The Banat Swabians are an ethnic German population in Southeast Europe, part of the Danube Swabians. They emigrated in the 18th century to what was then the Austrian Banat province, which had been left sparsely populated by the wars with Turkey. This once strong and important ethnic Banat Swabian minority has now become quite small. Most of its members were expelled to the West by the Soviet Union and its subsidiaries after World War II. Others left for economic and emotional reasons after 1990. At the end of World War I in 1918, an attempt was made by the Swabian minority to establish an independent multi-ethnic Banat Republic; however, the province was divided according to the Wilsonian Principles of self-determination (the wish of the majority population), 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 former Yugoslavia, and a small region around Szeged remained part of Hungary.

The Banat colonists are often grouped with other German-speaking ethnic groups in the area under the name Danube Swabians. Besides the Banat, these groups lived in nearby western Bačka in Vojvodina, Serbia, in Swabian Turkey (present-day southern Hungary), in Slavonia, (present-day Croatia), and in Satu Mare, Romania. All of these areas were under Austrian rule, when immigrants were encouraged to settle among local populations into the lands newly recovered from Turkish rule.

The Danube Swabians ( Donauschwaben (help·info)) is a collective term for the German-speaking population who lived in the former Kingdom of Hungary, especially alongside the Danube River valley. Because of different developments within the territory settled, the Danube Swabians cannot be seen as a unified people. They include the Germans of Hungary, Satu Mare Swabians, the Banat Swabians, and the Vojvodina Germans in Serbia's Vojvodina who called themselves Schwowe, and Croatia's Slavonia (especially in Osijek region). The Carpathian Germans and Transylvanian Saxons are not included within the Danube Swabian group.

Beginning in the 12th century, German merchants and miners began to settle in the Kingdom of Hungary at the invitation of the Hungarian monarchy (see Ostsiedlung). Although there were significant colonies of Carpathian Germans in the Spiš mountains and Transylvanian Saxons in Transylvania, German settlement throughout the rest of the kingdom had not been extensive until this time.