"Genocide Carried out by the Tito Partisans"
Österreichische Historiker-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Für Kärnten und Steiermark (Austrian Historian Working Group for Kärnten and Steiermark) Chapter one

Deportation to Russia

Translated by Henry Fischer

     The first mass deportations were carried out on Christmas Eve in 1944.  The choice of date was hardly accidental, which would make thousands upon thousands of children virtual orphans. 

     In all areas and communities of the Batschka and the Banat, all Danube Swabians men from 18 to 40 years of age, and all women from 18 to 30 had to report to an assembly area where they were examined physically to determine if they were able bodied for labor by a Russian commission.  They were then packed into cattle cars and transported to a destination that was unknown to the victims.  Only pregnant women and nursing mothers were exempt, but for many of them their fate would be even worse. 

     The officials were not satisfied with the numbers they had apprehended and a second so called “recruitment” was undertaken, in which the age for women was raised to 35 years, and some mothers of infants were also taken.  At the time of this second deportation the Partisans also occupied parts of south western Hungary and carried out the deportations there as well.  In Slavonia and Srem, only isolated actions associated with the deportation were carried out.  There were some 40,000 persons involved in the these deportations, including 2,400 persons from Apatin alone.  It was only in the summer of 1945 that their destination and destiny became known.  Few families were left intact. 

     Only the aged and the children were left behind, and only a few of the children had one of their parents with them to face what the future would hold for them.  Most of the children were with grandparents, or under the care of a teen-age brother or sister or relative.  In many cases small children were left alone in their houses and had to fend for themselves.  One old man in Filipovo gathered twenty-eight of his grandchildren in his house because all of their parents had been deported to Russia. 

(The authors now detour into an examination of what they perceive to be the reasons behind the liquidation of the Danube Swabian population, and I offer a precise.) 

     The reasons for the liquidation of the Danube Swabian population had several sources.  But at no time were they accused of going over to or supporting National Socialism.  At least no Yugoslavian government has ever accused them of such!  It was a well known fact among their Slavic neighbors that the vast majority of the Swabians did not support the Nazis.  During the occupation by the German Wehrmacht (Army) there were numerous instances where the local Danube Swabian populations offered protection to the Serbians among whom they lived and many of the Danube Swabian men had served in the Yugoslavian Army during the German and Hungarian invasion in 1941.  This was also well known in government circles.  Nor was membership in the Swabian Folk Group Union before the war seen as anti-Yugoslavian, but primarily pro-German in terms of language and culture.  The government never took action against the organization or saw it in any way subversive.  None of these issues were reasons for the persecution that was unleashed against them. 

     The issue behind the liquidation of the Danube Swabians at its simplest was racist.  The Partisans, like the Nazis saw assimilated families (inter-marriage with Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks) to be the source for “contamination” of the “race”, and they were as brutal, bestial and sadistic as any of those involved in the Final Solution of the Jewish population during the reign of the Third Reich.  

     The attitude of the local Slavic populations also played a role and through the support and help of many of the different nationalities, some 20,000 to 25,000 Danube Swabians escaped from the camps, and some 15,000 to 20,000 of them were able to flee to Austria and Germany.  That some 42,000 survived in the extermination camps after three and one half years of inhuman treatment was due to the assistance of thousands of Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ukrainians.  These people put their lives and the lives of their families on the line in assisting the Danube Swabians in any way they could.  This puts a lie to the claim that the Danube Swabians had lorded it over their neighbors during the Nazi occupation. 

     The other issue, as always, was economic.  The Danube Swabian’s property, homes, assets and savings were confiscated.  Nor were the bestial reprisals against them a result of any of their actions taken during the Nazi occupation.  The Roman Catholic priesthood, and the Lutheran and Reformed Danube Swabian pastors always sided with their Slavic neighbors against any Nazi attacks or actions taken against them.  In effect, the clergy in sense were the only anti-Nazi force that was active during the occupation.  It is ironic that such a large number of the anti-Nazi clergy were included in the mass shootings and executions.  They had three strikes against them.  They belonged to the German racial group.  Religion and Communism were enemies.  They were often the leading intellectuals in the Danube Swabian communities.  

     For example, in the Batschka there were forty-eight priests who were persecuted by the Partisans in some of the most bizarre cruel manner representing both German and mixed parishes.  Eighteen of them were killed.  Four were taken in the deportation to Russia.  Seventeen were interned in the camps and nine were imprisoned. 

     There were large elements of the population in the Batschka who were able to evacuate prior to the coming of the Russian Army and the Partisan Military Governments that followed. While in Slavonia and Srem there had been well organized mass evacuations of almost the entire Danube Swabian population, but in the Banat most of the attempts at flight were thwarted by Folk Group officials and the local populations were trapped in stalled treks and had to return home and to death and destruction, along with thousands of other Danube Swabians fleeing from the Romanian Banat who had sought to cross the Danube passing through Yugoslavia and make it to safety in Hungary but shared in the fate of the Danube Swabians of Yugoslavia instead. 

Next: Internment

[Published at www.dvhh.org, Sept. 2006]