 During the war that percentage was halved, largely by the loss of the border areas of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina (to the former Soviet Union, now Moldova and Ukraine) and southern Dobrudja (to Bulgaria).Two-thirds of the ethnic German population either left or were deported after World War II, a period that was followed by decades of relatively regular (by communist standards) migration.During the interwar period in Romania, the total number of ethnic Germans amounted to as much as 786,000 (according to some sources and estimates dating to 1939), a figure which had subsequently fallen to circa 36,000 as of 2011 in contemporary Romania.