I didn’t realise that some of them had ended up in Dinkelsbühl, but I have travelled fairly extensively in the Siebenbürgen in Transylvania. There are not that many German speakers still out there, but a lot of the properties in the Saxon villages are still owned by families who now live in Germany, and they usually visit every year, so you will regularly see cars with German numberplates. Unfortunately that does tend to mean that the villages are half empty, with most of the inhabitants having been ‘sold’ back to Germany by Ceausescu, who wasn’t keen on ethnic minorities, even though most of them had lived in Transylvania for hundreds of years. An interesting story.

Walking around what was left of the earthworks outside the town walls (now converted to an attractive park) I found a large wooden plaque, barely a foot off the ground, planted in the earth.

I had to read it several times to understand that it was a memorial to the homeland in «Siebenbürgen», which I subsequently discovered was Transylvania, from where many of the current citizens had originated.

However, I knew that not all German speakers had been driven out of the area, as Swiss friends of mine had travelled to Transylvania inthe summer of 1979 and were fascinated to discover villages of German speakers, living in dire poverty. Known as the Banater Schwaben, they were the decendents of immigrants to what is now Romania from Franconia, Bavaria, Baden and the Rhine Palatinate, as well as Austria, Alsace, Loraine and Luxemburg, having been invited to settle there by the Autro-Hungarian Monarchy in the late 17th century as the area had lost most of its population during the wars agains the Ottoman Turks. The heartland was centred on Kronstadt, Austria-Hungary, now called Braşov.

Ironically, «Banater Schwaben» seems to be translated into English as Banat Saxons (according to Wikipedia), not Banat Swabians.