Expulsion

Prior to the beginning of the Yugoslavian campaign in 1941, four leading personalities of the local brarich of the Swabian-German Cultural Association were ab ducted by Yugoslavian officials to Peterwardein. In other towns of similar size the number of hostages was usually higher. Matters never projessed as far as a disarmament of Yugoslavian soldiers by the People's Militia. The Hungarian arrned forces were able to occupy the town without a battle. In autumn 1940 several young men filled with enthusiasm for the German military secretly left the town and volunteered their services to the German authorities in Belgrade. The Waffen-SS campaigns of 1942, 1943 and 1944 resulted in considerable differences and several incidents of violence between the group of those who complied with the campaigns and the group of those who evaded them. Thus, the war sowed discord in the previously peaceful village. The number of Filipowan boys and men who served with the Hungarian and German armed forces in the Second World War may be estimated at 900. Of these, 165 fell in action or died in hospitals or in imprisonment, while 67 are considered missing. Military service claimed a total of 2321ives. Of the soldiers who fell in action or died in the field hospitals, only ten are buried in what is today Yugoslavia; 107 are buried in Russia, Finland, Romania and Hungary.

When Bačka became the scene of occasional partisan activities, which consisted in the main of arson attacks on hemp stacks and hemp-processing plants, an outdoor guard was set up in Filipowa; watchmen had to make nightly patrols arround the local bound area. However, no confrontations with the partisans occurred: In 1943 the latter launched a night-time raid on the train station at the outskirts of the town. No people were injured.

On October 4, 1944, when the offensive wedges of the Red Army advanced across the river Theiss, the regional administration of the People's Association appealed to the people to flee. The appeal was publicly announced that same day. However, only 115 families, totaling 510 persons, decided to leave their home. At 10%, Filipowa had the lowest flight rate of the entire Hodschag district. Between October 12 and 15, those who had agreed to the evacuation left the town with about 100 horse-drawn carts and several tractors.

Their path first took them to Baja, where they crossed the Danube and eventually reached the Plattensee/Balaton via Fünfkirchen. They travelled on via Ödenburg/Sopron to Viennese Neustadt. Here the refugees went several different ways. Some went via St. Pölten, Brünn and Zwittau to Hohenstadt, and from there they and their conveyances traveled by train to Breslau. By early December 1944, the other group also came by train from Moravian Nikolsburg, and arrived in Breslau, where they were split up. In early January 1945 all of them again had to flee from the advancing front. Many of them saw the end of the war in the Egerland. Some of the Filipowans were then handed over by the Americans to the Russians, and by them, in turn, to the Czechs, who used them as forced labor in agriculture until autumn 1946, when they were deported to Bavaria or Saxony.

Of the inhabitants of Filipowa, probably about 3,800 persons were still in the town itself in mid­October. Since Filipowa was not located along any surfaced roads, neither retreating German units nor advancing Russian front units and partisans passed through the town. This was probably the chief reason why there were relatively few rapes and little plundering, compared with other communities. On October 21 ten pamsans moved into Filipowa. Since the acting Mayor, Georg Eichinger, had reported for duty with the German armed forces a few weeks prior to the arrival of the partisans, there was no proper community representation. For that reason, ex-Mayor Martin Pertschi called a meeting of the former "sworn-ins" (the community councillors). These appointed Josef Held, who had served as volunteer fighting on the Serb side in World War One, as head of the district council. Djoka Lazić, who had been a policeman in Filipowa in the 1930s, was appointed police commander. However, no "People's Liberation Committee" (NOO) was established in Filipowa, only a "Local Committee" (Mesni Odbor).

The community administration was almost completely powerless against small bands of marauding partisans and Russians. From October 26 to November 8, hardly a day went by without small groups of Russian soldiers coming into town to rob the farmers of their horses. They also appropriated butchered pigs, wine, liquor and watches and occasionally also went looking for girls and woman. It was a time of fear.

October 28, 1944 marked the beginning of slave labor. Everyone fit to work and between the ages of 14 and 60 had to be prepared at all times to be summoned to form labor groups and to be literally "drummed up" to work in and around the town, to harvest the crops that had gone untended, or to work at military chores. The first large-scale slave labor task was to repair and restore the airf eld on the "hay meadow" located some 5 km towards Hodschag. When the Filipowans failed to appear for work on the meadow on November 2 due to a misunderstanding based on Ianguage difficulties, the 38-year-old farmer Franz König, who was completely innocent, was declared responsible for the mishap by the supervising Russian soldier and the partisans, dragged before a military court, pronounced guilty of sabotage in a biief trial, transferred to Sombor into the infamous Kronic Palais, and executed in December 1944. Executed along with him was Melchior Leopold, the 16-year-old son of the local group leader of the "Ethnic Association of the Germans in Hungary"; this boy had remained in his parental home and had evidently fallen victim to a sort of "collective family liability".

Also in November 1944, the 47-year-old farmer Martin Rapp was abducted by the partisans, and was probably liquidated in Sombor that same month. Rapp had been a plain and simple, unpolitical villager. No Filipowan could imagine what that unfortunate man was supposed to have done wrong.

On November 5 all radios, bicycles, motorcycles and firefighting equipment had to be turned in. On November 10 the 36-year-old farmwoman Eva Eichinger was executed by a "firing squad" in front of the presbytery. The previous night, a young partisan officer had been quartered in her home. The next day her house was searched, and some rifle cartridges were allegedly found. The set-up and her execution was probably revenge because she had not let the officer have his way with her.

On November 25, 1944 the town crier announced that all men and boys aged 16 to 60 were to report to the community hall. By about 9:00 o'clock some 300 of them had arrived there. The day before, a partisan mⁱt allegedly belonging to the "Krajiska brigada" had arrived in the town. The partisans (both men and women), armed to the teeth, now randomly selected 212 men and boys, wrote their names on a list, and' then herded them off towards Hodschag onto a sallasch (single farmstead) belonging to Josef Roth, who had been the last Mayor of Hodschag. Eyewitness reports that later became public reveal that many of the men and boys were tortured there before being ordered to strip naked; they were then herded to the pits where anti-aircraft artillery had used to stand. The men, most of whom were praying, were stabbed or shot, thrown into the pits, and covered with a thin layer of soil.

One well-corroborated account tells how the commando of old-experienced partisans, prior to its deployment in Filipowa, had reinforced its number with 50 Vojvodina Serbs, Bunjewatz, Slovaks and Hungarians. Upon amval at the Roth sallasch, the people from Vojvodina refused to participate in the torture and intended murder of the men from Filipowa. An inquiry sent to the headquarters in Hodschag returned the order that the disobedients were to be withdrawn at once.

As far as we can tell, no more mass executions of Danube Swabians took place in Bačka after November 25, 1944.

The murdered Filipowans represented all of the town's professional and social groups; 35 of them were youths aged 16 to 19. Among the 212 men aged 20 to 60 there were several fathers of families with ten or more children. Since the community physician Dr. Franz Dickmann, the physician Dr. Johann Engert of Filipowa, and the apothecary Ludwig Vogl M. Sc. also numbered among the victims, the town was henceforth without medical care. The murder of these men represented an act of pure terrorism, since not one of the murdered could be said to have done the slightest wrong to the Yugoslavian state or its citizens.

On Christmas Day 1944, 24 men aged 17 to 45 as well as 85 women aged 18 to 30 - a total of 109 persons - were rounded up and transferred to Apatin; the same happened on December 27 to another 30 men and 100 women. In early January, both groups, a total of 239 persons, were put into wagons and deported to Ukraine for forced labor. The first group was sent to Ivanovka near Charkov, to Camp 1551, the second to Camp Bakova-Antracit No. 1201 in the region of Vorošilovgrad. The first group had to do forest and factory labor, while the second was put to work in the coal pits and on the collective farms. Of the 239 deportees, 28 men and 25 women, a total of 53 persons or 22%, died by 1949, mostly of starvation and exhaustion. The last of the group were transported to Frankfurt a. d. Oder in November 1949, and released there.

In the first quarter of 1945 as well, labor groups were levied in Filipowa and taken to the labor camps of surrounding Bačka communities. On January 20, 1945, for example, a group of men and boys were taken to the district labor camp of Hodschag. On about February 10, some 20 men were shipped off to Karavukova and 21 men to Bač Brestovac. On March 12, almost 200 Filipowans aged 14 and up - mostly women and girls - were conscripted for forced labor and were assigned by the central camp at Sombor to various labor camps in northwestern Bačka. None of them were still in the town at the time of the forced internment of all remaining Filipowans. On March 14, 1945, some 1,200 Danube Swabians from the community of Karavukova and (on March 16 and 17) another 2,500 Danube Swabians from Bae Sentivan, were herded to Filipowa and assigned to the houses there. On Easter Saturday, March 31, 1945, about 200 partisans surrounded the town and, within two hours, herded all - German inhabitants as well as the refugees from Karavukova and Bač Sentivan - to the meadow. There, about 500 people deemed fit to work were selected and sent to the Filipowa labor camp, which consisted of several large houses. These people then had to clear out the houses and take care of the livestock. The remaining people - some 7,000 of them, mostly elderly, invalids, people unfit to work, and mothers with children under age 2 - had to spend Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday 1945, in other words two entire days and nights, on the street and in the yards of the houses before being herded to the train station on Easter Monday to be transported to the newly established regional concentration camp Gakowa.

During the entrainment on April 2, 1945, three Filipowans were shot. Jakob Ament, 64, had tried to sneak back home to get some bare necessities. One of the partisans noticed it, and gunned him down immediately. The farmer Franz Pertschy, 42, suffered a similar fate. He tried secretly to leave the column of deportees, but he was seen and shot on the spot. Magdalena Hoffmann, nee Eichinger, was 90 years old and unable to leave the house where some of the expellees had stayed overnight, quickly enough to suit the partisans. Three bullets struck her down on the house steps.

Like all nuns in Bačka, the Poor Nursing Sisters of Our Blessed Lady, who had a cloister in Filipowa and had taught the majority of the public school girls, were not confined to the concentration camp; they managed to set up an emergency hospital in the cloister which sheltered up to 70 invalids at a time and which the partisans tolerated for 66 days. On June 4 this emergency ward was suddenly shut down. The patients were shipped off to Gakowa, regardless of their state of health.

When the main transport from Filipowa arrived at Gakowa on April 2, 1945, 50 men and boys were immediately selected. Most of them were men more than 60 years of age. Among them were 17 Filipowans. They were taken to Sombor, whence a transport of 428 men from Baeka was dispatched to Syrmish Mitrovic (Sremska Mitrovica) on April 15, 1945. Until Neusatz/Novi Sad the trip went by freight car, but for the remaining distance the men were herded along on foot, with no regard to age or footwear. Anyone who lagged ten or twenty paces behind was shot or beaten to death by the partisans. From Mitrovicz the men were marched off to restore the damaged rail line from Belgrade to Slavonic Brod - and this railway construction is among the most dreadful chapters of the Danube Swabian Passion. In Jankovci, near Vinkovci, the partisans took "retaliatory measures", as they called their wilful murders. They selected victims at random from among the forced laborers; these had to dig their own graves, and were then gunned into them. On May 7, 1945, the 15-year-old Filipowan Josef Keller fell victim to this kind of random murder. 77-year-old Peter Garatva, father of seven children, grandfather and great-grandfather, was also abducted to Jankovci. When he was totally exhausted from the hard work and constant starvation, he was sent to the infamous camp in Mitrovicz (Sremska Mitrovica). According to an eyewitness from Kernei, partisans beat him to death there.

From late June to mid-October 1945 some of the Filipowan houses in the Böhmengasse also served as district concentration camp for Germans, mostly from communities of the Hodschag district, who , were not used for slave labor. On June 18 the expellees from Hodschag came to Filipowa, followed on June 22 by those from Parabucz and on June 26 by those from Militicz. But the 1,500 inmates of the camp also included Germans from Baö, Deronje, Vajska and Sonta. Due to the lack of medication and medical care, epidemics of malaria and dysentery broke out, and by the time the camp was transferred to Gakowa and Krushivl on October 17, 1945, some 250 persons had died - in other words, almost 17% of the inmates in only four months!

Labor camp Filipowa had already had its beginnings in January 1945, with the internment of Filipowan men in the New Public School. In the course of the expulsion it was expanded to hold about 6001aborers, men and women primarily from Filipowa but also from Karavukova and Sentivan. One group had to work in the mill and in the hemp factories. Another was charged with clearing out the houses; this task included setting up storerooms for the foodstuffs, furniture and linen, as well as collective stables for the cattle, horses and the smaller animals. A third group had to work the fields of the Filipowan Hotter area, and with that, the collective farming system was already introduced. As of the end of the war this economic activity was administered by the Uprava Narodnij Dobara (Administration of the People's Own Goods). Part of the clothing, the linen and the household appliances were sold cheaply to the Magyars and the Slavs from the surrounding villages. In this way a cheap bazaar-like sale of the Danube Swabian possessions went on for several weeks, and was soon referred to by the people only as "Hitler market" - "Hitler-vasar".

The fact that the forced laborers were essentially slaves without rights is demonstrated by one episode from the Filipowa labor camp. One night, more than a hundred rabbits died in the house where all rabbits were collectively kept. Circumstances indicated that they had accidentally been given wet grass to eat, so that the animals died of colic. A committee that amved from the military court at Hodschag - its spokesman was a German-speaking Jew named Obrad - deemed this a case of sabotage, and considered the camp coachmen to be the chief suspects. Each was severely interrogated. Since th

ey all knew themselves to be innocent and no saboteur could be identified, the committee selected from among the camp inmates, Stefan Eichinger (25) and Valentin Gauss (32), both from Filipowa, as well as the camp cook from Sentivan, and one other man, and had them executed that same night (June 17, 1945).

In early July 1945, the head of the district council, Josef Held, had an accident in the motorcar impro­vised by a Filipowan locksmith, and succumbed to his injuries a few days later in the hospital at Som­bor. He had held office for eight months, and had not gained his people any advantages. Whatever may have possessed him to confirm, with his signature, the wholly unfounded accusation that all of the 212 Filipowans murdered in November 1944 had been "Fascists" will probably ever remain a mystery.

As of November 1945 the first sporadic efforts were made to settle so-called colonists in the vacant houses. The systematic settlement of Filipowa by Serbs from Lika began in 1946. In spring 1946, as part of the new collectivist state doctrine, the "Litschaners" were urged to unite in eight kollkhozy. Camp inmates experienced in agriculture had to familiarize the newcomers with the intensive form of pannonian agriculture. After this had been accomplished to some degree, the camp laborers were sent in groups to Gakowa and Krushivl, and the Filipowan labor camp was dissolved. Thus, the old Filipowa ceased to exist in late 1946.

In early June 1948 the priest Peter Müller, who corresponded actively with his former parishioners, was arrested and sentenced to several years' imprisonment. As part of the increasingly severe antireligious policies of the regime, the Nursing Sisters also had to vacate their cloister in August 1948. They left Yugoslavia by 1957, along with the approximately 25 German former townspeople who had still remained in Filipowa after serving their three years of forced labor.

Between April 2, 1945 and March 1, 1948, 833 persons from Filipowa starved to death or succumbed to diseases, primarily in the two death camps Gakowa/Gakovo and Krushivl/Kruševlje. Four townspeople died as a consequence of having gone begging: Theresia Hönich (born in 1921), Anna Welsch (b. 1922), Anna Schmidt (b. 1913) and Josef Leicht (b. 1893) were caught by guards as they tried to reenter the camp with food; they were thrown into the infamous Cellar and tortured so hombly that they died shortly after being released. Martin Rack was caught in the attempt to leave the camp in order to trade some clothing for food; he was taken to the camp headquarters. The father of five children tried to flee from the headquarters, and was shot down in the street. - On January 5, 1946 Elisabeth Wurtzky (b. 1885) attended mass in the Gakowa church, even though it was forbidden; partisans forced their way into the church during the service and arrested those present. The 61-year-old woman was led straight to one of the mass graves and shot.

Until 1948, aside from the 833 victims of the camps and the 53 casualties of abduction to Russia, another 57 persons died while fleeing from the advancing Red Army, while escaping from the camps to Hungary, Ausiria and Germany, and of other direct causes. 24 persons were shot or beaten to death in various places; two civilians are still considered missing. Together with the 212 victims of November 25, 1944 and the fallen or missing soldiers, the community lost a total of 1,413 persons, or almost 27% of its population.

Subtracting 900 soldiers, 510 emigrants, 240 abductees to Russia, and 220 murdered, then including the victims of March 31, 1945 some 3,400 to 3,500 inhabitants of Filipowa were probably interned in the camps. If one adds to the 833 victims of the camps a few more casualties of escape attempts and fatal beatings, the number of victims of the internment may well be set at 860. Thus, some 25% of the approximately 3,500 internees died in the camps. If one assumes about 3,000 Filipowan internees and about 840 victims for Gakowa and Krushivl, then the death rate for these two camps amounts to 28%. In autumn 1944 an estimated 3,800 Filipowans came under partisan rule. Of these 3,800, 1118 died in the camps or were murdered (including the victims of the deportation to Russia). The losses of those who had initially remained in their home town thus amounts to 31%.

Of the Filipowans who were expelled or had fled, at least 1,000 settled in Austria, at least 2,000 in Germany, and several hundred in the United States and Canada. Barely one hundred remained in Hungary. An organized hometown community as well as transnational cooperation between the major settlement centers at Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart and the Palatinate has existed since 1965.

Authors: Georg Wildmann and Josef Pertschi

Originally published in and translated from: Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung, ed., Leidensweg der Deutschen im kommunistischen Jugoslawien,. Ortsberichte 1944-1948, Munich/Sindelfingen 1991, 473-480 (or: Weißbuch der Deutschen aus Jugoslawien,  Universitas, Munich, 1992), 473-480.

Sources: Anton Zollitsch, Filipowa. Entstehen, Wachsen und Vergehen einer donauschwäbischen Gemeinde in der Batschka. Freilassing: Pannonia, 1957.

Paul Mesli, Franz Schreiber, Georg Wildmann, Filipowa - Bild einer donauschwäbischen^-Gemeinde. vol. 6, Kriegs- und Lageropfer, Vienna: self-pub., 1985. By the same authors: vol. 7, Filipowa weltweit, Vienna 1992, pp. 25-44;  vol. 8, Filipowa 1914-1944, Vienna 1999, pp. 265-296.

Eyewitness reports of several authors, published in the Filipowaer Heimat­briefe, appearing continuously since 1961. Ed.: Verein der Filipowaer Ortsgemeinschaft in Öster­reich, Steingasse 25, A-1030 Vienna. 

Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte (Hrsg.) Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, Bd. V: Das Schicksal der Deutschen in Jugoslawien (abbr. Doc. V), 261-273, 319-337, 414-441, 626-633.