The rationale for including these duchies in the German Confederation even though historically they were not components of the HRE was strategic. In the negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, both Austria and Russia all desired control of the city of Krakow, both for its fortresses and strategic location. The solution to this impasse was to create a nominally independent micro-state, the Free City of Krakow. But Metternich was beset by the twin fears of both Russian expansionism and Polish irredentism. Alexander II's toying with the Polish issue during the Congress stoked fears that Russia would easily invade the strategic territory under the pretext of restoring the Polish kingdom. Therefore it became imperative for Metternich to have the German confederation directly share a border with the Krakow microstate. Austria could then present a threat to Krakow's independence as a threat to the German confederation, which Austria politically dominated in its first decades, and not as a strictly Austrian affair. Metternich's solution was fortuitous in 1846-7 when Austria was able to use the duchies as a staging ground to invade and annex Krakow. With the overall strategic rationale for including the duchies now moot, they left the German Confederation in 1850 and became a component of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

As for the Galician region's historical connection to Germany or other national groups, it is rather tricky matter. Oświęcim had a fairly significant German presence in the town since the fourteenth century and although its German population ebbed and flowed, it left enough of an imprint for the town to sometimes carry a German name, Auschwitz. The Habsburg rule over Galicia often meant that the region's cities, with the notable exception of Krakow, were often culturally Germanized. Their administrative elite were often educated in Vienna and German cultural motifs such as Biedermeyer architecture were signs of these cities' culturedness. This is not to say that these areas were islands of Germandom in a slavic sea, a metaphor used by the Third Reich, but rather that national and ethnic identity was not firmly set in the nineteenth century and could be highly contingent on larger political circumstances.