Chapter 3 is dedicated to the German occupation of the Western Banat during World War II. Employing archival and press sources from Germany and Serbia, as well as original oral history interviews, it explores the interplay between Reich-German and local Donauschwaben authorities in shaping institutions that would profoundly affect ethnic German children and young people’s wartime experience and conceptualizations of “Germanness”: the National Socialist Volksgruppenführung (minority leadership), the German-language school, and the Church. As the chapter shows, experiences of violence, the Nazi takeover of virtually all local ethnic German organizations, and the disappearance of any official religious alternatives caused an at least public equation of “German” with “National Socialist”—a definition which would be promoted, ignored, and resisted by individual youth.
tangible incursion of National Socialism into their communities' lives. 3 This article will first contextualize the experiences of ethnic German youths in the Batschka during World War II, presenting a brief historic background on the region and its ethnic German communities. Using Volksgeschichten (ethnographic national histories) and similar German studies on the region, the article will then outline the manners in which the Batschka became, even from the 1930s onwards, a target for "utopian" National Socialist planning. 4 Focusing primarily on the Nazi mobilization of youths, the article will then illustrate how German youths-both from within and outside of the Reich-became envisioned as a cornerstone to Nazi Germany's ambitions in eastern Europe. These National Socialist projections "from above," however, were not self-contained. Rather, as memoirs and oral history interviews with these former German youths themselves indicate, Nazi schemes ultimately gave rise to multiple and mutually constitutive utopian imaginations, as youths mobilized and educated within National Socialist projects developed and acted on their own conceptualizations of "Germanness" and "German" space. THE BATSCHKA: A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION As a region that experienced centuries of settlement by various ethnic groups and complex boundary changes between national, state, and imperial projects, the Batschka found itself for centuries at the crossroads between competing spatial imaginations and claims. Part of the Kingdom of Hungary from the Middle Ages onwards, the territory experienced Ottoman administration between 1526 and 1699. Becoming a Habsburg territory once again thereafter, the Batschka became the focus of intensive "repopulation" policies during the eighteenth century, which encouraged and financed German-speaking Christians (predominantly Catholics) to settle in the region. These so-called Donauschwaben thus joined a plethora of other preexisting and newly arrived minorities, including Hungarians, Serbs, Romanians, Ruthenians, Bunjevci, Šokci, Roma, Jews, French, Spaniards, and Italians. 5 With the collapse of the Habsburg Empire after the First World War, the Batschka was divided. Except for a small sliver in the north (which remained in Hungary), most of the Batschka now belonged to the newly founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. While it is difficult to obtain exact population statistics, according to the Yugoslav census of 1931, some 21.64 percent of the Batschka's population (out of a total population of 784,896) was German, 34.24 percent was Hungarian, and 24.05 percent was "Serb." 6 Following the Axis' invasion and division of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Batschka once again came entirely under the purview of the (Axis-allied) Kingdom of Hungary. In October 1944, with the deterioration of the Axis's Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 89 defenses in southeastern Europe, this situation altered once again: facing the Red Army's advance, approximately half of the local ethnic German population fled west...
Forging Germans explores the nationalization and eventual National Socialist mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in interwar and World War II Yugoslavia, particularly in two of its multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderlands: the Western Banat and the Batschka. Drawing upon original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and historical press sources, the book uncovers the multifarious ways in which political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and military agents from Germany colluded with local nationalist activists to inculcate Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans with divergent notions of “Germanness.” As the book shows, even in the midst of Yugoslavia’s violent and shifting Axis occupation, children and youth not only remained the subjects, but became agents of nationalist activism, as they embraced, negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the “Germanness” ascribed to them. Forging Germans is conceptualized as a contribution to the study of National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, to the mid-twentieth-century history of Southeastern Europe and its relation to Germany, to studies of borderland nationalism and experiences of World War II occupation, and to the history of childhood and youth.
Chapter 2 investigates the previously unexplored history of extracurricular youth mobilization among the Vojvodina’s ethnic Germans during the interwar period. It traces the many specifically “German” youth organizations that flourished as Yugoslav German cultural organizations like the Kulturbund, local pro-Reich Erneuerer, Third Reich teachers, Hitler Youth agents, Yugoslav sports groups, and both local and “reichsdeutsche” Catholic and Protestant agencies entered the youth mobilization race, attempting to imbue young Donauschwaben with specific notions of “Germanness.” As the chapter indicates, the initial organizational plurality and relative indifference to exclusivist national causes “from below” shifted towards the late 1930s: by 1940, over 90 percent of Yugoslavia’s young Donauschwaben had joined the local pro-Nazi Deutsche Jugend, creating a formidable army of potential home and battle front recruits ready and willing to fight for Hitler’s Reich.
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