Some colonists were from the upper Danube region, Baden-Württemberg (Swabian), and Alsace-Lorraine (Alsatian), but some were from other areas of the Habsburg monarchy such as Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary, etc.

[2] Some village residents emigrated to the United States, Canada and Argentina beginning in the early 1900s, before the World War I.

[citation needed] In 1944, Soviet Red Army and Yugoslav partisans expelled Axis forces from the region and village was included into new socialist Yugoslavia.

)[citation needed] Gakovo was one of the sites of these post-World War II internment camps for the ethnic Germans (Danube Swabians).

Gakovo and the nearby village of Kruševlje had at its maximum about 30,000 detainees, of whom between 11,000 and 12,000 died as the Yugoslav authorities deliberately created starvation conditions and extreme crowding, withheld water, and beat and shot the ethnic German civilians.

Internment camps were abolished in 1948[4] and remaining Gakovans were forced to work for two years as indentured slaves throughout Yugoslavia.

Since 1944, the village is part of autonomous province Vojvodina, which in 1945 was included into newly formed Socialist Republic of Serbia within new Yugoslavia.