Recruited as immigrants to Russia in the 18th century, they were allowed to maintain their German culture, language, traditions and churches (Lutheran, Reformed, Catholics, Moravians and Mennonites).

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Volga Germans emigrated to the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina.

After the October Revolution, the Volga German ASSR was established as an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR.

Following the lead of Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria and Hungary, inviting Germans to settle on the Danube in the Balkans, Catherine the Great published manifestos in 1762 and 1763 inviting non-Jewish Europeans[4] to immigrate and become Russian subjects and farm Russian lands while maintaining their language and culture.

Some, such as being exempt from military service, were revoked in the latter part of the 19th century when the government needed more conscripts for the Russian army.

This caused some Germans to organize themselves and send emissaries to some countries in the Americas in order to assess potential settlement destinations.

Many Catholic Volga Germans chose South America as their new homeland because the nations shared their religion.

The south-central part of North Dakota was known as "the German-Russian triangle" (that includes descendants of Black Sea Germans).

They also settled in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon (especially in Portland[6]), Washington, Wisconsin, and Fresno County in California's Central Valley.

Many of the immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1912 spent a period doing farm labor, especially in northeastern Colorado and in Montana along the lower Yellowstone River in sugar beet fields.

[7] In Canada, the largest groups settled mainly in the area of the Great Plains: Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan.

In Saskatchewan, many settled in the predominantly German settlement of St. Joseph's Colony, including the town of Luseland.

Every year, the community of Volga German descendants holds different celebrations in the country in which they keep their traditions alive.

Consequently, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution on August 12, calling for the expulsion of the entire ethnic German population.

With this authority, Beria on August 27 issued an order entitled "On Measures for Conducting the Operation of Resettling the Germans from the Volga German Republic, Saratov, and Stalingrad Oblasts", assigning the deputy head of the NKVD, (secret police) Ivan Serov, to command this operation.

Stalin allegedly gave the following "secret" order to the NKVD, produced in German controlled Latvia on September 20, 1941:

According to anti-communist Stanford historian Robert Conquest, during the first stage, about one-third (estimated at 1.5 million)[27] did not survive the camps.

After World War II, many survivors remained in the Ural Mountains, Siberia, Kazakhstan (1.4% of today's Kazakh population are recognized as Germans - around 200,000), Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan (about 16,000 or 0.064%).

Since the late 1980s and the fall of the Soviet Union, some ethnic Germans have returned in small numbers to Engels, but many more emigrated permanently to Germany.

This tempo increased after Germany stopped granting the free right of return to ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union.

The dialects of the Germans of Russia mainly presented differences in pronunciation, as occurs in the diversity of the English language.

[71] The Standard German-related variety influenced by dialects and spoken by Volgan Germans who moved to Argentina is called Paraná-Wolga-Deutsch.