The 20^th century was the worst in the history of the Saxons. The political and economic crises of the 1930s forced more than 82,000 Romanians to leave the country for America, of whom most were Saxons. The Second World War was particularly disastrous At the end of it, 35.000 Saxons were forced to flee from the Red Army;  more than 26000 Saxons were taken to Siberian labour camps. The few survivors returned home only in 1951.

The communist period after the 1960s was not good either, as the then communist leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, signed a secret agreement with the West German government, by which they would pay a fee for every individual of German descent who was given a visa to leave the country. More than 200,000 left in that period, having, in effect, been bought by the German government. It is said that this policy was implemented to counter the massive immigration of Turkish people into Germany. Many Saxons also left after the Revolution in 1989 because of the uncertainty of their situation in Romania. In the 1930s in Transylvania there were more than 500,000 Saxons. After the revolution in 1992 only 41,000 remained.

This isolated German-speaking population, who established the seven cities that gave the German name, Siebenburgen, to the province, has many wonderful and romantic legends –one of them being that the inhabitants were descendants of the children of Hamelin, lured to Transylvania by the Pied Piper. But that is another story.