The End of Schardau (and other Molotschna villages), 1941

My grandmother was four-years old when her parents moved from Petershagen, Molotschna to Schardau in 1908. This story is larger than that of Schardau, but tells how this village and many others in Molotschna were evacuated by Stalin days before the arrival of German troops in 1941. -ANF

The bridge across the Dnieper at Chortitza was destroyed by retreating Soviet troops on August 18, 1941 and the hydroelectric dam completed near Einlage in 1932 was also dynamited by NKVD personnel—killing at least 20,000 locals downstream, and forcing the Germans to cross further south at Nikopol. For the next six-and-a-half weeks, the old Mennonite settlement area of Chortitza was continuously shelled by Soviet troops from Zaporozhje on the east side of the river (note 1).

The majority of Russian Germans in Crimea and Ukraine paid dearly for Germany’s Blitzkrieg and plans for racially-based population resettlements. As early as August 3, 1941, the Supreme Command of the Soviet Forces received notification from the southern front that ethnic-German villages on the west bank of the Dnieper were welcoming the Nazi troops. Stalin’s brief response by telegram was unequivocal: “Out with them [Russian Germans] with a bang” (note 2). 

Rightly fearing further German sympathies, between August 28 and October 22, 1941 the Soviet government adopted eight resolutions for the deportation of all Soviet Germans from the western regions of the USSR to Kazakhstan and Siberia. This included a resolution “on resettling” the 63,000 Germans living in the Zaporozhje Oblast—the province in which the older Ukrainian Mennonite settlements were located, east of the Dnieper River (note 3). 

The decrees assumed that the entire German population was guilty of hiding spies and diversionists—“thousands, and tens of thousands” in the Volga Territory alone. To draw them out, a campaign was launched by the Soviet army with German-speaking parachutists disguised as German soldiers: any village that welcomed them was liquidated (note 4). The ethnic Germans of Crimea were among the first to be deported in August—perhaps with intelligence revealing Hitler’s plan for an exclusively German colony on the peninsula (note 5).

Before mass evacuation, two to three percent of the population had already been arrested by secret police to pre-empt resistance and remove those who might instigate disruption on the long journey east (note 6). On September 3, 4, and 5, hundreds of young men in the Molotschna were arrested, including fifteen-year-old Hans Abram Bräul of Paulsheim and his older cousin Heinrich Aron Bräul of Marienthal (my mother’s cousins; note 7). Forty-eight percent of those arrested were born after 1914, i.e., between fifteen and twenty-seven years old, and most were charged generically as “socially dangerous elements,” or for “anti-Social agitation” (note 8).  Other charges included: “has a repressed brother;” “father was repressed by the NKVD in 1937;” “is a fugitive from a kulak family;” “has relatives abroad;” “displayed anti-Soviet attitude and praised Germany;” “is dissatisfied with the existing Soviet system;” “brothers remained in the German occupied territory;” “family member of a traitor to the homeland;” “has a father [or other family member] who moved to the side of the German troops,” etc. Even an eight-year veteran of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol), Jakob J. Klassen of Lichtenau—age nineteen—was not spared arrest for “anti-Soviet agitation” that week, and received the typical sentence of eight years imprisonment. Seventeen year-old Komsomol member Jakob J. Funk of Petershagen was arrested September 4, 1941 as a “socially dangerous element,” and given a five-year sentence. Seventeen-year-old Jakob J. Suderman of Altonau, also a Young Communist League member, was sentenced to five years in a correctional camp in Irkutsk for being “anti-Soviet and a counter-revolutionary;” he died in the camp two years later. David D. Vogt, a twenty-eight-year-old Komsomol member from Pastwa, was also arrested September 4 for “anti-Soviet agitation” and sentenced to death. Johann H. Martens, a twenty-six-year-old from Großweide who had been a Komsomol member since 1935, was arrested the same day. Under heavy guard and before their screaming mothers and wives, one group of 150 young Mennonites—including its communist youth—were forcibly taken to Gnadenfeld and marched out “like criminals” to the Stulnowo-Waldheim station, one woman recalled (note 9). A similar pattern occurred in villages east of Waldheim. The village of Klippenfeld, population ca. 270, was typical: five were arrested; two died within the first year in prison, and a third a year later. Their ages upon arrest were seventeen, twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty-five, and forty-three (note 10).

Only women, children and elderly or handicapped men remained; the villages soon became “more of an armed camp with soldiers, tanks and cannons present everywhere. … Rumours abounded that there were [German] spies around that had been parachuted in behind the lines” (note 11). A Red Army unit had moved into Marienthal and set up a mess tent and headquarters in the home of its chairman, Kornelius J. Kornelsen (note 12). Three days after the mass arrests, orders came to drive all the cattle, sheep and pigs from the villages eastward; fifteen-year-old nephew Peter Rehan—another cousin to my mother—was made co-responsible for Schardau’s herd, and never seen again.

On September 22, 1941, when the German invasion east of the Dnieper was imminent, Stalin personally ordered the resettlement of 110,000 Germans from the Zaporoshje, Stalino (Donetsk) and Vorosilovgrad (Lugansk) districts to the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan; the Zaporoshje operation was to be completed by October 2 and the entire operation on October 10. “In cases of deliberate delay, anti-Soviet actions or armed clashes,” all operational cadres of the NKVD were ordered “to take firm measures for their liquidation.” And should any “individual family members to be resettled refuse to go to the settlement sites,” such persons were to be “arrested and forcibly transferred to the settlement sites” (note 13).

On October 1, residents of Marienthal, Pordenau and Schardau in Molotschna received their orders to assemble at the Nelgovka railway station eighteen kilometres east. From this cluster of villages, Schardau was scheduled to leave first. Hans Rehan remembered the fateful days in detail, including a small protest by the women. 

“In our village [Schardau] there were only children with mothers, and our mothers said they would not leave the village. They gathered daily at the kolkhoz horse stable and we children played in the garden. …[T]he Bolsheviks came and yelled that everyone should disperse or else they would all be shot. We were all barefoot. One soldier had pity and said, “I am a Siberian and I know how cold it is there; these children will freeze to death there.” But then the same Commissioner yelled again that we should go home, and tomorrow they will evacuate us. However the women—only the women—refused to move. Then the Commissioner fired a machine gun above their heads. I screamed, “Mama, let’s go home!” She didn’t want to. I said, “Mama, they are going to kill us! Don’t trust them!” But then they took two women by hands and feet and threw them into the car. And then the [other] women went home.” (Note 14) 

In hindsight, Rehan notes that this “was a mistake … anyone could see that the Communists protect no one. What all have they done to us when there was no war [with Germany], and now when there is war?” (note 15). Villagers of Schardau were not ready to leave.

“We came home; we butchered a young sheep for the journey. Our village was completely occupied with soldiers. Then early in the morning the Ukrainians came from their villages with horses and wagons. … We were loaded onto the wagons and were only allowed to take [a small amount of] food to eat [and hand luggage]. When we were on the street my mother remembered that the Bible was left in the house. Mother told the driver that she had forgotten something and he should stop. She ran quickly and came back with the Bible in her hand. …

We came to the village of Marienthal where our Aunt Helene [Bräul] lived, mother’s sister. They hugged each other and said their good-byes. She [Helene] said they [Soviet soldiers] would be bringing them [to the station] next, and they we would meet up with each other again. But no, they would never again see each other on this earth.” (Note 16)

Of the 200 residents of Schardau, 185 were deported on October 1. Some only had two hours notice; those unwilling to go or who tried to escape were shot (note 17). Helene Bräul was able to give her sister Sara and family extra coats for the journey. Those not deported had been drafted and mobilized some months earlier into the Soviet work army (Trudarmee) to dig tank traps—two-and-a-half metres deep and six metres wide to thwart the advance of the German army. Typically about thirty to fifty persons from each Mennonite village were enlisted, composed of “untrustworthy minorities”—some men, but specifically also women whose husbands had been arrested (note 18). They were watched carefully and accused frequently as “Hitler supporters or Hitler spies” (note 19).

By mid-October they returned to their villages—now under German control—only to find many of them empty. “[M]any walked barefooted; others wrapped rags around their feet to ease some of the soreness and keep them warm. As they followed the German army they begged for food from the Ukrainian people and slept in straw stacks” (note 20). A group returned to Wernersdorf on October 10; on October 12 Hauptmann Rottendorf found a group of “36 ethnic German refugees” in Gnadenfeld (Bogdanowka) “who had been forced by the Russians to do fortification work near Kachowka and were on their way back to their home villages” (note 21). Schardau had been evacuated, and my mother’s uncle Jacob Dyck returned only to find his wife and children gone. Another uncle Abram Bräul returned to Paulsheim and was informed that his only son, Hans, had been arrested and shipped east. Her brothers Franz Bräul Jr. and brother Heinrich were among those who found their way back to Marienthal, which had been spared evacuation with the German advance.

        ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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Photo: This bronze by Jakob Wedel powerfully depicts the fate of women and children after the Soviet military’s “German Operation”. In the second half of 1941, 31,320 or about half of the ethnic Germans in the Zaporozhje Oblast, and in total 840,058 Soviet Germans from the European territories of the Soviet Union were deported; more than half were first brought “like livestock” to Kazakhstan on train, and the others to Siberia. An estimated 55,000 of 100,000 Soviet Mennonites were deported eastward or otherwise removed from their home. 

Note 1:Robert Forczyk, The Dnepr 1943: Hitler’s Eastern Rampart Crumbles (Oxford: Osprey, 2016), 38. The explosion of the dam was heard as far away as Chortitza, according to Peter Harder, St. Catharines (interview with author, November 5, 2018).

Note 2: Victor Krieger, “Patriots or Traitors? The Soviet Government and the German Russians after the Attack on the USSR by National Socialist Germany,” in Russian-German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century: A Closed Chapter?, edited by Karl Schlögel, 133–163 (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 137f. The long imprisoned Mennonite Elder Jakob Rempel was also executed on specific orders of Stalin on September 11, 1941 in Orel, together with 157 other political prisoners; cf. his story in Alexander Rempel and Amalie Enns, ed., Hope is our Deliverance: Aeltester Jakob Aaron Rempel (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2005).

Note 3: J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 39.

Note 4: Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ und die Zwangsumsiedlung der Deutschen in der UdSSR,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 30 (1982), 312.

Note 5: Adolf Hitler, “Night of 5–6 July 1941,” Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations, 3rd edition, translated by N. Cameron and R. H. Stevens (New York: Enigma, 2008), 6; also ibid, 15, 89. There were over 5,000 Mennonites on the peninsula in 1926 (Theodor Brandt and Cornelius Krahn, “Crimea (Ukraine),” GAMEO, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Crimea_(Ukraine).  

Note 6: On the deportations and settlements in work camps, cf. Alfred Eisfeld and Victor Herdt, Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1996).

Note 7: Nellie Bräul Epp, interview with author, 2017; cf. the Einwandererzentrale (Central Immigration Office) file for Heinrich Bräul’s wife, Maria Peters Bräul, A3342-EWZ50-A073 2084, National Archives Collection Microfilm Publication A3342, Series EWZ, Washington, DC.

Note 8: The calculation and examples are based on a sample of 240 Mennonites arrested the first week of September 1941. Cf. Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region, I–VI (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2004–2013 [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область], http://www.reabit.org.ua/books/zp/), including here below from vols. II, 322, 429; III, 644; IV, 249, 602; II, 429.

Note 9: Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 17. The Gnadenfeld scene was confirmed by Nellie Bräul Epp—sister to Hans Bräul--to author, February 10, 2019. On the deportations, see Helmut Huebert, Molotschna Historical Atlas (Winnipeg, MB: Springfield, 2003), 181, https://archive.org/details/MolotschnaHistoricalAtlasOCRopt; Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 37; for first-hand accounts, cf. Gerhard Lohrenz, ed., Lose Blätter III (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1976), 127f.; Cf. also J. Neufeldt, Path of Thorns, 202–204.

Note 10: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region II, 241: Gerhard A. Enns; II, 242: Johann A. Enns; III, 314: Johann J. Wiens; III, 522: Heinrich J. Neufeld.

Note 11: K. Friesen, Into the Unknown, 38; cf. also Lohrenz, Lose Blätter III, 128.

Note 12: Selma Kornelsen Hooge and Anna Goossen Kornelsen, Life Before Canada (Abbotsford, BC: Self-published, 2018), 50.

Note 13: In Eisfeld and Herdt, Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee, 90f., doc. 73. (Decision of the State Defense Committee of the USSR of September 22, 1941, on the resettlement of Germans); p. 93, doc. 74, (Order of the USSR People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, L. Beriya, September 23, 1941).

Note 14: Johann Rehan, “Etwas aus der Vergangenheit” (1992/1995), 8. In author’s possession.

Note 15: Ibid.

Note 16: Ibid., 9.

Note 17: Helmut Huebert, Molotschna Historical Atlas (Winnipeg, MB: Springfield, 2003), 181, https://archive.org/details/MolotschnaHistoricalAtlasOCRopt; Fleischhauer, “‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’ und die Zwangsumsiedlung der Deutschen in der UdSSR,” 307. In total, some 8,500 Molotschna residents were to be deported (S. Toews, Trek to Freedom, 17).

Note 18: Frank H. Epp, Mennonite Exodus (Altona, MB: Friesen, 1962), 352; Lohrenz, Lose Blätter III, 126f.

Note 19: Cf. “Einlage Dorfbericht,” 424b, in “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp.” Prepared for the German Reichsminister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1942. In Bundesarchiv Koblenz, BArch R6 GSK, files 620 to 633; 702 to 709. 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+Einlage%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Kitschkas+&p=R_6_622%5C%D1%823_842-975%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=18.

Note 20: Huebert, Molotschna Historical Atlas, 181; see account by Anna Braun (“Neu-Chortitza Dorfbericht (Barotov),” 10, in Stumpp, “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp”), who with two other women and six men moved 700 head of cattle east across the Dnieper from Neu-Chortitza, but escaped back. https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Rayon%3A+Sofijevka%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Neu-Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Nowo-Chortitza+&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%823_510-593%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=9.

Note 21: Hauptmann Rottendorf,“Kontrolle des Strassenverkehrs (Melitopol),” October 13, 1941, Bundesarchiv RH 23/78, no. 55b [111], https://invenio.bundesarchiv.de/invenio/direktlink/f45f2bf5-8a76-4fb2-b85a-e36717dd72af/; Elisabeth Heidebrecht Steffen, “Wernersdorf,” 2, Mennonitische Geschichte und Ahnenforschung, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/kb/wernd7.pdf.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "The End of Schardau (and other Molotschna villages), 1942," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 26,  2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-end-of-schardau-and-other.html.