Assimilation
Distress
In appreciation of Hungary’s
assistance during the 7-years war between Austria and Prussia (1756-1763), the
Empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780) placed the Banat under Hungarian jurisdiction in
1778. Following the change in administration, Hungarian officials initiated
long-range efforts toward assimilating the different indigenous nationality groups,
who greatly outnumbered Hungarians in southern regions by then. After the Hungarian
revolution of 1848/49, the territory called ‘Woiwodschaft Serbian und Temeser
Banat,” which included the former crown colony, briefly came under Austrian
jurisdiction again. At the time, the local population consisted of 400 000 Serbs,
300 000 Germans, 300 000 Romanians, 250 000 Hungarians and a host of less numerous
groups.
While Magyarization efforts were
variously successful among different national groupings, they also tended to
alienate non-Hungarians. It turned out to be among factors resulting in Hungary’s
loss of two-thirds of its territory after WW I, as determined by the victors at
Saint-Garmain and Trianon. The related rulings simultaneously resulted in a
tripartite division of former Hungary’s indigenous Germans.
In scholarly discourse,
German-speaking descendants of the colonists were generally referred to as
German-Hungarians or Hungarian Germans until after WWI; however, since large numbers
of the minority were subsequently living in parts of Romania and what later became
Yugoslavia, ongoing use of the terms ‘Deutschungarn’ or Ungarndeutsche’ was no
longer entirely accurate; thus, the term ‘Donauschwaben’ was introduced in 1922 as a
blanket name for the ethnic group.
WW II-era Turning Point
Figures, regarding the total
number of Danube Swabians in Southeastern Europe prior to WWII tend to vary
according to respective sources. Realistic educated guesses add to 650 000 in
Hungary, 540 000 in Yugoslavia, and 310 000 in Romania, tallying up to a total of
1.5 million. Besides Danube Swabians, the two later countries also had additional
German-speaking constituent groups, like the Transylvania Saxons in Romania for
instance, and the Gottscheer in former Yugoslavia, among others.
WWII and its aftermath resulted
in unremitting upheavals in Danube Swabian areas of habitation. Several thousand
were taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers around Christmastime in 1944,
where many succumbed to prevalent harsh conditions. Upon the release of survivors 3
to 5 years later, most chose to live in Germany or Austria, rather than return to
their former homelands, where communist regimes had obviated possibilities of a
continued existence in accustomed ways.
Dispersion from Hungary
Like Czechoslovakia and Poland,
Hungary was granted permission by the victorious WW II powers at Potsdam, in July
and August 1945, for a ‘humane and orderly transfer’ of their indigenous ethnic
German populations to what was left of Germany, after the country’s decimation by
over 24 percent of its 1937 size.
Until mid-1949, when no more
expellees were accepted into allied zones of occupation, Hungary had transferred
around 170 000 Danube Swabians to Germany. Others had fled there on their own
earlier. Post-war Hungarian authorities aimed to get rid of citizens who had
re-adopted their German names, which had been magyarized previously, due to
assimilation pressure. Men, who had chosen to serve in German military units rather
than in allied Hungarian ones, were no longer wanted in their native country either.
Housing of expelled Germans was
made available to Hungarians relocated from neighboring states like Romania,
Slovakia, and Yugoslavia. While it is readily evident that the communists adamantly
suppressed media coverage regarding concomitant human rights violations, persistent
Western inclinations to disregard what was happening, baffled and disappointed
especially those who were adversely affected and left without recourse to justice.
Since democracies are supposed to function best with an informed constituency, how
were people in Western societies supposed to be able to exercise good judgments,
without adequate media or historic coverage!?
Dispersion from Romania
Dreading prospects of an
impending existence under communism, approximately 320,000 Danube Swabians from
Romania and Yugoslavia fled to Germany in autumn 1944. Unlike neighboring countries
to the North, Romania was not determined to expel its Germans after WWII, however,
in 1951 many group members from territories along the country’s border with
Yugoslavia were among 40 000 persons forcibly relocated to the Baragan plain near
the Black Sea. Along with other indigenous nationality groups, including Romanians,
the mixed enlisted populace was to convert the barren region into productive land.
The ill-conceived venture failed and, after a few years, the uprooted folks involved
were allowed to return to their former habitats, or elsewhere in the country.
Between 1950 and 1992, there was
a steady outflow of approximately 200,000 indigenous Germans to Germany. In efforts
to curtail the exodus of valued workers, Nicolai Ceausescu, who became president of
Romania in 1974, imposed an emigration tax amounting to the equivalent of $3,000 per
emigrant with an Associate Degree (Abitur) and smaller amounts for applicants with
less education or training. Exit fees for individuals with an M.A. or doctoral
degree ran as high as $15,000. Since very few ethnic Germans, anxious to leave
Romania, had that kind of money, the West German government paid the necessary
‘redemption fees’ until the disputed tariff was officially rescinded in 1983.
Thereafter, getting official consent to emigrate entailed even longer delays and
bureaucratic hassle.
Dispersion form Yugoslavia
Approximately half of
Yugoslavia’s roughly 700,000 ethnic Germans fled by train, horse-drawn wagons, and
even on foot or by bicycle, before Red Army units reached their respective home
areas as of October 1944. Since my mother was too sick to travel, my family was
among the nearly 200,000 remaining group members, who stayed put where our pioneer
ancestors had settled during the 18th Century. Though innocent of
wrongdoing, we turned out to be easy-to-reach victims on whom vengeful partisans
could vent their rancor.
The awareness that Danube
Swabians guilty of misconduct would NOT have waited around for expectable reprisals,
made no difference at all, because a ‘final solution’ regarding the fate of
Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans had already been determined beforehand. It called for:
Cancellation of civil rights
Confiscation of material assets,
Expulsion from our homes,
Deprivation of personal liberty,
And
placement into punitive confinement as of 1944/45
During the next three and a half
year period, over one-third of the Danube Swabians who wound up under Tito’s rule,
fell victim to:
Executions without trials,
Torment and torture including bodily mutilations,
Starvations,
Forced labour, and
Illness, including epidemic, without access to health care.
My mother had to die at age 38,
because Tito and his partisans were resolved not to ‘waste’ medications on
indigenous fellow citizens of German ethnicity. – My father’s death in 1940, before
the war reached Yugoslavia, spared him of the brutal nightmare as to our ethnic
minority’s obliteration.
Adding insult to injury,
non-German media generally refrained from mentioning this heinous genocide, since
the perpetrator Tito was an ally of the victorious powers and, because the victims
were ethnic Germans denigrated by simplistic insinuations of collective guilt.
One year after Tito’s violent
reign had made me an orphan at age 13, I fled to Romania. Like a good many other
Danube Swabian escapees from Yugoslav concentration camps for ethnic Germans, I was
an incognito farm worker before trekking to Austria in 1947 as a refugee. In 1951, I
immigrated to America as a stateless displaced person.
