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Chortitza Greets Reich Minister for Occupied East Territories Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg, the German Reich Minister for the Occupied East Territories, visited the predominantly Mennonite settlement area of Chortitza on June 27, 1942; photos and a video capture that day (note 1). Twice Rosenberg also visited the Mennonite German settlements of Halbstadt/Prischib (note 2)—though that area was under special oversight of his some-time rival Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

A warm welcome to a very powerful high-ranking visitor with a sympathetic disposition to the repression of Mennonites under Stalin does not tell us much about the Mennonites who gathered in Chortitza to greet Rosenberg. But the Nazi world in all of its dimensions—a comprehensive worldview presented in press and schooling; totalitarian organization of communities; brutally enforced racial policy; centrality of military and its requirements and orders—engulfed the Mennonites fully for three-and-a-half years and with such an intensity that survivors rarely spoke of it afterwards.

For next-generation Mennonites it is all a fantastic curiosity, as well as a heavy, family-church-cultural history still to be documented and understood. As Mennonite families and scholars knit together memoir fragments with newly accessible archival materials, events like the Rosenberg visit help us to tell the Russian-Mennonite story with honesty and propriety.

Rosenberg represented not only the whole regime, but the Führer himself. At the Chortitza visit, District Mayor (Rayonchef) Johann Epp presented a letter to Rosenberg signed by many in the community for Hitler (note 3).

The "Special Commando Dr. Stumpp" in the Chortitza district villages was commissioned by Rosenberg specifically “to provide a genealogical and Volks-biological accounting of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine”—with population and family data, village histories and experiences under Stalin, and the cultural and physical assets of each community as well (note 4). Stumpp's deputy Gerhard Fast later settled in Canada where he was also a Mennonite minister (note 5).

Rosenberg and Himmler were both contributors to Hitler’s plan for the “biological eradication of the entire Jewry of Europe.” While racial politics was everything, Rosenberg also estimated that ten to fifteen percent of Germans in the east were “ethnic scrap,” including those who mistreated fellow Germans during the Bolshevik era, directors of collectives and Communist party members (note 6).

But the Mennonites impressed Rosenberg.

When Rosenberg visited Chortitza on June 27, 1942 after almost one year of occupation, he found the ideological situation far better than he had imagined. Rosenberg was born in the Russian Empire (Estonia), where Baltic German educational institutions and leaders had largely embraced a Russian cultural identity; but here he found that Mennonites had kept their language and customs. “I will report to the Führer that here I have found a piece of Germany” (note 7).


The Ukraine Post recognized the Mennonites of Chortitza and Molotschna as amongst the “most successful” German settlers in the east due to their “austere way of living” and “exemplary industriousness;” the Mennonite Volksdeutsche birthrate was also amongst the highest of all European peoples—an average of 7.94 offspring per couple, and of extraordinarily high “German racial purity” (note 8). “Even when forced into servitude, a strong sense of duty prevailed in the Volk-German collectives that distinguished them from others in terms of performance, yield, and thorough, tenacious labour and reliability—even for a state which deemed them to be the enemy” (note 9).

This “human material” was now protected by force of the death penalty for crimes committed against them (note 10).

Rosenberg invested heavily in schools and German teacher-training in Ukraine, “to ensure an education and instruction of youth in the spirit of National Socialism” (note 11).

When Rosenberg was in Halbstadt he held a large open-air rally on June 15, 1943. According to the German press, “thousands of Volks-German farmers, and especially women farmers, arrived on foot or wagon to greet these co-workers of the Führer. Many Volks-German boys and girls were in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls” (note 12). Rosenberg promised that they would soon become naturalized citizens of the German Reich, “but now we stand in the midst of a great struggle which demands the entire strength of the nation, including the Volks-German forces, for this new Reich. We fight under one [Swastika] flag” (note 13).

Below is my translation of Rosenberg’s diary entry for the visit, plus the related German press news story.

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Rosenberg’s Diary/Calendar: Visit to Chortitza, June 27, 1942 (Note 14)

“The next day we visited the German colonists. This was undoubtedly the most poignant and impressive part of the whole trip.

A great many German colonists had once settled in the Dnieper Bend who, thanks to their diligence and hard work, acquired a quarter of all the land of the province [Gouvernement]. These colonists were—and this is quite exceptional—Frisians! A rally had been scheduled for that day in the village of Chortitza, and already many kilometers from Chortitza German colonists stood in line with their entire families, swastika flags in hand.

We kept having to step out and greet them, and thereby we heard some harrowing stories about their experience. They all emphasized that if the German Wehrmacht (Army) had not arrived in time, they too would have been deported to Siberia. Many men were missing, and many women and children began to cry when they told their stories.

First, we drove through the village and saw the huge Zaparov power plant. ... Then the rally took place in the square in the centre of Chortitza. Here, as in Germany, several thousand agricultural workers stood in the square where I gave a long speech. They had stood up for Germany for over 150 years and Germany had not been able to defend them in their struggle. However I emphasized to them that that era had now finally come to a definitive end. The German Reich has now taken them under its protection and will not relinquish this rule again. Later some choirs sang old German folk songs, and the women presented me with a letter of thanks to the Führer with all their signatures.

The Ukrainians also came forward with a huge baked loaf of bread and gave speeches in the usual manner, clearly showing their rejection of Jewish Bolshevism and Moscow. The days in Dnepropetrovsk came to an end with a visit to the military hospital and a speech by the regional commissar and an address to the entire entourage. The trip here was also very enriching for me, because now I can picture vividly before my eyes everything that had been reported to me.”

--

News Report of the June 27, 1942, Chortitza Rally: “You are a piece of Germany!” (Note 15)

"Reich Minister Rosenberg reminded the assembled crowd that their ancestors were part of the great German migration east at the end of the 18th century. He honoured their ancestors, who farmed vast regions of the Province of Ekatarinoslav, today’s Dnepropetrovsk, and Tauria. Moreover, two-thirds of the Crimea belonged to ethnic Germans, tilling four million desiatines around the Black Sea and another 2.5 million desiatines on the Volga River. The fate of the German colonists under the tsars as well as under the Bolsheviks had always been one of persecution, oppression, deportation and murder, because through their [ethnic German] ability and achievements they repeatedly became masters of the land. The German people in the Reich shared in the struggle [against communism], but what Bolshevism could not do to the Reich, it did to Germans in Soviet Russia. For a long time the Reich could not provide assistance, because for 14 years it was fighting for its own continued existence and for its renewal. Only when the Führer’s revolution was successful did the Reich regain its strength. And today it is strong enough to be able to assist here. Reichsminister Rosenberg called on the German colonists—who listened to his appeal with profound attention—to do their part to ensure that their homeland remains free and that the present-day generation is worthy of the deeds and attitudes of their ancestors. All departments have been instructed to take special care of the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) since they are the present helpers of the Germans who come here now. ‘You, who are standing here before me,’ said Reich Minister Rosenberg, ‘are a part of Germany. You belong to that Germanness that was lived out most strongly and consistently by that man [Hitler] whose name today is Germany and the new Europe.

The Führer’s National Socialist revolution will create in a new form in this country all that it has been achieved in the Reich. The fighting energies of Adolf Hitler’s old comrades-in-arms have been deployed here and rule these areas, which are inseparably affiliated with the Reich, purposefully and with certainty of success. The district commissioner [Johann Epp, Rayonchef] closed the German rally in Chortitza with a greeting to the Führer. The national anthems were listened to with silence. A great hour had come to an end, as great as the hour in which German troops first appeared here.

The Reich conveyed its greetings to these German farmers who had proven their Volkstum (nationality) abroad for generations, and who now experience the certainty that their land and soil becomes German soil, inalienably granted to them for all generations. When the Reich Minister finished, the applause for him was long and stormy. The whole square was white with the simple linen clothes that the women wear here on festival days and that they had put on for this most festive day of German culture in Chortitza.”

Rosenberg’s boastful, confident tone changed by the end of 1942; on December 3, Rosenberg issued a directive to fellow Reich ministers asking for restraint in speeches and writings about the eastern territories, and that they no longer speak of “colonization,” “exploitation” of land and people, or “Germanization of soil”—terms effectively repeated in Soviet propaganda, because they worked to fuel new resistance by Ukrainians (note 16).

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: See 1942 YouTube video news reel, "German Occupation Forces In Russia (1942)," starting at 1:11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKPoJLXMhW8&t=68s, June 27, 1942.

Note 2: “Der Ruf des Reiches an die Volksdeutschen am Schwarzmeer. Reichsminister Rosenberg und Reichskommissar Koch im Gebiet Halbstadt Großkundgebung der Partei,” Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 2, no. 138 (June 16, 1943) 1, https://libraria.ua/issues/875/.

Note 3: See translated Rosenberg diary entry and press report below.

Note 4: “Das Bluterbe der Väter: Die biologische Kraft der Volksdeutschen in der Ukraine,” Ukraine Post no. 9 (March 6, 1943), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/878/32418/.

Note 5: Fast was born in a Mennonite village in Neu Samara, sought emigration via Moscow in 1929, was exiled to a labour camp in Northern Siberia, escaped by hiding on a on a wood transport steamship (described in Im Schatten des Todes [Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1973]), sailed to England then to Germany, arranged to get his son and wife out of the USSR in 1934, worked with the evangelical organization “Licht zum Osten,” joined the German military administration as part of the Stumpp Commando, and wrote a book on the “end of Chortitza” (Das Ende von Chortitza [Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1973]).

Note 6: In Eric J. Schmaltz and Samuel D. Zinner, “The Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp in Ukraine and its North American Legacy,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2000), 58. Report by Sergeant Dr. Hermann Maurer, cited in ibid., 57.

Note 7: "Ihr seid ein Stück Deutschlands!," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 1, no. 135 (June 28, 1942), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/875/31921.  Also recorded by Karl Stumpp, cited in Schmaltz and Zinner, “Nazi Ethnographic Research of Georg Leibbrandt and Karl Stumpp," 48. Compare a negative 1902 assessment of Baltic German schools in Deutsche Erde 1 (1902),15, https://brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/dsdk/periodical/titleinfo/2052150.

Note 8: “Deutsche Leistung in der Ukraine,” Ukraine Post, no. 11 (September 26, 1942), 3f., https://libraria.ua/issues/878/32407/. Cf. also “Bluterbe der Väter.” Mennonite settlements are also mentioned in: “Der Deutsche Zug nach der Ukraine,” Ukraine Post, no. 15 (October 24, 1942), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/878/32402/.

Note 9: “Das Bluterbe der Väter,” Ukraine Post no. 9 (March 6, 1943), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/878/32418/.   

Note 10: Cf. J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 44f.

Note 11: “Schulpflicht für volksdeutsche Kinder,” Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 1, no. 283 (December 18, 1942), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/875/31983/.

Note 12: “Der Ruf des Reiches an die Volksdeutschen am Schwarzmeer. Reichsminister Rosenberg und Reichskommissar Koch im Gebiet Halbstadt Großkundgebung der Partei,” Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 2, no. 138 (June 16, 1943), 1, https://libraria.ua/issues/875/32193/.  

Note 13: “Reichsleiter Rosenberg besuchte die Schwarzmeerdeutschen. Die Partei nimmt die Volksdeutschen in ihre Obhut,” Deutsche Bug-Zeitung 2, no. 49 (June 22, 1943), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/1/32491/.

Note 14: Alfred Rosenberg, “Besichtigungsreise durch die Ukraine vom 18. Juni 1942 (ff.),” T-454/105 Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1941-1945, Ortsministerium files, T-454/105/000055/71. Pp. 14b-15b. Captured German and Related Records, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.

Note 15: "Ihr seid ein Stück Deutschlands!"; also same page: "Festtag im deutschen Dorf am Dnjepr," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 1, no. 135 (June 28, 1942), 3, https://libraria.ua/issues/875/31921.  

Note 16: “Rundschreiben Rosenbergs zur Zurückhaltung bei öffentlichen Äußerungen über die Plannungen des Reiches im Osten vom 3. Dezember 1942,” cited in Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik: Die Zusammenarbeit von Wehrmacht, Wirtschaft und SS (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1991), 198f. Rosenberg reminds colleagues always to distinguish between the annexed Reich territories such as Danzig West-Prussia and Wartheland, and the occupied eastern territories or the General Government territories.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Chortitza Greets Reich Minister for Occupied East Territories Rosenberg, 1942,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 23, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/chortitza-greets-reich-minister-for.html.

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