The Price of Belonging to the Volk: Volksdeutsche,Land Redistribution and Aryanization in the Serbian Banat,1941–4

Reliance on collaborators was a key aspect of the Third Reich’s ability to control much of the European continent between Brest and Leningrad during the Second World War. Jan Tomasz Gross’s sociological analysis of occupied Poland pinpointed the two groups which made excellent collaborators: either a former governing elite given new legitimacy (a prime example would be Vichy France) or an aggrieved minority. ¹ Both types of groups profited from collaboration by gaining power, legitimacy, wealth and local prestige, but the second type of collaborationist group described by Gross was arguably the better option for the Third Reich. A minority group which had been oppressed by a regime dismantled by the Nazis – or had perceived itself as oppressed – would have owed its new freedom and empowerment to the Reich. As a minority, it could not challenge the Reich’s claim to absolute power and control of its home region. Finally, it had little or no leverage with which to bargain against whatever demands the Reich placed on it.

According to these criteria, in east and southeast Europe during the Second World War the Third Reich found its most promising collaborators in ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). As persons of German origin who did not belong to the German state as residents or citizens, they occupied a high position in the Nazi racial hierarchy and could claim a place in the German Volk, albeit never quite on a par with Reich Germans (Reichsdeutsche). Their position depended on Nazi foreign and racial policy, and was inherently precarious: the more power they exercised over local ethnic groups which did not rank high in the Nazi racial hierarchy, and the more they abused (or were seen to abuse) that power, the more dependent they became on the Third Reich’s military, material and ideological support. In terms of material support, the Reich gave Volksdeutsche within its sphere of influence privileges and perks at the expense of other ethnicities, such as easy access to arable land and Aryanized property. The Third Reich expected the Volksdeutsche to repay every perk many times over with loyalty, deliveries of food for Reich soldiers, administrative and security service and, finally, armed service in the Waffen-SS.

The experiences of the Volksdeutsche minority which inhabited the Serbian Banat – the western half of the historic Banat region divided between Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) after the First World War – represent an especially cogent example of these developments. In April 1941 the Third Reich and its allies Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded and partitioned the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This was due less to ideological long-term planning than to circumstance and the practical necessity to secure the southern flank of Adolf Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union. Following an anti-Tripartite Pact coup in Yugoslavia on 27 March 1941, Adolf Hitler settled on the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece as a way to ensure no second front would be opened in southeast Europe. Yugoslavia was partitioned by Germany, its old allies and a new ally, the Independent State of Croatia, in such a way that almost all involved states’ desires for territorial expansion were satisfied. The Serbian Banat remained a bone of contention. Claimed by both Hungary and Romania but occupied by their ally Germany (as was Serbia proper, south of the River Danube), the Serbian Banat was an area in which German policies had to take into account allies’ desires as well as Reich interest. Because the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union remained his main objective, Hitler desired to pacify southeast Europe quickly and efficiently, so as to be able to withdraw most German troops from the area and have them available for the campaign in the East. It was in his interest to allow his allies to occupy large portions of Yugoslav territory. In Serbia and the Banat, however, at least a nominal German armed presence had to remain. There, too, Hitler encouraged the use of reliable native collaborators. In Serbia proper this meant the creation of the Council of Ministers, a collaborationist Serbian government. In the Serbian Banat, Hitler profited ideologically as well as materially from the presence of a substantial Volksdeutsche minority.

The Volksdeutsche administration in the Serbian Banat was all the more important for Reich policy because the influence the Serbian Council of Ministers wielded over Banat affairs diminished rapidly. By the end of 1941, although the Banat remained formally tied to occupied Serbia by administrative and financial arrangements, its internal affairs were decided by the Third Reich and its representatives in Belgrade in limited dialogue with local Volksdeutsche administrators. This state of affairs prevailed until the Banat was liberated in fall 1944. Neither its long-term occupation by German (rather than Hungarian or Romanian) forces, nor its continued status as a mostly autonomous part of occupied Serbia was set in stone. Even so, the experience of German occupation and the attendant elevation of Volksdeutsche to leading positions within the Banat reassured the latter of continued close relations between the Banat and Berlin at the expense of Serbian, Hungarian and Romanian interests in the region.

Numbering approximately 120,000 people and accounting for one fifth of the Banat’s population, ² the Banat Volksdeutsche were descended from Habsburg-era settlers in what had been southern Hungary. They were a community of mostly peasants and artisans, led by a core group of Nazified middle-class professionals led by Josef ‘Sepp’ Janko, a lawyer from Grossbetschkerek (Veliki Bečkerek or Petrovgrad, postwar Zrenjanin ³ ). Between April 1941 and the arrival of the Red Army in October 1944 these Volksdeutsche set up an administrative apparatus which ensured peace and order unparalleled in others parts of wartime Yugoslavia. The Volksdeutsche’s group identity was confirmed and strengthened by their close relations with Nazi Germany. Banat Volksdeutsche leaders dealt directly with the Reich’s representatives in Belgrade and Berlin, unimpeded by the need for intercession through German diplomatic representatives in the defunct Kingdom of Yugoslavia or non-German governments and occupation zones in southeast Europe. Ordinary Volksdeutsche profited from these close relations both materially and ideologically, since improving their living standard at the expense of other Banat residents (especially Serbs and Jews) became part and parcel of promoting them as members of the German Volk and bearers of the Nazi New Order in southeast Europe.

The Reich extracted a steep price for the privileges it granted the Banat Volksdeutsche. As means to elevate Volksdeutsche over other ethnic groups in southeast Europe, the material benefits which individual Volksdeutsche enjoyed as well as the very creation of the Volksdeutsche administration in the Banat ultimately served the interests of the Third Reich. While propaganda posited the equality of Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche, in fact the latter played the part of junior partners to the former. As the war progressed and Germany’s military situation in east and southeast Europe deteriorated, the demands the Third Reich placed on the Banat Volksdeutsche increased exponentially. The Volksdeutsche could not refuse any of these demands since the privileges they enjoyed meant they owed the Reich a material debt as well as a debt of honor based on perceived racial kinship and the protection Reich forces extended to Volksdeutsche. Even more damningly, the privileges granted to Volksdeutsche isolated them from other ethnic groups and implicated them in the Third Reich’s criminal and murderous policies.

Volksdeutsche profited because the Third Reich embraced them as racial kin. As such, they benefited materially from the expropriation of their non-German – in the Banat specifically Serbian and Jewish – neighbors. In the context of the Banat Volksdeutsche’s collaboration with the Third Reich, ideology and greed went hand in hand. The fact that many individual Volksdeutsche profited materially in this manner ensured group cohesion by implicating all Volksdeutsche in Reich policies. There is no evidence of marked individual or group dissent with Nazi policies within the Banat Volksdeutsche community during the war. Documents indicative of some individual Volksdeutsche’s ambivalence toward or distaste for those policies which directly benefited the Volksdeutsche community were produced after the war, and usually involved implicit or explicit exculpation. Informal pressures to social conformity within the tightly knit Volksdeutsche community meant that even those individuals who objected to or were uneasy about Reich policies failed to voice their objections, and may have accepted the material benefits the Reich offered so as not to gain a reputation as social misfits. This high degree of conformity made it impossible for individual Volksdeutsche or their leaders to refuse any of the Reich’s escalating demands, including those for agricultural deliveries and, starting in spring 1942, armed service with the Waffen-SS.

Wartime memoranda from the Third Reich called the Banat a region ‘small in area, towering in achievement,’ ⁴ whose produce could reach the Reich in a matter of days, not weeks as did the grain from Ukraine. ⁵ While its potential as a source of agricultural surpluses for the chronically undersupplied German state was recognized before April 1941, the Serbian Banat under German occupation and Volksdeutsche administration became a major exporter of grains and meat. The German war effort monopolized the Banat’s agricultural output. In order to stress the Volksdeutsche’s duty to supply the Reich’s soldiers, the very first issue of the Volksdeutsche leadership’s mouthpiece, the Verordnungsblatt der Volksgruppenführung der deutschen Volksgruppe im Banat und Serbien, contained an appeal to the Banat Volksdeutsche peasant to produce even more than before. Although it was tucked away slyly on the last page of the publication and framed as the ultimate sign of Volksdeutsche gratitude to Adolf Hitler, the man who ‘liberated us from long years of servitude,’ ⁶ the rationale underlying rapturous appeals to the peasant to achieve greatness by an effort of will was stern and clear. The Banat was expected to feed not only itself, but the Third Reich as well, specifically the Wehrmacht units and Reich personnel in Serbia.

The most obvious measure in favor of Banat Volksdeutsche peasants’ increased productivity was the overturning in June 1941 of the interwar Yugoslav land reform. Land which had used to belong to the Hungarian nobility in those parts of the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy annexed by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the end of the First World War, which included the Serbian Banat, had been parceled out, mostly to Serbian veterans of the war. While in the interwar period the possibility existed for non-Serbs to obtain some of the land affected by the reform, as relations between Yugoslavia and the Third Reich became tense and fear of irredentism grew inside Yugoslavia in the late 1930s, it became difficult for Volksdeutsche to buy land along Yugoslavia’s borders. The perceived ban on land purchases thus became a symbol of Serbian (and Yugoslav) anti-German sentiment in Volksdeutsche and Reich German eyes.

The repeal of this interwar land reform did not target all Serbian-owned land in the Banat. Instead, it focused specifically on the so-called ‘volunteer fields’ (Dobrovoljzen-Felder, from the Serbian ‘dobrovoljac’ means volunteer), land from broken-up estates of the absent Hungarian nobility, given to Serbian First World War veterans in the interwar period. This land could be taken away from its owners and given not only to Banat Volksdeutsche, but also to Romanian citizens of Romanian, Hungarian or German ethnicity, who had owned land in the western half of the Banat during Habsburg times. The reform was repealed by the Serbian Council of Ministers ⁷ rather than the German military commander in Belgrade. While on the surface it appears a triumph of Nazi racial policy in its overt promotion of the interests of Volksdeutsche and Germany’s other allies, in fact this document demonstrated the continued importance of Nazi diplomacy during wartime. The fact that only land already affected by the interwar land reform was freed up for the purposes of furthering German nationality policy in the Banat was due to diplomatic pressures exerted by Germany’s allies. In summer 1941, when the interwar land reform was overthrown, Hungary and Romania fielded repeated demands for their own forces to be allowed to occupy the Serbian Banat. Nominally granting Romanian citizens the opportunity to profit from the repeal was a salve to Romanian pride in the face of the perceived slight incurred by Hungary having been granted a stronger future claim on the Serbian Banat by the Third Reich in the days leading up to the invasion of Yugoslavia. ⁸

There is a tentativeness to the text of the repeal, also inspired by foreign-political considerations. At a time of increased tension between Hungary and Romania over any and every issue pertaining to the Serbian Banat, the German administration in Belgrade was intensely aware of the need to make the reform repeal not seem like a move by which the Third Reich favored either ally. This was why the repeal was issued officially by the Serbian collaborationist government, and why in principle each individual land transaction had to be examined separately, instead of passing a blanket order benefitting Banat Volksdeutsche over all other Banat ethnicities. ⁹ While Romanian citizens could profit from the repeal, the Reich could also afford to pay lip-service to Hungary, since the Hungarian state lacked the funds to back any large land purchases by ethnic Hungarians residing in the Banat. ¹⁰ In early 1942 Felix Benzler, the Reich’s diplomatic representative in occupied Serbia, felt sufficiently confident of the weakness of the Hungarian claim on the Banat to write to the German Foreign Ministry with hypocritical magnanimity that ethnic Hungarians might ‘also be allowed to buy [land], with the caveat that such purchases will be very modest in scope.’ ¹¹ In order to prevent Romanian-Hungarian tensions from flaring up, ethnic Romanians were also allowed to buy at least some of the available Dobrovoljzen-Felder. The scope of these purchases remained far inferior to purchases allowed to Banat Volksdeutsche. In addition, instead of declaring all Serbian-owned land in the Banat available to Volksdeutsche and other non-Serbs, the June 1941 reform repeal explicitly stated that only land obtained by Serbs through the interwar agrarian reform, which was not being cultivated by its owners, could be expropriated. ¹² This indicates an initial hesitance on the part of the Reich Germans in Serbia about mistreating the Serbian population or impinging on its rights without at least a plausible pretext. Even though the repeal was announced a mere two days before the start of Operation Barbarossa and the related flaring up of communist resistance in Serbia proper, efforts continued to be made to alleviate at least some of the repeal’s impact on the Serbian peasantry in the Banat. ¹³

Such gestures showed a modicum of goodwill toward the predominantly peasant Serbian population on the part of the Reich authorities. This goodwill was based on practical calculation rather than a sudden improvement of the Serbs’ position in the Nazi racial hierarchy. A 1942 memo from the Four-Year Plan recommended that those Serbian First World War veterans in the Banat who had not already been expropriated, not be expropriated at all. The reasoning was that the Hungarians were expelling Serbs from their occupation zone in the neighboring Bačka without benefiting the Bačka Volksdeutsche; that the Banat Volksdeutsche lacked funds for large land purchases; that the overturning of the interwar land reform represented a thorny legal issue, since the redistributed land was still partly owned by the Serbian state; and that the start of the recruitment of Banat Volksdeutsche men by the Waffen-SS increased the need for labor. ¹⁴ These practical concerns suggested the desirability of a relatively stable Serbian peasantry continuing to live and work in the Banat.

Even with these reservations, prompted by foreign-political and economic concerns, the net result of the June 1941 reform repeal was that Banat Volksdeutsche could and did obtain land more easily and cheaply. Within four months of the announcement of the repeal, almost one eighth of the newly available land was bought up by Volksdeutsche peasants. ¹⁵ From October 1941 onwards, Volksdeutsche land transactions did require the permission of the General Plenipotentiary for the Economy in Serbia Franz Neuhausen, ¹⁶ but even this formal obstacle was lifted barely two months after it was imposed. ¹⁷ The initial repeal had left all land transactions already on the books open to annulment or alteration at the sole ¹⁸ and unappealable ¹⁹ discretion of Volksdeutscher Josef ‘Sepp’ Lapp in his role as head of the Banat administration. After Neuhausen’s right of veto on land transactions was lifted, Lapp’s permission – easily obtained by Volksdeutsche – remained the only firm legal requirement for Volksdeutsche to buy Serbian-owned land. By July 1943, Volksdeutsche owned about 25.9 per cent of the total land (as opposed to 21 per cent in 1938 ²⁰ ), and cultivated some 30 per cent of all arable land in the Banat. ²¹

Postwar eyewitness reports differ on how the reform repeal actually worked. Most testimonies of Volksdeutsche residing in West Germany following their escape, expulsion or postwar emigration from socialist Yugoslavia, collected by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and Persons Damaged by War (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte), emphasized that Volksdeutsche could buy but not simply alienate or seize Dobrovoljzen-Felder. ²² Some even implied that Volksdeutsche refrained from buying such land for fear it would engender bad blood between them and the local Serbs. ²³ Others confirmed the worst Nazi anti-Slavic prejudice by complaining after the war that only Dobrovoljzen-Felder not worked by their Serbian owners could be bought up by Volksdeutsche, ²⁴ and that any property at all had remained in the hands of lazy, tax-dodging Serbs. ²⁵

Depositions made mostly by the Banat’s non-German residents to the postwar Yugoslav State Commission for the Determining of Crimes Committed by Occupiers and Their Helpers (Državna komisija za utvrđivanje zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača) predictably told a different story. In this version of events, Volksdeutsche peasants – and the occasional ethnic Hungarian – outright alienated land from their Serbian neighbors ²⁶ or went through the motions of a legal transaction but withheld payment ²⁷ or obtained proof of ownership from the Volksdeutsche administration without the supposed seller even being consulted. ²⁸ These testimonies, as well as those about Volksdeutsche – and, again, the occasional ethnic Hungarian – compelling Serbs to sell land at ludicrously low prices ²⁹ or to work Volksdeutsche fields without payment ³⁰ were likely inspired by a mixture of true grievance and the desire to obtain property (possibly even property legally sold during the occupation) or redress after the end of the German occupation. In spite of the diametrically opposed perspectives they present, a critical comparison of these two sets of testimonies produces a remarkably cohesive picture of the mixed motives exhibited by both Banat Volksdeutsche and Banat Serbs during and after the Second World War. The wartime blend of greed and empowerment was best expressed by a laconic Volksdeutscher who, when a Serb asked why he had not called in an old, mostly invented debt sooner, said: ‘Ja, those were different times!’ ³¹

The official stance toward Serbian ownership of land in the occupied Banat remained ambivalent, the Serbian peasant’s value as laborer and producer offset by the desire to improve the overall standing of Volksdeutsche. In practice the possibility existed for individual Volksdeutsche to abuse their new, prominent position. The German authorities in Belgrade and Berlin gave them the de facto (if not always de jure) right to do so, but the alienation of Serbian land never became a matter of course as did the alienation of Jewish real estate, in spite of occasional proposals from mid-level Volksdeutsche administrators to Lapp and Neuhausen to place large Serbian landholdings under commissarial administration. ³²

Access to land expropriated from Serbs carried with it the expectation that the new Volksdeutsche owners would cultivate and extract the maximum amounts of produce and grain from the land. Whether they chose to avail themselves of the legal and extralegal possibilities to increase their landholdings or not, Banat Volksdeutsche peasants under Reich occupation no longer produced for a free market. The food supply in occupied Serbia and the Banat was under as strict control as Neuhausen and the Wehrmacht could impose. It was strictest in the Banat, the most stable and peaceful of all the Yugoslav lands under occupation. The Banat’s grain deliveries were not affected by the unsettled conditions and black market in Serbia proper, with its two competing resistance movements (the royalist Četnici and the communist Partisans) and only nominal Reich German control outside major urban centers. ³³ After the Waffen-SS division ‘Prinz Eugen’ (created in spring 1942 and filled by Volksdeutsche recruits) was deployed in the Independent State of Croatia in early 1943, Neuhausen relied specifically on the Banat to feed not only the Wehrmacht in Serbia, but also the German, Volksdeutsche and even Croatian forces in Croatia, since rural Croatia was even more unsettled than rural Serbia proper. ³⁴ To this end, ostensibly the Banat administration but really Neuhausen’s office in Belgrade set down yearly quotas of various agricultural produce expected from the Banat, as well as which peasant should grow what to ensure these quotas were filled. ³⁵ Although they were only one fifth of the Banat population, Volksdeutsche were responsible for anywhere between one quarter and nearly one half of the Banat’s deliveries of various foodstuffs. In 1943 the Volksdeutsche percentages of Banat deliveries were: 25 per cent of corn, 28 per cent of wheat, 30.8 per cent of sugar beets, 33.7 per cent of sunflowers, and 47.5 per cent of fattened pigs. ³⁶ Peasants who failed to deliver their predetermined quota could have it requisitioned without payment. ³⁷ Such coercion affected Volksdeutsche and others alike, and reflected the Reich’s need for food rather than ideological favoritism.

Volksdeutsche peasants were as likely to not meet their individual quotas as others. In the village of Soltur (Soltur, postwar part of Banatsko Veliko Selo) the required delivery of pigs for the Wehrmacht was customarily preceded by a few days’ arguing back and forth before the Volksdeutsche agreed to hand over the porkers. ³⁸ In Nakodorf (Nakovo) Volksdeutsche found themselves in default for more than one half of their expected wheat delivery from the 1942 harvest. ³⁹ The reasons included bad weather and flooding, a scarcity of draft animals, tools, seed and animal feed for milk cows, low prices offered for the food and cattle delivered, ⁴⁰ and a chronic labor shortage exacerbated in 1942 by the conscription of virtually all able-bodied Banat Volksdeutsche men into the Waffen-SS. These were valid reasons, but they could be seen as the Volksdeutsche’s ideological and racial failure, a sign of their continued inequality vis-a-vis Germans from the Reich. One Volksdeutscher took the Reich’s perspective when he declared that the Banat Volksdeutsche’s ‘materialism knows no limits.’ ⁴¹

Despite this perceived failure to live up to the ideal of Germanness set by Reich Germans, the ideological and the material promotion of the Banat Volksdeutsche went hand in hand. This was especially evident during the Aryanization of the Banat Jews’ property. Doris L. Bergen has argued that Nazi racial policy in the East saw the true obverse of the Jew as not just the German but the ethnic German, since it was the latter who profited most directly from the dispossession and murdering of Jews. ⁴² This was equally true in the Serbian Banat, where the existence of a Volksdeutsche administration and police aided in the initial abuse and the eventual rounding up of Jews, as well as the placing of the Jews’ property at ordinary Volksdeutsche’s disposal.

The Holocaust in Serbia remains an under-researched topic. It is of special interest because of the time period and the people involved. The organized killing of the Jews in occupied Serbia took place in the context of a broader racial and anti-partisan struggle, but it began in late fall 1941 with the express desire to destroy all Serbian Jews. This happened in parallel with the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, but before the construction of the death camps. The Wehrmacht played a central role as its soldiers shot Jewish men in retaliation for attacks by communist guerrillas on Reich and ethnic Germans. In early 1942 there followed the murder of the interned Jewish women, children and few remaining men by gas van. ⁴³

Among the victims were most Banat Jews. In Grossbetschkerek, the Banat’s biggest town and administrative center, the vast majority of the town’s Jews were arrested on 21 April 1941. ⁴⁴ Sources differ on whether this was done by the SS or the Wehrmacht regiment ‘Grossdeutschland.’ Although the commander of Kreiskommandantur 823, the Wehrmacht command post in town, did not mention whether Volksdeutsche participated in this event in the document he produced only two days later, a Jewish survivor did in his postwar deposition. He testified that a group of Volksdeutsche policemen arrested him, after he had already been robbed by another armed gang led by the future chief administrator for peasant affairs, Volksdeutscher Josef ‘Sepp’ Zwirner. ⁴⁵ Most Jews still at large in the Banat suffered verbal abuse, random house searches-cum-robbery, assault (including sexual assault on women), battery and incarceration between April and August 1941. The perpetrators included Reich German soldiers, but mostly (or most noticeably) younger Volksdeutsche, who tended to be more openly Nazified and – according to one eyewitness – drowned out their elders’ objections by hurling the moniker ‘white kike’ (‘beli čivut’) at them. ⁴⁶ Some took advantage of their new role as policemen. Others – including the child who, likely echoing his parents, called a woman wearing the yellow armband a ‘[d]irty Jewish sow’ ⁴⁷ – needed no such pretext. ⁴⁸

When prominent Jews were executed outside Grossbetschkerek on several occasions between April and August 1941, crowds of local Volksdeutsche and ethnic Hungarians were usually in attendance. ⁴⁹ The remarkable thing about the Serbian eyewitness testimonies about these events is that none of the witnesses stated for certain whether the executions were carried out by Reich Germans or Volksdeutsche, though they mentioned that executioners were men in uniform (Wehrmacht grey as well as black, which could have been either the SS or the Deutsche Mannschaft, the Volksdeutsche militia). It is certain that Volksdeutsche civilians attended and cheered on the executions, and sometimes even herded prisoners to the execution site. A similar division of labor was in evidence in fall 1941, after the Jews had been deported from the Banat to Belgrade. On several occasions prisoners – Jews, Serbs and Roma mixed together – were transported by trucks from Belgrade to a spot on the road outside the Banat village of Apfeldorf (Jabuka), where the Wehrmacht shot them as part of the retaliatory measures intended to combat the Communist resistance. ⁵⁰ The main difference was in the role played by the Volksdeutsche police. It was in charge of rounding up local Roma to dig graves and of crowd control. At least one eyewitness reported after the war that some policemen had also executed prisoners, apparently settling old scores. ⁵¹

Postwar Yugoslav historians rather overstated the case when they insisted the Reich Germans in Serbia undertook the deportation of the Banat Jews to Belgrade in August 1941 at Volksdeutsche urging alone. ⁵² Volksdeutsche in general did not play the role of policymakers, and very rarely that of policy-instigators in Hitler’s Europe. The deportation of the Banat Jews took place within the context of the German desire to concentrate the Serbian Jews, as a perceived racially and politically dangerous social element, in Belgrade. Away from the countryside in Serbia proper where resistance was rife, the Jews could more easily be watched and disposed of as necessary. There can be no doubt, however, that Sepp Janko and other leading Volksdeutsche agreed wholeheartedly with these decisions or that many Banat Volksdeutsche were no longer just cheering on German soldiers during the rounding up and deportation of the Banat Jews to their ultimate fate in Belgrade. These Volksdeutsche participated fully and actively in the expropriation and physical removal of their Jewish neighbors from the Banat.

On the night of 13–14 August 1941, ⁵³ all of the Banat Jews still at liberty were rounded up from their homes in a highly coordinated, joint action by German soldiers, the Volksdeutsche police and the Deutsche Mannschaft. The Jews were interned briefly in concentration camps in Grossbetschkerek and Neu-Betsche (Novi Bečej) before being transported to Belgrade by river barge on 18 August. The Jews of Pantschowa (Pančevo), a town close to Belgrade, were taken from the municipal police building straight to the city. In Belgrade the deportees were quartered temporarily with the Belgrade Jewish community before the men were interned in the camp at Topovske Šupe, ⁵⁴ from which Jews were consistently selected for execution by Wehrmacht firing squads. The Jewish women and children lived in relative freedom until the Sajmište camp opened in December 1941. By the time the gas van had its test run in Serbia in spring 1942, when it was used to kill the Jewish prisoners at Sajmište, the prisoner pool at Topovske Šupe was nearly depleted, and the Holocaust in Serbia a foregone conclusion with the decimation of the adult male Jewish population. No document ordering the deportation of the Banat Jews to Belgrade in August 1941 has been found, but the order must have come from the German commander in Belgrade, relayed by Kreiskommandantur 823 in Grossbetschkerek to the Volksdeutsche leadership, which in turn instructed the Volksdeutsche security forces to take part in the rounding up of the Banat Jews.

The most striking detail survivor testimonies stressed about the deportation from the Banat was not the random beating suffered by the Jewish men, the possibility of sexual assault on the women, ⁵⁵ the general humiliation or the crowded conditions in transit and upon arrival in Belgrade. ⁵⁶ It was the wanton greed displayed by Volksdeutsche administrators, guards, policemen and ordinary Volksdeutsche toward the Jews’ property. One Jewish woman from Pantschowa described the experience succinctly as ‘formal weeding,’ ⁵⁷ a complete ripping away of the Jews’ remaining property and dignity. Only allowed to bring hand luggage and a limited amount of money and valuables, the Jews had their pockets turned out and their luggage pilfered by the Volksdeutsche guards, first while waiting to be processed in the police stations and camps in the Banat, and then again in transit or upon arrival in Belgrade. ⁵⁸ Some Volksdeutsche rationalized that they were taking valuables for safekeeping, holding up the illusion of the Jews’ speedy return to the Banat. ⁵⁹ Others disdained to do even that much. A young secretary with the Pantschowa police flounced into the room where jewelry was piled high on a table and selected some for herself in full view of the assembled Jewish women. ⁶⁰ This young woman displayed a teenager’s heedlessness and a new-found sense of righteous empowerment in her Germanness, which she must have considered an indisputable quality.

Volksdeutsche across east and southeast Europe profited directly from the expropriation of Jewish property in their host countries. ⁶¹ The ‘Verordnung betreffend die Juden und Zigeuner’ (‘Order Concerning Jews and Gypsies’) issued by the German commanding general in Belgrade on 30 May 1941 and its addenda ⁶² laid the legal groundwork for Aryanization, and effectively legalized the unpunished plundering of Jewish property already taking place (‘wild’ Aryanization). ⁶³ These documents did not specify explicitly that Volksdeutsche should profit from Aryanization. The main beneficiary was the Third Reich, but allowing Volksdeutsche a share of the spoils was part of the ideological plan to strengthen the Volksdeutsche’s position as racial Germans resident in east and southeast Europe. Unlike the ulterior motive the Reich had in allowing Banat Volksdeutsche easy access to more arable land, which was that the crops grown and the cattle raised on it would feed Reich soldiers, the decision to allow Volksdeutsche to appropriate the Jews’ property seems to have stemmed from a purely ideological impulse. Volksdeutsche participation in Aryanization represented the ideal, frictionless marriage of ideological righteousness and material greed. ‘Low’ material cravings and ‘high’ ideological aspirations fueled each other, and conspired to produce a moral myopia in many Volksdeutsche.

The same reasoning underlay the shared decision of the Reich Germans in Belgrade and the Volksdeutsche leadership in the Banat to turn a blind eye to the theft of movable Jewish property before and during the deportation in August 1941. In the Banat, the swift physical removal of the Jews must have made taking or accepting their property easier, as individual beneficiaries could argue that houses, furniture and other belongings had simply been left behind, masterless and ownerless. The Volksdeutsche leadership profited from this ‘wild’ Aryanization, as did ordinary Volksdeutsche. In their postwar testimonies, given under very different circumstances, a Jewish survivor and a Volksdeutsche woman – who expressed disgust at what she perceived as indecent behavior and unseemly greed on the part of lazy upstarts within the Volksdeutsche community ⁶⁴ – were in agreement. Both claimed that it was common to see the wives of leading Volksdeutsche wearing jewelry which everyone knew had belonged till recently to Jews ⁶⁵ or taking basketful after basketful of fine china, crystal and linens from empty Jewish homes. ⁶⁶ At the same time, German soldiers plundered the deported Jews’ homes for furniture, carpets, clothing material and other bulky goods, which were then transported to the Reich. ⁶⁷

Franz Neuhausen, the Reich’s Plenipotentiary for the Economy in Belgrade, and the Four-Year Plan in Berlin had their eye on a far bigger prize than carpets and suits, fine as those might be: the regulated, legalized Aryanization of Jewish real estate and economic enterprises. Even before August 1941, Reich German officials – sometimes working in conjunction with representatives of the collaborationist Serbian government – exerted pressure on Banat Jewish business owners to sign over their properties for a minimal price. ⁶⁸ After the deportation, the Reich Germans fell upon Jewish real estate without restraint, with frequent help from Volksdeutsche.

They destroyed or desecrated the most obviously Jewish objects: synagogues and cemeteries. The lavishly furnished synagogues in Grosskikinda (Velika Kikinda, postwar Kikinda) and Werschetz (Vršac) were stripped of all their furnishings and decorations and transformed into, respectively, a laundry ⁶⁹ and a property of the Reformed Church. The original intention had been for the Wehrmacht to sell the Werschetz synagogue to a Volksdeutsche butcher for use as a storage space or slaughterhouse, ⁷⁰ adding the insult of pigs being slaughtered inside to the injury of Jewish deportation and expropriation. The Pantschowa synagogue became a Wehrmacht storage space for Aryanized movable property. ⁷¹ Volksdeutsche broke gravestones and used the town’s Jewish cemetery as an open-air toilet. ⁷² While Aryanization on the whole represented a happy marriage of Nazi ideology and economic profit, the treatment of Jewish religious buildings and property was explicitly ideological in purpose. This destruction served to make the Banat landscape more closely resemble the Third Reich by removing its most obvious ‘foreign’ (Jewish) elements. Apart from the treatment of Jews (and their property), no major efforts at ethnic reshuffling took place in the multiethnic Banat during the war, due not least to the Banat’s lesser importance on the fringes of the Eastern Lebensraum and the continued need for Germany not to upset the Banat minorities protected by its allies, Hungary and Romania.

Jewish property of explicitly economic value was legally transferred into Reich German or Volksdeutsche hands (Aryanized). At a meeting on 14 May 1941, two weeks before the ‘Verordnung betreffend die Juden und Zigeuner’ proclaimed the new status of the Jews in Serbia and the Banat, Felix Benzler, the German Foreign Ministry’s representative in Belgrade, recommended that ‘capable Volksdeutsche or reliable Serbs’ be appointed commissars for Aryanized property. ⁷³ Volksdeutsche with backgrounds in bookkeeping, teaching, administration and banking were tasked with looking after and selling Jewish businesses and homes. ⁷⁴ Some of these commissars for Jewish property exerted themselves with a zeal born of a sense of ideological – though they took pains not to stress this aspect in their postwar testimonies – as well as professional and personal duty. They balked at having to sell off plundered properties because they had been plundered, not because they had belonged to deported Jews. ⁷⁵ Others saw in their appointment a duty only to their own pocketbooks. Postwar testimonies and wartime complaints alike suggested the manifold possibilities for corruption and legalized robbery. One woman from Pantschowa described how erstwhile employees and apprentices stole or sold off the inventory of Jewish stores, then applied for liquidation and pocketed the proceeds. ⁷⁶ A Volksdeutsche butcher from Grossbetschkerek earned the loathing of his co-nationals when, as commissar for a leather-goods factory, he consistently failed to provide shoes even to Volksdeutsche with the right ration cards. Instead, he used the inventory to curry favor with Reich Germans attached to the Kreiskommandantur. ⁷⁷ A Volksdeutscher from Deutsch Elemer (Nemački Elemir or Elemir, postwar Elemir) embraced becoming a commissar for a wood trade in Melenz (Melenci) as a way to pay off his personal debts and employ his adult children. ⁷⁸

Regularized Aryanization was plagued by a lack of personnel and by imperfect bookkeeping. ⁷⁹ Volksdeutsche kept the upper hand vis-a-vis other Banat ethnic groups. Ethnic Hungarians demanded an equal share of Aryanized real estate, but they lacked the strength of numbers and Hungarian governmental support to press their claim. Ethnic Romanians and Serbs had practically no opportunities to obtain Aryanized property, ⁸⁰ especially by legal means. Despite pervasive corruption, wartime Reich sources praised the Volksdeutsche leadership and the Volksdeutsche commissars’ overall professional and ideological dedication. ⁸¹ Sepp Janko earned special praise for his early efforts to prevent the misappropriation of Aryanized property. ⁸² Orders for property obtained by ‘wild’ Aryanization in the Banat to be turned in without punishment apparently met with much positive response within the Volksdeutsche community. ⁸³ In spring 1942 the Volksdeutsche leadership even started remedying the fact that real estate was often Aryanized at a fraction of its real value – in Pantschowa, Jewish houses were sold for as little as one-quarter, though most went for about one-third, of their value ⁸⁴ – by making the new owners pay additional dues on the properties. ⁸⁵

Within the Volksdeutsche community, there was some resentment caused by the fact that well-off people bought Aryanized houses instead of leaving them for poorer Volksdeutsche families. ⁸⁶ Even so, whether they took the opportunity to help themselves to Jewish property before and during the deportation or bought it directly from a Jewish house or at a public auction, ⁸⁷ even the poorest Volksdeutsche could obtain movable property which they would not have been able to afford at normal prices. One Volksdeutscher bragged to acquaintances that he had amassed so much clothing, shoes and underwear from the deported Jews that his whole family was set for life. ⁸⁸ A married couple of modest means – the husband a waiter, the wife a cook – were quite proud of a good deal they got on expensive furniture and clothes which used to belong to a Jewish banker. ⁸⁹ They did feel sufficiently ashamed to assure their neighbor, herself a Jew, that they would give it all back if the previous owner came back to claim it. ⁹⁰

Whatever their opinion of the Jews and Nazi ideas about the Jews, for most Banat Volksdeutsche the physical absence of Jews after summer 1941 seems to have engendered an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. While they may not have considered themselves antisemites, even the older, more conservative Volksdeutsche accepted Aryanization as a matter of course. An example of this general acceptance of the Jews’ absence and the accessibility of their property can be found in a letter written to the Banat Economic Office in late 1942 by an elderly Volksdeutscher from Grossbetschkerek, a former caretaker of the local Jewish cemetery. The letter writer demanded compensation for loss of livelihood caused by the deportation of the Banat Jews. He considered it only natural to expect compensation from the Aryanized property of the dissolved Jewish Community in Grossbetschkerek. ⁹¹ Though he did not state it explicitly, his reasoning is clear: he had worked for the Jews his entire adult life, and was not personally responsible for their absence. All around him he saw people younger and richer than himself appropriating objects and real estate which had belonged to the Jews, and decided to follow the Zeitgeist. The Volksdeutsche leadership gave him the right, and supported his claim. ⁹²

One thing no Volksdeutscher who obtained Jewish property could rightly claim after the war was ignorance of what had happened to the Jews, though some tried. One expellee claimed ingenuously that the Jews’ fate after they arrived at Sajmište ‘eludes [his] knowledge.’ ⁹³ Another expellee implicitly admitted just how much he knew and understood during the war when he recounted how, while purchasing an Aryanized house in Belgrade, he enquired after the previous owner’s signature on the sale agreement, and was told that the previous owner was ‘certainly no longer living.’ ⁹⁴ Revealed in such oblique statements, heard in the sounds of gunfire and the tales of passers-by and Romani gravediggers from the Apfeldorf road, seen and heard as the gas van drove through the streets of Belgrade in spring 1942, the Holocaust was a tangible presence for the Volksdeutsche and other residents of Belgrade and the Banat. The Banat Volksdeutsche were central to the efforts to erase the Jewish presence from the Banat’s physical and mental landscape.

In late 1941, in the midst of regularized Aryanization, the central role Volksdeutsche played in it was confirmed following a ham-fisted attempt by the Wehrmacht in Serbia to claim jurisdiction over the Banat economy as a whole. ⁹⁵ Though the German army offered the valid reason that in the Third Reich the economy was a matter of state control – and, for all intents and purposes, the German army was the state in occupied Serbia – the German Foreign Ministry successfully argued that such a move would set a dangerous precedent for neighboring states to start denying their Volksdeutsche’s economic and other rights. ⁹⁶ While deporting, interning and killing Jews was an issue on which the Foreign Ministry and the Wehrmacht were in agreement, the disposition of Jewish property was more contentious. The Foreign Ministry carried the day with a solution which espoused both ideology and practicality: it defended the Volksdeutsche’s right to Aryanized property as Volksdeutsche as well as the German Reich’s right to said property by using Volksdeutsche as middlemen. Volksdeutsche mostly bought furniture, personal belongings and houses. The Reich profited from the acquisition of several of the Banat’s major economic enterprises which had belonged to Jews and been administered by Volksdeutsche commissars, including the oil and vinegar factories in Grossbetschkerek, numerous mills, food-processing factories, shares in the Grossbetschkerek sugar factory, and a shipping company and glass factory in Pantschowa. ⁹⁷

While foreign-political concerns which combined ideology with practical issues continued to matter in Banat Volksdeutsche civilian affairs until the end of the war, the disposition of Aryanized property did not remain untouched by another Reich institution, which had had only a limited influence in the Banat at first. Heinrich Himmler’s SS – including its militarized wing, the Waffen-SS – dealt with practical war matters and was also an ideological institution par excellence. Starting in 1942 Sepp Janko and Franz Neuhausen expended much effort into securing Aryanized real estate which had not already been bought up, so that some could be kept in trust for Volksdeutsche veterans following a German victory. ⁹⁸ ‘In trust’ was the key phrase. Wartime documents were circumspect about the fact that, in principle, everything the Volksdeutsche owned they owned at Hitler’s pleasure, and could be expected to give it all up in the future. But as historian Robert L. Koehl pointed out already in the 1950s, at the same time as Volksdeutsche were being settled in the Warthegau and given land ‘in trust’ there, Himmler was building up the Waffen-SS as a means to increase his power and realize his ideas about a future Germanic East, settled by Volksdeutsche veterans of the ongoing war who would unify the roles of peasant and soldier. ⁹⁹ The Waffen-SS division ‘Prinz Eugen’ was created in 1942 with the express intent to mobilize the Volksdeutsche of the Serbian Banat and southeast Europe as soldiers for the Reich. In the war of races and ideologies, Volksdeutsche were not only expected to serve the Reich, which had been their protector and champion – they had to serve it if they wished to prove themselves, once and for all, good Germans. Most Volksdeutsche recruits realized that they owed the Reich a material debt as well as a debt of honor, and served without resistance.

In the course of the last 30 months of the war, the Banat Volksdeutsche in the Waffen-SS participated in anti-partisan actions of escalating brutality and diminishing effectiveness. In 1944 ‘Prinz Eugen’ protected the Wehrmacht’s retreat from southeast Europe. The Banat was liberated by the Red Army and occupied by Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans in October 1944. Some Volksdeutsche and their leaders escaped the Banat before the arrival of the Soviets, reached Reich territory and blended in with other German and Volksdeutsche refugees. Roughly three-fifths of the Banat Volksdeutsche stayed, and suffered physical and material abuse at the hands of Soviet soldiers and Partisans even before two laws in 1944–5 passed a blanket judgment of assumed collective guilt against the whole Volksdeutsche community, depriving its members of the rights to property and Yugoslav citizenship. Because they were all associated with the crimes and abuses of the Nazi regime in southeast Europe, surviving Volksdeutsche of all ages suffered disenfranchisement and incarceration at the hands of the new Yugoslav authorities until the late 1940s, when – following the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 – the government in Belgrade started to allow them to reintegrate into society or to emigrate. Most chose the latter option.

During the Second World War, the Third Reich’s attitude to Banat Volksdeutsche owning Aryanized property and land taken away from Serbian First World War veterans was clear: in order to enjoy land and security at the expense of other ethnic groups in the Banat, it was not enough for the Volksdeutsche to claim kinship with the German Volk. They had to prove their loyalty to the Third Reich and help win the war. Ultimately they had to do this with weapon in hand, not just by delivering grain to the Wehrmacht and spreading Nazi ideology through their ranks. Profoundly implicated in the Third Reich’s policies by their acceptance of Dobrovoljzen-Felder and Aryanized property, and by the responsibility entrusted in the Volksdeutsche administration and police, neither Banat Volksdeutsche leaders nor ordinary Volksdeutsche were in a position to refuse Hitler and Himmler’s call to arms when Waffen-SS recruitment began in spring 1942. Volksdeutsche had to pay dearly for every privilege the Reich extended them, including their nominally privileged position in the Nazi racial hierarchy. As their elevation over other Banat ethnicities had an ideological as well as a material aspect, so the Volksdeutsche’s collaboration with the Reich incurred a steep material and moral price, the higher for their claim on membership in the German Volk. The Third Reich enabled the Volksdeutsche exploitation of the Banat Jews and, to a lesser extent, the Banat Serbs. The Reich, in turn, exploited the Volksdeutsche’s economic and military potential for its own ends. The Banat Volksdeutsche’s greatest value for the Third Reich was as instruments of its aggressive, expansionist and racist policy.