Banat Swabians
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The '''Banat Swabians''' are an [[ethnic German]] population in [[Southeast Europe]], part of the [[Danube Swabians]], who immigrated over 200 years ago from different parts of Southern [[Germany]] into the [[Banat]], since it had been sparsely populated after [[Ottoman wars in Europe|wars with Turkey]]. This formerly strong and important German minority has now become quite small, many of its members having returned to Germany as a result of the Second World War and again for economic reasons after 1990. The Banat was divided between several countries by the [[Treaty of Versailles]] of 1919, and the [[Treaty of Trianon]] of 1920: the greatest part was included into [[Romania]], a smaller part into [[Yugoslavia]], and a small strip in the area of [[Szeged]] into [[Hungary]].
==Banat and the Danube Swabians==
The Banat colonists are often grouped together with other German-speaking ethnic groups in the area under the name ''[[Danube Swabians]]''. Besides Banat, these groups lived in nearby western [[Bačka]], in [[Swabian Turkey]] (present-day southern Hungary), in [[Slavonia]], and in [[Satu Mare|Sathmar]]. All these places were then under [[Austro-Hungarian Empire|Austrian]] rule.
==The colonists' origins and recruitment==
[[Image:deutschsieben bürgen.svg|thumb|right|250px|Traditionally German (Saxon or Swabian) territories in Banat and Transylvania.]]
Most of the settlers came from [[Alsace-Lorraine]], [[Austria]], [[Bavaria]], [[Franconia]], and the [[Rhenish Palatinate|Palatinate]]; another small group can be traced to [[Middle Germany]]; however, only a small few actually came from the [[Swabia]]n regions of what was then known as [[Further Austria]]. Therefore, it is unclear how the group came to be called the Banat ''Swabians''. It is probably due to the fact that the majority of the immigrants were registered and embarked at the Swabian city of [[Ulm]], and then were transported with ''Ulmer Schachteln'' on the [[Danube]] to [[Belgrade]], where they then set off on foot to found their new homeland.
The majority of the colonists came from agricultural areas and were the younger sons of poor farming families, who saw little chance for success in their native land. Under [[Maria Theresa of Austria|Maria Theresa]] they received financial support and long-term tax relief. Later many failed to get married because there were not enough women there. Many craftsmen were financially assisted, as were teachers, doctors, and other professionals.
Some of them, coming from French-speaking or linguistically mixed communes in [[Lorraine (province)|Lorraine]], maintained for some generations the French language, and a specific ethnic identity, later labelled as Banat French, ''Français du Banat''<ref>[http://www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id=1641&l=fr 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] </ref>.
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 [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]]'s ''[[Heim ins Reich]]'' policy. These included 164 Banat Swabians from Bardarski Geran and 33 from Gostilya.
==Banat Swabians 1920-1944==
The Treaty of Trianon of 1920 was the beginning of the end for the Swabians of Banat. Of course, the end of the empire and the assumption of most of Banat by Romania had many positive effects as well. Towards the end of the 19th century, Hungary had undergone a period of [[Magyarization]], when it attempted to assimilate all of its minorities. With the end of the monarchy, it was possible to have German schools for the first time since 1867. German culture was flourishing: once again there was a German theatre in Timişoara, and across Romania more German newspapers were being established.
Economically, things did not go so well. [[Black Friday]] and the subsequent financial crises of the 1930s hit Banat hard. This caused many Swabians to leave Banat to work as cheap labor in such places as [[Argentina]], [[Brazil]], and the [[United States]] to seek their fortunes and never return.
Also, after 1933, some of Banat Swabians, like some [[Volksdeutsche|ethnic Germans]] in [[Eastern Europe]], became supporters of [[Adolf Hitler]] and his [[Third Reich]] in its mission for economic and military strength. Nazis forced many of them to join the local militia. In the Second World War, many were drafted into the Romanian army. After 1943, a German-Romanian treaty allowed them to fight with the [[SS]]. Towards the end of the war, some Banat Swabians also opposed the Nazis, which executed some of them in [[Jimbolia]] ([[Jimbolia|Hatzfeld]]).
==Life after 1944==
The [[Kingdom of Romania]], formerly a German ally, changed sides and joined the [[Allies]] on August 23, 1944. Overnight, all Germans living in Romania became potential enemies of the state. The approach of the unstoppable [[Red Army]] caused a flood of refugees to flee from all parts of the country into Germany.
The most tragic was the fate of the ethnic Germans who lived in Yugoslavian Banat. After the [[Soviet]] occupation, along came angry mobs of Yugoslav partisans seeking revenge, brutally murdering more than 300.000 men, wemen, seniors and children, and forcing more into exile. In the last weeks of the war, not only German soldiers, but entire villages were imprisoned and surrounded by barbed wire and turned into real concentration camps like in [[Knićanin|Rudolfsgnad]], similar to Nazi extermination concentration camps earlier. All citizens of German origin (those who bore germanic names, were Roman Catholic or Protestant, and spoke any of the German dialects), had to assume a collective guilt for what Nazi Germans did in Yugoslavia previous years. They were collectively stripped of their Yugoslavian/Serbian citizenship and any basic human rights. Ethnic Germans were not allowed to own anything, not even the clothes they bore on their boddies; they were literally enslaved. Yugoslav patrisans, Serbs or Russians could at any time torture and kill anyone who was ethnic German, without any consequences. While still alive, ethnic German well-off farmers were forced to share their homes with arriving waves of ethnic Serb refugees from the Balkans: Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Croatia. A very brutal system of concentration camps for Banaters of German origin was established (like most notorious ones at Rudolfsgnad/[Knićanin], or Susara). Those ethnic Germans who sided with Nazis during the war have already had left with Wehrmacht for Germany or Austria. In the death camps for Germans, simliar to Nazi concentration camps, many remaining innocent civilians of German origin (mailny wemen and children) served as forced labour until they died; many were constantly raped, brutally tortured, starved to death, or left to slowly die of preventable diseases. Many German children and women were taken to Siberia by Soviets as forced labour to work in mines, or as sex-slaves. Lasting from 1944 to 1948, this marked the end of Banat Swabians in Yugoslavia. Today, there are no more than 15.000 of people in Serbian Banat who claim German ancestry left. Many remaining were forced to change their names and accept new Serbian names, in order to stay in Banat. Serbian government still denies that this gencide ever happened, even though there are many survivors who testify.
Life in Romania was not much better. By 1945, the nation was completely under Soviet influence. The head of the [[Romanian Communist Party]], [[Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej]], was called a ''Romanian [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]]''. In 1944, much of the German population was [[Expulsion of Germans from Romania after World War II|deported]] to labor camps in the [[Soviet Union]]. Thousands died. Those who remained (as well as those who fled West) lost their citizenship and were dispossessed. In 1951 more than a thousand German-speakers were [[Bărăgan deportations|displaced]] and forced to found new villages in the [[Bărăgan Plain|Bărăgan Steppe]] of southeast Romania. The majority were allowed to return in 1955.
In the 1960s the Romanian political atmosphere relaxed significantly. Gradually the policy of disenfranchising and dispossessing the German minority was retracted. Once again they could enjoy all the privileges of a Romanian citizen.
It was during this time that the final departure of the Banat Swabians for Germany began. The discrimination and economic adversity were too much, and before long, many had developed a desire to emigrate permanently, which also took hold among the [[Transylvanian Saxons]]. Although the families of the Danube and Banat Swabians had lived in the area for around ten generations, and even though their culture and way of life had grown to be different from that of Germany, they still wanted to leave.
Several families from both Romanian and Yugoslav Banat fled to Germany and were helped by the French minister [[Robert Schumann]] as Banat French, ''Français du Banat'', to settle in [[France]] in 1945-1950<ref>[http://www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id=1641&l=fr 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] </ref>.
==The Ceauşescu era==
In 1965, [[Nicolae Ceauşescu]] came to power in Romania. At first he opened the country to the West, but by the end of the 1970s, he had become nationalistic and a great opponent of the ethnic minorities. This did not keep him from making a profit from them though. Under his rule, any German willing to emigrate would have to pay the regime a [[bounty]] of up to more than a thousand [[German mark|mark]]s (depending on age and education). In this way over ten thousand Germans left Romania. The departing families would need the right papers to emigrate and to get them, they would have to pay a bribe, or else wait for years. This doubled Ceauşescu's income from the emigrants. Nevertheless, the Banat Swabians' continued going to Germany into the 1980s. The extreme economic crisis of this time, as well as increased persecution of minorities - including a village destruction project - caused 200,000 to flee Romania during that decade.
==The "bleeding" after the fall==
After Ceauşescu's fall in 1989 and [[German Reunification]] in 1990, almost all the remaining Germans in [[Romania]] left the country for [[Germany]]. The German population in Romania is much reduced, and skewed towards older people because it is mainly young people who leave. Individual emigrants are returning, usually entrepreneurs with economic ambitions or as part of a development project.
In [[Serbia]] and [[Croatia]] the situation is similar, whereas in [[Hungary]] there are less than 62,000 Danube Swabians left<ref>[http://www.nepszamlalas.hu/eng/volumes/24/tables/load1_4_1.html Hungarian census by ethnic groups, 2001], the category Germans including mostly, but not only, the Danube Swabians</ref>, who also have political representation. One city and many towns have German-speaking mayors {{Fact|date=February 2007}}. Displacement and dispossession of the German minority took place in Hungary only between 1945 and 1948.
==The current situation==
Of around 750,000 Germans who once lived in Romania, less than a tenth remain there today. The remaining population is too small and aged to build a functioning society. Only in a few places with large populations is there a functioning German cultural life, sometimes helped along by Romanian inhabitants. Still, the ''Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung'' is a strong weekly paper, and the German State Theater in [[Timişoara]] (''Deutsches Staatstheater Temeswar''), subsidized by the Romanian government, still produces good German theatre. In the cities of [[Timişoara]] and [[Arad, Romania|Arad]] there are still German language secondary schools, attended mostly by Romanian students.
The Banat Swabians that emigrated to Germany are generally well integrated into the society in which they live. They keep contact through cultural organisations (''Landsmannschaften''). Notably in [[Vienna]] and in South Germany, where most Banat Swabians now live, they maintain their customs and dialect, and support those who remain in Romania.
The remaining Germans (including Banat Swabians) in Romania are represented in politics by the DFDR or ''Demokratisches Forum der Deutschen in Rumänien'' ([[Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania]]).
==Famous Banat Swabians==
*[[Geza von Cziffra]], film director
*[[Johnny Weissmuller]] (born Peter Weißmüller), American actor and swimmer
*[[Nikolaus Lenau]], writer
*[[Stefan Jäger]], painter
==References==
*The information in this article is based on and translated from that found in its German equivalent.
* [[German-speaking Europe]]
* Banat Swabians in Bulgaria: {{cite book |title=Banatskite bǎlgari: istorijata na edna malcinstvena obštnost vǎv vremeto na nacionalnite dǎržavi |last=Njagulov |first=Blagovest |year=1999 |location=Sofia |publisher=Paradigma |language=Bulgarian |chapter=Banatskite bǎlgari v Bǎlgarija |isbn=954-9536-13-0 }}
{{reflist}}
==External links==
* [http://www.halbjahresschrift.homepage.t-online.de/zill1.htm#Hockl] about Nazi war-time executions in [[Jimbolia]] ([[Hatzfeld]]) (in [[German language|German]])
{{Ethnic groups of Romania}}
{{Ethnic groups of Serbia}}
{{GermanDiaspora}}
[[Category:Banat]]
[[Category:German diaspora]]
[[Category:Ethnic German groups in Romania]]
[[Category:Ethnic groups in Bulgaria]]
[[Category:Ethnic groups in Hungary]]
[[Category:Ethnic groups in Serbia]]
[[Category:Ethnic groups in Transylvania]]
[[Category:Ethnic groups in Vojvodina]]
[[Category:Ethnic minorities]]
[[de:Banater Schwaben]]
[[fr:Allemands du Banat]]
[[ro:Şvabi bănăţeni]]