| Abstract | This article examines stories told after 1945 by ethnic German refugees from the Banat region of Yugoslavia about encounters they had with Partisans -- fighters in Josip Broz Tito's army -- who had become vampires. The essay situates these tales firmly within their place of origin and views them as an idiom through which Yugoslavian Germans described wartime acts of, encounters with, and anxieties about violence. After World War II, ethnic-German former inhabitants of the Yugoslavian Banat region -- often referred to as Danube Swabians, or Donauschwaben -- recalled chilling encounters they had with "Tito Partisans" who had become vampires. Tales of vampire Partisans were recorded in the late 1940s and early 1950s by a folklorist and former National Socialist and SS man named Alfred Karasek. Today, they belong to one of the largest legend archives in Germany. In Yugoslavia as in many parts of Europe, the months following the war saw not a cessation but a continuation of violence.
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