Drawing upon Serbian and German sources, Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II is a detailed, deeply-researched regional study of how ethnic Germans in the Yugoslav Banat, a borderland region between Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, became nationalized and Nazified before and during the Second World War.
Ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, played a central yet complicated role in the Third Reich's expansionist policies and occupied territories. As Zakić describes, ambiguities in German racial theory meant that policymakers had no clear directives on the place of ethnic Germans in the larger German nation or the political fabric of the Third Reich. Indeed, despite their shared language and culture, most Nazi-occupying forces mistrusted ethnic Germans to govern themselves. But Banat Germans, Zakić suggests, proved an important exception: they became “junior partners” (3) to their Nazi bosses, trusted to administer their own region and implement Nazi policy in their region and the broader Yugoslav region. By slowly walking the reader through the local history of the interwar and wartime period, Zakić explores the layers of collaboration and complicity that emerged, showing how, with each passing month and year, Volksdeutsche agendas coalesced with the ideological and pragmatic ambitions of the Third Reich. But the relationship, she emphasizes, was fraught. Banat Germans learned quickly that “perks” granted by Nazi Germany could easily be rescinded. Doing the Third Reich's dirty work became a litmus test for proving their loyalty and Germanness.
The book is organized into seven thematic chapters. Following a historiographical introduction, Chapter 1 presents a thick overview of the history of Banat Germans from their arrival in the eighteenth century to the interwar period. Zakić shows how, by the 1930s, the Banat German community felt conflicting loyalties between their “host” country, Yugoslavia, and their “homeland,” Germany. Chapter 2 then teases out the “mental leap” that Banat Germans had to take in the weeks before the war in order to align with the Reich, “commit treason against the Yugoslav state,” (63) and psychologically and politically reframe the invasion as their “true liberation” (73).
The next set of chapters explores how the Banat Germans experienced and participated in the war. In Chapter 3, we learn how the Banat Germans won the right to self-administer their region and developed a quasi-government under the guidance of the local Kulturbund organization. The fourth chapter then turns to how the Third Reich micromanaged this collaborative arrangement on the ground. Challenging dominant presumptions about the motives of ethnic Germans during the war, Zakić argues that the partnership was primarily pragmatic; ideology took a backseat. As the relationship developed, Nazi officials required ethnic Germans to demonstrate their loyalty through conscription, taxation, and police work. A short Chapter 5 investigates how this quid-pro-quo dynamic extended to recruitment for auxiliary police units, while Chapter 6 connects these arguments to the active roles played by the Banat Germans in the Holocaust.
The last two chapters situate this story in broader theoretical and historical lenses. Chapter 7 (which would have worked best as an analytical conclusion) explores how the Banat wartime experience might be profitably framed as an example of how Heimat played out within the expanding Nazi empire and produced particular collaborative arrangements. The final chapter examines the emergence of the Waffen-SS Division “Prinz Eugen” as an ethnic German anti-partisan force deployed throughout Yugoslavia. In detailing the many massacres and atrocities committed by the group, Zakić explains how Yugoslav citizens came to see their own Volksdeutsche as a fifth column that committed treason and then slaughtered their fellow citizens. Zakić concludes with a post-script on the fate of Banat Germans in postwar Yugoslavia, highlighting the stories of flight, expulsion, and war crimes trials.
By reframing the place of Volksdeutsche in the complex Nazi paradigm of Europe and teasing out how collaborative arrangements evolved over time, Zakić’s study successfully counters the antiquated German diasporic narrative that sought to vindicate ethnic Germans. The book also complicates the Serbo-Croatian historiography by giving agency to Banat Germans and exploring local-level collaborative arrangements. The book's shortfalls are its thematic organization, which can be confusing chronologically, and its failure to connect to many relevant themes in twentieth century east European history: the question of minority rights and citizenship, the legal landscape of Nazi occupation, and the ways that Waffen SS units and auxiliary police became mapped into multi-sided civil conflicts across Europe. The book thus will appeal most to a narrow audience of scholars and students with a strong command of the analytical debates and an interest in the regional history of Yugoslavia. For us, it is an admirable case study, beautifully researched and filled with rich detail.
