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The Northern Banat
"Where the lust for murder raged"
Ruskodorf
There
were one hundred and twenty Danube
Swabian families who lived in Ruskodorf.
The remainder of the population was
Hungarian. They were all poor people,
most them did not own land and hired
themselves out as day farm laborers on
the large estates, and the two
nationalities lived in harmony with one
another. After the annexation of this
portion of the Banat to the new state of
Yugoslavia after the First World War
many Slavic colonists were brought from
the south and settled here by the
Yugoslavian government. The estates of
the Hungarian nobles who had left the
county were divided up among these new
colonists and the Hungarian and Danube
Swabian population were not eligible to
buy any of it. After the Partisans came
to power in the fall of 1944 these
colonists wanted to confiscate the homes
and property of the Swabians and see to
their physical extermination. During
the first days of October, there were
twenty leading Swabians in the community
who were taken by force to nearby
Cernje, including four women. Here they
were imprisoned in a cellar along with
many other Swabians from the area and
were brutally abused for several days.
On October 27th most of them
were shot in the meadows just outside of
Cernje where they executed one hundred
and seventy-four of them.
Fourteen Swabian men from Ruskodorf were
taken to the camp at Kikinda and seven
of them were brutally killed shortly
after they arrived. Another group of
men were taken to the camp at Julia
Major where many of them perished.
But in
Ruskodorf itself there were large
portions of the Danube Swabians who were
being gruesomely liquidated by the
Partisans. On November 5th,
1944 two men and one woman were
horrendously slaughtered, the fifty-six
year old machinist Matthias Frauenhofer,
the forty-three year old landowner
Johann Martin and thirty-two year old
Maria Rottenbach. After the Partisans
inflicted all kinds of cuts to their
bodies with knives, they then chopped
off of their arms and legs while they
were still alive with axes. The walls
of the room where these brutal
atrocities were committed were
splattered with blood. Swabian women
were given the task of cleaning up the
mess. The limbless bodies were tossed
in a basket, loaded on a wagon and taken
and buried in the animal cemetery.
There
were ten young women both married and
unmarried who were tortured, violated,
raped and liquidated by an extermination
squad of Partisans made up of eight
young Slavic colonists who lived in
Ruskodorf who were rabid beasts who
committed the atrocity in the presence
of other terrified Swabian women in a
room of the castle residence of the
former Hungarian noble landowner. The
five married women, Katharina Kartje,
Fanni Hass, Elisabeth Martin, Margarete
Frauenhofer and Anna Reff had all of
their finger nails torn off by a pair of
pliers and then their hands and feet
were chopped off with axes and they were
raped and tormented until they died.
All ten women were buried in the animal
cemetery. After this bloodletting the
ceiling of the room remained splattered
with blood.
The
Danube Swabians who remained were in a
local camp in Ruskodorf that was set up
for that purpose. On April 18, 1945
they were driven on foot out of the
village to the camp in Molidorf. A
great portion of them died of hunger
there. Today you will find the Slavic
colonists living in the homes of the
Danube Swabians.
(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 |
