Germans of Romania

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Germans in Romania
Rumäniendeutsche
Total population
(36,884 (2011 census) [1])
Regions with significant populations
Central and North East Romania (Eastern carpathians)
Languages
mainly German, Swabian German, Transylvanian Saxon dialect
also Romanian, Hungarian etc.
Religion
Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism
File:Germanii din Romania (2002).png
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

Members of the German family of Hohenzollern who ruled over Romania for a period:

Notable communities for the German minority (at least 1%)

Notable German-Romanians

War crimes 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 ("Self-protection").

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

In the German colony of Schonfeld, Romas were burned in farms. During the winter of 1941/1942, German Selbstschutz units participated in the shooting, together with Ukrainian 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.[3]

Expulsion of Germans from Romania after World War II

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Historical population
Year Pop. ±%
1887 50,000 —    
1930 745,421 +1390.8%
1948 343,913 −53.9%
1956 384,708 +11.9%
1966 382,595 −0.5%
1977 359,109 −6.1%
1992 119,462 −66.7%
2002 59,764 −50.0%
2011 36,042 −39.7%
Starting with the 1930 figures, the reference is to all German-speaking groups in Romania.

See also

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. Moses, Dirk A. (editor) Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, Berghahn Books, December 2009, ISBN 978-1-84545-719-8, p. 389