the German armed forces of whom 2,200 were killed on the Eastern Front. The region suffered severely during the Ardennes Offensive of 1944–45 and Sankt Vith, in particular, was nearly totally destroyed by bombing. Return to Belgium, 1945–present After the war, the Belgian state reasserted sovereignty over the area, which caused the male inhabitants of the area who had served in the German army to lose their civil rights as "traitors to the Belgian state". After the war, the Belgian authorities opened 16,400 investigations into citizens from Eupen-Malmedy, representing around 25 percent of the region's entire population. In comparison, the figure for the rest of Belgium represented less than five percent. After the war, demands to return Eupen-Malmedy to Germany faded. The first regionalist political party, the Party of German-speaking Belgians (Partei der Deutschsprachigen Belgier, or PDB), emerged in 1971 to argue that greater autonomy to be given to Belgium's German speakers within the newly created federal state but not for regional secession or unification with what had become West Germany. The PDB's campaign culminated in the creation of the German-speaking Community of Belgium in 1984 which provided cultural autonomy to Belgium's 70,000 German speakers along the same lines as those already negotiated for Belgium's Dutch and French-speaking communities between 1971 and 1980. The nine German-speaking communes of the East Cantons form part of the German-speaking Community while Malmedy and Waimes are part of the French Community. There are protected rights for the minority language in both areas. Languages spoken in the area The linguistic situation of the wider area is complex since it lies on the border between the Romance and Germanic languages and on an isogloss dividing several German dialects. In general, over the past decades, the local dialects have lost ground to German and French. Historically, in Aubel, Baelen, Plombières, Welkenraedt (neighbouring Belgian municipalities), Eupen, Kelmis and Lontzen, the local languages have been classed as Limburgish, thus dialects of Low Franconian or Dutch. The inhabitants of Raeren have spoken Ripuarian and those of the district of Sankt Vith Moselle Franconian, which are dialects of High German. On the other hand, most of the people living in Malmedy and Waimes speak Walloon or French, with a minority of German speakers. Some of the folklore and carnival traditions there are still in the Walloon language. That is also the case for the children: "The New Year's wishes have hardly