German communities in Eastern Europe

[Tomenable]

I've always been a bit surprised how separate the German communities in Eastern Europe remained.

Where do you have this info from?

Eastern Germans usually do not plot anywhere close to West Germans in PCA graphs. They have mixed a lot.

One known exception are Volga Germans, but it was a late migration, they settled in Russia in the 1700s. Most of them still plot close to South Germans (which is where most of Volga Germans originally came from in the 1700s).

It is also said that Baltic Germans in Latvia and Estonia remained separate, but I haven't seen their results.

In East Prussia for example it was a different situation than in Latvia, and huge mixing/assimilation took place.

 

[davef]

Droit de soignur, watz dat now u said? (Googling...)

 

[davef]

Droit du seigneur, also known as jus primae noctis, refers to a supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with subordinate women, in particular, on their wedding nights. Some scholars believe the "right" might have existed in medieval Europe. Wikipedia

Oh uh....never learned that in school

 

[Tomenable]

Droit du seigneur, also known as jus primae noctis, refers to a supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with subordinate women, in particular, on their wedding nights. Some scholars believe the "right" might have existed in medieval Europe. Wikipedia

Oh uh....never learned that in school

Congrats, it means you had good, no BS type of teachers.

Ius primae noctis is a myth, no such thing ever existed, at least not apart from some isolated cases.

 

[Angela]

Where do you have this info from?

Eastern Germans usually do not plot anywhere close to West Germans in PCA graphs. They have mixed a lot.

One known exception are Volga Germans, but it was a late migration, they settled in Russia in the 1700s. Most of them still plot close to South Germans (which is where most of Volga Germans originally came from in the 1700s).

It is also said that Baltic Germans in Latvia and Estonia remained separate, but I haven't seen their results.

In East Prussia for example it was a different situation than in Latvia, and huge mixing/assimilation took place.

A little cognitive dissonance perhaps? You're skeptical that they remained separate and then point out two situations where they remained separate. You can add the German communities in the Balkans.

One of my closest friends comes from a family which lived in the former Yugoslavia for generations, and they are pretty vehement they never admixed, maintaining their own language, press, churches, etc. and never intermarried. According to the grandmother, after World War II they were terrorized and forced to leave, walking all the way back to Germany. They then went to the U.S., settling in Chicago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Yugoslavia

Another friend (I seem to have a plethora of German descent friends, in addition to Italian and Jewish descent friends, now that I think about it) descends from a family that settled in Galicia, but again, she's insistent that they remained German and didn't intermarry. Again, they went to German schools apparently, had their own churches, etc.

There are other groups in Eastern Europe you might want to investigate, including, of course, the Sudetenland Germans.

"

• Sudetenland (Sudeten Germans)
• Transylvania (Transylvanian Saxons)
• Carpathian Mountains (Carpathian Germans)
• Memelland, Estonia and Latvia (Baltic Germans)
• Poland (see History of Poland (966–1385))

Walddeutsche

• Bulgaria (see Germans in Bulgaria)
• Slovenia"

"

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German_settlement_in_Central_and_Eastern_Europe

 

[Angela]

Congrats, it means you had good, no BS type of teachers.

Ius primae noctis is a myth, no such thing ever existed, at least not apart from some isolated cases.

You have some nerve taking that tone and that position when it is still very much supported by certain scholars. Perhaps you should try not substituting agendas, pre-conceived ideas and sloppy scholarship for painstaking analysis and logical reflection.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur

You don't bother passing laws abolishing customs which never existed.

For goodness' sakes, as if powerful men demanding sexual favors from women over whom they have power is a surprising occurrence!

 

[bicicleur 2]

You have some nerve taking that tone and that position when it is still very much supported by certain scholars. Perhaps you should try not substituting agendas, pre-conceived ideas and sloppy scholarship for painstaking analysis and logical reflection.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur

You don't bother passing laws abolishing customs which never existed.

For goodness' sakes, as if powerful men demanding sexual favors from women over whom they have power is a surprising occurrence!

It is something from anciant times or even before.
I don't think it was a widespread practice.
Powerfull men had acces to many women anyway.

 

[davef]

Congrats, it means you had good, no BS type of teachers.

Ius primae noctis is a myth, no such thing ever existed, at least not apart from some isolated cases.

Or it means I never had history courses beyond basic 101 back in college. Never got far in terms of history, and most of what I retained from school has to do with math and teh codez (programming)

 

[Ailchu]

I think you're missing the obvious point that for most of recorded human history people really didn't have much choice when it came to mating. Until very recently in western Europe and I would bet in eastern Europe as well, if your family had any property whatsoever you married whom you were told to marry, where it would do the most good for your family. Nobody cared about your personal inclinations and whom you found attractive.

Haven't you read Romeo and Juliet? That's only one example. A prime stock character in much of European comedy is the elderly, disgustingly lecherous rich old man married to a pretty teen age girl. You think she found him attractive? Chaucer is full of stories like that.

As for the serfs, their choices were limited to the people on their lord's estate, and they had to get his permission to marry. In some benighted places the lord had the droit de seigneur and could sleep with any young girl he chose on her wedding night. You think anyone asked her if she was in agreement?

Forty years ago, one of my distant cousins was told by her parents she couldn't marry the young man of her choice for absurd reasons. She almost had what used to be called a nervous breakdown before they relented. They didn't relent with her brother. He was married to a distant cousin, a very plain widow almost eight years older than he was in order to consolidate family holdings.

The problem with a lot of analysis that is done on topics like this is that young people, in particular, who don't have a very good grasp of the history of even a half century to a century ago, create these theories which never applied to life as it was actually lived, and is barely even a reflection of what goes on nowadays.

If I belonged to a women's liberation group, which I don't and never have, they would kick me out for this, but it's my opinion that on average, and even today, men are different in terms of sexuality than women, especially once a woman has married and had children. A lot of men would happily and do have affairs even with women who aren't particularly attractive, whom they might not even like, and certainly don't love, and all while I think sincerely loving their wives some of them, merely because they like the hunt, they like variety, because it validates their sense of themselves as men and as powerful human beings. I don't like it, but that's the way it is, imo.

Moralists, racists, whoever, can rail against it all they like, but it's the way it is.

well i also think there is a difference in sexual behaviour that was never the question. especially in the last few hundred years a man who had enough money just didn't care that much because he is not the one getting pregnant and it wont financially hurt him. though i do not want to generalize. and i don't think that this is just the way it is.

but why do we have sexual preferences? why did this develop and what is the evolutionary explanation? if men alwasy just mated with everything and did not have to decide it would make no sense. and i'm not talking about the last 500 years also not about the last 6000 years. more like the last 300000 years and beyond and not only with humans but also with other hominis. you can see similar things in other species that are way further away from us. birds, mammals and fish will pick mates that look similar to their parents. a sheep adopted by a goat mother will try to mate with goats when it is adult.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...eople-who-look-like-our-parents-a6897006.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/6885270

"If different species are hybridizing, both sexual imprinting and learning to avoid heterospecifics during adulthood promote assortative mating and hence speciation."

"The role of behaviour and learning in completing the speciation process is relatively overlooked. In particular the evolution of sexual imprinting as a result of selection against hybridization warrants more study."

though its probably hard to show the reasons for assortative mating and if, when assortative mating exists, it is caused because individuals with favorable traits mate with individuals with similar traits while individuals with less favorable traits are left out and have no other choice than to mate with individuals with less favorable traits and not because they actually want to do so. when populations mix it would also be important to know if these traits are considered favorable not only inside a specific population but also inside many other populations. and if those traits have a similar distribution among populations. with humans, if traits are considered favorable just because of social imprinting.

 

[Angela]

I never meant to imply that people don't have sexual preferences. However, there are no rigid rules as to how it operates. While many people, me included, may find people of their own "genetic cluster" more attractive, some people are attracted to the exotic. Some "white" men are attracted to east Asian women, for example, while some women might be attracted to African men. Ever heard of "Othello"? They might not be the majority, but they exist.

Likewise, yes, certain studies suggest people may be more attracted to people who have some resemblance to their opposite sex parent, although the replication crisis in social science studies should make everyone wary of relying too much on those studies. However, other people, me included again, seem to shy away from people who look too much like their opposite sex parent, while still having a very close bond with that parent. That's probably why I've never been very attracted to blonde men.

You can't put people in boxes like this.

What I'm also saying is that when you look within a society, for example, for most of recorded history women, and even men in certain circumstances didn't have much choice. Economic considerations or familial concerns were often the priority. So how much was sexual selection a factor in selection in general?

Also, as I pointed out above, regardless of men's specific sexual preferences, many of the instances of mass admixture in human history involved predominantly male mediated migrations. (Women have never had a choice.) That's why you have such changes in the y chromosome while the mtDna remains the same. Look at the example of Latin America. In the beginning it was often just men. Therefore, they mated with the Amerindian women. Once Spanish and Portuguese women arrived, they were chosen for "marriage". How much of that was a "sexual" preference, and how much was an elite maintaining their elite status is difficult to disentangle. Regardless, the result was that even the "whitest" looking Latin Americans often have Native American mtDna, and some degree of autosomal Amerindian ancestry as well. However, do you think that stopped the more elite men with more European ancestry from mating with women of Amerindian or African descent? Have you ever looked at a crowd of Brazilians? How do you think African Americans wound up about 20% European?

This is all much more complicated than you understand or want to understand. There is no biological imperative to keep races "pure", no matter what uneducated people might have told you, and even if there were, it is often overridden. Otherwise, there wouldn't be Uighurs, or North Africans, or South Asians or Mexicans or many other similar groups.

If you think people from different countries are different species, there's nothing more to be said.

I'm out.

 

[Tomenable]

Angela,

There is no biological imperative to keep races "pure"

John R. Baker in his book "Race" wrote that in the animal kingdom races within the same species almost never mix, they are always attracted to their own race. Baker claimed that any attraction to "exotic" is cultural, not natural. This study seems to confirm:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology...m/retrieve/pii/S0960982215010192?showall=true

http://www.pulseheadlines.com/beauty-preferences-linked-personal-experiences-study/7387/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151001125637.htm

Mixing disrupts the process of speciation/adaptation, it disrupts fine-tuned networks of genes.

For example if you mix a Congo Pygmy with a Nunavut Inuit, you will get offspring that is neither well adapted to tropical jungle environment, nor to arctic wasteland environment. Their mixed offspring will be poorly adapted to both parental environments.

Also for example not everyone can live at high altitudes in places like Tibet or Peru.

At high altitudes, it is not just about oxygen, also risk of skin cancer is much higher.

Mixed individuals report more health problems, more mental issues, can have difficulty with finding bone marrow donors, etc.

 

[Tomenable]

One of my closest friends comes from a family which lived in the former Yugoslavia for generations, and they are pretty vehement they never admixed, maintaining their own language, press, churches, etc. and never intermarried.

Good. Tell them to buy a DNA test and we will see how much of their family legend is true.

For example I was also pretty vehement that I have R1a haplogroup, until I took DNA tests.

Autosomal tests for myself and my parents had some surprises as well.

Now I'm planning to test my maternal grandfather's brother. Wanna bet what will his Y-DNA be?

His surname is Meller. I suppose he will be R1a (since my surname is Slavic and I got R1b-DF27).

=====

Edit:

That said, it is far more likely - considering deep subclades and close matches - that my R1b is Scottish (there were plenty of Scots in Poland-Lithuania) or ancient Celtic (there was Celtic presence in Iron Age Poland), than that it is German.

 

[Tomenable]

descends from a family that settled in Galicia, but again, she's insistent that they remained German and didn't intermarry

Here is a book about Albigowa (one of towns established by German settlers in Galicia in the late 1300s and 1400s, they were invited there by Polish King Casimir III, who wanted to increase population in sparsely populated areas such as the Jasło-Sanok Basin):

http://www.jerzy-ulman.neostrada.pl/Monografia/monografia_Albigowej_Tadeusz_Ulman.pdf

By the 1500s they were all Polonized and forgot how to speak German, but surnames of German origin are still common among inhabitants.

The book written by Tadeusz Ulman. Many of the most common Polish (but of German origin) surnames among the town's population are mentioned (Ulman, Inglot, Cwynar, Nycz, Groelle, Szpunar, Lonc, Uchman, Bartman, Reizer, Rejman, Pelc, Kluz, Szajer, Szmuc, Preisner, Rydel, Falger, Bem, Tejchman, Bytnar, Ladenberger, etc.).

However you will notice that they have Polish given names (Stanisław Tejchman, Jerzy Ulman, Tadeusz Ulman, Józef Bem, etc.).

Another one (Nycz = Polonized Nitz) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Nycz

Some of them also changed their surnames to more Polish-sounding ones, like Tadeusz Ładogórski (born Ladenberger):

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ładogórski

Sometimes surnames are clearly Slavic but Y-DNA not, because during most of the Middle Ages, surnames were not yet commonly used in this part of Europe (unlike for example in Ireland, where surnames were in common usage already back during the Dark Ages). So someone might be paternally descended from a German settler whose descendants became assimilated and later adopted a Slavic surname. This works the other way around as well - there are East Germans with super Germanic surnames, but typically Balto-Slavic Y-DNA subclades.

Many towns and villages in Galicia have names with German etymology. For example Łańcut (Landshut), Grybów (Grynberg), Albigowa (Helwigau), etc. On the other hand in East Germany you have many towns with names of Slavic origin (Rostock, Berlin, Neustrelitz, Krakow am See, etc.).

==========

Later - after 1772 - there was another wave of German settlers, so called Josephine colonization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_colonization

Of those late settlers, some could indeed remain German and unmixed until emigration to the US.

But these are Germans who came in the late 1700s and 1800s, just like Volga Germans in Russia.

Bear in mind, that early settlers (1200s-1400s and later) came invited by the Poles (and only those who accepted the invitation moved to Poland), while those after 1772 came uninvited, as occupiers, after the Austrian partition of Poland. That said - at least to my knowledge - many of those late settlers also became Polonized over time.

Generally Galicia had a very low percentage of German-speakers according to the last census before WW1 (in 1910). There were far more Germans even in the Congress Kingdom, in the regions of Lublin (in what is now Eastern Poland) and Łódź (Central Poland), than in Galicia. In Harvard's Human Origins dataset, they have Lublin Polish samples, and some of them have recent German admixture, based on their results. Łódź Germans also have mixed with Poles (and maybe with Jews too).

On Eupedia there is one Polish user with substantial Galician German ancestry (I won't tell which one, but not me and not LeBrok).

On Anthrogenca there is one Polish user with 3/16 Łódź German ancestry, as well as one German user with some Łódź German ancestors and with one ethnically Polish great-grandfather, also from the same area.

By the way Łódź Germans came to that area mostly from Lower Silesia, so autosomally they were East Germans.

Someone who is 3/16 East German and 13/16 Polish still plots firmly with Poles in a PCA graph.

Someone 3/16 West German and 13/16 Polish would probably be more visibly western-shifted.

==========

Also Angela Merkel has both ethnically Prussian German ancestors, and ethnically Prussian Polish ancestors (including her grandfaher, whose original surname was Kaźmierczak, but he later Germanized it to Kasner after emigrating from Poznań to Berlin).

 

[Tomenable]

That book about the history of Albigowa is only in Polish.

Here is a book about Kargowa, which was also an ethnically mixed place. The difference is that Albigowa was a German community established deep inside continuous ethnically Polish and Polish-ruled territory (which is why it became assimilated so fast), while Kargowa was typical ethnic borderland. But this book is in German (and in Polish - each chapter in both languages) so more users will be able to read:

http://www.kargowa.pl/sites/default/files/Kargowa_poprawiony_19_03.pdf

The owners of Kargowa were the von Unruh family (link):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Józef_Unrug

^^^
Which is why another name of this town was Unruhstadt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargowa

The town had a Jewish community too (apart from German and Polish).

 

[Tomenable]

BONUS:

Some East Prussian WW1 casualties with "purely Germanic" blood:

Every town in the German Empire had a memorial to the fallen in WW1.

So you can check what surnames people typically had in which region.

 

[Angela]

Here is a book about Albigowa (one of towns established by German settlers in Galicia in the late 1300s and 1400s, they were invited there by Polish King Casimir III, who wanted to increase population in sparsely populated areas such as the Jasło-Sanok Basin):

http://www.jerzy-ulman.neostrada.pl/Monografia/monografia_Albigowej_Tadeusz_Ulman.pdf

By the 1500s they were all Polonized and forgot how to speak German, but surnames of German origin are still common among inhabitants.

The book written by Tadeusz Ulman. Many of the most common Polish (but of German origin) surnames among the town's population are mentioned (Ulman, Inglot, Cwynar, Nycz, Groelle, Szpunar, Lonc, Uchman, Bartman, Reizer, Rejman, Pelc, Kluz, Szajer, Szmuc, Preisner, Rydel, Falger, Bem, Tejchman, Bytnar, Ladenberger, etc.).

However you will notice that they have Polish given names (Stanisław Tejchman, Jerzy Ulman, Tadeusz Ulman, Józef Bem, etc.).

Another one (Nycz = Polonized Nitz) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_Nycz

Some of them also changed their surnames to more Polish-sounding ones, like Tadeusz Ładogórski (born Ladenberger):

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ładogórski

Sometimes surnames are clearly Slavic but Y-DNA not, because during most of the Middle Ages, surnames were not yet commonly used in this part of Europe (unlike for example in Ireland, where surnames were in common usage already back during the Dark Ages). So someone might be paternally descended from a German settler whose descendants became assimilated and later adopted a Slavic surname. This works the other way around as well - there are East Germans with super Germanic surnames, but typically Balto-Slavic Y-DNA subclades.

Many towns and villages in Galicia have names with German etymology. For example Łańcut (Landshut), Grybów (Grynberg), Albigowa (Helwigau), etc. On the other hand in East Germany you have many towns with names of Slavic origin (Rostock, Berlin, Neustrelitz, Krakow am See, etc.).

==========

Later - after 1772 - there was another wave of German settlers, so called Josephine colonization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_colonization

Of those late settlers, some could indeed remain German and unmixed until emigration to the US.

But these are Germans who came in the late 1700s and 1800s, just like Volga Germans in Russia.

Bear in mind, that early settlers (1200s-1400s and later) came invited by the Poles (and only those who accepted the invitation moved to Poland), while those after 1772 came uninvited, as occupiers, after the Austrian partition of Poland. That said - at least to my knowledge - many of those late settlers also became Polonized over time.

Generally Galicia had a very low percentage of German-speakers according to the last census before WW1 (in 1910). There were far more Germans even in the Congress Kingdom, in the regions of Lublin (in what is now Eastern Poland) and Łódź (Central Poland), than in Galicia. In Harvard's Human Origins dataset, they have Lublin Polish samples, and some of them have recent German admixture, based on their results. Łódź Germans also have mixed with Poles (and maybe with Jews too).

On Eupedia there is one Polish user with substantial Galician German ancestry (I won't tell which one, but not me and not LeBrok).

On Anthrogenca there is one Polish user with 3/16 Łódź German ancestry, as well as one German user with some Łódź German ancestors and with one ethnically Polish great-grandfather, also from the same area.

By the way Łódź Germans came to that area mostly from Lower Silesia, so autosomally they were East Germans.

Someone who is 3/16 East German and 13/16 Polish still plots firmly with Poles in a PCA graph.

Someone 3/16 West German and 13/16 Polish would probably be more visibly western-shifted.

==========

Also Angela Merkel has both ethnically Prussian German ancestors, and ethnically Prussian Polish ancestors (including her grandfaher, whose original surname was Kaźmierczak, but he later Germanized it to Kasner after emigrating from Poznań to Berlin).

I'm going to try to explain my reasoning one more time. I don't know if there was actually more intermarriage in some of these German communities than they know or are willing to admit. The point is that for upwards of at least 250 years there were groups of "ethnic" Germans in Eastern European countries who spoke German as their primary language, sent their children to German language schools, had their own German language press, went to their own German language churches, in many cases Lutheran churches in contrast to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Catholic people around them. Most importantly, they self-identified as "German", so much so that in Poland:

"After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Second Polish Republic in September 1939, many members of the German minority (around 25%^[14]) joined the ethnic German paramilitary organisation Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. When the German occupation of Polandbegan, the Selbstschutz took an active part in Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles. Due to their pre-war interactions with the Polish majority, they were able to prepare lists of Polish intellectuals and civil servants whom the Nazis selected for extermination. The organisation actively participated and was responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 Poles.^[15]"

"During the Nazi German occupation many citizens of German descent in Poland registered with the Deutsche Volksliste. Some were given important positions in the hierarchy of the Nazi administration, and some participated in Nazi atrocities, causing resentment towards German speakers in general. These facts were later used by the Allied politicians as one of the justifications for expulsion of the Germans.^[35] The contemporary position of the German government is that, while the Nazi-era war crimes resulted in the expulsion of the Germans, the deaths due to the expulsions were an injustice.^[36]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350)#View_of_German_minorities_as_potential_fifth_columns

In the Sudetenland, many of them agitated to have it rejoined to Germany. The same was true in other areas.

I by no means approve of this attitude of the older people that intermarrying with the Slavs was somehow demeaning and that it never happened in their families. My friends, their grandchildren, also have an issue with it, but the attitudes existed whether it was to some extent hypocritical or not because there might have been some admixture in their own families. I also think that if there was admixture, the people involved would move out of the sphere of the German community and become part of the larger community.

 

[Tomenable]

Angela,

Czechs are actually hard to distinguish from East Germans (including Sudetenland Germans) in terms of autosomal DNA. How do you explain this? I'm not suggesting this must be due to recent mixture. After all RISE569 (labeled as "Early Czech Slav") already plots with modern Czechs, even though this sample is older than any German immigration to Bohemia (which started few centuries later).

Between Poles and Germans there is generally more autosomal difference.

But I've seen also Prussian* Germans on GEDmatch who overlap with Poles, often despite having all 16 great-great-grandparents with German surnames (this person has GEDCOM going back several generations - there are a few Polish surnames but they appear further back than great-great-grandparents).

*By Prussian I don't mean East Prussian, just anywhere from the 1800s Kingdom of Prussia.

 

[Tomenable]

I by no means approve of this attitude of the older people

I'm more worried that many modern researchers also share this bias, and that it will have negative impact on genetic research about Slavic origins and migrations in the Early Midle Ages, and about the extent of Slavic ancestry in European populations, including East Germans. You can already see this attitude in genetic companies - 23andMe describes R1a as "Ashkenazi Jewish" rather than "Slavic" (even though it is only common among Ashkenazi Levites, and only one subclade of R1a, while among Europeans many subclades of R1a correlate with Slavic and Baltic ancestry much better). Living DNA counts East Germany as part of "Germanic" cluster, even though it is known that the area was Slavic in the Early Middle Ages, and Germans east of the Elbe harbour substantial Slavic admixture (we don't know exactly how much).

Just like there is a lot of interest in testing Migration Period and other ancient Germanic DNA, I don't see as much interest in testing Migration Period and Early Medieval Slavic samples, to determine what the Early Slavic genetics really was. And there is no shortage of ancient bones to collect DNA from.

For example in Germany they discovered this 800s-1000s Slavic cemetery with fully preserved skeletons:

https://www.wochenspiegel-web.de/autothumb/620x400/Neue_Gleise_auf_alten_Wegen_slawisches.jpg

Radiocarbon-dating showed that these graves date back to the 800s-1000s:

The location of burials is Niederwünsch near Leipzig, in Saxony-Anhalt:

======

Polish and Czech scientists are showing more interest in this subject.

They started testing 11th century Slavic samples from Czech Republic:

https://i.imgur.com/Lw48eyR.jpg

 

[Tomenable]

Account from a voyage by a Greek traveller - Laskaros Kananou - to Northern Germany in years 1438-39:

He wrote that near Lübeck there was a land where people spoke Slavic and it was called Σθλαβουνία (Slavonia). How did he recognize that it was Slavic language? Well, he knew how Slavic languages sound, because he was Greek, and in parts of Greece there also lived Slavic-speakers.

Indeed, in parts of Holstein and of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Slavic continued to be used until the 1600s.

In Hanoverian Wendland (part of Lower Saxony), Polabian language died out in the late 1700s-1800s:

http://www.sharedlist.org/writing/T...nnenberg district of Lower Saxony-589/?i=1963

In Lusatia (divided between Brandenburg and Saxony) you have Sorbs who still speak Slavic today.

==========

Extent of Polabian Slavic (in the north) and Sorbian Slavic (in the south) languages during the 1500s:

In the 1600s the area of Mecklenburgische Seenplatte (in Central Mecklenburg) was still Slavic-speaking:

After the war of 1618-1648 only Wendland continued to speak Polabian Slavic.

Wendland & Lusatia (where Sorbs live) suffered very low casualties in that war:

 

[Tomenable]

"After Nazi Germany's invasion of the Second Polish Republic in September 1939, many members of the German minority (around 25%^[14]) joined the ethnic German paramilitary organisation Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz. When the German occupation of Poland began, the Selbstschutz took an active part in Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles. Due to their pre-war interactions with the Polish majority, they were able to prepare lists of Polish intellectuals and civil servants whom the Nazis selected for extermination. The organisation actively participated and was responsible for the deaths of about 50,000 Poles.^[15]"

This is very true, and one of my close relatives was also on that list, and was murdered in Piaśnica Wielka:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion_Pommern

But not just the Volksdeutsche were responsible, also German Abwehr which had agents (spies) in Poland.

During the Nazi German occupation many citizens of German descent in Poland registered with the Deutsche Volksliste.

In some regions of Poland, many Polish people were forced to register with the Deutsche Volksliste.

For example Donald Tusk's grandfather was forcibly registered, even though he did not want to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Tusk

He was also later foricbly conscripted to the Wehrmacht.

The Polish Army in the West was reinforced by thousands of Polish Wehrmacht deserters later on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Armed_Forces_in_the_West

1st Polish Armoured Division (gen. Maczek) recruited thousands of Afrika Korps veterans in 1943...

Poles served in the Wehrmacht, but not in the SS. There is even this "Band of Brothers" scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOSvLWK5Z2A#t=2m50s