Germans of Romania

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Germans in Romania
Rumäniendeutsche
Total population
36,884 (2011 census)
Regions with significant populations
Central and North East Romania (Eastern carpathians)
Languages
mainly German,
also Romanian, Hungarian etc
Religion
Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism
Germans in Romania (2002 census)

The Germans of Romania or Rumäniendeutsche are an ethnic group of Romania. They were of a number of 786,000 of Germans in interwar Romania in 1939,[1][2] a number that had fallen to 36,884 by 2011 in modern Romania. They are not a single group; thus, to understand their language, culture, and history, one must view them as independent groups:

See Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania for their official representation.

House of Hohenzollern in Romania

The house of Hohenzollern representative kings from a German family house that ruled over Romania for a period:

  • 1866–1914: Charles I (also Prince of Romania)
  • 1914–1927: Ferdinand
  • 1927–1930: Michael
  • 1930–1940: Charles II
  • 1940–1947: Michael (again)

Important communities for the German minority

Notable Romanian Germans

Role in Second World War

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. They eventually contained German mayors, farms, schools and ethnic German paramilitary groups functioning as police called Selbstschutz.

Those German colonists and Selbstschutz forces engaged in ethnic cleansing, massacring Jewish and Roma population near their settlements. In the German colony Shonfeld gypsies were burned on farms, and during the winter 1941/1942 German Selbstschutz units participated in shooting (together with Ukrainian militia and Romanian gendarmes) 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 most impressed by the Volksdeutsche communities and the work of the Selbstschutz and ordered to these methods be copied in Ukraine.[3]

By year 1950 about 253,000 Rumäniendeutsche were expelled and 421,846 remained in Romania.[citation needed] By year 2011 about 36,000 remained as the result of mass migration to Germany. [4]

Historical population
Year Pop.  ±%  
1887 50,000—    
1930 745,421+1390.8%
1939 786,000+5.4%
1950 421,846−46.3%
1956 384,708−8.8%
1966 382,595−0.5%
1977 359,109−6.1%
1990 200,000−44.3%
2009 135,088−32.5%
Starting with the 1930 figures, the reference is to all German-speaking groups in Romania.

References

  1. ↑ Dr. Gerhard Reichning, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen, Teil 1, Bonn 1995, Page 17
  2. ↑ Die deutschen Vertreibungsverluste. Bevölkerungsbilanzen für die deutschen Vertreibungsgebiete 1939/50. Herausgeber: Statistisches Bundesamt - Wiesbaden. - Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1958 Page 46
  3. ↑ Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History by Wendy Lower, A. Dirk Moses Berghahn Books 2008, page 389
  4. ↑ Die Deutschen und Ungarn erreichten historisches Tief

See also

  • ethnic Germans
  • Expulsion of Germans from Romania after World War II


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