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  • Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II by Mirna Zakic
  • Mirna Zakic
Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II. By Mirna Zakić. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xii + 298. Cloth $99.99. ISBN 978-1107171848.

In this new microhistory of the German community of the Banat, a region located in present-day Serbia, Mirna Zakić shows that Banat's German minority managed [End Page 422] to exercise a considerable degree of agency within the constraints imposed upon them by the Nazi destruction of Yugoslavia in World War II. The volume's thorough examination of the ambivalent position that Banat's Germans occupied in the Third Reich's plans and policies for southeastern Europe provides a new framework for thinking about Nazi rule, collaboration, and resistance in Yugoslavia and beyond. Zakić shows that studying small and seemingly insignificant places—the Banat's Germans were relatively peripheral in Nazi plans for the East—remains a worthwhile endeavor that can meaningfully enhance our overall understanding of World War II and the Holocaust.

The Banat Germans begin displaying their agency in the volume's first chapter, which chronicles German experiences in the Serb-dominated interwar Yugoslav state. Zakić shows that Yugoslav Germans attempted to bargain with the government for concessions in a way that, they hoped, would grant them preferential treatment visà-vis the country's other ethnic groups. German leaders in Yugoslavia thus came into conflict with the state less frequently than the figureheads of the some of the country's other Slavic groups, namely the Croats and Macedonians. Zakić also emphasizes that Banat Germans (and Yugoslav Germans more broadly) did not constitute a monolithic mass. Recognizing that nationalization remained incomplete among Banat Germans who sometimes displayed indifferent and polynational behaviors, she nevertheless maintains that most Yugoslav Germans were not nationally indifferent; instead, she shows that the majority had grappled with competing understandings of what it meant to be German. Zakić's description of the chasm that emerged between older conservative, religious Germans and a younger generation of Nazified leaders like Sepp Janko nicely foregrounds her subsequent discussion of the ways that Banat Germans negotiated their self-understandings once the Nazis dismantled the Yugoslav state and empowered the local German community to administer the Banat.

The sections pertaining to World War II show that the Nazi leadership established hierarchies not only for Jews, Slavs, and other non-Germans. While Nazi ideology considered Germans from Eastern Europe superior to their non-German neighbors, the Nazi leadership treated Germans who lived beyond the confines of Germany as less trustworthy than those living in the Third Reich. In spite of such apprehensions, the Nazis did not clarify which Germans from outside the Third Reich would be eligible for full membership of the Volksgemeinschaft. Zakić suggests that the Nazis' decision to postpone defining their position on such matters until they won the war may have been intentional, as it provided the Nazi authorities with an effective mechanism for securing compliance from German populations in the Slavic lands they occupied. The volume shows that the Third Reich effectively used the prospect of future racial-national belonging to incentivize collaboration from the Banat Germans, most of whom remained uncertain about their position in the Reich's plans. Such a focus on the flexibility of Nazi racial categories for Germans allows Zakić to [End Page 423] provide important insights about the ways Nazis sometimes privileged persuasion and cajoling over coercion and terror as they solicited cooperation in Eastern Europe. By providing economic, ideological, and educational perks to Banat's Germans, the Nazis drew them deeper into complicity. As a result, very few Banat Germans objected to the Nazi-led destruction of the region's small Jewish community or to the recruitment of local men into Waffen-SS detachments that went on perpetrate atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia. Excessive violence against Banat Germans was unnecessary to secure their cooperation, Zakić argues, and leaders like Janko knew that the efficacy of local rumors, social pressures, and other informal ways of exercising power made violence a last resort. Most importantly, however, the Banat Germans' hope that the Reich would one day...

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