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The Zipser Germans are the German-speaking townspeople, miners and farmers of Spiš, an upland region below the High Tatras in what is now northeastern Slovakia. For most of their history the region was Szepes county in the Kingdom of Hungary. The Zipsers were an old, self-governing German society living among Slovaks, Hungarians and Rusyns. They were loyal to the Hungarian crown and proud of their own law. Most of their ancestors arrived in the 12th and 13th centuries, many after the Mongol invasion of 1241 left the kingdom short of people. Medieval documents called them Saxons, the same catch-all name used for the Germans of Transylvania, though they came from several parts of the German lands.

Their towns ran their own affairs under a count of their own and a written code, the Zipser Willkür, set down in 1370. In 1412 King Sigismund pawned thirteen Zips towns to Poland as security for a loan. Those towns stayed under Polish administration until Hungary took them back in 1769, more than three and a half centuries later. The region splits in two. The Upper Zips, around Kežmarok, Levoča and Poprad, was a country of market towns and farming villages. The Lower Zips, along the Hnilec valley around Gelnica and Smolník, lived by mining copper, silver and iron. Its people, nicknamed Mantaken, spoke a dialect of their own.

Lutheran teaching spread quickly through the Zips towns in the 16th century. The Counter-Reformation later pulled much of the population back to Rome, leaving the community divided between Catholic and Lutheran congregations. Kežmarok's wooden articular church, built in 1717 when Habsburg law allowed Lutherans to build only in wood, is one of the lasting marks of that split. In the late 18th century Zipser miners and woodcutters also moved east to Bukovina and Maramureș. In Vișeu de Sus, Zipser families kept a German-speaking logging community going into modern times.

The 20th century undid the community. After 1918 Spiš became part of Czechoslovakia, and many Zipsers, whose loyalties had long run toward Budapest, were slow to take up German nationalist politics. In late 1944 many were evacuated ahead of the advancing Red Army. After the war, those who stayed or tried to return lost their citizenship, and most were expelled. Descendants now live mainly in Germany and Austria, and other Zipser families had already emigrated to the United States decades earlier. A small community remains in Slovakia, where the dialect hangs on among older speakers and local associations keep the old town histories in view.