When Elector John Sigismund of Brandenburg converted to Calvinism in 1613 he became the second major German prince, with the elector of the Palatinate, to renounce Lutheranism in favor of Calvinism. Unlike Frederick of the Palatinate and the dozen or so other minor German princes in the empire who had opted for Calvinism, the Hohenzollern decided not to impose his new faith on his subjects, who had been Lutheran since the days of Joachim II in the early sixteenth century. John Sigismund decreed instead that the two Protestant churches were to exist together in peace and harmony in his domains.

In September of 1894, Emperor William stood before his Junkers in Königsberg. He reprimanded them for their outspoken opposition to the policies of his government, particularly to the treaties leading to lower duties on grain. He called it a “thing of nonsense” for Prussian noblemen to oppose their king, though, he said, as a good father he was willing to forget such unruly behavior. The Prussian nobility, he declared, must gather now about the House of Hohenzollern “in the struggle for religion, morality, and order against the parties of revolution.”

The totalitarian pretensions of the Nazi party's leadership are nowhere better illustrated than in the belief that the entire German people could be “educated” to a sense of service to the Volk, that mythical national community whose sum was allegedly infinitely greater than its parts. Excluded from real power in the state— whatever was claimed about “the unity of party and state”—the party in the Third Reich assumed the role of “spiritual leader” of the community, with the task of reorienting the aspirations of men, women, and children away from the satisfaction of personal desires and ambitions and toward service. Germans were not merely to accept passively the wisdom of the regime's policies, but were positively to channel their concern and their energy into supporting them. In this way, ran the message, they would find deeper satisfaction than in the pursuit of selfish pleasure.

Considered in isolation, the experiences of the ethnic German minority of Slovakia hardly warrant more than a footnote in the history of East-Central Europe during the years of World War II. The wartime experiences of this numerically small German minority, known as the Carpathian Germans, do, however, stand out in vivid contrast to those of the other German minority group of Czechoslovakia, the much-publicized Sudeten Germans of Bohemia and Moravia. And it is this glaring contrast that lends significance to a study of the Slovakian German experiences, both with the Third Reich and with the ephemerally independent Slovak state. The juxtaposition of the estimated 130,000 Carpathian Germans of Slovakia and the more than 3,000,000 Sudeten Germans of central and western Czechoslovakia suggests a natural and dramatic comparison, which reveals that no blanket generalization can be offered regarding the wartime experiences of any of the German minorities of Europe.