details of the cruelty of the German expedition which were taken from soldiers' letters home, styled the Hunnenbriefe.
The Kaiser's speech was widely reported in the European press at that time.
The term "Hun" from this speech was later used for the Germans by British and other Allied propaganda during the war. The comparison was helped by the spiked Pickelhaube helmet worn by German forces until 1916, which would be reminiscent of images depicting ancient warrior helmets. This usage, emphasising the idea that the Germans were barbarians, was reinforced by the propaganda utilised throughout the war. The French songwriter Théodore Botrel described the Kaiser as "an Attila, without remorse", launching "cannibal hordes".
By coincidence, Gott mit uns, a motto first used in the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire, may have contributed to the popularisation of 'Huns' as British Army slang for Germans by misreading 'uns' for 'Huns'.
The usage of the term "Hun" to describe Germans resurfaced during World War II, although less frequently than in the previous war. For example in 1941, Winston Churchill said in a broadcast speech: "There are less than 70,000,000 malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable, most of whom are already engaged in holding down Austrians, Czechs, Poles and the many other ancient races they now bully and pillage."
Later that year Churchill referred to the invasion of the Soviet Union as "the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts." During this time American President Franklin D. Roosevelt also referred to the German people in this way, saying that an Allied invasion into Southern France would surely "be successful and of great assistance to Eisenhower in driving the Huns from France."

Fritz

soldiers employed a variety of epithets for the Germans. Fritz, a German pet-form of Friedrich, was popular in both World War I and World War II.

Heinie (pejorative)

The Americans and Canadians referred to Germans, especially German soldiers, as Heinies, from a diminutive of the common German male proper name Heinrich. For example, in the film 1941 the Slim Pickens character calls a German officer "Mr Hynee Kraut!".
Heinie is also a colloquial term for buttocks, in use since the 1920s. In German, Heini is a common colloquial term with a slightly pejorative meaning similar to "moron" or "idiot", but has a different origin.

Japanazi (pejorative)

During World War II, the slur Japanazi was developed as a combination of the words Japan and Nazi, used as discriminatory words against both the Japanese and Germans for being the driving forces and brutalities in the same war. The word was popularised in a 1943 propaganda cartoon, Tokio Jokio.

Jerry

Jerry was a nickname given to Germans mostly during the Second World War by soldiers and civilians of the Allied nations, in particular by the British. The nickname was originally created during World War I. The term is the basis for the name of the jerrycan.
The name may simply be an alteration of the word German. Alternatively, Jerry may possibly be derived from the stahlhelm introduced in 1916, which was said by British soldiers to resemble a "jerry".

Kraut (pejorative)

is a German word recorded in English from 1918 onwards as a derogatory term for a German, particularly a German soldier during World War I. The term came up after the American entry into World War I, which followed the Turnip Winter and had resulted in the food trade stop for Germany through neutral states. The analogy of this term is the starving soldier of World War I, who ran out of supplies for a long war-period and needed to eat wild cabbage.
Before the Second World War the term was used in relation to cabbage, because anti-German boycotts and de facto trade limitations hit Germany's food imports. Early American war propaganda used the language in such a manner that 'Kraut' and 'Krauthead' gave the Germans less dignity.
In the 18th century, poor Swiss German immigrants to the US were described as Krauts because they consumed sauerkraut. Sauerkraut was also a common food served on German ships to fight scurvy, while the British used limes and got called limey. In Switzerland it was a food preserved for hard winters that could go on for half a year.
The stereotype of a sauerkraut-eating German appears in Jules Verne's depiction of the evil, German industrialist Schultze, who is an avid sauerkraut-eater in The Begum's Fortune. Schultze's enemy is an Alsatian who hates sauerkraut but pretends to love it to win his enemy's confidence.
The rock music genre krautrock has been commonplace in music journalism since the early 1970s and is of English invention.

Nazi (pejorative)

Nazi, a shortening of Nationalsozialist a derogatory word for a backwards peasant, which may have influenced the use of that abbreviation by the Nazis′ opponents and its avoidance by the Nazis themselves.

Ted

"Ted", and "Teds", from Tedeschi, the Italian word for Germans, became the term used by Allied soldiers during the Italian campaign of World War II.

Teuton (poetic)

In a more poetical sense Germans can be referred to as Teutons. The usage of the word in this term has been observed in English since 1833. The word originated via an ancient Germanic tribe, the Teutons.

Boche (pejorative)

Pronounced, boche is a derisive term used by the Allies during World War I, often collectively. It is a shortened form of the French slang portmanteau alboche, itself derived from Allemand and caboche. The alternative spellings "Bosch" or "Bosche" are sometimes found. According to a 1916 article in the New York Times magazine Current History, the origin is as follows:

Squarehead (pejorative)

"Squarehead", a generic derogatory term for people from Germany and Scandinavia; Commonly used for Germans during the First and Second World War, but found in a collection of slang from 1906 relating particularly to German military style.
The term Boxhead, commonly used after World War II within the British Armed Forces in the former West Germany is derived from this.

Erics

First came to prominence in the English 1983 television show Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. It was a term used by the English and Irish when referring to Germans without them knowing it was them being talked about.

Other countries

Austria

Piefke (pejorative)

The Austrian ethnic slur for a German is Piefke. Like its Bavarian counterpart Saupreiß, the term Piefke historically characterized only the people of Prussia, and not people of other Germanic states. There are two hypotheses on how the term developed; both of them suggest an origin in the 1860s. One theory is that the term came from the name of the popular Prussian composer Johann Gottfried Piefke, who composed some of the most iconic German military marches, for example Preußens Gloria and the Königgrätzer Marsch - particularly since Piefke and his brother conducted the Prussian music corps in the parade in Austria following the Prussian victory of the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. The second theory suggests an origin in the Second Schleswig War in 1864, where Prussians and Austrians were allies. A Prussian soldier with the name Piefke and a stereotypically Prussian gruff and snappy manner made such a negative impression on his Austrian comrades that the term came to refer to all Prussians.
Since Prussia no longer exists, the term refers to the cliché of a pompous northern Protestant German in general and a Berliner in particular. However, the citizens of the free Hanseatic cities and the former northern duchies of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Mecklenburg are also quite offended by the terms Piefke and also by Saupreiß. In 1990, Austrian playwright Felix Mitterer wrote and co-directed a TV mini-series, Die Piefke-Saga, about Germans on holiday in Tyrol. Sometimes the alteration "Piefkineser" is used. Some Austrians use the playful term "Piefkinesisch" to refer to German spoken in a distinctly northern German - that is, not Austrian - dialect.