Germans of Hungary - History

History

The immigration of German-speaking peoples into Hungary began in approximately 1000, when knights who came in the company of Giselle of Bavaria, the German-born queen of the first King of Hungary, Stephen I, entered the country.

Three waves of German migration can be distinguished in Hungary before the 20th century. The first two waves of settlers arrived to the Hungarian Kingdom in the Middle Ages (11th and 13th centuries) and formed the core of the citizens of the few towns in Upper Hungary and in Southern Transylvania (Transylvanian Saxons, "Siebenbürger Sachsen").

The third, largest wave of German-speaking immigrants into Hungary occurred due to a deliberate settlement policy of the Habsburg government after the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire from Hungarian territory. Between 1711 and 1780, German-speaking settlers from Southern Germany, Austria, and Saxony immigrated to the regions of Southwest Hungary, Buda, Banat and Szatmár County. This influx of immigrants helped to bring economic recovery and cultural distinction to these regions. At the end of the 18th century, the Kingdom of Hungary contained over one million German-speaking residents. During this time, a flourishing German-speaking culture could be found in the kingdom, with German-language literary works, newspapers, and magazines being produced. A German language theater also operated in the kingdom's capital, Budapest.

Throughout the 19th century, a strong German industrial community developed, with glass-blowing, foundries, and masonry being particularly important. In response to this, the second half of the century saw the rise of a strong Hungarian nationalist political movement, whose purpose was to retain German economic power by assimilating the German-speaking citizens into Hungarian culture. As a mean toward this end, the German language was slowly replaced with the Hungarian language.

By 1918, at the onset of World War I, almost 2 million Danube Swabians and other German-speaking peoples lived in what is now present-day Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia and the former Yugoslav republics. Between 1918 and 1945 several factors greatly reduced the number of German-speaking residents in the kingdom so much that only thirty percent of the original German-speaking population was left after World War II. The number of Germans in the Hungarian kingdom was more than halved by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, as the kingdom was forced to make large cessions of its territory to neighboring countries.

In 1924, under the leadership of Jakob Bleyer, the Hungarian Germans' Peoples' Preservation Society (German: Ungarnländische Deutsche Volksbildungsverein) was formed to combat the forced dominance of the Hungarian language in schools and government. However, the Hungarian government proceeded with its Magyarization programs. In this situation, the German-speaking community of Hungary looked for foreign intervention in its language predicament. This fact was very interesting to Hitler controlled Germany, and the German and Hungarian governments used the status of German-speaking peoples within the Hungarian state as a political bargaining chip. In 1938 a National Socialist German organization was formed, The Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn under the leadership of Franz Anton Basch and it became the most influential political organization among the Hungarian Germans. In 1940 it became the official representative of the Hungarian Germans and it was directly controlled from Germany. The Volksbund had representatives in the Hungarian parliament until 1945.

After the end of World War II, the German-speaking community in Hungary was seen as a scapegoat by Communists. The advancing Red Army, referring to "security reasons", deported about 600,000 civilians and prisoners of war from Hungary, of whom 40-65,000 were Germans. On top of this, a great number of Germans, mostly members of Nazi organisations, who felt threatened by the prospect of being deported to Siberia, fled from Hungary as well (approx. 60-70,000). Many Germans were sent back to Germany, first to the American-occupied area of Germany, and later to the Soviet-occupied area. Overall, approximately 220,000 Germans were expelled from Hungary. From that point on, the history of Hungary Germans focuses on two points, the fate of Germans who remained in Hungary, and the fate of the exiles.