Mobilizing on Germany’s Frontier

Chapter 4 investigates the World War II mobilization of the Western Banat’s ethnic German children and youth into National Socialist organizations. It explores the evolution of the region’s (now mandatory) Deutsche Jugend, showing how—through the coordinated efforts of the German minority school system, the local youth leadership, and the military—almost all children and youth deemed to be “German” officially joined the organization. Not all individuals forced into the Deutsche Jugend, however, saw its activities as an onerous burden. Rather, even decades later, some of its former members appreciated their engagement with the Deutsche Jugend as a key “nationalizing” experience and as an avenue of great personal accomplishment. Within the organization, being “German” once again officially entailed defending the Third Reich, a calculation which would bring thousands of youth voluntarily and coercively into the arms of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s key themes, historiographic framework, and research questions. It situates the book at the confluence of studies on National Socialism from a transnational and comparative perspective, experiences of Axis occupation during World War II, minorities and borderland nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe, and the history of childhood and youth. Upon providing a brief historic overview of the ethnic Germans (Donauschwaben) in northern Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina and outlining the book’s key historiographic contributions, it reflects on the book’s multiscalar approach of interweaving archival, press, and original oral history sources to juxtapose and intertwine different levels of analysis. The chapter suggests that studying childhood and youth mobilization enables insight into larger historic conundrums, such as the interplay between categories like age, (ascribed) nationality, and gender in shaping historical experiences; the interaction between nationalizing forces “from above” and the lived, subjective experience of nationality “from below”; and questions of individual and collective agency in contexts of occupation and war. It presents the book’s main argument, that children and youth confronted with nationalizing projects themselves became agents of nationalization.

Conclusion

The conclusion reflects on the key transformations that ethnic German childhood and youth education and mobilization underwent between interwar Yugoslavia and the wartime Western Banat and Batschka/Bácska/Bačka. Engaging in a comparative analysis, it highlights how children’s and young people’s agency and definitions of “Germanness” were shaped by diverse wartime contexts, occupational regimes, and social circumstances. Retracing ethnic German interviewees’ postwar lives, it contemplates the continued importance of categories like “Germanness” to individuals formerly engaged in the interwar and wartime periods’ contested nation-building projects. Finally, it advocates not only for the continued implementation of transnational and comparative approaches in studies of National Socialism, occupation, and war, but for the inclusion of “the little” in critical historical analysis.

Forging Germans under Germany

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.

Alternate Fronts

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.

Mobilizing across Borders

Chapter 6 examines the extracurricular mobilization of ethnic German children and youth in the Hungarian-occupied Batschka/Bácska/Bačka during World War II. It shows how unlike in the German-occupied Banat, the Deutsche Jugend in the Batschka competed with the Hungarian Levente (a mandatory paramilitary youth organization) and various religious youth groups. Kinderlandverschickung (child evacuation, KLV) groups from the Reich further mingled with the region’s ethnic Germans to convey images of Germany and the “Reichsdeutsche” that remained unavailable to the Banat’s children and youth. Young Batschka Donauschwaben thus continuously formulated and defended diverse definitions of “Germanness,” despite the Axis occupation and overwhelming pro-Nazi mobilization of their communities. However, with Germany’s occupation of Hungary in March 1944, these dynamics, too, would shift: any youth who had not yet voluntarily joined formations like the Waffen-SS were coerced into service, making them complicit in some of the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes.

Forging Germans under Hungary

Chapter 5 explores the fraught (re-) incorporation of the Batschka/Bácska/Bačka into the Hungarian state during World War II, highlighting the experiences of the region’s ethnic Germans. Interweaving archival, press, and oral history sources, it elucidates the violent conflicts that erupted even among children and youth as the region’s Donauschwaben suddenly became Hungarian citizens. Arenas such as the school and the Church became highly contested spaces of nationalization, as the Third Reich’s imperialist ambitions, local Donauschwaben activism, and Hungary’s nation-building project collided over differing notions of “Germanness.” Unlike in the Western Banat, the Catholic Church in the Batschka maintained its programs and advocated a religious, pro-“host state,” anti-Nazi “Germanness.” This violently bifurcated the Batschka’s Donauschwaben communities, including youth, into pro-Church, pro-Hungarian “blacks” and pro-Nazi “browns,” inspiring conflicts and diverse notions of national belonging that reverberate to the current day.

National Education and Yugoslavia’s Donauschwaben Minority Schools, 1918–1941

Chapter 1 explores nationalist activism surrounding German minority education in interwar Yugoslavia, focusing in particular on the ethnic German (Donauschwaben) communities in the Vojvodina. Following Yugoslavia’s mass nationalization of schools in 1920, demands for German minority education reverberated from the provincial schoolyard to the German Foreign Office, from Donauschwaben politicians to the League of Nations, and from local Sunday school priests to Germany’s Catholic and Protestant religious agencies. Implementing novel archival and press materials from Germany and Serbia, the chapter shows how debates surrounding the linguistic minority classroom helped ignite the Donauschwaben’s “German” nationalization. As the chapter claims, the ensuing transnational entanglements not only gave rise to a politicization of childhood and youth; they also opened the door to direct interventions from Germany.