On this map, does German equate to Swedish and/or Scandinavian and/or Slavic?
My father grew up in Alabama and while I know very little about those before him, it was sort of a “family known” that our surname was truncated from a more complicated Slavic version.
Because Germany is in the middle of Europe and had shifting boundaries, many Germans had (and have) Danish, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Italian or French last names (and vice versa).