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I think you mistook German for Germanic. German means citizenship in Germany, Germanics were peoples living in central Europe and Scandinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples

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German is also ethnicity, as I mentioned above, there are Germans e.g. in Kazakhstan and other countries, who are not German citizens.

How can it be an ethnicity when Germany itself was founded out of the leftovers of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 19th century? You might have an argument for some of the constitute elements like Prussia(ns), but even that's a stretch.

German ethnicities existed before and outside Germany, it is not the same as in the US, where Americans didn't exist before it was founded. In Europe peoples' ethnicities are not tied to the state the same way as it is in the US.

For example, Volga Germans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans) were Russian subjects who lived outside of Germany; Baltic Germans as well.

More examples - Hungarians in Romania, Turks in Bulgaria, and so on.

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