Mirna Zakić's Ethnic Germans and National Socialism in Yugoslavia in World War II is an enthralling study of the ethnic-German community in the Yugoslavian Banat region during the war. After the German dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis granted the Banat ethnic-German minority administrative control over this multiethnic region, allowing them a degree of power over their Serb, Hungarian, Romanian, and Jewish neighbors. Although this access to power was unique in Hitler's Europe, Banat ethnic Germans still depended, like other ethnic-German communities in the occupied territories outside the Reich, on the overall Nazi project—from the basic issue of security to questions of ideological legitimation, actions they were permitted to take, and so on (3). This ambiguity in which Banat ethnic Germans found themselves—nominal rulers, yet ultimately dependent on Berlin, which had neither their local interests in mind nor offered them a consistent policy—allows the author to approach the subject at hand both as a microhistory and as a transnational study. Zakić thus engages with broader patterns of nationalism, collaboration, and ideology in Nazi Europe, in addition to questions of local dynamics and individual actions.

The book is organized into eight chapters, in addition to the introduction and conclusion. The first two chapters focus on the history of the German ethnic minority in Yugoslavia and the invasion and occupation of the Yugoslav Banat by the German army in the spring of 1941. Crucial in the interwar period was the generational shift in the leadership of the Kulturbund, an ostensibly educational and cultural organization of Yugoslav ethnic Germans. By the outbreak of World War II, the new leaders pushed for the politicization of the organization and a transition, as Zakić puts it, “from state loyalty to Volk loyalty” (41), and ultimately, nazification. Still, in the chaos of war in spring 1941, ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia were left to their own devices: unimportant to the Reich's grand plans, their leadership was kept in the dark about what position ethnic Germans might occupy once the country was defeated. Here, Zakić documents a range of individual behaviors that complicate the image of well-oiled “fifth column,” painted by Yugoslav and Serbian historiography.

The following two chapters describe the establishment of the ethnic-German administration in Banat—an ad hoc development driven by fears of Hungarian territorial aspirations and the nature and complexities of the system of German occupation in Serbia proper as well as by the dynamic between ethnic Germans and other ethnic groups in Banat. In the summer and fall of 1941, the Nazi racial hierarchy was institutionalized in Banat through a number of legal measures that established an ethnic German administration of the region; within this space, its local leaders, uniquely in occupied Europe, defined a nazified Volk community and sought to forge it through persuasion and occasional punishment. At the same time, ethnic Germans took advantage of economic privileges available to them by dint of their participation in the larger Nazi project. In this part of the book, the author also shows how the relative absence of organized resistance in Banat (compared to elsewhere in occupied Serbia, and the neighboring Independent State of Croatia) allowed for a modicum of coexistence between ethnic Germans and other ethnic groups—Hungarians and Romanians in the first instance, but even Serbs to some extent, despite the latter's inferior position in the Nazi racial hierarchy. This, of course, did not apply to the Banat Jews.

The remaining four chapters of the book engage the more prominently ideological aspects of Banat life from 1941 to 1944, including the Holocaust, policing and antipartisan activity, and propaganda. Zakić describes the violent persecution of the Jews and their swift deportation to Belgrade in August 1941, where they were all murdered by the end of the spring of 1942. Participating in the persecution of the Jews was one way of legitimizing one's “Germanness” and provided opportunities to partake of the spoils of genocide through the “aryanization” that followed. Ethnic Germans in Banat were also organized into several paramilitary and military units, including the infamous Waffen-SS Division “Prinz Eugen,” which took part in German military operations in Serbia proper, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and which committed mass crimes against civilians in all those areas.

It is in the second half of the book that the author develops the argument most clearly. Banat Germans never had access to, or influence on, Nazi policies nor on their outcomes in the region, yet they could leverage their “Germanness” to achieve material and personal benefits unavailable to their “non-German” neighbors. These privileges, however, came at a significant material and political cost, from having to supply the German troops with food and being drafted into military units away from home to participating in the Holocaust and tying their fate irrevocably to that of the Nazi Reich. Ultimately, even though Zakić wants to maintain the space for individual local “agency,” the reader gets a sense that this area in which ethnic German life trajectories in Banat unfolded was far too narrow. Perhaps a “thicker description” of the persecution of the Jews or of possible reception(s) of Nazi ideology—something that the richness of the sources cited might have allowed the author to do—could have painted a picture of a more complex moral economy in which individual action was embedded. Even so, Zakić's book is a fascinating read and a valuable contribution to the history of Nazi occupation policy in southeastern Europe, as well as a welcome addition to the body of literature on occupation and collaboration more generally.