If people are interested in studying this further, I can recommend the work of Alfred M. de Zayas, who as a non-German wrote about the atrocities that took place at the end of WWII and the years following. He worked in the UN High Commission for Human Rights for several years.

My parents were born in now, present day Hungary on the Serbian border .. They never spoke about it I've had to learn all the history of my families as much as I can . I still experience this prejudism here in Hungary I cannot automatically receive my citizenship because of the 46-49 confiscation law A 3 year law still valid here It is extremely upsetting and humiliating to be offspring of the expelled peoples stripped of land and citizenship Thank you so much for sharing I so appreciate this from the very depth of my heart

My parents came from the province of Syrmia from the towns of Alt Pasua and Neu Banovci they where lucky as they where the first to depart before the Russian Army and the Partisans got to them. I lost many of my distant relatives in that time. I was born 6 years after the war and lived in a camp in Austria. My family never spoke to us about that time for them it was too much to rehash the pain they experienced and the life they had to leave behind. My mother was highly pregnant with my oldest brother at that time and having to endure the trek and the hardship that came with it. I can only imagine what it must have been like for some of my people at that time. I will also never know the love of my grandparents,uncles,ants and cousins for the war has taken some and others have been lost in the shuffle of the war.

It is because of this family history that I became a human rights advocate. It has given me a lot of empathy and in the letter writing campaigns we do in Amnesty International we have taken issue with many governments around the world. It is important that we hold governments (and militias) accountable for what they do in the name of the people. Bearing witness is such an important first step.

Thank you sharing. This is the other side of history.

Vrbas is very close to where my family is from. My mom was 6 when they had to leave, so the stories no doubt were very similar.

My Father's family who lived in the Batchka, (Neu Werbass) Vbas, were lucky enough to get out during an early wave of exodus. He was only 8 or 9 years old and the oldest of 5 siblings. They were settled in the areas from where they originally came, Baden. Growing up, the stories were horrific! He often spoke of the aftermath, from 1944 - 1948 and said how that history had been over shadowed by other dreadful acts at the time. I am always surprised and appreciative of people with new info!

My parents were Donauschwaben born in Transylvania. After WWI their town was given to Romania. My mother and father were unhappy about that. They liked the Hungarians and were not happy to have their schooling changed to Romanian. They spoke Hungarian to the end of their lives. Toward the end of WWII the German army came and gathered the men in the town hall. There were several men standing in the corners of the room with rifles. They asked for volunteers. Everyone volunteered. At the time word came that the Russians were comig. My mother and her two sisters and their children packed up a wagon with as much food and essentials as possible. They left their vineyards, wine business, store and home behind and headed out for Austria. On their last night together my mother became pregnant with me. It was a terrible time but they all survived. I was born shortly after the war. We were impoverished and had to start over.

Well done. Thank you

It is true that some people who had been living in southeastern Europe were disenfranchised. This happened under most administrations (Ottoman, Austrian, Hungarian etc), it is just different groups who get threatened at different times. However, when the farmers from Germany and Austria were settled in the Vojvodina in the 18th century under the Habsburgs, no new state was created. So the situation with Israel is different. My point is that all people regardless of ethnicity deserve protection.

My family comes from Glogon and Zichydorf, it appears the migrated to Canada during before or just after ww1. Very sad to see what happened to our people.

What continues to confound my mind is the fact that within all of this there is not a mention of Stalin, or what he did. The man who was placed as a hero on the cover of LIFE magazine created the monster in 1918 - 1956 that Hilter based his camps on: The Gulag. Over a period of over 30 years, 15 - 30 MILLION people were starved, killed or died under the watch of Stalin, yet, Hitler remains the monster. Mau actually was responsible for more death than either of these two men. War means that innocent children, adults and the elderly will pay the price. War means that woman will be raped. War is not necessary, yet remains. We humans, deserve to be erased from this planet, the most stupid of all of God's creation. Yes, all wrong acts in history need to be uncovered, shared, studied, and felt. Will the endless cycle of power continue to destroy lives? Gulag, abbreviation of Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey, (Russian: “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps”), the system of Soviet labour camps and accompanying detention and transit camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed the political prisoners and criminals of the Soviet Union. At its height the Gulag imprisoned millions of people. The name Gulag had been largely unknown in the West until the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973), whose title likens the labour camps scattered through the Soviet Union to an island chain. A system of forced-labour camps was first inaugurated by a Soviet decree of April 15, 1919, and underwent a series of administrative and organizational changes in the 1920s, ending with the founding of Gulag in 1930 under the control of the secret police, OGPU (later, the NKVD and the KGB). The Gulag had a total inmate population of about 100,000 in the late 1920s, when it underwent an enormous expansion coinciding with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. By 1936 the Gulag held a total of 5,000,000 prisoners, a number that was probably equaled or exceeded every subsequent year until Stalin died in 1953. Besides rich or resistant peasants arrested during collectivization, persons sent to the Gulag included purged Communist Party members and military officers, German and other Axis prisoners of war (during World War II), members of ethnic groups suspected of disloyalty, Soviet soldiers and other citizens who had been taken prisoner or used as slave labourers by the Germans during the war, suspected saboteurs and traitors, dissident intellectuals, ordinary criminals, and many utterly innocent people who were hapless victims of Stalin’s purges. Inmates filled the Gulag in three major waves: in 1929-32, the years of the collectivization of Soviet agriculture; in 1936-38, at the height of Stalin’s purges; and in the years immediately following World War II. Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 “some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago.” Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The true figures remain unknown. At its height the Gulag consisted of many hundreds of camps, with the average camp holding 2,000-10,000 prisoners. Most of these camps were “corrective labour colonies” in which prisoners felled timber, laboured on general construction projects (such as the building of canals and railroads), or worked in mines. Most prisoners laboured under the threat of starvation or execution if they refused. It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag’s total prisoner population each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million. The Gulag started to shrink soon after Stalin’s death; hundreds of thousands of prisoners were amnestied from 1953 to 1957, by which time the camp system had returned to its proportions of the early 1920s. Indeed, the Gulag was officially disbanded; its activities were absorbed by various economic ministries, and the remaining camps were grouped in 1955 under a new body, GUITK (Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Kolony, or “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Colonies”).

Bravo Ute! I love your attitude and scholarship, Both my parents came from the Voivodina, they met in Austria after the war, both dazed and hardened by Hitler and Stalin. My earliest memories at age 3 in Canada were of ethnic disparagement- we looked right but were suspect, no time for for big ethnic explanations.

I was going to grade one ( 1950 ) in Neusatz (Novi Sad ) in Batschka Bacska, and that when the Germans came out from labour camps. Some of them were ten years old kids when they started grade one and that was a Hungarian language school. By the end of the school year they have gone to Germany that was the first group. The second group left in 1955. My father who was ethnic German also was called to leave, but he and our family would never go. My mother was Hungarian who lost her both parents in early years of her childhood and was raised by Hungarian Jews. She was raised and worked with Jews. During the war we had a food store, the Nazis forbid giving food to Jews but my mother risking her life hid food and gave her Jewish clients. My German grandmother whose best friend was also a Jewish lady, also protected her family and children by living with them. In 1960 there was about 5000 Germans still living in Vojvodina. I not saying it was easy because there was a lot of anti-German feeling. The houses of Germans which were confiscated the new owners almost totally destroyed, they were not used to that kind of living just like in communist Russia those peasants could not maintain the aristocracy’s property Our family became fully Hungarian and I was raised in Hungarian spirit. At the end what is that Macedonian song got to do with Vojvodina?

My father Anton Gass was in one of those camps his little sister died there. He has tolled me horrified thing that was happened. He is from Apatin.

You must tell them more about the old history of the Schwaben going back over 2000 years ago.

Does anyone know where the Displaced Persons camp was in Saalfelden, Salzburg, Austria? My mother was there.

It's unfortunate what has happened to many peoples who were displaced throughout history. I currently have much sympathy for the crimes against the Palestinians. And the recent prefabricated unrest in nations such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and others are crimes that must never go unpunished nor be forgotten. They are be written about and being archived as we speak. I thank people like you, Ute, and our Donauschwabisch parents who passed along these nightmarish stories.

I wondered about the number 12 to 15 million people ethnically cleansed through forced deportation. Do you know many ethnic Germans were deported from East Prussia, Posen, and Siliesia? What do you believe that the U.S. Army did in Vietnam?

revenge is stupid! MsRhuby! Star Diamond

Wonderful. Do you know where Homilitz was.