Banat Swabian

The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians.

They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Empire's Banat of Temeswar province, later included in the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary, a province which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with Turkey. At the end of World War I in 1918, the Swabian minority worked to establish an independent multi-ethnic Banat Republic; however, the province was divided according to the Wilsonian Principles of self-determination (the wish of the majority population as registered in voting), by the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. The greater part was annexed by Romania, a smaller part by former Yugoslavia, and a small region around Szeged remained part of Hungary.

Following World War II most Banat Swabians were expelled to the West by the Soviet Union and its subsidiaries, and after 1990 and the fall of the Soviet Union and its republics many of those remaining left for economic and emotional reasons.

The Banat colonists are often grouped with other German-speaking ethnic groups in the area under the name Danube Swabians. Besides the Banat, these groups lived in nearby western Bačka in Vojvodina, Serbia, in Swabian Turkey (present-day southern Hungary), in Slavonia, (present-day Croatia), and in Satu Mare, Romania. All of these areas were under Austrian rule, when the Crown recruited German immigrants, particularly farmers. It wanted to repopulate the lands newly recovered from Turkish occupation and to revive agriculture in an area that had been frequently overrun by war.

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