someone_else12

In daily life maybe, but doesn't mean that German ethnicity doesn't exist, see Law of Return, where the state quite explicitly judges on who is German or not, based on ethnicity.

I know a few Germans whose ancestors were from Volga and who lived in Kazakhstan, they were able to claim German citizenship by the virtue of the state considering them of German ethnic descent (they never had German citizenship before).

I am from Kazakhstan, and the Germans who live there are pretty much Russians, yet the German state still would allow them to "return" by the virtue of their ethnicity.

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.

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

German is both nationality and ethnicity.

There are ethnic Germans outside of Germany. For example, Germans in Kazakhstan, they report their ethnicity as "German", despite being Kazakh citizens.