South Western Banat
"Wholesale Murder"

Kowatschitza 

  In Kowatschitza there was a prison operated by the OZNA (Secret Police).  Untold numbers of Swabian men were brought to this prison from the whole area around Kowatschitza.  Every Wednesday and Saturday mass shootings took place.  A former prisoner in this prison relates the following: 

  "Along with another man from Glogau I was brought to the prison in Kowatschitza.  When we entered the cell, two men were lying there, who had been beaten unmercifully and did not move and who obviously were no longer alive but who would have died in one of the two weekly mass shootings that took place there.  The next day we had to go to work.  Every Wednesday and Saturday in the evening the cell was opened whereby several men from each of the cells were led out into the hallway and were bound or fettered.  We never heard from them again or ever saw them, only later we did see their clothes when we had to clear out the attic of the prison.  Each time the men were led away, we opened the windows of our cells and heard the group leave in the direction of Debeljascha.  After not even half an hour, each time we heard a salvo of machine pistols firing and then a large number of single shots.  These single shots we counted very carefully.  Because many inmates were taken away to work the next day, when the opportunity lent itself, they spoke to one another, so that in the evening we always knew who had been taken away the previous night.  The total that was estimated was usually close to the number of single shots we had counted during the night.  The selected group of victims was first gunned down together by numerous shooters and then each man was shot in the head to make sure he was dead.  The last mass shooting took place three weeks before my release.  On that occasion twenty-nine men were taken from the cells and twenty-eight of them were taken away by truck.  In the five weeks during which the regular Wednesday and Saturday shootings took place about two hundred men met their deaths.  The man who had come with me was already among the dead eight days after we had arrived."

(Following the First World War the Banat was divided between Yugoslavia & Romania, with two thirds going to Romania & one third annexed to Yugoslavia)

Österreichische Historiker-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Für Kärnten und Steiermark 
(Austrian Historian Working Group for Kärnten and Steiermark)

Translated & contributed by Henry Fischer