Yes, and I love every time I'm reminded of that
.
OK, that's enough joking for this thread, I'm going to be serious now...
This is true, but really, it just scratches the surface. When you look at it in a wider perspective, the entire story of Germans in EE during WWII is pretty much the ultimate proof that permanent multiculturalism where the minority hangs onto its identity instead of assimilating just doesn't work in the long run.
The Germans were in EE for centuries by that point. Ever since the Ostsiedlung started in the early middle ages which, btw, I consider to be the single biggest mistakes Slavs have ever made in history. And what happened during those centuries? Sure, there was a lot of peaceful coexistence and so on, but ultimately, the Germans didn't assimilate, kept an identity separate from those of the people they lived amongst, and, when there
wasn't peaceful coexistence, they started oppressing the natives (and sometimes the natives oppressed them, it admittedly went both ways.)
I'll admit, I'm not too knowledgeable on the ethnic relations in the other medieval Slavic countries, which I guess would be a lot more in their favor considering that they had their own sovereign countries where they dominated, but I've been doing a deep dive into what medieval Slovakia (Upper Hungary during those times) was like, and it's fucking bizarre. You had German-controlled cities passing Jim Crow-style anti-miscegenation laws banning intermarriage between Germans and Slovaks, banning Slovaks and other non-Germans from settling in them (including one city which started by banning Slovaks and Poles from moving into it, then Czechs and Hungarians a few years later when they started to move there, and so on until basically all non-Germans were banned from there) and so on.
Basically, after centuries, Germans in EE still saw themselves as separate people from their Slavic neighbours... and then WWII came. A unified, German empire guided by an explicitly German supremacist ideology invaded EE. What did the Germans who have lived in EE for centuries do? Did they decide to resist the invaders and side with the people their families have lived next to and among for almost a thousand years?
Nope. Not at all. By all accounts, after the Nazis started putting their theory into practice and kicking Slavs from their jobs and so on, the German natives started flocking to the occupied cities to take those jobs and otherwise support the invaders. Not even almost a
millenium of them living here was enough to make them feel like locals and get them to not turn traitor the moment their co-ethnics invaded.
This despite the fact that Germans and West Slavs are obviously very similar genetically, with the language and culture being the only real differences, and yet... this is what happened. The implications are insane when you look at how many countries are now mass importing completely different groups of immigrants and not even encouraging them to assimilate
.