Danube Swabians in the context of "Principality of Fürstenberg"

The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in the former Kingdom of Hungary in Central-Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians and Germans of Romania. They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Empire's Banat of Temeswar province, a province which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with the Ottoman Empire. At the end of World War I in 1918, the Swabian minority worked together with the Hungarians and Jews to establish an independent multi-ethnic Banat Republic; however, the province was divided by the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. The greater part was annexed by Romania, a smaller part by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (since 1929 Yugoslavia) and a small region around Szeged remained part of Hungary.

Following World War II most Banat Swabians were expelled to the West by the Soviet Union and its subsidiaries, and after 1990 and the fall of the Soviet Union and its republics many of those remaining left for economic and emotional reasons.

Tracht (German pronunciation: [ˈtʁaxt] ) refers to traditional garments in German-speaking countries and regions. Although the word is most often associated with Bavarian, Austrian, South Tyrolean and Trentino garments, including lederhosen and dirndls, many other German-speaking peoples have them, as did the former Danube Swabian populations of Central Europe.

Elek (German: Renndorf, Romanian: Aletea) is a town in Békés County, in the Southern Great Plain region of south-east Hungary. Until the Second World War, the town was home to the largest concentration of Germans in the county, with its population consisting almost entirely of Swabians. Jews lived in the city as early as the 19th century and in 1944 many of them were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust.