Bărăgan deportations

Their aim was to forcibly relocate individuals who lived within approximately 25 km (15 miles) of the Yugoslav border (in present-day Timiș, Caraș-Severin, and Mehedinți counties) to the Bărăgan Plain.

After relations deteriorated between Romania and Yugoslavia, which was excluded from the Cominform in 1948, the border between the two states became a sensitive area for Bucharest (see Informbiro period).

[citation needed] Additionally, the plans involved the expulsion of members of several social categories considered dangerous by the Romanian Communist Party.

Among the targets were farmers with large holdings (known as chiaburi, and roughly equivalent to the Soviet kulaks), wealthy landowners, industrialists, innkeepers and restaurant owners, Bessarabian and Macedonian refugees, former members of the Wehrmacht, foreign citizens, relatives of the refugees, Titoist sympathizers, wartime collaborators of Nazi Germany (see Romania during World War II), Romanian Army employees, fired civil servants, relatives of counter-revolutionaries and all who had supported them, political and civic rights activists, former businessmen with Western ties, and leaders of the ethnic German community.

In 1956, a change in government policy meant that the majority of deportees returned home, but some chose to stay permanently in the Bărăgan Plain.