History
Germans started to settle in the territory of present-day Serbia in the end of the 17th century, when Habsburg Monarchy took parts of these areas from the Ottoman Empire. During Habsburg rule, Germans were privileged nationality in the Monarchy and German language was a lingua franca of the country, used by members of other ethnicities as well. After the Austro-Hungarian compromise from 1867, present-day northern Serbia was included into the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy and Hungarian language replaced German as a main language of administration and inter-ethnic communication.
In 1918, following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, an short-lived Banat Republic was proclaimed in Banat region, mainly as an initiative of local Germans. Soon, the territory of this republic was divided between the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Romania. In 1929, regions of present-day Serbia that had sizable German population (Banat, Bačka, Syrmia) were included into the newly formed Danube Banovina province. In the interwar period, Germans were one of the largest national minorities on the territory of present-day Serbia, second only to the Hungarians.
During Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, from 1941 to 1944, Banat was an autonomous German-administered region within occupied Serbia. In 1943 Heinrich Himmler introduced compulsory military service for ethnic Germans in Serbia. The German military defeat in World War II resulted in flight or imprisonment of the almost entire German community (which numbered about 350,000) in Serbia's territory. It is estimated that about 200,000 Germans was evacuated during the flight of the German army from Serbian territory, while about 140,000 who remained in the country were sent to prison camps run by the new communist authorities. After prison camps were dissolved (in 1948), most of the remaining German population left Serbia because of economic reasons.
In 2007, the minority formed a national council for the first time since the Second World War. In the 2000s several monuments to the pre-war German population have been erected. In 2008 the Association of Danube Swabians requested that the government of the city of Sremska Mitrovica exhume the bodies of Germans who died in a post-war camp in the town.
Read more about this topic: Germans Of Serbia
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