Bosnia was freed from the Turk's occupation only in 1878 and was administered directly by the Habsburg's Crown (The Emperor of Austro-Hungary). Some of Hrastovac families resettled to Bosnia after it was opened for settlements.

Research in the Bundes Arhiv of Berlin for Bosnia's ethnic Germans

By Herbert Hoffmann

In the year 1942 17,000 Danube Swabians, who lived in Bosnia, were deported to German occupied Poland by the Nazi administration. They collected the etnic Germans, who lived in splintered communities, to bring them ‚home into Reich’, and intended to repopulate the occupied areas of Poland with those settlers. Besides Bosnia-Germans there were also ethnic German families from Croatia, Serbia, Bukowina, Bessarabien as well as other southern settlement areas. The number of those settlers was arround 800,000 people.

The ‚Einwanderungs Zentrale’ EWZ in Litzmansatadt (Lodz) was in charge of that resettlement, as well as the ‚Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhand’ DUT. All the settlers were registered as per their etnicity and checked about their Nazi ideology. Those registration books ended after the war in the Bundesarhiv in Berlin.

For more on Bundes Archiv please see: http://www.bundesarchiv.de/benutzung/sachbezug/personenbezogen_genealogie/00248/index.html.de. Under ‚Suchbegriff’ enter EWZ.

Bosnia's_Danube_Swabians