Entangled Utopias: The Nazi Mobilization of Ethnic German Youths in the Batschka, 1930s–1944

Abstract

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...

Borderland Child Heterotopias. A Case Study on the Belgian-German Borderlands

“…As the anthropologists Spyrou and Christou have noted, children are "linked with the power struggles that accompany the processes that give rise to, maintain, and transform borders and their role in the world" (2014,2). Case study research on the history of children in borderlands revealed that states, upon acquiring new pieces of land near their political borders, invested their hopes in child policies in order to raise a generation of socially engaged citizens able to bring the periphery closer to the country's core (Präger 2015;Mezger 2016). In order to understand how individual children reacted to such policies, researchers have used the oral history method.…”