Conclusion

The conclusion reflects on the key transformations that ethnic German childhood and youth education and mobilization underwent between interwar Yugoslavia and the wartime Western Banat and Batschka/Bácska/Bačka. Engaging in a comparative analysis, it highlights how children’s and young people’s agency and definitions of “Germanness” were shaped by diverse wartime contexts, occupational regimes, and social circumstances. Retracing ethnic German interviewees’ postwar lives, it contemplates the continued importance of categories like “Germanness” to individuals formerly engaged in the interwar and wartime periods’ contested nation-building projects. Finally, it advocates not only for the continued implementation of transnational and comparative approaches in studies of National Socialism, occupation, and war, but for the inclusion of “the little” in critical historical analysis.