[4] According to the historian Doris Bergen, Adolf Hitler coined the definition of Volksdeutsche which appeared in a 1938 memorandum of the German Reich Chancellery.

[5] 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.

[6] In some areas, such as in Poland, Nazi authorities compiled specific lists and registered people as ethnic Germans in the "Deutsche Volksliste".

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.

Frederick the Great (reigned 1740–1786) 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.

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.

[12] Heimkehr's introduction explicitly states that hundreds of thousands of Poles of German ethnicity suffered as the characters in the film did.

[14] 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.

[15] 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.

[18] 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;[19] 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.

[25] Historian Matthias Fiedler typified ethnic German collaborationists as former "nobodies" whose major occupation was the expropriation of Jewish property.

In occupied Pomerania, the Gauleiter of the Danzig-West Prussia region Albert Forster ordered a list of people considered of German ethnicity to be made in 1941.

Due to insignificant voluntary registrations by February 1942, Forster made signing the Volksliste mandatory and empowered local authorities to use force and threats to implement the decree.

[35] The Deutsche Volksliste categorised non-Jewish Poles of German ethnicity into one of four categories:[36][37] Volksdeutsche of statuses 1 and 2 in the Polish areas annexed by Germany numbered 1 million, and Nos.

There were Volksdeutsche who played important roles in intelligence activities of the Polish resistance, and were at times the primary source of information for the Allies.

[39] The secret protocols caused Hitler to hurriedly evacuate ethnic German families, who had lived in the Baltic countries for centuries and now classified as Volksdeutsche, while officially condoning the invasions.

[40][41] When the three Baltic countries, not knowing about the secret protocols, sent letters protesting the Soviet invasions to Berlin, Ribbentrop returned them.

[42] In August 1940, Soviet Foreign minister Molotov told the Germans that, with the government change, they could close down their Baltic consulates by September 1.

[42] Germany wanted guarantees of the safety of property of ethnic Germans, security for the 125,000 Volksdeutsche in Bessarabia and North Bukovina, and reassurance that the train tracks carrying Romanian oil would be left alone.

[51] After Romania acquired parts of Soviet Ukraine, the Germans there came under the authority of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, which deployed SS personnel to several settlements.

German colonists and Selbstschutz forces engaged in extensive acts of ethnic cleansing, massacring Jewish and Roma populations.

During the winter of 1941/1942, German Selbstschutz units participated in the shooting, together with Ukrainian People's Militia and Romanian gendarmes, of some 18,000 Jews.

In the camp of Bogdanovka, tens of thousands of Jews were subject to mass shootings, barn burnings and killing by hand grenades.

Heinrich Himmler was sufficiently impressed by the Volksdeutsche communities and the work of the Selbstschutz to order that these methods be copied in Ukraine.

In the former Yugoslavia, the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen was formed with about 50,000 ethnic Germans from the Banat region of Serbia.

[54] 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.

[55][56][57][58] Most left the Soviet-occupied territories of Central and Eastern Europe; they comprised the largest migration of any European people in modern history.

[citation needed] The western powers hoped to avoid ethnic Germans being an issue again in Central and Eastern Europe.

A significant ethnic German community has continued in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania) in Romania and in Oberschlesien (Upper Silesia) but most of it migrated to West Germany throughout the 1980s.