Hans P. Epp, Blumengart: Teacher & Minister between Stalin and Hitler

The 1943 Chortitza district photographs of a Mennonite village schoolmaster and students bring that world to life in a vivid manner (note 1).

Today, archival documents allow us to give background to those photographs—some of which are troubling—and to piece together a fuller story.

During German occupation, Johann (Hans) P. Epp was schoolmaster in the Mennonite village of Blumengart, 5 km east of Nieder Chortitza and the Dnjepr River; in April of 1943 Epp was 59 years-old (note 2).

According to the 1942 Village Report completed for Commando Dr. Stumpp, Blumengart had 62 families. Each of the families had a typical Mennonite last name with 40 adult males and 73 adult females, and 143 youth under eighteen. Of the 62 families, twenty-one were without a “male head;” in 1937-38, twenty village men were arrested and either executed or exiled, and another seven men were missing since hostilities with Germany began in June 1941 (note 3).

The Blumengart village report was written with the assistance of Gerhard Fast, an administrator supporting Commando Dr. Stumpp; it was signed by Fast and Mennonite Mayor Redekop (see pic).

The report noted that school attendance had suffered in past years due to lack of clothing and food. Classrooms had had “no instructional materials,” but by May 1942 they received chalkboards, classroom maps, and other teaching materials from Germany. The school building was in the middle of the village and in need of general repair, according to the report. The photographs capture all of this.

Children in the first four grades had never experienced instruction in German, and now schooling was exclusively in German. There were 23 boys and 22 girls divided into two classrooms taught by Mr. Epp and his eldest daughter. Both had attended the spring 1942 pedagogical camp for ethnic-German teachers in Chortitza and taught by teachers from the Reich.

Blumengart had a library before German occupation, but the books were largely Russian or Ukrainian and ideologically slanted—thus hardly read. In 1942 the village was receiving five copies of the German occupation newspaper, Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung but had little else in German.

Mennonite students were easily introduced to the “German greeting” and salute, “Heil Hitler!” Schools enforced “rules and order” and over time offered music, occasional films, and drawing competitions to “awaken the joy of work” and “raise up a new breed of German humanity (Menschenschlag)" (note 4).

The fabric of the community from which they came had been badly torn under Stalin. The village report noted that socializing had virtually stopped; “since collectivization [1930], neighbours no longer wanted to see their neighbours.” And again: “a particular obstacle to social life, especially among the youth, is the lack of clothing. One woman said that she has a wedding veil that has been used by 30 brides because no new ones could be ordered” (note 5).

The village had two Ukrainian families prior to the arrival of the German armies, but they were now gone. Villagers had witnessed how many—“mainly Jews”—from the region fled in panic east across the Dnjepr River in advance of the German armies. When the Germans had reached the west bank, other Mennonite communities like Einlage, Rosenort or Chortitza which had had larger numbers of Jewish neighbours, reported that all remaining Jews “were simply taken and shot” (note 6).

With German occupation, the Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung—the only German language reading material in Blumenort and most other Mennonite villages at the time—offered regular interpretations of their past misery as something orchestrated by Jews. E.g., “The Jews and Moscow: [National] Socialism is Aryan, Communism is Jewish” (Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 1, no. 245 [Nov. 4, 1942] 1f.).

Not only were schools slowly given a new life, but also the churches. Blumengart was technically part of the larger Chortitza Mennonite Church, but locally they met Sundays in a home. Schoolmaster Epp was also elected minister and installed by Chortitza elder-elect, Heinrich Winter (note 7). Epp was the great-great-grandson of the first full Mennonite elder in Russia, David Epp.

Johann Epp married in 1912 to Anna Heinrichs; they had four children. In the Stalin years, Johann was an accountant at a mill. He was arrested on November 28, 1934. The charges laid against him were trumped up and typical of those laid against many Mennonite men in Ukraine in the 1930s: “carried out active work on the distribution of Hitler’s material assistance among the Germans” (note 8). In short, he received or helped distribute famine aid packages from Mennonites in North America and Europe. These were all funneled through Benjamin H. Unruh and Mennonites in Germany. Epp was held in prison in Dnepropetrovsk for six months and then convicted for “counter-revolutionary agitation and promotion of a capitalist country.” Epp was sentenced to four years in a forced labour camp in Siberia (1935-1939) and disenfranchised for two years. He was one of the few who survived and returned home alive.

The schoolmaster’s study has a portrait of Hitler and two swastikas. A similar photograph can be found of a schoolmaster and his study in the Lutheran village of Prischib, immediately across from the Mennonite centre of Halbstadt (note 9). A photograph of the Chortitza High School during this same time has a swastika on the flag pole as well.

The photographs are certainly for propaganda purposes, but they also served an artistic purpose for the photographer, whose career continued after the war. Herbert List was known for his “austere, classically posed black-and-white compositions” (especially of males), and was “influential in modern photography and contemporary fashion photography” (note 10).

Together the photographs and the stories bring to life the complexities and complicities of Mennonite life between Stalin and Hitler.

Schoolmaster and minister Hans Epp—together with the entire Mennonite population in Ukraine—was evacuated to Prussia and resettled in Warthegau (German-annexed Poland) towards the end of the war, 1943-44. Mennonite resettlers were all naturalized as German citizens.

Immediately after the war, Epp and his family together with 12,000 other Mennonites were displaced refugees in the western zone. Another ca. 24,000 Mennonites on the flight west were forcibly repatriated by the Soviet Union. In 1947 Mennonite Central Committee resettled Epp’s family to the new colony of Volendam in east Paraguay. In 1954 Epp and family moved to Canada. He died one day shy of his 90th birthday in Crystal City, Manitoba in 1974.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: See Mennonite photos by Herbert List, 1943 (Magnum Photos). https://pro.magnumphotos.com/CS.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2K1HZOBWEHWPVJ&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=608&POPUPIID=2K1HRG69Q5IX&POPUPPN=13#/SearchResult&VBID=2K1HZOBWEHWPVJ&SMLS=1&RW=1366&RH=608&POPUPIID=2K1HRG69QQ99&POPUPPN=16.

Note 2: “Johann Peter Epp,” GRanDMA #435629 (Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry, California Mennonite Historical Society).

Note 3: “Blumengart Village Report Commando Dr. Stumpp.” Prepared for the German Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1942. In Bundesarchiv Koblenz, BArch R6_GSK. State Electronic Archive of Ukraine, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_622+Gebiet%3A+Zwischen%0D%0ARayon%3A+Chortizza%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Saporoshje%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropertrowsk+Dorf%3A+Blumengart%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Kapustjanka&p=R_6_622%5C%D1%824_787-835%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=34.

Note 4: “Die Suche nach 5000 Volksdeutschen,” Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung 1, no. 98 (May 16, 1942), 3, https://libraria.ua/all-titles/group/875/.

Note 5: “Blumengart Village Report Commando Dr. Stumpp.”

Note 6: Heinrich Bergen, ed., Einlage: Chronik des Dorfes Kitschkas, 1789–1943 (Saskatoon: Self-published, 2010), 80.

Note 7: Henry H. Winter, Shepherd of the Oppressed. Heinrich Winter: The Last Aeltester of Chortitza (Leamington, ON: Self-published, 1990), 75; pic of baptismal class, p. 68.

Note 8: History: Zaporizhia Region, Book VI (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2013) [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область], 251, http://www.reabit.org.ua/files/store/Zaporozh-6.pdf.

Note 9: For Prischib teacher photo, cf. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, eds., The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 232. For Chortitza High School photo, cf. https://enc.rusdeutsch.ru/articles/5767?fbclid=IwAR1i0o6h1Xv6F-QCc3spiHUuQRSUt1Y6Lb-7zDl2XGU9LIJvSCDbajeAjzc.

Note 10: Cf. background on the photographer, Herbert List, in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_List. One of List’s grandparents was Jewish, which limited his professional opportunities during the Nazi period.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Hans P. Epp, Blumengart: Teacher & Minister between Stalin and Hitler," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 25, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/hans-p-epp-blumengart-teacher-minister.html.

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