Abstract
According to the 1930 census, there were 745,421 ethnic Germans in Romania. The majority was located in the former Habsburg provinces of Transylvania, Banat, and Bukovina, in communities that gradually radicalized under the influences of the local “Nationalist Self-Help Movement” and Nazi Germany’s foreign policy.1 These local Germans’ lives changed significantly in 1940. After the territorial shifts that summer only 300,000 still lived in Romania. Many ethnic German men went to Nazi Germany during the war to serve in the Waffen SS units, which created tensions with Ion Antonescu.2 The number of Germans diminished further in the autumn of 1940, as a result of the Romanian-German convention (22 October 1940): while few ethnic Germans from the Banat and Transylvania were repatriated to the Reich, some 76,500 from Southern Bukovina and Dobrogea were repatriated to Germany.3
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