page_title: Germany–Russia relations
section_title: German migrations eastward
hierarchical_section_title: Germany–Russia relations / History / German migrations eastward
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Памятник Э.И. Тотлебену: бульвар Исторический, Ленинский район, Севастополь This object is located on the Crimean Peninsula and recognized as cultural heritage by both Russia and Ukraine under the monument&#160;ID: 9230108002/ 85-002-0004, respectively. The legal status of the Crimean region is currently disputed.
context_page_description: Germany–Russia relations display cyclical patterns, moving back and forth from cooperation and alliance to strain and to total warfare. Historian John Wheeler-Bennett says that since the 1740s:
  Relations between Russia and Germany...have been a series of alienations, distinguished for their bitterness, and of rapprochements, remarkable for their warmth....A cardinal factor in the relationship has been the existence of an independent Poland...when separated by a buffer state the two great Powers of eastern Europe have been friendly, whereas a contiguity of frontiers has bred hostility.
  Russia helped liberate Germany in 1812–15 in the Napoleonic Wars, and the two were generally friendly for a century, especially during the time of Otto von Bismarck who established the League of Three Emperors in 1873 with Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. But after Bismarck's dismissal in 1890, his successors chose to support Austria against Russia over competing influence in the Balkans. Germany fought against Russia in World War I. Relations were warm in the 1920s, very cold in the 1930s, friendly in 1939–41, and then turned into war to the death in 1941–45.
context_section_description: Over the centuries there was a steady movement of Germans eastward, often into mostly Slavic areas and areas near to or controlled by Russia. Flegel, points out that German farmers, traders and entrepreneurs moved into East and West Prussia, the Baltic region (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonian), the Danzig and Vistula River region, Galicia, Slovenia, the Banat, the Bachka, Bukovina, Transylvania, the Volga River district of Russia, Posen, the Duchy of Warsaw, Polish and Ukrainian Volhynia, Bessarabia, and the Mount Ararat region between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Often they came at the invitation of the Russian government. The Germans typically became the dominant factors in land owning and business enterprise. Some groups, such as the Mennonites, migrated to North American 1860-1914.  The Germans in the Baltic states returned home voluntarily in 1940. Some 12 to 14 million were brutally expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries in Eastern Europe in 1944-46, with the death of 500,000 or more.  When the Cold War ended Germany funded the return of hundreds of thousands of people of German descent, whether or not they spoke German.
  A number of Baltic Germans served as ranking generals in the Russian Imperial Army and Navy, including Michael Barclay de Tolly, Adam von Krusenstern, Fabian von Bellingshausen, Friedrich von Buxhoeveden, Paul von Rennenkampf, Ivan Ivanovich Michelson and Eduard Totleben.
  Many Baltic Germans (such as Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, Yevgeny Miller, and Anatoly Lieven) sided with the Whites and related anti-Bolshevik forces (like the Baltische Landeswehr and the Freikorps movement) during the Russian Civil War.
caption: Monument to Baltic German military engineer Eduard Totleben in Sevastopol, Crimea
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