Danube Swabians

The Danube Swabians (German: Donauschwaben, Hungarian: Dunai svábok or Dunamenti németek, Romanian: Şvabi or Şvabi Dunăreni, Serbian: Дунавске Швабе, Dunavske Švabe, Croatian: Podunavski Švabe, Bulgarian: Дунавски шваби, Dunavski shvabi) is a collective term for Germans who lived in the former Kingdom of Hungary, especially in the Danube (Donau) River valley. Because of differential development within the territory settled, the Danube Swabians cannot be seen as a unified people. They include the Germans of Hungary (Ungarndeutsche), Satu Mare Swabians, the Banat Swabians (Banater Schwaben), and the Vojvodina Germans in Serbia's Vojvodina (Wojwodinedeutsche) and Croatia's Slavonia (especially in Osijek region). The Carpathian Germans and Transylvanian Saxons are not included within the Danube Swabian group.

Contents

History

Danube Swabian men's tracht, from the historic house of the parents of Stefan Jäger, Hatzfeld (Jimbolia), Romanian Banat.

Origins

Beginning in the 12th century, German merchants and miners began to settle in the Kingdom of Hungary at the invitation of the Hungarian monarchy (see Ostsiedlung). Although there were significant colonies of Carpathian Germans in the Spiš mountains and Transylvanian Saxons in Transylvania, German settlement throughout the rest of the kingdom had not been extensive until this time.

During the 17th-18th centuries, warfare between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire devastated and depopulated much of the lands of the valley, referred to geographically as the Pannonian plain. The Habsburgs ruling Austria and Hungary at the time resettled the land with people of various ethnicities including Magyars, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Germans. The Germans came at this time from Swabia, Hesse, Franconia, Bavaria, Austria, and Alsace-Lorraine. However, despite their origin, they were all referred to as Swabians. The most of them went on board in Ulm (Swabia) and came to their new destination on the Danube with a kind of boats called "Ulmer Schachteln".

Settlement

The first wave of resettlement came as the Ottoman Turks were gradually being forced back after their defeat at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. The settlement was encouraged by nobility whose lands had been devastated through warfare, and by military officers including Prince Eugene of Savoy and Claudius Mercy. Many Germans settled in the Bakony (Bakonywald) and Vértes (Schildgebirge) mountains north and west of Lake Balaton (Plattensee), as well as around the town Buda (Ofen), now part of Budapest. The area of heaviest German colonization during this period was in the Swabian Turkey (Schwäbische Türkei), a triangular region between the Danube river, Lake Balaton, and the Drava (Drau) River. Other areas settled during this time by Germans were Pécs (Fünfkirchen), Satu Mare (Sathmar), and south of Mukachevo (Munkatsch).

After the Banat area of Central Europe was annexed from the Ottomans by the Habsburgs in the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718), plans were made to resettle the region, which became known as the Banat of Temesvár (Temeschwar / Temeschburg), as well as the Bačka (Batschka) region between the Danube and Tisza (Theiss) rivers. Fledgling settlements were destroyed during another Austrian-Turkish war (1737-1739), but extensive colonization continued after the suspension of hostilities. The resettlement was accomplished through private and state initiatives. After Maria Theresa of Austria assumed the throne as Queen of Hungary in 1740, she encouraged vigorous colonization on crown lands, especially between Timişoara and the Tisza. The land steadily rejuvenated: marshes near the Danube and the Tisza were drained, farms were rebuilt, and roads and canals were constructed. Many Danube Swabians served on Austria's Military Frontier (Militärgrenze) against the Ottomans. Between 1740 and 1790 more than 100,000 Germans immigrated to the Kingdom of Hungary.

The Napoleonic Wars ended the large-scale movement of Germans to the Hungarian lands, although the colonial population grew steadily and was self-sustaining. Small daughter-colonies developed in Slavonia and Bosnia. After the creation of Austria-Hungary in 1867, Hungary established a policy of Magyarization whereby minorities, including the Danube Swabians, were induced by political and economic means to adopt the Magyar language and culture.

Beginning in 1893, Banat Swabians began to move to Bulgaria, where they settled in the village of Bardarski Geran, Vratsa Province, founded by Banat Bulgarians several years prior to that. Their number later exceeded 90 families and they built a separate Roman Catholic church in 1929 due to conflicts with the Bulgarian Catholics. Some of these Germans later moved to Tsarev Brod, Shumen Province together with a handful of Banat Bulgarian families, as well as to another Banat Bulgarian village, Gostilya, Pleven Province. Between 1941 and 1943, a total of 2,150 ethnic German Bulgarian citizens were transferred to Germany as part of Hitler's Heim ins Reich policy. These included 164 Banat Swabians from Bardarski Geran and 33 from Gostilya.[1]


After the treaties of Saint-Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920) following World War I, the Banat was divided between Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary; Bačka was divided between Yugoslavia and Hungary; and Satu Mare went to Romania. Before World War II, the biggest populations of Germans in the Vojvodina were Hodschag, Werbass, and Apatin.

Although absolutely precise figures are sketchy it is believed there may have been approximately one million Danube Swabians in the region before World War II. In 1935 the scholar Paul Gauss asserted there were around 500,000 in Hungary, 450,000 in the Vojvodina, and between 230 to 300,000 in the Romanian Banat area with an additional 60,000 in Satu Mare (Sathmar).

World War II, Expulsion and Current Situation

See also: Yugoslav Front, 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, Banat (1941-1944), and Independent State of Croatia

At the start of World War II, many Danube Swabians served in the militaries of Romania, Hungary, and the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), a fascist puppet state[2][3] created within Axis-occupied Yugoslavia, was home to 182,000 Danube Swabian Volksdeutche ("Folksdojčeri" in Serbo-Croatian).[4] In addition, a separate autonomous area of Banat was established by Nazi Germany within German-occupied Serbia (another part of occupied Yugoslavia). Banat was dominated by the Danube Swabian minority, who in the 1931 census formed 20% of the population with 120,500 members.[5] In both areas, it was illegal to draft Volksdeutsche. However, of the approximately 300,000 strong Volksdeutsche minority in occupied Yugoslavia (182,000 in the NDH, 120,000 in Banat) cca. Only a small minority volunteered to join the German and Axis military organizations even after occupation; ultimately conscription had to be imposed by SS officials under the dubious legal pretext that occupied Serbia was deutsches Hoheitsgebiet and the archaic Tiroler Landsturmordung (Tyrol General Levy Act) of 1872 was introduced.[6]

"After the initial rush of Volksdeutsche to join, voluntary enlistments tapered off, and the new unit did not reach division size. Therefore, in August 1941, the SS discarded the voluntary approach, and after a favourable judgement from the SS court in Belgrade, imposed a mandatory military obligation on all Volksdeutsche in Serbia-Banat, the first of its kind for non-Reich Germans."[7]

Consequently around 100,000 Danube Swabian men served in the German and Axis military, most notably in the two locally formed Waffen-SS volunteer divisions, the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen, and the 22nd SS Volunteer Cavalry Division Maria Theresa (which was made-up of Hungarian Volksdeutsche). The 7th SS was a volunteer formation, but some have claimed that later in the war the local German authorities of Banat used coercion to recruit more troops. Dr Guenther Reinecke, chief of the Hauptamt SS-Gericht (SS legal office) wrote to Himmler at one point that the Prinz Eugen was "no longer an organization of volunteers, that on the contrary, the ethnic Germans from Serbian Banat were drafted, to a large extent under threat of punishment by the local German leadership, and later by the SS Erganzsamt."[8]

The 7th SS Prinz Eugen was engaged in fighting the Yugoslav resistance, the Partisans. The 7th SS became notorious for its atrocities against the Yugoslav civilian population, particularly during the battles of the Neretva and Sutjeska (1943), including the killing of all captured prisoners and wounded (per Hitler's directive).[9] In addition, the division was responsible for large-scale atrocities committed in the area of Nikšić in Montenegro:

“Everything they came across they burnt down, they murdered and pillaged. The officers and men of the SS division Prinz Eugen committed crimes of an outrageous cruelty on this occasion. The victims were shot, slaughtered and tortured, or burnt to death in burning houses. Where a victim was found not in his house but on the road or in the fields some distance away, he was murdered and burnt there. Infants with their mothers, pregnant women and frail old people were also murdered. In short, every civilian met with by these troops in these villages was murdered. In many cases, whole families who, not expecting such treatment or lacking the time for escape, had remained quietly in their homes were annihilated and murdered. Whole families were thrown into burning houses in many cases and thus burnt. It has been established from the investigations entered upon that 121 persons, mostly women, and including 30 persons aged 60-92 years and 29 children of ages ranging from 6 months to 14 years, were executed on this occasion in the horrible manner narrated above. The villages [and then follows the list of the villages] were burnt down and razed to the ground.”

—Dr. Dušan Nedeljković, Yugoslav State Commission, Document D-940, [10]

During the Nuremberg trials, a photograph of SS troopers (of low rank) decapitating a Yugoslav civilian with a woodsman's axe was shown. When asked to account for the atrocities of the 7th SS, the SS Oberstgruppenführer Paul Hausser (second in command of the SS) stated in explanation that the division was composed primarily of Yugoslav Germans.[11] Of about 100,000 men who served in the various forces, approximately 29,000 were killed. This total includes 2,000 POWs from the 7th SS Prinz Eugen which were summarily executed by Allied Yugoslav troops as Yugoslav citizens collaborating with the enemy.[citation needed]

In 1944, the Soviet Red Army, assisting Yugoslav forces, liberated northern areas of German-occupied Yugoslavia which were home to the Danube Swabian minority. Thus beginning the exodus of Germans from the area. After the war, many of the Germans of Yugoslavia, who by this point were mostly women, children, or elderly, were held in camps made out of their former towns, such as the ones at Knićanin and Molin.[citation needed] From 1945-48, many Germans in Hungary were dispossessed and forced to "return" to Germany, although it was not their birthplace. The Germans in Romania were not deported but were instead dispersed within Romania. Many left Romania for West Germany between 1970-90, and this trend increased in 1990. Beginning in 1920 and especially after World War II, many Danube Swabians migrated to the United States, Brazil, Canada, Austria, Australia, and Argentina. Some of them, descending from French-speaking or linguistically mixed families from Lorraine, had maintained for some generations the French language, and a specific ethnic identity, later labelled as Banat French, Français du Banat, and were resettled in France around 1950[12]

Culture

Danube Swabian women's tracht, from the historic house of the parents of Stefan Jäger, Hatzfeld (Jimbolia), Romanian Banat.

The Danube Swabian culture is a melting pot of southern German regional customs, with a large degree of Balkan and mostly Hungarian influence. This is especially true of the food, where paprika is heavily employed, which lead to the nickname for Hungarian Germans or Paprikadeutsche. The architecture is neither Southern German nor Balkan but is unique to itself. The houses, often made of mud bricks, are ubiquitous throughout the Banat region. Georg Weifert was responsible for developing one of the most famous beers in the Serbia / Yugoslavia region and later became an important banker and politician in Belgrade (his image currently features on the Serbian 1000 dinar note).

Weifert on the 1000 Serbian dinar bill.

Language

The Danube Swabian language is only nominally Swabian (Schwäbisch in German). In reality, it contains elements or many dialects of the original German settlers, mainly Swabian, Franconian, Bavarian, Rhinelandic/Pfälzisch, Alsatian, and Alemannic, as well as Austro-Hungarian administrative and military jargon. Loanwords from Hungarian are especially common regarding cuisine and agriculture, but also regarding dress, politics, placenames, and sports. Other cultures of influence include Serbian and Croatian, Russian (for communist concepts), Romanian, Turkish (Hambar), English (for football), and general Balkan and South Slavic loanwords or, properly, wanderwörter like Kukoriz (maize). However, Hungarian is the most prestigious - and therefore also the most common - of all the contact languages of Danube Swabian. The plural of loanwords is in most cases formed in the Danube Swabian way. Conjunctions and adverbs from the respective contact languages may be integrated as well.[13]

Many German words used by speakers of Danube Swabian dialects may sound archaic. To the ear of a Standard German speaker, the Danube Swabian dialect sounds like what it is: a mix of southwestern German dialects from the 1700s. Due to relative isolation and differing proximities to nearby German speakers (Austrians and Transylvanian Saxons), the language varies considerably, with speakers able to distinguish inhabitants of neighboring villages by the words they use for such things as marmalade (Schleckle being one variant), or by how many (usually Hungarian) loanwords they employ.

Naming

As is the custom in Hungary, Danube Swabians often put the surname first, especially when writing, for example Butscher Jakob (see photo of memorial). Danube Swabian villages tend to have relatively few family names as the villagers stem from only a few families, but usually the same family name does not appear in more than a couple of villages, meaning that there are many Danube Swabian family names. The names come from throughout southern Germany, from assimilated Hungarians, and occasionally from Balkan and Italian origins. There are usually no middle names, but often double first names, if a distinction can be made. The variety of first names is few, since children were usually named after grandparents or godparents. Popular names for women include: Anna, Barbara, Christina, Katharina, Magdalena, Maria, Sophia, Theresia, and many two-name combinations thereof. Popular names for men include: Adam, Christian, Friedrich, Georg, Gottfried, Heinrich, Jakob, Johann, Konrad, Ludwig, Mathias, Nikolaus, Peter, Philipp (or Filipp), and Stefan (or Stephan). With so few names in villages, other modifiers or nicknames were almost always used to distinguish people. The modifiers were often size related (e.g., "Kleinjohann" or "Little Johann"), occupation related, or location related (usually by prefixing the streetname).

Coat of arms

A coat of arms designed in 1950 by Hans Diplich has been adopted by many Danube Swabian cultural organizations. Its blazon is Parti per fess wavy 1 Or, an eagle displayed couped Sable langued Gules; 2 parti per fess Argent and Vert, a fortress Argent roofed and turreted Gules surmounted with Sun and Crescent waning Or; chief wavy Azure.

It depicts:

Resources for genealogical research

Germany

  • Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Stuttgart; (institute of foreign relations); church records (microfilm) of villages in the banat

Austria

  • Theresianischer Kataster, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv; Austrian archive

Luxembourg

  • Institut Grand-Ducal, Section de Linguistique, d’Ethnologie et d’Onomastique, village chronics and family records
  • Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines
  • Nationalarchiv Luxemburg, Microfilms, notary records, church records

See also

Memorial in German for soldiers who died in World War I in Sekitsch (Lovćenac), Vojvodina.

External links

References

  1. ^ Njagulov, Blagovest (1999). "Banatskite bǎlgari v Bǎlgarija" (in Bulgarian). Banatskite bǎlgari: istorijata na edna malcinstvena obštnost vǎv vremeto na nacionalnite dǎržavi. Sofia: Paradigma. ISBN 954-9536-13-0. 
  2. ^ Independent State of Croatia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia
  3. ^ Yugoslavia, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  4. ^ [1] Pavlowitch, Stevan K. "Hitler's New Disorder" Columbia University Press, 2008
  5. ^ http://www.hic.hr/books/jugoistocna-europa/02tablice.htm
  6. ^ George H. Stein, The Waffen-SS, Hitler's Elite Guard at War 1939-1945, (Cornell University, 1966), page.172.
  7. ^ Valdis O. Lumans, Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National minorities of Europe, 1939-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), page.235.
  8. ^ George H. Stein, The Waffen-SS, Hitler's Elite Guard at War 1939-1945, (Cornell University, 1966), page.171.
  9. ^ [2] Wolff, Stefan. "German minorities in Europe", Berghahn Books, 2000
  10. ^ http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-20/tgmwc-20-196-02.shtml
  11. ^ Stein, George H.; The Waffen SS: Hitler's elite guard at war, 1939-1945; Cornell University Press, 1984; p. 274; ISBN 0-80149-275-0
  12. ^ Smaranda Vultur, De l’Ouest à l’Est et de l’Est à l’Ouest : les avatars identitaires des Français du Banat, Texte presenté a la conférence d'histoire orale "Visibles mais pas nombreuses : les circulations migratoires roumaines", Paris, 2001
  13. ^ Bentz, Michaela (2008). German as a Minority Language: The "Swabians" in the Danubian States and their Language(s). In: Kokkonidis, Miltiadis (ed.), Proceedings of LingO 2007, pp.20-26
  • Krallert, Wilfried (1958). Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung. Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing.
  • Valdis O. Lumans, Himmler's Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National minorities of Europe, 1939-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), page.235.
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