Bosnian Germans

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The youngest group of settlers among the Germans in Yugoslavia is called Bosnian Germans . They settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1879 .

During the Second World War, the increasing number of partisan attacks on the remote German scattered settlements led to flight and "evacuation" to Syrmia , then to the "resettlement" of large parts of the approximately 20,000 Bosnian Germans to the Warthegau . Some places in Bosnia were held until September 1944, their residents were driven out with the capture of the places. At the end of the war, the Bosnian Germans were spread over all of Germany and Austria; those who returned to Bosnia were detained in camps. The number of Germans in Bosnia today is negligible.

history

Settlement from 1879 and development until 1941

Population groups in Austria-Hungary in 1910.
Ethnic distribution in Yugoslavia, 1940.

The Congress of Berlin spoke Austria-Hungary the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the administration, which formally the Ottoman Empire remained. The Habsburg Monarchy occupied these areas in their occupation campaign of 1878 . The provinces were found largely sparsely populated.

Between 1879 and 1900 "colonists" immigrated to the region under very different conditions; a mixture of soldiers, officials, experts and farmers. The first settlers were of Catholic denomination and came from northwest Germany. From 1879 they bought land near Banja Luka and founded the village of Windthorst (now Nova Topola ). Danube Swabians of Protestant denomination from Vojvodina acquired land in Franz-Josefsfeld  near Bijelina . Russian Germans , whose opportunities to acquire land in the Russian Empire were limited, arrived and were given forest and wasteland for lease in Vranovac and Prosora (near Dubica ). From 1892 onwards, the monarchy targeted the leasing of unused publicly owned land with favorable conditions. Around 10,000 Poles and 7,000 Ukrainians accepted the offer. Germans immigrated with them from, among others, Galicia and Croatia (for example to Glogovac , German Schutzberg ) as well as Dutch, Italians and Czechs. The predominant type of settlement was scattered settlement .

Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 , after which the situation for the Germans threatened to deteriorate. Some of the immigrants went back, others moved on, to industrial areas, to North America, Brazil or to East Germany. In 1910 there were 22,968 people with German as their mother tongue in Bosnia, of whom 8,000 lived in around 20 predominantly Protestant villages. 5246 people with German as their mother tongue had settled in Sarajevo by 1910, which corresponded to about 10 percent of the city's population.

The sometimes hostile attitude of the local Serb population, including threats of displacement, reached back to the time before the First World War . When the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes replaced the Habsburg Monarchy in Bosnia in 1918 , the two German newspapers Bosnian Post and the Sarajevoer Tagblatt had to cease publication, and only a few larger colonies kept their German schools. A large part of the German-speaking elite left the cities of Bosnia or "Croatianized" themselves, especially the Catholics. Overall, around a third of Germans left the country, mainly military and civil servants. The widespread labor migration, which from the 1930s onwards was preferably aimed at the German Reich , was due to structural poverty in some German settlements (the Germans in Bosnia-Herzegovina were significantly poorer than those in Slovenia , Croatia or the Banat ), which acutely exacerbated by economic crises and environmental influences. In addition, the predominantly Protestant denomination increased the distance between Bosnian Germans and the indigenous Serbian Orthodox population, while their ties to Germany deepened. A “resettlement” had already been considered several times before 1941.

Second World War to the present

The historical landscape of Syrmia in today's state borders.
Map of the General Government with the districts of Lublin, Radom and Galicia.

After the Balkan campaign (1941) under German leadership and the formation of the Independent State of Croatia , to which Bosnia now belonged, a main arena of partisan war developed here , the dynamic of which was increasingly directed against the villages of the 20,000 or so Bosnian Germans. Very soon after the first Serb persecution by the Ustashe and the beginning of the Serbian uprising in Bosnia escape or evacuation of the ethnic German population began in some places. For a long time it was unclear in which direction or under what circumstances an emigration was possible, and improvised resettlement plans repeatedly replaced one another. According to the plans of the “German ethnic group”, which emerged from the Swabian-German cultural association under “ ethnic group leader ” Branimir Altgayer , and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) , ethnic German refugees in East Syrmia were to be resettled permanently on land owned by Serbs. The plans failed because in the summer of 1942 the area became more and more the scene of fierce fighting.

From October 6 to November 22, 1942, 18,360 Bosnian Germans from these areas were "smuggled through" from these areas to collection camps run by the VoMi in Łódź (then Litzmannstadt ) in the Warthegau due to increasing partisan attacks on the remote German scattered settlements south of the Save . According to Heinrich Himmler's plans , here in the function of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Ethnicity , they should be relocated to the Lublin district as part of the Zamość campaign - a pilot project of the General Plan East - but also to the Galicia and Radom districts , where they should preserve the houses of displaced Poles. The procedure that followed in Łódź, called “Durchschleusung”, was used to classify people with regard to the granting of German citizenship and possible settlement in the east or Carniola . The "smuggling" took place after " herds ". In addition to the nationality office, which decided according to political (according to the judgment of a “ethnicity expert”) and ancestry criteria, (hereditary) health, social (“performance reports”) and racial (in four “rating levels”) aspects were also used. However, the settlement plan failed because of the Polish resistance, so that the stay in one of nine resettlement camps remained an extended stopover for many. Here they served the German armaments industry as a reserve of work. Small groups were still settled in Alsace , Lorraine and Luxembourg .

Some places in Bosnia such as Windthorst (Nova Topola), Rudolfstal ( Alexandrovac ) and Trošelje with about 1000 inhabitants were excluded from resettlement in 1942 and were held until September 1944. But when the partisans started to storm, they drove the remaining residents, many of them by horse-drawn cart or by train to reception camps in Saxony and Silesia , to Vienna and Bruck an der Leitha , to Emsland , to Bavaria ( Simbach , Altötting ), Tyrol and flee elsewhere.

When the Red Army advanced on the settlement sites in Poland in 1944/45, almost all Bosnian Germans fled to the area of ​​the " Old Reich ". Scattered there, they became part of the population of Germany and Austria in the post-war period.

The few Bosnian Germans who wanted to return to their former possessions and thereby reached Yugoslavian territory were sent to internment camps and used for forced labor. Many of them did not survive the internment; most of the few survivors emigrated from Yugoslavia in the 1950s.

There are hardly any Germans living in the former “colonies” today; the former evangelical places with dilapidated churches and overgrown graves are mostly lost places today . Occasionally one still meets women from “mixed marriages” in the cities who remained in Yugoslavia after 1945. Places with a Catholic character allowed the social space more continuity, but the number of people of German origin is negligible here as well.

literature

  • Carl Bethke : "Voluntary Resettlement" and Expulsions: On the History of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950.
  • Carl Bethke: From "Resettlement" to "Resettlement". On the destructive dynamics of “ethnic land consolidation” using the example of the Germans in Bosnia and Croatia 1941–1948. In: Mariana Hausleitner : From Fascism to Stalinism. Germans and other minorities in East Central and Southeast Europe 1941–1953. Institute for German Culture and History of Southeast Europe, 2008. ISBN 3-98116-940-9 , p. 23ff.
  • Carl Bethke, Husnija Kamberović, Jasna Turkalj (eds.): Nijemci u Bosni i Hercegovini i Hrvatskoj. Nova istraživanja i perspektiven, zbornik radova ( German  The Germans in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. New research and perspectives, conference contributions. ) Sarajevo 2015.
  • Valentin Oberkersch : The Germans in Syrmia, Slavonia, Croatia and Bosnia. History of a German ethnic group in Southeast Europe. Stuttgart 1989.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Böhm : The German ethnic group in Yugoslavia 1918-1941. Domestic and foreign policy as symptoms of the relationship between the German minority and the Yugoslav government. Peter Lang, 2009, ISBN 3-631-59557-3 , p. 72.
  2. ↑ a b c d Marica Karakaš Obradov: The forced and voluntary migrations of the German population on the Croatian and Bosnian-Herzegovinian territory in World War II and in the post-war period. Pp. 46, 47.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Carl Bethke: Bosnia and Herzegovina . Section: The Bosnian Germans. In: Online encyclopedia on the culture and history of Germans in Eastern Europe from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg , 2015.
  4. ^ A b Carl Bethke: "Voluntary resettlement" and expulsions: On the history of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950. P. 26, 27.
  5. ^ Ferdinand Sommer: History of the German Protestant community Schutzberg in Bosnia 1895–1942. The fate of the Bosnian Germans. C. Bleck, Mülheim an der Ruhr 1960.
  6. ↑ Carl Bethke: "Voluntary resettlement" and expulsions: On the history of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950. P. 2.
  7. ↑ Carl Bethke: "Voluntary resettlement" and expulsions: On the history of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950. P. 3.
  8. ↑ Snježana Ivkić: Flight, evacuation and forced resettlement of the German population from Croatia after the Second World War. Historical and cultural studies faculty of the University of Vienna, 2013. p. 9.
  9. ^ A b Carl Bethke: German "colonists" in Bosnia. Imaginations, ideology and social practice in sources of the Evangelical Church. In: Bosna i Hercegovina u okviru Austro-Ugarske 1878-1918. Zbornik radova. Izd. Filozofski Faculty. Sarajevo 2011, pp. 235-266. Quoted in: Carl Bethke: Voluntary resettlement and expulsions. Footnote 8.
  10. ^ Hans Maier: "The German settlements in Bosnia." Stuttgart 1924, p. 32; Franzjosefsfeld-Petrovopolje-Schönborn. In: Neuland from July 19, 1958. Quoted in: Carl Bethke: Voluntary resettlement and expulsions. Footnote 9.
  11. ^ Mariana Hausleitner : The Danube Swabians 1868 - 1948. Their role in the Romanian and Serbian Banat. Steiner, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-515-10686-3 , p. 148.
  12. ^ Mira Kolar-Dimitrijevic: Movement of Labor Force between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia (1933-1941). In: The Third Reich and Yugoslavia. Belgrade 1977, pp. 331-362.
  13. ^ A b Carl Bethke: "Voluntary resettlement" and expulsions: On the history of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950. Pp. 27, 28.
  14. ↑ Carl Bethke: "Voluntary resettlement" and expulsions: On the history of Germans from Bosnia, 1941–1950. P. 24.
  15. ↑ Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims : Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe, Volume V: The fate of Germans in Yugoslavia. Bonn 1961. In connection with Werner Conze , Adolf Diestelkamp , Rudolf Laun , Peter Rassow and Hans Rothfels . Edited by Theodor Schieder . P. 84E .
  16. ↑ Emir Musli: Priča Dana. Tužni simbol prošlosti Nijemaca u Semberiji. In: Deutsche Welle of December 26, 2012.