The Germans of Serbia are an ethnic minority which numbers about 3,900 people, mostly in the autonomous Vojvodina region. The Germans of Vojvodina refer to themselves as Swabian. The Hungarian and Serbian populations also refer to them as Swabian as well. They are known as the Danube Swabians or Banat Swabians. In the interwar period, Germans were the largest national minority on the territory of what is today Serbia, second only to the Hungarians in Vojvodina. In 1943 Heinrich Himmler introduced compulsory military service for ethnic Germans in Serbia.[1] The German defeat in WWII resulted in expulsion of the almost entire German community, more than 350,000 strong, from Serbia's territory.
In 2007, the minority formed a national council for the first time since the Second World War.[2] In the 2000s several monuments to the pre-war German population have been erected.[3] In 2008 the Association of Danube Swabians requested that the government of the city of Sremska Mitrovica exhume the bodies of Germans who died in a post-war camp in the town.[4]
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