Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Building on recent investigations into children as historical actors, this article examines the experiences of ethnic German (Donauschwaben) expellees from northern Yugoslavia's Vojvodina region. Using original oral history interviews, the article embeds these individuals' childhood experiences of World War ii and expulsion into their greater life stories, thereby highlighting children's multifaceted wartime roles and opportunities for agency. Contrary to prevailing (German) historiographic and popular imagination—as encouraged particularly by postwar expellee organizations—young ethnic Germans were not the mere passive victims of war and expulsion. Rather, even during their expulsion, they actively participated in Nazi youth organizations, accompanied columns of Jewish camp evacuees, worked in Nazi munitions factories, and fought in the Third Reich's final desperate military "storm." At different occasions, children and youth thus became both witting and unwitting agents of wartime destruction. As the article concludes, a more concerted investigation into questions of childhood agency in war is central to the analysis of such contested topics as German victimhood and perpetration during World War ii, the Vertreibung (expulsion), and Germany's transgenerational postwar reckoning with the crimes of its past.

A volume exploring the nationalization of ethnic German youth in interwar and World War II Yugoslavia, focusing on the ways in which political, ecclesiastical, cultural, and military agents from Germany colluded with local nationalist activists to inculcate Yugoslavia's ethnic Germans with divergent notions of 'Germanness'.

This article presents novel research on Nazi youth programs amongst the Batschka's "Donauschwaben." Illustrating how "reichsdeutsche" and "auslandsdeutsche" youths came into contact through Nazi youth programs during the 1930s and early 1940s, it traces how youth exchanges shaped diverse but mutually constitutive utopian imaginations of "Germanness" and "German" space. Children from the Reich promulgated visions of a "utopian" but "corrupted" Batschka, while ethnic German youths gained visions of a Germany which they could, in adhering to National Socialism, seemingly help build. As this article argues, utopias were not merely created "from above" and then multiplied and altered "from below"; rather, they also helped spur activity and violence in line with Nazism's geopolitical and ideological aims.

Defence date: 8 September 2016 ; Examining Board: Professor Laura Lee Downs, European University Institute (Supervisor) ; Professor Pieter M. Judson, European University Institute (Second Reader) ; Professor Doris Bergen, University of Toronto ; Professor Tara Zahra, The University of Chicago ; This dissertation investigates the National Socialist mobilization of ethnic German ("Donauschwaben") children and youth in two multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderland territories: the Western Banat and the Batschka. Weaving together archival materials, the contemporary press, and original oral history interviews, it traces the evolution of boys' and girls' extra-curricular youth organizations from the Habsburg Empire's 1918 collapse to the ethnic Germans' 1944 "expulsion" from the region. Focusing initially on the interwar period, the dissertation shows how Yugoslavia's ethnic German educational activists quickly framed their demands on national terms. From the 1920s onwards, secular and religious authorities thereby attracted Germany's attention and aid, giving rise to a "nationalization" of local concerns and a politicization of youth. Curricular frustrations, however, spurred extra-curricular solutions: from the 1930s, Donauschwaben youth became a bone of contention between Catholic, Protestant, pro- Reich, anti-Reich, and Yugoslavist youth organizations, each of which promulgated its own visions of "Germanness." Turning to the years between 1941 and 1944— when the Batschka became Hungarian-occupied, and the Western Banat a semi-autonomous, Reich-occupied territory under ethnic German administration— this dissertation deploys a comparative and multiscalar approach in order to explore the experiences of Donauschwaben children and youth under divergent occupational regimes. In the Banat, the curricular, extracurricular, and military domains meshed to coerce all ethnic German youth into the pro- Nazi "Deutsche Jugend," extinguishing any non-Nazi "national" alternatives; in the Batschka, Hungarian nationalization projects, Catholic activism, and the Third Reich's imperial ambitions continued to compete over the Donauschwaben's loyalty, shattering communities over diverse conceptions of "Germanness." In both regions, the majority of youth ultimately joined National Socialist organizations, thus becoming agents of their own, and their peers', nationalization, actors in local inter- and intra-ethnic conflict, and soldiers in Nazi Germany's devastating military campaigns.

Introduction--The Holocaust in the Borderlands : Interethnic Relations and the Dynamics of Violence in Occupied Eastern Europe / Gaëlle Fisher and Caroline Mezger -- The Rise of Antisemitism in the Multiethnic Borderland of Bukovina : Student Movements and Interethnic Clashes at the University of Cernauti (1922-1938) / Anca Filipovici -- Saving Christianity, Killing Jews : German Religious Campaigns and the Holocaust in the Borderlands / Doris L. Bergen -- Hungarians, Germans, and Serbs in Wartime Vojvodina : Patterns of Attitudes and Behaviors towards Jews in a Multiethnic Border Region of Hungary / Linda Margittai -- The Ustasha Youth and the Aryanization of Jewish Property in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 / Goran Miljan -- Local Agency and the Appropriation of Jewish Property in Romania's Eastern Borderland : Public Employees during the Holocaust in Bessarabia (1941-1944) / Svetlana Suveica -- Listening to the Different Voices : Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian Narratives on Jewish Property in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Galicia / Anna Wylegala -- "Gornisht oyser verier"?! Khurbn-shprakh as a Mirror of the Dynamics of Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe / Miriam Schulz -- Law Decree on Racial Affiliation (April 30,1941) in the Independent State of Croatia / Sanela Schmid -- Fascist Italy and the "Other" : Italianization and the Holocaust in the Triveneto Borderlands, 1918-1948 / Elysa Ivie McConnell -- Vanishing Point Transnistria : Post-Imperial Biographies and German Transnational Continuities in an Age of Empire-Building and Ideologized Mass Violence / Frank Gorlich -- Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe / Dana Mihailescu -- The Extermination Site Malyj Trostenec : History and Memory / Aliaksandr Dalhuoski -- EHRI Seminars : Researching and Remembering the Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century / Anna Ullrich -- About the Authors.