At the start of the Second World War, the German-speaking minorities of Estonia and Latvia – known as “Baltic Germans” – were “relocated” into the “Third Reich”by the National Socialist power and ceased to exist in their historical form. This episode of radical ethnicization of their life paths irreversibly altered the meaning of the ethnonym “Baltic German” and the forms of belonging it encompassed. After the Second World War, being a Baltic German was a reality reconfigured in various ways throughout space and time: one could become and then cease to be a “Baltic German expellee” in West Germany, a “Baltic German resettler” in East Germany, a “Soviet citizen of German nationality” in Soviet Estonia or Latvia, or an “ethnic German” in independent Estonia or Latvia. Being simultaneously legal or administrative conditions, principles of collective organization and discursive or emotional projection screens, these categories shaped multiple versions of “Baltic Germanness”. The study of their development, implementation and perception by the individuals concerned highlights how belonging is made at the intersection of institutional, collective and personal realities. By breaking with diasporic and homogenizing approaches to belonging, the investigation of these distinct contexts enables us to contrast mechanisms of institutionalization of the ethnic under different political rules. While the stigma of “German nationality” in the Soviet Union followed an ascriptive logic and produced assignment criteria that were alien to the individuals concerned, the guardians of Baltic Germanness in West Germany and independent Estonia and Latvia adjusted its eligibility criteria following a restrictive logic, limiting access to the material or symbolic benefits brought by group membership. Analyzing the negotiation and re-affiliation strategies generated by these situations and embedded in distinct social realities therefore contributes to the historization of “Germanness” and displays how “imagined” communities (Benedict Anderson) are also pragmatically fashioned.