not everyone got resettled, either. anecdotally i know of a family where the dad said that if hitler’s german, then he isnt, and so the entire family marked themselves as ethnically hungarian on a pre-war census. said census was used to deport germans after the war, so his family got to stay.
his eager nazi collaborator neighbor was shipped off to germany and came back years later, rich, in a mercedes.
also, 1.9% of hungary still self-describes as some kind of german.
Yeah that’s one of the issues with determining ethnicity, it’s often more about self-identification than pure genetic or cultural markers. A group or family can move into an area and retain their prior cultural identity, or they can just subsume themselves into the local culture, identify as such, and within a few generations are indistinguishable from the “native” population. Which makes me think that this 12 million number is coming from an extremely broad definition of “Germanic” that’s throwing in a lot of displaced persons that probably didn’t identify as German.
not everyone got resettled, either. anecdotally i know of a family where the dad said that if hitler’s german, then he isnt, and so the entire family marked themselves as ethnically hungarian on a pre-war census. said census was used to deport germans after the war, so his family got to stay.
his eager nazi collaborator neighbor was shipped off to germany and came back years later, rich, in a mercedes.
also, 1.9% of hungary still self-describes as some kind of german.
Highly effective ethnic cleansing campaign I see. What a tragedy for ethnic germans in hungary.
Same in Poland, after 1989, reprivatisation got mentioned and suddenly a fuckton of “ethnic Germans” appeared.
Yeah that’s one of the issues with determining ethnicity, it’s often more about self-identification than pure genetic or cultural markers. A group or family can move into an area and retain their prior cultural identity, or they can just subsume themselves into the local culture, identify as such, and within a few generations are indistinguishable from the “native” population. Which makes me think that this 12 million number is coming from an extremely broad definition of “Germanic” that’s throwing in a lot of displaced persons that probably didn’t identify as German.