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

Fraktur (or Gothic) font and Kurrent- (or Sütterlin) handwriting: Nazi ban, 1941

In the middle of the war on January 1, 1942, the Winnipeg-based Mennonitische Rundschau published a new issue without the familiar Fraktur script masthead ( note 1 ). One might speculate on the reasons, but a year earlier Hitler banned the use of the font in the Reich . The Rundschau did not exactly follow all orders from Berlin—the rest of the paper was in Fraktur (sometimes referred to as "Gothic"); when the war ended in 1945, the Rundschau reintroduced the Fraktur font for its masthead. It wasn’t until the 1960s that an issue might have a page or title here or there with the “normal” or Latin font, even though post-war Germany was no longer using Fraktur . By 1973 only the Rundschau masthead is left in Fraktur , and that is only removed in December 1992. Attached is a copy of Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann's official letter dated January 3, 1941, which prohibited the use of Fraktur fonts "by order of the Führer. " Why? It was a Jewish invention, apparent...

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

A Mennonite Pandemic Spirituality, 1830-1831

Asiatic Cholera broke out across Russia in 1829 and ‘30, and further into Europe in 1831. It began with an infected battalion in Orenburg ( note 1 ), and by early Fall 1830 the disease had reached Moscow and the capital. Russia imposed drastic quarantine measures. Much like today, infected regions were cut off and domestic trade was restricted. The disease reached the Molotschna River district in Fall 1830, and by mid-December hundreds of Nogai deaths were recorded in the villages adjacent to the Mennonite colony, leading state authorities to impose a strict quarantine. When the Mennonite Johann Cornies—a state-appointed agricultural supervisor and civic leader—first became aware of the nearby cholera-related deaths, he recommended to the Mennonite District Office on December 6, 1830 to stop traffic and prevent random contacts with Nogai. For Cornies it was important that the Mennonite community do all it can keep from carrying the disease into the community, though “only God knows...

The Beginnings: Some Basics

The sixteenth-century ancestors of Russian Mennonites were largely Anabaptists from the Low Countries. Because their new vision of church called for voluntary membership marked by adult baptism upon confession of faith, they became one of the most persecuted groups of the Protestant Reformation ( note 1 ). For a millennium re-baptism ( a na -baptism) had been considered a heresy punishable by death ( note 2 ), and again in 1529 the Imperial Diet of Speyer called for the “brutal” punishment for those who did not recognize infant baptism. Many of the earliest Anabaptist cells were found in Belgium and The Netherlands--part of the larger Habsburg Empire ruled after 1555 by “the Most Catholic of Kings,” Philip II of Spain. The North Sea port cities of the Low Countries had some limited freedoms and were places for both commercial and cultural exchange; ships arrived daily not only from other Hanseatic League like Danzig, but also from Florence, Venice and Genoa, the Americas and the Far Ea...

“We have no poor among us”: From "Blue Bag" to e-Transfer

Through not unique or original to Menno Simons, the idea of watching and caring for fellow travellers on the journey of faith “where no one is allowed to beg” ( note 1 ) was a pillar of his teaching, and forms one of the most consistent threads in the Anabaptist–Mennonite story. In the decades before Mennonites settled in Russia they used the “Blue-Bag” to collect for the poor in Prussia. In 1723 Abraham Hartwich—an otherwise unsympathetic observer of Mennonites—noted that Mennonites in Prussia “do not allow their co-religionists to suffer want, but rather help them in their poverty from the so-called blue-bag, their fund for the poor” ( note 2 ). It is unclear when the “blue-bag tradition” changed? Similarly, in the early 1800s, two Lutheran observers—Georg Reiswitz and Friedrich Wadzeck—noted that the Mennonite care for their poor through annual free-will contributions was “exemplary” ( note 3 ). Moreover Reiswitz and Wadzeck describe a community stubbornly committed to each ot...

Formidable Fräulein Marga Bräul (1919–2011)

Fräulein Bräul left an indelible mark on two generations of high school students in the Mennonite Colony of Fernheim, Paraguay. Former students and acquaintances recall that Marga Bräul demanded the highest effort and achievements of her students, colleagues and of herself—the kind of teacher you either love or hate but will never forget! In March 1947, Marga was offered a position at the Fernheim Secondary School ( Zentralschule ). A recent refugee to Paraguay from war-torn Europe, she taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1952, she was the only female faculty member ( note 1 ). Marga wedded a strong commitment to academics with a passion for quality arts and crafts. She provided extensive extra-curricular instruction to students in handiwork and was especially renowned for her artwork—which included painting and woodworking— end of year art exhibits with students, theatre sets, and festival decorations. Marga’s pedagogical philosophy was holistic; she told Mennonite ed...

Shaky Beginings as a Faith Community

With basic physical needs addressed, in 1805 Chortitza pioneers were ready to recover their religious roots and to pass on a faith identity. They requested a copy of Menno Simons’ writings from the Danzig mother-church especially for the young adults, “who know only what they hear,” and because “occasionally we are asked about the founder whose name our religion bears” ( note 1 ). The Anabaptist identity of this generation—despite the strong Mennonite publications in Prussia in the late eighteenth century—was uninformed and very thin. Settlers first arrived in Russia 1788-89 without ministers or elders. Settlers had to be content with sharing Bible reflections in Low German dialect or a “service that consisted of singing one song and a sermon that was read from a book of sermons” written by the recently deceased East Prussian Mennonite elder Isaac Kroeker ( note 2 ). In the first months of settlement, Chortitza Mennonites wrote church leaders in Prussia: “We cordially plead ...

Mennonite-Designed Mosque on the Molotschna

The “Peter J. Braun Archive" is a mammoth 78 reel microfilm collection of Russian Mennonite materials from 1803 to 1920 -- and largely still untapped by researchers ( note 1 ). In the files of Philipp Wiebe, son-in-law and heir to Johann Cornies, is a blueprint for a mosque ( pic ) as well as another file entitled “Akkerman Mosque Construction Accounts, 1850-1859” ( note 2 ). The Molotschna Mennonites were settlers on traditional Nogai lands; their Nogai neighbours were a nomadic, Muslim Tartar group. In 1825, Cornies wrote a significant anthropological report on the Nogai at the request of the Guardianship Committee, based largely on his engagements with these neighbours on Molotschna’s southern border ( note 3 ). Building upon these experiences and relationships, in 1835 Cornies founded the Nogai agricultural colony “Akkerman” outside the southern border of the Molotschna Colony. Akkerman was a projection of Cornies’ ideal Mennonite village outlined in exacting detail, with un...

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 ...

"In the Case of Extreme Danger" - Menno Pass and Refugee crisis, 1945-46

"In the Case of Extreme Danger 1. We are Russian-Mennonite refugees who are returning to Holland, the place of origin. The language is Low German. 2. The Dutch Mennonites there, Doopsgezinde , will take in all fellow-believing Mennonites from Russia who are in danger of compulsory repatriation. 3. The first stage of the journey is to Gronau in Westphalia. 4. As a precaution, purchase a ticket to an intermediate stop first. The last connecting station is Rheine. 5. Opposite Gronau is the Dutch city of Enschede, where you will cross the border. 6. On the border ask for Peter Dyck (Piter Daik), Mennonite Central Committee, Amsterdam, Singel 452. Peter Dyck (or his people) will distribute the relevant papers—“Menno Passes”--and provide further information. 7. Any other border points may also be crossed, with the necessary explanations (who, where to, Mennonites from Russia, Peter Dyck, M.C.C., etc.). The Dutch border Patrol is informed. 8. Here the whole matter must be h...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog