Organised Persecution of Ethnic Germans

The Organised persecution of ethnic Germans refers to systematic activity against groups of ethnic Germans based on their ethnicity.

Historically, this has been due to two causes: the German population were considered, whether factually or not, linked with German nationalist regimes such as those of Imperial Germany or the Nazis. This was the case in the World War I era persecution of Germans in the United States, and also in Eastern and Central Europe following the end of World War II. While many victims of these persecutions did not, in fact, have any connection to those regimes, cooperation between German minority organisations and Nazi regime did occur, as the example of Selbstschutz shows, which is still used as a pretense of hostilities against those who did not take part in such organisations. After World War II, many such Volksdeutsche were killed or driven from their homes in acts of vengeance, others in ethnic cleansing of territories prior to populating them with citizens of the annexing country. In other cases (e.g. in the case of the formerly large German-speaking populations of Russia, Estonia, or the Transylvanian (Siebenbürgen) German minority in Rumania and the Balkans) such persecution was a crime committed against innocent communities who had played no part in the Third Reich.

German populations have also been persecuted because they were perceived as lacking proper ties to the country in which they lived — this includes the persecution of ethnic German Mennonite, Amish and Hutterite communities in the United States, and of Tyrolean Germans in the province of South Tyrol. In the case of the South Tyrol, these hostilities hit the historically German population of an Austrian territory which had been annexed by Italy after World War I.

The debate sometimes encompasses the persecution of citizens of German descent in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia during World War I and World War II.