Banat Swabians

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 Austro-Hungarian Banat province, within the Kingdom of Hungary, 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.