German diaspora

The German diaspora (German: Deutschstämmige, pronounced [ˈdɔɪ̯t͡ʃˌʃtɛmɪɡə] ) consists of German people and their descendants who live outside of Germany. The term is used in particular to refer to the aspects of migration of German speakers from Central Europe to different countries around the world. This definition describes the "German" term as a sociolinguistic group as opposed to the national one since the emigrant groups came from different regions with diverse cultural practices and different varieties of German. For instance, the Alsatians and Hessians were often simply called "Germans" once they set foot in their new homelands.
Volksdeutsche ("ethnic Germans") is a historical term which arose in the early 20th century and was used by the Nazis to describe ethnic Germans, without German citizenship, living outside of Nazi Germany, although many had been in other areas for centuries. During World War II, Hitler forbade the use of the term because it was being used in a derogatory way against the many ethnic Germans in the SS. It is used by many historians who either deliberately or innocently are unaware of its Nazi history.
Auslandsdeutsche (adj. auslandsdeutsch) is a concept that connotes German citizens, regardless of which ethnicity, living abroad, or alternatively ethnic Germans entering Germany from abroad. Today, this means a citizen of Germany living more or less permanently in another country (including expatriates such as long-term academic exchange lecturers and the like), who are allowed to vote in the Republic's elections, but who usually do not pay taxes to Germany but in their resident states. In a looser but still valid sense, and in general discourse, the word is frequently used in lieu of the ideologically tainted term Volksdeutsche, denoting persons living abroad without German citizenship but defining themselves as Germans (culturally or ethnically speaking).
Ethnic Germans are a minority group in many countries. The following sections briefly detail the historical and present distribution of ethnic Germans by region, but generally exclude modern expatriates, who have a presence in the United States, Scandinavia and major urban areas worldwide.
In 1980, the first year of the US Census national origins questionnaire, Americans self-identifying as being of German ancestry formed the second-largest group. With the introduction of the "American" ethnic category between 1990-2010 (it was eliminated in the 2020 Census), millions of Americans ceased identifying as being of English ancestry, instead opting to identify only as "American" (or ignoring the ancestry question altogether). English is the most widespread ancestry in the United States, and still the largest white demographic in both 'Alone', and 'Alone and In Combination' categories in the 2020 Census, though demographers still consider this an under-count due to previous national origin studies showing over 2x more English ancestry than German as recent as 'Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933).. People of partial German ancestry form an important minority group in several countries, including Canada (roughly 10% of the population), Argentina (roughly 8% of the population), Brazil (roughly 3% of the population), Australia (roughly 4.5% of the population), Chile (roughly 3% of the population), Namibia and in central and eastern Europe—(Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Russia).
Distribution of German citizens and people claiming German ancestry (figures are only estimates and actual population could be higher, because of misleadingly formulated questions in censuses in various countries (for example in Poland) and other different factors, f.e. related to participant in a census):
Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein each have a German-speaking majority, though the vast majority of the population do not identify themselves as German anymore. Austrians historically were identified as and considered themselves Germans until after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II. Post-1945 a broader Austrian national identity began to emerge, and over 90% of the Austrians now see themselves as an independent nation.
Aside from the Germans who migrated to other parts of Europe, the German diaspora also covered the Eastern and Central European states such as Croatia, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, along with several post-Soviet states. There has been a continued historical presence of Germans in these regions due to the interrelated processes of conquest and colonization as well as migration and border changes. During the periods of colonization, for instance, there was an influx of Germans who came to Bohemia and parts of Romania as colonizers. Settlements due to border changes were largely 20th century developments caused by the new political order after the two world wars.
In Belgium, there is an ethnic German minority. It is the majority in its region of 71,000 inhabitants. Ethnologue puts the national total of German speakers at 150,000, not including Limburgish and Luxembourgish.
Before World War II, some 30% of the population in Czechia were ethnic Germans, and in the border regions and certain other areas they were in the majority. There are about 21,000 Germans in the Czech Republic (number of Czechs who have at least partly German ancestry probably runs into the hundreds of thousands). Their number has been consistently decreasing since World War II. According to the 2011 census, there remain 11 municipalities and settlements in Czech Republic with more than 6% Germans.
The situation in Slovakia was different from that in Czech Republic, in that the number of Germans was considerably lower and that the Germans from Slovakia were almost completely evacuated to German states as the Soviet army was moving west through Slovakia, and only a fraction of those who returned to Slovakia after the end of the war were deported with the Germans from the Czech lands.
Many representatives of expellee organizations support the erection of bilingual signs in all formerly German-speaking territory as a visible sign of the bilingual linguistic and cultural heritage of the region. The erection of bilingual signs is permitted if a minority constitutes 10% of the population.
In Denmark, the part of Schleswig that is now South Jutland County (or Northern Schleswig) is inhabited by about 12,000–20,000 ethnic Germans They speak mainly Standard German and South Jutlandic. A few speak Schleswigsch, a Northern Low Saxon dialect.
In France, over 100,000 German nationals residing in the French country. The exact number is not known; some statistics indicate more than 300,000 Germans in France, but they are not officially sanctioned. There, the Germans live mainly in the northeastern area of France, i.e., in regions close to the Franco-German border (i.e. Alsace), and the island of Corsica.
Prior to World War II, approximately 1.5 million Danube Swabians lived in Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Today the German minority in Hungary have minority rights, organisations, schools and local councils, but spontaneous assimilation is well under way. Many of the deportees visited their old homes after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Around 178,000 Germans live in Hungary.
There are smaller, unique populations of Germans who arrived so long ago that their dialect retains many archaic features heard nowhere else: the Cimbrians are concentrated in various communities in the Carnic Alps, north of Verona, and especially in the Sugana Valley on the high plateau northwest of Vicenza in the Veneto region; the Walsers, who originated in the Swiss Wallis, live in the provinces of Aostatal, Vercelli, and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola; the Mòchenos live in the Fersina Valley. Smaller German-speaking communities also exist in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region: the Carinthians in the Canale Valley (municipalities of Tarvisio, Malborghetto Valbruna and Pontebba) and the Zahren and Timau Germans in Carnia.
Contrarily to the before-mentioned minorities, the German-speaking population of the province of South Tyrol cannot be categorized as "ethnic German" according to the definition of this article, but as Austrian minority. However, as Austrians saw themselves as ethnic Germans until the end of World War II they can technically also be called Germans. The province was part of the Austrian County of Tyrol before the 1919 dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. South Tyroleans were part of the over 3 million German speaking Austrians who in 1918 found themselves living outside of the newborn Austrian Republic as minorities in the newly formed or enlarged respective states of Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Italy. Their dialect is Austro-Bavarian German. Both standard German and dialect are used in schooling and media. German enjoys co-official status with the national language of Italian throughout this region.
Germans have been present in the Iglesiente mining region in the south west of Sardinia since the 13th century. Successively since 1850 groups of specialised workers from Styria, Austria, followed by German miners from Freiburg settled in the same area. Some Germans influenced building and toponym is still visible in this area.
In Norway, there are 27,770 Germans making them the ninth largest ethnic minority in the country, thus constituting 0.52% of Norway's total population, and 2.94% of all foreign residents in Norway. Immigration from Germany to Norway has occurred since the Middle Ages. There have been many Germans who migrated to Bergen during the Middle Ages and also during Norway's union with Denmark. During the Union with Denmark, a lot of German miners migrated to the town of Kongsberg. As of 2020, there are 1,446 Germans in the city of Bergen, making up 0.51% of the total population, and in the town of Kongsberg there are 114 Germans, making up 0.41% of the total population respectively. The city with the biggest population of Germans is Oslo. 3,743 Germans live in the city, thereby making up 0.55% of the total population. Germany is also the country that sends the most foreign exchange students to Norway, in 2016, 1,570 exchange students came to Norway from Germany.
The remaining German minority in Poland (109,000 people were registered in the 2011 census) enjoys minority rights according to Polish minority law. There are German speakers throughout Poland, and most of the Germans live in the Opole Voivodeship in Silesia. Bilingual signs are posted in some towns of the region. In addition, there are bilingual schools and German can be used instead of Polish in dealings with officials in several towns.
As of December 2022, there are 20,500 German nationals residing in Portugal. This number only include foreign nationals and thus excludes German citizens who have acquired Portuguese citizenship (around 400 people since 2008), as well as Portuguese people of German descent.
Around 6,000 Germans live in the municipalities of Lisbon, Oeiras, Sintra or Cascais, in the Portuguese Riviera. On the other hand, around 5,000 Germans live in the southern region of Algarve. The German community is especially noticeable in Lisbon and Porto. Each city hosts a German Evangelical Church, a German school and offers German libraries. There is also a German church as well as a German school in Algarve while Madeira hosts a German Evangelical Church. Lisbon also hosts a Catholic German Church and a German cemetery since 1821. Many Luso-Germans have acquired fame throughout the years. Individuals of the community include Alfredo Keil (1850–1907), composer of A Portuguesa, the Portuguese national anthem, archaeologist Virgínia Rau (1907–1973), banker and industrialist António Champalimaud (1918–2004), architect Francisco Keil do Amaral (1910–1975) and former prime minister Ernesto Hintze Ribeiro (1849–1907). Contemporary figures of German descent include football player Diego Moreira, Eurovision song contest winner Salvador Sobral, surfer Nic von Rupp, actresses Catarina Wallenstein and Vera Kolodzig, and tennis player Maria João Koehler. Amongst the most notable Luso-Germans there is undoubtedly João Frederico Ludovice, who was commissioned the project for the Mafra National Palace in 1711.
As of 2022, according to the Romanian Census, there were circa 22,900 ethnic Germans recorded in Romania.
Since the High Middle Ages, the territory of present-day Romania has been continuously inhabited by German-speaking groups, firstly by Transylvanian Saxons then, gradually, by other immigrant groups of ethnic German origin. They are all politically represented by the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (FDGR/DFDR).
During the 11th century, Sweden was visited by missionaries from Germany. During the Middle Ages, Hanseatic merchants had a great influence on Swedish trade and also the Swedish language. According to a survey, the proportion of German loanwords in Swedish is 24–30 percent (slightly depending on how you calculate). During the period of great power, a number of German congregations were formed in Sweden. Including Karlskrona German parish, which then became part of Karlskrona Admiralty parish. Today, there are two more active German congregations in Sweden. They are part of the parishes of the Church of Sweden, the German Christinae parish and the German St. Gertrude's parish consists of German citizens or Swedes of German origin. In connection with the two world wars, several German children of war came to Sweden. Between the late 1940s and early 1990s, many East German refugees also came to Sweden. On 31 December 2014, there were 49,359 people in Sweden who were born in Germany, of whom 23,195 were men (47.0%) and 26,164 women (53.0%). The corresponding figure for 31 December 2000 was 38,155, of which 16,965 men (44.5%) and 21,190 women (55.5%).There were 28,172 people in Sweden with German citizenship. In 2019, according to Statistics Sweden, German immigrants together with the Chinese were the most highly educated who migrate to Sweden, with a proportion of 70 per cent who are highly educated, which is well above the average for Sweden's population which is 30 per cent. Around 29,505 German Citizens living in Sweden in 2020.
In the United Kingdom, a German-Briton ethnic group of around 300,000 exists. Some are descended from 19th-century immigrants. Others are 20th-century immigrants and their descendants, and others are World War II prisoners of war held in Great Britain who decided to stay there. Others arrived as spouses of English soldiers from post-war marriages in Germany, when the British were occupying forces. Many of the more recent immigrants have settled in the London and southeast part of England, in particular, Richmond (South West London).
The British royal family are partially descended from German monarchs.
Due to Brexit, the number of Germans in the UK has declined significantly. In 2021, there were only 135,000 Germans in the UK.
During the long decline of the Roman Empire and the ensuing great migrations Germanic tribes such as the Vandals (who sacked Rome) migrated into North Africa and settled mainly in the lands corresponding to modern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria. While it is likely that some of the people living there at present are descended from these Germanic peoples, they did not leave visible cultural traces.
The first German trading post in the Duala area on the Kamerun River delta was established in 1868 by the Hamburg trading company C. Woermann. The firm's agent in Gabon, Johannes Thormählen, expanded activities to the Kamerun River delta. In 1874, together with the Woermann agent in Liberia, Wilhelm Jantzen, the two merchants founded their own company, Jantzen & Thormählen there. At the outbreak of World War I, French, Belgian and British troops invaded the German colony in 1914 and fully occupied it during the Kamerun campaign. The last German fort to surrender was the one at Mora in the north of the colony in 1916. Following Germany's defeat, the Treaty of Versailles divided the territory into two League of Nations mandates (Class B) under the administration of Great Britain and France. French Cameroun and part of British Cameroons reunified in 1961 as Cameroon, though some Germans still remain in Cameroon.
Germany was not as involved in colonizing Africa as other major European powers of the 20th century, and lost its overseas colonies, including German East Africa and German South West Africa, after World War I. Similarly to those in Latin America, the Germans in Africa tended to isolate themselves and were more self-sufficient than other Europeans. In Namibia there are 30,000 ethnic Germans, though it is estimated that only a third of those retain the language. Most German-speakers live in the capital, Windhoek, and in smaller towns such as Swakopmund and Lüderitz, where German architecture is highly visible.
In South Africa, a number of Afrikaners and Boers are of partial German ancestry, being the descendants of German immigrants who intermarried with Dutch settlers and adopted Afrikaans as their mother tongue. Professor JA Heese in his book Die Herkoms van die Afrikaner (The Origins of Afrikaners) claims the modern Afrikaners (who total around 3.5 million) have 34.4% German ancestry.
Germans also emigrated to South Africa during the 1850s and 1860s, and settled in the Eastern Cape area around Stutterheim, and in Kwazulu-Natal in the Wartburg area, where there is still a large German-speaking community. Mostly originating from different waves of immigration during the 19th and 20th centuries, an estimated 12,000 people speak German or a German variety as a first language in South Africa. Germans settled quite extensively in South Africa, with many Calvinists immigrating from Northern Europe. Later on, more Germans settled in the KwaZulu-Natal and elsewhere. Here, one of the largest communities are the speakers of "Nataler Deutsch", a variety of Low German, who are concentrated in and around Wartburg. German is slowly disappearing elsewhere, but a number of communities still have a large number of speakers and some even have German language schools. Around 17,000 German Nationals lived in South Africa in 2020.
When mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi were under German control, they were named German East Africa; they received some migration from German communities. After Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi became British and Belgian mandates following Germany's defeat in World War I, some of these communities remained. There is a small community of Germans remaining in Tanzania.
In the United States are ca. 160,000 German Citizens Registered.
In Japan, during the Meiji period (1868–1912), many Germans came to work in Japan as advisors to the new government. Despite Japan's isolationism and geographic distance, there have been a few Germans in Japan, since Germany's and Japan's fairly parallel modernization made Germans ideal O-yatoi gaikokujin. (See also Germany–Japan relations)
In China, the German trading colony of Jiaozhou Bay in what is now Qingdao existed until 1914, and did not leave much more than breweries, including Tsingtao Brewery
In South Korea, there are Germans in Korea.
Smaller numbers of ethnic Germans immigrated in the former Southeast Asian territories of Malaysia (British), Indonesia (Dutch) and the Philippines (American) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Indonesia, some of them became well-known figures in history, such as C.G.C. Reinwardt (founder and first director of Bogor Botanical Garden), Walter Spies (German of Russian origin, who became the artist that made Bali known to the world), and Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (owner of a big plantation in the south of Bandung and dubbed "the Humboldt of the East" because of his ethno-geographical notes).
Members of the German religious group known as Templers settled in Palestine in the late 19th century and lived there for several generations, but were expelled by the British from Mandatory Palestine during World War II, due to pro-Nazi sympathies expressed by many of them.
Communist East Germany had relations with Vietnam and Uganda in Africa, but in these cases population movement went mostly to, not from, Germany. After the German reunification, a large percentage of "guest workers" from Communist nations sent to East Germany returned to their home countries.
See also: German colonial empire and List of former German colonies
There have been ethnic Germans in Australia since the founding of the New South Wales colony in 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip (the first Governor of New South Wales) had a German father. But, the first significant wave of German immigration was in 1838. These Germans, mostly Prussian immigrants (but also winegrowers from the Hesse-Nassau state and the Rheingau). From there after, thousands of Germans emigrated to Australia until World War I. Also, German Australian was the most identified ethnicity behind English and Irish in Australia until World War I.
After World War II, large numbers of Germans emigrated to Australia to escape war-torn Europe.
From Celtic times, the early Germanic tribes settled from the Baltic all the way to the Black Sea until the great migrations of the 4-6th century AD.
Medieval Germans migrated eastwards during the medieval period Ostsiedlung until the flight, evacuation and expulsion of Germans after World War II; many areas in Central and Eastern Europe had an ethnic German population. In the Middle Ages, Germans were invited to migrate to Poland and the central and eastern regions of the German Holy Roman Empire and also the Kingdom of Hungary following the Mongol invasions of the 12th century, and then once again during the late 17th century after the Austrian-Ottoman wars to set up farms and repopulate the eastern regions of the Austrian Empire and Balkans.
The Nazi government termed such ethnic Germans Volksdeutsche, regardless of how long they had been residents of other countries. (Now they would be considered Auslandsdeutsche). During World War II, Nazi Germany classified ethnic Germans as Übermenschen, while Jews, Gypsies, Slavic peoples, mainly ethnic Poles and Serbs, along with Black and mixed-race people were called Untermenschen. After the war, Central European nations such as Poland, the Czechoslovakia, Hungary, as well as the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and Yugoslavia in the Balkan region of Southern Europe, expelled most of the ethnic Germans living in their territories.
There were significant ethnic German populations in such areas as Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine at one time. As recently as 1990, there were one million standard German speakers and 100,000 Plautdietsch speakers in Kazakhstan alone, and 38,000, 40,000 and 101,057 standard German speakers in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, respectively.
There were reportedly 500,000 ethnic Germans in Poland in 1998. Recent official figures show 147,000 (as of 2002). Of the 745,421 Germans in Romania in 1930, only about 60,000 remain. In Hungary the situation is quite similar, with only about 220,000. There are up to one million Germans in the former Soviet Union, mostly in a band from southwestern Russia and the Volga valley, through Omsk and Altai Krai (597,212 Germans in Russia, 2002 Russian census) to Kazakhstan (353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan, 1999 Kazakhstan census). Germany admitted approximately 1.63 million ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 1999.
These Auslandsdeutsche, as they are now generally known, have been streaming out of the former Eastern Bloc since the early 1990s. For example, many ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union have taken advantage of the German Law of Return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or the spouse or descendant of such a person. This exodus has occurred despite the fact that many of the ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union were highly assimilated and spoke little or no German.
According to the 1921 census, the German community was the largest minority group in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (505,790 inhabitants or 4.22%).
Note that many of these groups have since migrated elsewhere. This list simply gives the region with which they are associated, and does not include people from countries with German as an official national language. In general, it also omits some collective terms in common use defined by political border changes where this is antithetical to the current structure. Such terms include:
Roughly grouped:
In the Americas, one can divide the groups by current nation of residence:
...or by ethnic or religious criteria:
In Africa, Oceania, and East/Southeast Asia
A visible sign of the geographical extension of the German language is the German-language media outside the German-speaking countries. German is the second most commonly used scientific language as well as the third most widely used language on websites after English and Russian.
Deutsche Welle (German pronunciation: [ˈdɔʏtʃə ˈvɛlə]; "German Wave" in German), or DW, is Germany's public international broadcaster. The service is available in 30 languages. DW's satellite television service consists of channels in German, English, Spanish, and Arabic.
German-speaking people living abroad (and people wanting to learn German) can visit the websites of German-language newspapers and TV- and radio stations. The free software MediathekView allows the downloading of videos from the websites of some public German, Austrian, and Swiss TV stations and of the public Franco-German TV network ARTE. With the webpage "onlinetvrecorder.com," it is possible to record programs of many German and some international TV stations.
Note that some material is region-restricted for legal reasons and cannot be accessed from everywhere in the world. Some websites have a paywall or limit the access for free/unregistered users.
See also:
Since June 27, 2024, unrestricted dual citizenship has been possible.
Prior to that date, German nationality law allowed dual citizenship only with other EU countries and Switzerland; with other countries, in some cases:
A law adopted in June 2019 allows the revocation of the German citizenship of dual citizens who have joined or supported a terror militia such as the Islamic State and are at least 18 years old.
Naturalized Germans can lose their German citizenship if it is found out that they got it by willful deceit / bribery / menacing / giving intentionally false or incomplete information that had been important for the naturalization process. In June 2019, it was decided to prolong the deadline from 5 to 10 years after naturalization.
As of July 2024, German citizens can visit 194 countries without a visa or with visa on arrival. The Henley Passport Index ranks the German passport second in the world in terms of travel freedom.
As EU citizens, Germans can live and work indefinitely in other EU countries and the EFTA countries; however, the right to vote and work in certain sensitive fields (such as government, police, military) might in some cases be restricted to the local citizens only. The EU/EFTA countries can exclude immigrants from getting welfare for a certain time period to avoid "welfare tourism," and they can refuse welfare completely if the immigrants do not have a job after a certain period of time and do not try to get one. Immigrants convicted of welfare fraud can be deported and be refused the re-entry of the country.
When in a non-EU country where there is no German embassy, Germans as EU citizens have the right to get consular protection from the embassy of any other EU country present in that country. See List of diplomatic missions of Germany and List of diplomatic missions in Germany.
German citizens can be extradited only to other EU countries or to international courts of justice, and only if a law allows this (German Basic Law, Art. 16). Before the introduction of the European Arrest Warrant, the extradition of German citizens was generally prohibited by the German Basic Law.
Germany regularly publishes travel warnings on the website of the Auswärtiges Amt (Federal Foreign Office) to its citizens. The Office allows German citizens to register online in a special list, the Krisenvorsorgeliste ("Crisis-Prevention List") before they travel abroad (Elektronische Erfassung von Deutschen im Ausland [ELEFAND] Electronic Registration of Germans Being Abroad). With a password, the registered persons can change or update their data. The registration is voluntary and free of charge. It can be used for longer stays (longer than 6 months), but also for a vacation of only two weeks. The earliest date of registration is 10 days before the planned trip.
Most numbers are from the www.ethnologue.com, apart from a few from German language and Germans, as well as the following: