Thank you Menes for pointing out about Hansi - I had never heard of him before. I find it interesting that his surname was “Waltz” meaning ethnic German, but he was a French patriot.
In Poland I see the same - there were many ethnic German (well, Saxon) families that Polonized like the Schulz, Merklein, Wedel etc. and alternatively there were people like Dostoevsky who was pretty definitely ethnically a Pole but was a Russian patriot and anti-Polish.
Yes, and there were similar occurrences in Germany: 90% of the Czech-speaking inhabitants of the Hlucinsko region in Upper Silesia didn’t want to join Czechoslovakia in 1919, the vast majority of Masurians in Southern East Prussia, who spoke an archaic form of Polish, didn’t want to join Poland, and the Lithuanian-speakers in the Memel region mostly didn’t wish to join Lithuania.
After all, They had all been loyal subjects of the Kings of Prussia for centuries- and furthermore, they were Protestants, having undergone the Reformation in the 16th century- contrary to the Poles, the Lithuanians of Lithuania and most Czechs.
Thus, language and political loyalty were not always identical…just as was the case with many Alsatians.