Baltic Germans were German speaking people who lived the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, in what today are Estonia and Latvia. Hitler agreed with Stalin in 1939 that they should be moved to German territory as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Families were transported by sea from the Baltic States.^[1] Now there are not many people with any German identity in Latvia or Estonia.

Since the Middle Ages, most of the of merchants and clergy were German-speakers. So were the large majority of the local landowning nobility who were a ruling class over the Latvian and Estonian people. By the time the idea of a Baltic German ethnic identity appeared in the 19th century, most Baltic Germans were not nobles. They were mostly the urban and professional middle class and lived in the cities