, Map of
Josephinian Land Survey (1769–1772),
city without still existing fortification In the late 19th and early 20th century many archaeological
artifacts of the
Stone Age period were found, remains of settlements and places of burial from the times of
Bronze Age (
Urnfield culture) and
Ancient Rome on the urban area. Most of the objects are exhibited at the National Museum of the town. In 1154,
Arabic Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi described region in his
Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands as an important mercantile place. The regional area was administered by the
Bulgarian Empire until early 11th century, then by the
Kingdom of Hungary until it became part of the
Ottoman Empire in
1521. During Turkish rule, the region was part of the
Temeşvar Eyalet and mostly populated by
Serbs. In 1660,
Evliya Çelebi described the town as a quadrangular
fortification being diameter of one hundred
Turkish feet. During the
Austro-Turkish War, the fortification was conquered by Imperial troops under supreme command of
Claude Florimond de Mercy in 1716. There is an impression of the old city and its fortification recorded on maps from 1717 and 1720 which are located at
National Széchényi Library and Institute of Military History in
Budapest. After the
Treaty of Požarevac, the urban area belonged to the
Habsburg Banat, and temporarily served as
garrison of the
Habsburg Imperial Army. In December 1764, a military commission of Viennese
Hofkriegsrat registered all people and number of more or less habitable houses, and the Habsburg government encouraged massive immigration of German settlers for administrative furnishing and developing new district of
Military Frontier. In January 1794,
Francis II signed the
charter of
borough rights of Pančevo, there is no other real evidence like a
deed of city founding. In 1852, the fortification was
slighted for urban expanding. In 1873, the military frontier was abolished and Pančevo included into the
Torontál county of
Austria-Hungary. In 1902,
cadastral maps of the town were recorded which are located at the
National Archives of Hungary. was confiscated by
Danube Swabians of Autonomous Banat After the
Austrian-Hungarian Armistice of Villa Giusti, the region became part of the provisional
Torontalsko-tamiške županja and due to the
Treaty of Trianon finally belonged to the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1922, the region was structured into the
Belgrade oblast and since 1929 into the
Dunavska banovina.
Effects of World War II on City life In April 1941, Pančevo was occupied during the invasion of Yugoslavia by
Germany. On 21-22 April, 1941,
Wehrmacht soldiers, led by Johann Hubert Steinmair, committed a
war crime massacre in the city when 36 Serbian people
were murdered by hanging and shooting as a reprisal for the deaths of 9
Volksdeutsche members of the paramilitary formation
Mannschaft, a part of the
SS Division Das Reich, and a wounded comrade of that division, attacked by three men of the
Royal Yugoslavian Army before the state
surrender. On April 11, 1941, Royal Cavalry officers Stevan Rikanović, Saša Rakezić and Milan Orlić gave a signal during the German parade that they did not accept the looming Yugoslavian defeat. They erected temporary scaffolding behind a wall of a Catholic cemetery and fired at the Nazi Mannschaft, who, after overcoming that surprise, returned fire immediately, assisted by two SS men who had been seated in a nearby German café. On
April 6, 1941, members of the Mannschaft had already daubed
anti-semitic slogans on some graves in this cemetery; some gravestones were badly damaged, too, but they put on the grave of
Georg Weifert a wreath with a decorated
swastika ribbon. The following day, pro-German groups marched through all the streets, smashed windows of Serbian shops and taunted, spat and beat Serbian civilians because "they had to stay in their homes and were not allowed to go out." On
April 17, 1941, there was a power demonstration with a deployment of Mannschaft units in front of City Hall Square, and an incendiary speech by Kreisführer Otto Vogenberger from the balcony of the building, in which he spoke about the "liberation of regional Germans from Yugoslav slavery" and announced "three days of celebrations until the birthday of our Führer." On April 20, 1941, the Kreisführer was personally gifted with a portrait of Hitler by
Heinrich Knirr, who was "visiting his beloved homeland". On May 1, 1941, selected policemen from the Banatian State Guard were publicly sworn in at the same place with black uniforms and a
Totenkopf on their collar, speaking words such as "protecting the rights and lives of German people," although they had already been recruited in April. Propaganda photos and film of the reprisal massacre were used decades after the event to help chronicle the Wehrmacht's complicity in the atrocities during the war, often manipulated in German-language TV documentaries. since April 1941 and
OZNA since October 1944. During
World War II in Yugoslavia, Pančevo was part of Autonomous
Banat within German-occupied Serbia. Selected Danube Swabian men were recruited and conscripted in Mannschaft, in
Waffen-SS, the majority of them either in
SS-Division Das Reich, in
German Police or
SS Freiwilligen Gebirgsjäger Division Prinz Eugen. More than 99.99 percent of local German women and youth were organized in formations such as the Deutsche Frauenschaft and the
Deutsche Jugend (including the
DMB) and dedicated to Nazism. In 1943, the Südostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft issued a very treacherously worded census with the note "for official use only," stating that "there are amazingly fifty eight 'orthodox Germans' in it," which is a phrase used to describe collaborators of Romanian origin. In 1944, after the defeat of the German Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS during the
Belgrade Offensive by the
Allied Armies, a part of the German population left the city, together with the defeated German army. In November 1944, in cooperation with the
OZNA, a
KNOJ brigade was set up to denazify the region, consisting of 20 elite partisans who volunteered to execute symbolic deterrent measures under the supreme command of Brigade Commander
Svetozar Rupić. All measures began for the first time in January 1945 after intensive research and determination of the execution sites. The rest of the ethnic German population remained in the country. These people were sent to local
internment camps which existed until 1948. After their dissolution, much of the ethnic German population left Yugoslavia for economic reasons. From 1945, the city belonged to the
Srez Pančevo of the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The city was the administrative center of the region from all these centuries to the present. ==Administration==