From Hitler’s Disciple to Wartime Refugee

Abstract

Abstract Building on recent investigations into children as historical actors, this article examines the experiences of ethnic German (Donauschwaben) expellees from northern Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina region. Using original oral history interviews, the article embeds these individuals’ childhood experiences of World War ii and expulsion into their greater life stories, thereby highlighting children’s multifaceted wartime roles and opportunities for agency. Contrary to prevailing (German) historiographic and popular imagination—as encouraged particularly by postwar expellee organizations—young ethnic Germans were not the mere passive victims of war and expulsion. Rather, even during their expulsion, they actively participated in Nazi youth organizations, accompanied columns of Jewish camp evacuees, worked in Nazi munitions factories, and fought in the Third Reich’s final desperate military “storm.” At different occasions, children and youth thus became both witting and unwitting agents of wartime destruction. As the article concludes, a more concerted investigation into questions of childhood agency in war is central to the analysis of such contested topics as German victimhood and perpetration during World War ii, the Vertreibung (expulsion), and Germany’s transgenerational postwar reckoning with the crimes of its past.