Înrolarea forţată a şvabilor din Timiş-Torontal în WAFFEN-SS
The Forced Conscription of the Banat Swabians of Timiş-Torontal into the Waffen-SS

Summary/Abstract: During the Second World War, the Banat Swabians of Timiş-Torontal County in Romania were under the leadership of the German Ethnic Group of Romania, which was the main political organization of the German minority within the country after it had acquired juridical recognition on November 20, 1940. This organization acted as a deep state and as an intermediary between the Nazi Reich and the Romanian government. However, its main objective was the indoctrination of the Ethnic Germans of Romania into the ideology of national-socialism, which in turn would lead to loyalty and allegiance to the Third Reich. In May 12, 1943 a convention was reached between the governments of Germany and Romania on allowing able-bodied German men from Romania to be recruited for armed service in the Waffen-SS units. The recruitment campaign organized by the German Ethnic Group willfully omitted the voluntary nature of these recruitments and urged their people to join as a patriotic duty. Those that did not comply were subject to, at best, harassments and death threats, at worst, they were outright forced into conscription at gunpoint. The reports of the rural Gendarmerie of Timiş-Torontal County describe the violence whereby these recruitment were carried out and even more so, later reports that came in at the end of 1943 and the start of 1944, describe the distress and anguish that many of these recruits felt on the front. These descriptions would be given by the soldiers on leave to the people in their towns, from whom the gendarmes would later write their reports. This paper intends to shed some light on these two subjects: the forced nature of these recruitments and the trauma that these recruits came home with.

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