Mennonite Rebel Leader Executed: Katharina Siemens, July 1930

In news (2022) from Ukraine we see some women active in the resistance against Russia.Is there any record of Mennonite women “rebels” against Moscow-based repression?

In 1930 there were more than 3,700 recorded anti-Soviet, anti-collective farm, anti-kulakization “mass disturbances” in the USSR undertaken almost exclusively by women. “Vigrous action” … “some armed with pitchforks, sticks, stakes, and knives” with disturbances that would last several days (note 1).

Did Mennonites participate or lead in any such “rebellions”? Thousands had been turned back home after hoping to flee via Moscow in Fall 1929 and immigrate to Canada. Many of these refused to plant crops in 1930 and were intent on trying again to leave.

There is a record of one Mennonite rebellion in 1930—and with a woman leader (note 2). There may have been others. The following fascinating account is based on the work of Abram A. Fast, written in Russian (note 3).

Johann Martin Winter, a “kulak” emigration leader from the village of Alexandrovsk, Barnaul, who had been sent back from Moscow in December with hundreds of others unable to emigrate, was arrested locally on July 2, 1930.

That night, David Giesbrecht notified all the other villages in the German District to come to the district centre in Halbstadt (Barnaul) to help secure Winter’s release. Some villages in the Slavgorod and Khabarsky Districts were also informed.

A large and “excited” crowd gathered at the building of the District Executive Committee, demanding the release of Winter. They were addressed by the secretary and chairman, as well as by the representative of the OGPU (secret police). The speech by the secretary was interrupted by shouts from the crowd, and the secretary himself was “insulted, threatened and, in the end, dragged from the porch from where he was speaking.”

The OGPU representative who arrested Winter gave reasons for the arrest, which the crowd refused to accept. Some from the crowd entered from the rear of the district building seized the weapons and forced the OGPU commissioner and his assistant onto the street.

The commissioner said that Winter was now in Slavgorod, and so he could not possibly release him. The loud crowd demanded that the commissioner go directly to the post office and talk [telegraph?] with OGPU police in Slavgorod and secure the immediately release Winter.

The leaders of the uprising gave the police commissioner three hours, or they would arrest him and lock him up in their local prison. The post-master however refused the open the door to the crowd.

One of the rebel leaders was a woman, Katharina Jakovlevna Siemens, and she called for the door to the post office to be broken down. Then the local police commissioner was forced to negotiate with the Slavgorod OGPU and communicate the demands of the rebels. The commissioner and his assistant were then detained as hostages. With control over the post office and the district offices, the rebels controlled all means of communication with the outside world.

After two to three hours had passed and the rebels had received no response regarding the release of Winter, their anger began to grow.

Threats and insults were directed at the commissioner. “Why are you arresting our people at night?” “We demand that Winter be released immediately, or we will show you a thing or two.” “You want to destroy religion, but not knowing how you gather false information and judge people on that basis. Well, how do you feel now, when you are the one arrested?” “The time for the release of Winter has now expired (3 hours), which means that we will take you away and put you in a cell as you do to our brothers, and we will keep and feed you in the same manner that you keep and feed our arrested people.”

After 3 or 3.5 hours, after the two officers of the OGPU had been “arrested” by the rebels, new demands were made of them: they were told to call the OGPU District Department and demand the release of others arrested. The commissioner categorically refused.

Then Katharina J. Siemens addressed the crowd: “Well, then we are forced to arrest the secretary and chair of the district committee executive, and the chair of the district farm union as well," and all of those present voted unanimously in support.” Forty to fifty people separated themselves from the crowd and headed to the district building to carry out the decision.

Then four armed local communist party members got on a truck to intersect this group, and two shots were fired in the air. Soon a car with an armed detachment of Chekists from Slavgorod arrived which changed the mood immediately. The Chekists surrounded the post office which had been in the hands of rebels for 6 hours. They demanded that the rebels immediately release the two OGPU officers, return the officers's weapons, and surrender the mail and telegraph office.

The OGPU then arrested nine of the most active rebel leaders: Katharina Jak. Siemens, I. P. Penner, K. Jak. Krahn, P. G. Koop, J. J. Driedger, Jak. Jak. Derksen, P. G. Enns, and G. K. Reimer. There was no resistance. The crowd had no choice but to disperse and go home.

David Isaakovich Giesbrecht, Aron Aronovich Peters, Johann Martinovich Winter, Ivan Alex. Plohotnikov, Jacob Petrovich Peters, David Franzovich Neufeldt, and Mikhail Sergeyevich Kirichenko were sentenced to death (J. M. Winter: August 31, 1930) and executed by shooting (J. M. Winter: October 22, 1930). The others were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. "That was the end of the emigration movement of the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s."

Katharina Jak. Siemens was sentenced on July 30 to be executed.

… the participants in the uprising in Halbstadt/Barnaul suffered a terrible fate. Of the 500 active participants, only 20 remained alive [by 1938?? Unclear]

–Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: “Document 78, Report from the OGPU Secret Political Department on the forms and dynamics of the class struggle in the countryside in 1930, 15 March 1931,” in Steven Shabad, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, Volume One (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 350.

Note 2: I am aware of only one brief English reference to this rebellion, by Russian scholar P. P. Wiebe, “The Mennonite Colonies of Siberia: From the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 30 (2012), 23-35; 33. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/144.

Note 3: The above is pieced together from Abram A. Fast's research supported by archival materials from the Centre for Preservation of Archival collections of Altai kra. His book's title: V setyakh OGPU-NKVD: Nemetskiy rayon Altyskogo kraya v 1927-1938 (Slavgorod: Slavgorod Publishing, 2002). https://chortitza.org/Dok/FastR.pdf. The section on the "Halbstadt (Barnaul) Rebellion" begins on p. 57, and is very well documented by A. A. Fast.

Comments

Turning Weapons into Waffle Irons!

Turning Weapons into Waffle Irons: Heart-Shaped Waffles and a smooth talking General In 1874 with Mennonite immigration to North America in full swing, the Tsar sent General Eduard von Totleben to the colonies to talk the remaining Mennonites out of leaving ( note 1 ). He came with the now legendary offer of alternative service. Totleben made presentations in Mennonite churches and had many conversations in Mennonite homes. Decades later the women still recalled how fond Totleben was of Mennonite heart-shaped waffles. He complemented the women saying, “How beautiful are the hearts of Mennonites!,” and he joked about how “much Mennonites love waffles ( Waffeln ), but not weapons ( Waffen )” ( note 2 )! His visit resulted in an extensive reversal of opinion and the offer was welcomed officially by the Molotschna and Chortitza Colony ministerials. And upon leaving, the general was gifted with a poem by Bernhard Harder ( note 3 ) and a waffle iron ( note 4 ). Harder was an inf...

Soviet “Farmer Giesbrecht” and the German Communist Press, 1930

The 1930 booklet Bauer Giesbrecht was published by the Communist Party press in Germany —some months after most of the 3,885 Mennonite refugees at Moscow had been transported from Germany to Canada, Paraguay and Brazil ( note 1 ). In Fall 1929 Germany set aside an astonishingly large sum of money and flexed its full diplomatic muscle to extract these “German Farmers” (mostly Mennonites) who had fled the Soviet countryside for Moscow in a last ditch attempt to flee the "Soviet Paradise". About 9,000 however were forcibly turned back. Communists in Germany saw their country’s aid operation—which their crushed economy could ill afford—as a blatant propaganda attempt to embarrass Stalin with formerly wealthy ethnic German farmers and preachers willing to tell the world’s press the worst "lies." With Heinrich Kornelius Giesbrecht from the former Mennonite Barnaul Colony in Western Siberia they finally had a poster-boy to make their point: in Germany he had seen an...

Swiss and Palatinate Connections

Sometime after 1850 Andreas Plennert and his family immigrated to South Russia from the Culm Region of West Prussia. Though there was at least one Mennonite “Plehnert” who had already immigrated to Russia in 1793, it is not a very common Prussian-Russian Mennonite name. As such, however, it is easier to trace than many and offers a minority narrative and identity within the longer and broader Russian Mennonite story. The account below is adapted largely from information in Horst Penner, Die ost- und westpreußischen Mennoniten , vol. 1, though I have expanded upon his work to offer a slightly different narrative. In 1724 there was a group of Mennonites forced out of the Memel region in East Prussia for political and religious reasons and were given assistance to resettle back to West Prussia in areas populated by Mennonites. Among the 23 households that went to the Stuhm region there is one Plenert listed, namely Christian Plenert. We know that Mennonites entered the Memel region ...

Snapshots of Danzig Mennonites, late 1600s & early 1700s

A picture can be worth a thousand words. We do not have photographs, but we have a few colour paintings of life in and around Danzig in the late 1600s and early 1700s, as well as maps. We also have a limited number of "textual snapshots" of Mennonites at this time and place, which offer an instructive window into that foreign world. These snapshots of work, worship, health, education, community relationships, smaller repressions, and security can contribute to the creation of a larger collage of Mennonite life in Danzig and Polish Prussia. Snapshot 1 : In 1681 there were approximately 180 Mennonite families who lived in the “gardens” or villages outside Danzig, with 113 of those families within the jurisdiction of the city. At this time Mennonites were barred from owning houses within the walls of the city. Of these 113 family heads, we know: 43 were retailers of spirits, 24 merchants, 9 lacemakers, 7 dyers, 3 silk dyers, 3 pressers, 2 brokers, 2 treasurers, 2 waitresses, et...

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...

Catherine the Great’s 1763 Manifesto

“We must swarm our vast wastelands with people. I do not think that in order to achieve this it would be useful to compel our non-Christians to accept our faith--polygamy for example, is even more useful for the multiplication of the population. … "Russia does not have enough inhabitants, …but still possesses a large expanse of land, which is neither inhabited nor cultivated. … The fields that could nourish the whole nation, barely feeds one family..." – Catherine II (Note 1 ) “We perceive, among other things, that a considerable number of regions are still uncultivated which could easily and advantageously be made available for productive use of population and settlement. Most of the lands hold hidden in their depth an inexhaustible wealth of all kinds of precious ores and metals, and because they are well provided with forests, rivers and lakes, and located close to the sea for purpose of trade, they are also most convenient for the development and growth of many kinds ...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 1 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accuarte and carefully considered. ~ANF American Mennonite leaders who supported Trump will be responding to the election results in the near future. Sometimes a template or sample conference address helps to formulate one’s own text. To that end I offer the following. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mennonites in Germany sent official greetings by telegram: “The Conference of the East and West Prussian Mennonites meeting today at Tiegenhagen in the Free City of Danzig are deeply grateful for the tremendous uprising ( Erhebung ) that God has given our people ( Volk ) through the vigor and action of [unclear], and promise our cooperation in the construction of our Fatherland, true to the Gospel motto of [our founder Menno Simons], ‘For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.’” ( Note 1 ) Hitler responded in a letter...

Easter and Molotschna's First Ethnic German Cavalry Regiment of the Waffen-SS, 1942

For the two years of German occupation, 1941-43, the Molotschna Settlement area—renamed “Halbstadt” after its largest village—was under S.S. ( Schutzstaffel ) control. During this time, new National Socialist ceremonies and liturgies were introduced to the Mennonites in Ukraine, including Easter. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler named Halbstadt with its surrounding 144 villages a district commando. SS-Storm Unit Leader ( Sturmbannführer ) Hermann Roßner was appointed the Special Command R[ussia] leader for Halbstadt. Halbstadt had Waffen-SS doctors, a Waffen-SS pharmacist team and pharmacy, hospital equipment from the medical offices of the Waffen-SS and soon a Waffen-SS cavalry self-defense regiment of some 500-plus Mennonite young men ( note 1 ). Two of my uncles became members of the cavalry unit; a later, long-time lay minister in my home congregation was in the regiment as well. SS-celebrations for “Easter” were deliberately non-religious and anti-Christian, though careful ...

Molotschna's 50th Anniversary Celebration Plans, 1854

There is no mention of this celebrative event in Hildebrand’s Chronologischer Zeittafel, no report in the newly launched Prussian church paper Mennonitische Blätter , or in the Unterhaltungsblatt for German colonists in South Russia. But plans to celebrate five decades of Mennonite settlement on the Molotschna River were well underway in 1853; detailed draft notes for the event are found in the Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive ( note 1 ). Perhaps most importantly the file includes the list of names of the first settlers in each of the first nine Molotschna villages (est. 1804). While each village had been mandated a few years earlier to write its own village history ( note 2; pics ), eight of these nine did not list their first settler families by name. The lists with the male family heads are attached below. By 1854 Molotoschna’s population had increased to about 17,000; more than half of those living in the original nine villages were landless Anwohner ( note 3 ). Celeb...

Landless Crisis: Molotschna, 1840s to 1860s

The landless crisis in the mid-1800s in the Molotschna Colony is the context for most other matters of importance to its Mennonites, 1840s to 1860s. When discussing landlessness, historian David G. Rempel has claimed that the “seemingly endemic wranglings and splits” of the Mennonite church in South Russia were only seldom or superficially related to doctrine, and “almost invariably and intimately bound up with some of the most serious social and economic issues” that afflicted one or more of the congregations in the settlement ( note 1 ). It is important from the start to recognize that these Mennonites were not citizens, but foreign colonists with obligations and privileges that governed their sojourn in New Russia. For Mennonites the privileges, e.g. of land and freedom from military conscription, were connected to the obligation of model farming. Mennonites were given one, and then later two districts of land for this purpose. Within their districts or colonies , villages w...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog