Co-authored with Karl Cordell and subsequently published in Nationalities Papers in 2005, this article analyses the nature of the German minorities in the Czech Republic and Poland. In order to achieve this goal, the relationship between Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Poland with the Federal Republic of Germany forms an essential intellectual backdrop to our main theme, while reference to the German Democratic Republic is made only as and where appropriate. Although we do consider wartime German occupation policy in both Poland and the Czech lands and the consequent expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, due to limitations of space, these themes, which have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere, do not form part of our main focus of study.