Late in the fall of 1940 the
first of the ‘Teaching Corps’ arrived in our town of Ulmbach and were
ecstatically greeted. They had superb armaments, were neatly dressed, were
extremely disciplined, but to our greatest surprise they were quite
uninformed. They were totally clueless about the country, or what kind of
situation its Army happened to be in, and specifically they had no knowledge
about us. This disappointed us the most. They could not understand, that
people lived so far from the Heimat, who claimed to be ethnic German, spoke
German between themselves, were actually so good at it, that they could not
have just recently learned the language.
To us it was quite
incomprehensible that even though the organization of the “Volksbund fuer
das Deutschtum im Ausland” (League of the Nation for the Germaneness
abroad), as well as other organizations, who apparently worked for decades to
establish and support contacts between us and the German educational system,
that so much ignorance could exist in those otherwise so well educated young
people. Even our priest recalled, that he had first to explain to the
military chaplains who we were, where we came from, etc.
Right at the start the German
‘Teaching Corps’ removed the beating punishments in the Romanian Army, which
until that time was a normal procedure. As next they made sure that the
soldiers received proper food rations and not as before day in day out always
a bean soup. As Germany’s later Allies this foremost contributed that the rank
and file while in Russia became brave and loyal compatriots, as they
thankfully remembered that it was through them that they were for the very
first time dealt with humanly while in the military. On the other side of the
Bug River the German Wehrmacht later provisioned the Romanian Divisions. And
this also contributed that the Romanians supported the Germans and stood at
their side. When later the Red Army’s break through at Stalingrad was blamed
by the arrogant Wehrmacht membership on the so–called cowardice and
untrustworthiness of the Romanians they felt much offended by it.
The Company of the German
Army, which in the winter of 1941 was stationed for a whole month in our
village, consisted mostly of the cheerful Rheinländers,
who enjoyed and savored the overly generous hospitality offered to them. They
were thrilled specifically that in our town they could celebrate their beloved
Carnival. In our town you could also eat and drink excellently, even celebrate
the Carnival, specifically during the wintertime, when there was no fieldwork
and everyone had time for amusements. To the young soldiers it felt like a
fairyland. The war was distant one could purchase anything; nothing was
rationed as back home. Many took the opportunity to send with delicacy filled
parcels home, which their family members already had to go without for quite
some time. The hosts generously contributed to it, whatever their overfilled
larders could offer.
The rumor started that there
would be war with the Soviet Union when those soldiers departed. But first
our Heimat was almost involved in a battle. We hardly noticed that Yugoslavia
also became Germany’s Allies and became aware of it only when a clique of
military Officers revolted and not only broke the one-week old agreement but
also joined the other side. A military fight seamed to be inescapable and so
it turned out to be.
Vienna’s Decree
The first arrival of the
German troops in Romania were preceded by the political events, which alarmed
also the ethnic Germans: both of the Vienna’s Decrees in the Fall of 1940,
after which Romania had to cease the northern part of Siebenbürgen to Hungary
under the pressure of the German Reich, which was populated mainly by
Hungarians and ethnic Germans. For a long time during the negotiations it
became unclear, just which parts Hungary demanded and quite a few of the older
generations hoped, that all of the Banat would be reunited with Hungary, while
us the younger folks hoped for the later decision. We didn’t want to hear
anything about being reunited, less so because of Hungarian language we had to
learn instead of the Romanian language, but more so as we knew that
German-Hungarians had less rights than us ethnic Germans in Romania. Only one
accountant and a railway employee with their families left for Hungary. Both
sons of the railway employee went with me to school.
Our town stayed untouched
from the Vienna’s Decree events, except of the departure of those two
families. When in contact with the bureaucracy it the city
and the surrounding area one soon noticed that the Romanians pretended that
those Decrees were unimportant, but in reality were resentful towards the
ethnic Germans as well as their arch-enemies the Hungarians. After the war
they turned the skewer around and used the favor of the hour taking back the
areas that were taken from them five years earlier under the pressure of the
German Reich. Their Hungarian ‘socialist brothers’ in turn did not forgive
this to this very day. With that Romania took possession of about 2 million
Hungarians who lived in those areas and the ethnic animosity between those two
countries continues until our times.
Just how the nationalism in
Romania escalated to the bloody excesses in the short revolution of 1989 one
could clearly see on the television news. The ancient animosity between
Romanians and Hungarians motivated the many still living ethnic Germans in
Romania to emigrate, so not to be pulled under between those two milling
stones. This dilemma was spared to the Bistriz’ Sachsen of North Siebenbürgen.
They were evacuated to the West in 1944 prior to the invasion of the Red Army.
As a soldier in the winter of
1944/45 while billeted in the Hungarian schools I noticed that the maps still
presented the Hungarian territory as the borders were in 1914. A slogan
embellished the map: “Nem, nem, soha!” – “No, no, never!” The Hungarians
refused to accept the Trianon Accord’s consequences – “the torment of 1919”-
but they also never lost the dream of “Stephan’s-Crown Empire”. Stephan I was
the first Hungarian king, who let him self being christened and was crowned by
the Pope around the year 1000 AD, and brought Christianity to all of Hungary,
the area roughly the size of its 1918 borders.
Home to the Empire – The Resettlement
After the Hitler-Stalin-Pact
in the fall of 1939 a new resentment welled up over the taking over of
Bessarabia and north of Bukovina by the Soviet Union. Already in the summer
months of 1940 many Romanian refugee families arrived from that area to our
town and were billeted with the farming families. That led to quite a few
unpleasantness's, as the refugees hardly ever helped out in the households or
on the farms of their hosts and were considered as exploiters by them. Hardly
any one thought about their fate much less that the same experiences would not
be spared to themselves.
After the war my father told
that in September of 1944 some officers arrived also with the Russian troops,
who looked on hand of the lists for the refugees who escaped them in
Bessarabia in 1940. They knew exactly in which of the houses in our town they
were living, collected them, arrested them and took them away. Most likely not
all of the imprisoned were sent to the Soviet Union, as during the internment
years in the Baragan-Steppe (1951-1956) between those ten of thousands of
Banat’s Danube Swabians were also many of the former refugees considered by
the government as ‘politically untrustworthy’.
The resettlement of the
ethnic Germans started in the fall of 1940 from the Romanian areas of
Bessarabia and North Bukovina that were ceded to the Soviet Union - home to
the Empire. This was the first ethnic cleansing, and Hitler led it
meticulously through. Everyone else, - Yugoslavs, Poles, Czechs, and even the
Romanians (!) only dreamed hopefully about such possibility. Alas, we had
absolute no clue about that. It was only after the ‘revolution’ of 1989 when
the archives were opened to the public that concrete plans from the times long
before the war were made to forcefully resettle the Romanian-Germans all over
the country. The plans had the goal of ‘nationalization of the borders’, of
which the Romanian news always talked in foggy articles, which were never
taken seriously. At least one of those ‘nationalizations of the borders’ were
achieved, the border to Yugoslavia when our people were deported to the
Baragan-Steppe in 1951. The excuse for it was the ruffle with Tito, who went
as of 1948 on his own way of ‘socialism’ and stepped out of the Soviet Block.
The re-settlers from
Bessarabia and Bukovina had only evil things to report in that short time that
they were under the Soviet’s administration. Equally so there was nothing good
to hear from the resettlement agents about the Soviets, Hitler’s negotiations’
partners. Bessarabia, which is the eastern Romanian province between the
rivers Pruth and Dnjestr was all through the history a bone of contention
between the neighbouring states. Until 1918 it belonged to the Russian Czars.
The older Bessarabia-Germans fought in the First World War as soldiers of the
Russian Czars against the Wilhelm’s German Kaiser Reich and against
Austro-Hungary, but in 1940 they wanted rather ‘home to the Empire’, than to
have to live in the communist Soviet-Empire. They were considered equal to the
Baltic-Germans, the Dobroduscha-Germans and the Wolhyia-Germans who lived too
far from the German Empire boarders that they could have been defended.
We were aware that the first
goal of the NSDAP, the National Socialistic German Workers Party, was to
reunite all the Germans
in a “Greater Germany Empire” and we observed how Hitler tried to implement
this goal step by step. We had the feeling that even us were just a figure in
that chess game named Power. Just which part we were supposed to play no one
could guess. After the Yugoslavia Campaign the rumor obstinately went around
that a new autonomy area was in plans, which would include most of the south
east Europe’s ethnic German population. It was to be supposed to be similar like
Austria’s 1849-1861 ‘Serbian Vojvodschaft and Temescher Banat’. Our history
teacher pointed out in the class that in our area too many different ethnic
people lived side by side and such an undertaking was not feasible without
opening the gates to a flood of other complications or bringing on the war to
resolve the arguments.
All those events around us
did not go unnoticed by us high school students which sharpened our attention
as well as our senses to the political changes that involved our Heimat and
with it us without any contributions of ours.
To be continued.
