Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? The "partisan" Anna Wiens

With the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Ukrainian women and men were/are being hailed for their "partisan" fighting against Russian aggression. A similar level of partisan fighting was displayed during Nazi occupation of Ukraine, Fall 1941 to Fall 1943.

There is at least one archival account of a young Mennonite woman who became an active underground supporter of a partisan group on behalf of Ukraine/ USSR during German occupation: Anna Petrovna Wiens.

The Mennonite story in Ukraine during WWII is messy. Some 35,000 Mennonites welcomed and embraced the Germans as liberators from the very real repression and terror they experienced under Stalin.

Anna Wiens however was different—she became a partisan fighter against the Nazis. Anna was born in 1918 in Kleefeld, Molotschna to Peter and Elisabeth (Klassen) Wiens, and she had Mennonite cousins who immigrated to Canada mid-1920s. But according to a later testimony by her Ukrainian husband and director of the village school, Vladimir Okunta, “there was nothing German in her. … She considered fascist Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union 'a treacherous attack on her homeland,' ... and she considered Nazi warriors to be barbarians and criminals." As “true patriots of their homeland,” they could not resign themselves to submit themselves to a regime that considered itself to be a “master” race (note 1).

In 1941 when the Germans arrived, Anna lived and worked with her husband in the village of Alexandrovka just outside of the German settlement.

Anna registered with the occupying force as an “ethnic German” and received all the benefits and protections of a German: better food and clothing and other rights not afforded to Ukrainians, Russians or Jews. There is no indication that Anna had any connection to her family's Mennonite faith background as an adult.

With her husband she became a supporter of a Ukrainian partisan group, whose task was to extract ammunition, to organize acts of sabotage in public agriculture, to share information with the underground, and to frustrate the movement of agricultural products to the German army.

Because she was of German-Mennonite descent and spoke perfect German, officers and officials treated them "with great confidence," and sometimes went to her home to "drink tea" or "to shave."

With privileged information, Anna and her husband apparently foiled a German plan to send a large catchment of local Ukrainian youth to labour camps in Germany. Any youth resisting would be shot, but Wiens provided false health records with illnesses that were incompatible with residency in the German Reich. Other young people were warned about their planned departure and fled from the village. And Wiens hid some in her home as well, according to her husband.

With the fall of Stalingrad, Germany's military fortunes in Ukraine turned. Memoirs from Mennonites in the same area record that "partisans" became increasingly bold. From the nearby Mennonite village of Marienthal (Molotschna), one Mennonite recalls:

"In August while Elsie and some of the other girls were working the fields behind our village near a hedge, they thought there were Partjisane (partisans, or guerilla snipers) shooting at them. … The next day when they went out again, they found empty ammunition shells and returned to the work yard, refusing to work in the fields again. Then the refugees going west began to travel through our villages again. They reported that the Germans were suffering terrible losses, and that their own villages were burnt." (Note 2)

Anna Wiens did not retreat behind German lines together with 35,000 other Mennonites in September 1943, though her mother and sister Luise Unrau did (note 3). Luise's German naturalization papers (EWZ) indicate that she and her children were deemed “100%” German, though the children’s German language skills were weak. Luise like her sister Anna was born in the Molotschna village of Kleefeld, but she also lived in Donbas, Melitopol and Tokmak (the latter two near Molotschna). Though her reported genealogy has the names Warkentin, Toews, Klassen and Wiens, Luise registered for German naturalization as “Lutheran;” curiously she also refrains from swearing an oath—a Mennonite privilege in Nazi Germany.

As noted Luise's sister Anna did not retreat with the Germans. Nevertheless, at the end of the war Anna was tried by a Soviet tribunal with treason for accepting ethnic-German identity papers during occupation. Anna Wiens was sentenced to five years of forced labour in Kazakhstan.

Ukrainian archivists have produced an entire essay on Anna Wiens and her resistance during German occupation. It appears in a large series of volumes cataloging the tens of thousands of arrests and executions during the Stalin era (see note 1).

About 500 to 700 Mennonite men (generally younger than Anna), all without any memory of church, were trained by the German occupying forces as an elite military cavalry unit with the primary task of fighting "partisans" in the immediate area of these German villages (note 4).

These are all part of the messy, deadly web of war in which Mennonites in Ukraine were caught—between Stalin and Hitler.

Today's Ukrainian "partisans" (language used by CNN) remind me of the story of Anna Wiens.

I still do not know how to properly frame her unique defiance and courage to stand up against the Nazis and fight on behalf of the Ukraine underground—but also against her Mennonite people.

There are no other Mennonite stories of active resistance against Nazi Germany in Ukraine that I am aware of though at least two attempts to poison officials (June 28, 1943) or cavalry members in Halbstadt were attempted (note 5).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region, Book III (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2006) 210-215. [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область]. http://www.reabit.org.ua/files/store/Zaporozh-3.pdf. Also available on pp. 140-144 of: https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/Sapor.pdf. For biographical information on Anna Petrovna Wiens, see GRanDMA #1070782.

Note 2: Selma Kornelsen Hooge and Anna Goossen Kornelsen, Life Before Canada (Abbotsford, BC: Self-published, 2018), 59.

Note 3: Cf. "Elisabeth Klassen," born 1879 in Ladekop, in Richard D. Thiessen, "Index of Mennonites Appearing in the Einwandererzentrallestelle (EWZ) Files," film A3342-EWZ50-I069, frame 206. https://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/EWZ_Mennonite_Extractions_Alphabetized.pdf.

Note 4: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/08/notes-on-lost-generation-first-ethnic.html.

Note 4: See previous post (forthcoming, including sources from Roßner, Eduard Reimer and Bundesarchiv VoMi correspondence).

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? The "partisan" Anna P. Wiens," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 11, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/terrorist-or-freedom-fighter-partisan.html.

Comments

1923 Mennonite immigrants "kept behind": Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp

An important part of the larger 1923 immigration story includes the chapter of the hundreds who were held back at Riga and Southampton and taken to the Lechfeld (Bavaria) transit camp for medical care. “Germany generously and magnanimously helped our organizations, on my intercession, to overcome the manifold difficulties connected with such a ( Volksbewegung ) movement of people in such critical times,” Benjamin H. Unruh wrote some years later ( note 1 ). Just as the first group of Russländer Mennonites set foot in Canada 100 years ago this month, the North American relief effort in the USSR was also winding down (August 1923). The famine relief work in 1921 and 1922 had found broad support in the North American Mennonite community. However excitement about a larger immigration of Russian Mennonites to North America was muted, and a new call to action could not forge the same level of cooperation across Mennonite groups. The plan required huge money guarantees. In USSR B.B. Janz h...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (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 accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws. It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...

1920s: Those who left and those who stayed behind

The picture below is my grandmother's family in 1928. Some could leave but most stayed behind. In 1928 a small group of some 511 Soviet Mennonites were unexpectedly approved for emigration ( note 1 ). None of the circa 21,000 Mennonites who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s “simply” left. And for everyone who left, at least three more hoped to leave but couldn’t. It is a complex story. Canada only wanted a certain type—young healthy farmers—and not all were transparent about their skills and intentions The Soviet Union wanted to rid itself of a specifically-defined “excess,” and Mennonite leadership knew how to leverage that Estate owners, and Selbstschutz /White Army militia were the first to be helped to leave, because they were deemed as most threatened community members; What role did money play? Thousands paid cash for their tickets; Who made the final decision on group lists, and for which regions? This was not transparent. Exit visa applications were also regularly reje...

School Reports, 1890s

Mennonite memoirs typically paint a golden picture of schools in the so-called “golden era” of Mennonite life in Russia. The official “Reports on Molotschna Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98,” however, give us a more lackluster and realistic picture ( note 1 ). What do we learn from these reports? Many schools had minor infractions—the furniture did not correspond to requirements, there were insufficient book cabinets, or the desks and benches were too old and in need of repair. The Mennonite schoolhouses in Halbstadt and Rudnerweide—once recognized as leading and exceptional—together with schools in Friedensruh, Fürstenwerder, Franzthal, and Blumstein were deemed to be “in an unsatisfactory state.” In other cases a new roof and new steps were needed, or the rooms too were too small, too dark, too cramped, or with moist walls. More seriously in some villages—Waldheim, Schönsee, Fabrikerwiese, and even Gnadenfeld, well-known for its educational past—inspectors recorded that pupils “do not ...

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...

Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina Neufeld Bräul

This month (April 2023) we celebrated my aunt’s 97th birthday—Adina Neufeld Bräul. Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina were born within hours of each other, April 20-21, 1926. She once told me—in somewhat different words—that this makes her wonder about God’s providence … In 1944 in German-annexed Poland, my 16-year-old uncle Walter Bräul was required to report for military service. His first thought: no good soldier should be without a girlfriend! Before leaving for training, he asked one of the girls from "the trek" on a date to see a movie in Exin. Seven years later they would marry in Paraguay. Adina and her mother and sister were on the same trek or group (Gnadenfeld/ Molotschna) out of Ukraine as Walter and my mother (in the 2023 photo). Adina’s most terrible memory of the trek was when their wagon almost tipped over into a deep ravine. She was 17—a year older than Walter—and it was Walter’s 17-year-old brother Peter who literally jumped from his wagon to physically stop ...

A Traveler's Impressions of the Molotschna, 1927

In November 1927, Susanna Toews of Ohrloff, Molotschna wrote to her brother Gerhard in Canada, "Father is sleeping and the sisters are reading, even though they have read the stuff ten times. . .. Twice a week we get Das Neue Dorf . We read the most important material the first evening and then father reads the rest of it the next day" ( note 1 ). A youth in Friedensruh, Molotschna reported to the communist youth paper Die Saat in 1928, that their village receives 13 copies of Das Neue Dorf , 6 copies of Die Saat , one of the Moscow-based Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung , 16 copies of Die Trompete, 2 copies of Neuland , and some Russian papers as well. On average, 2 papers per household--all communist papers. A Mennonite-based monthly agricultural journal, “The Practical Agriculturalist” ( Der praktische Landwirt ) had been approved for publication in Ukraine in 1924 but was shut down in December 1926. Government authorities in Ukraine were exasperated to see a “significant a...

Warthegau, Nazism and two 15-year-old Mennonites, 1944

Katharina Esau offered me a home away from home when I was a student in Germany in the 1980s. The Soviet Union released her and her family in 1972. Käthe Heinrichs—her maiden name (b. Aug. 18, 1928)—and my Uncle Walter Bräul were classmates in Gnadenfeld during Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and experienced the Gnadenfeld group “trek” as 15-year-olds together. Before she passed, she wrote her story ( note 1 )—and I had opportunity to interview my uncle. Käthe and Walter both arrived in Warthegau—German annexed Poland—in March 1944 ( note 2 ), and the Reich had a plan for their lives. In February 1944, the Governor of Warthegau ordered the Hitler Youth (HJ) organization to “care for Black Sea German youth” ( note 3 ). Youth were examined for the Hitler Youth, but also for suitability for elite tracks like the one-year Landjahr (farm year and service) program. The highly politicized training of the Landjahr was available for young people in Hitler Youth and its counterpart the League of G...

Flemish Anabaptists and Witch Hunts

Political leaders have long used the term "witch hunt"--and there is an historical connection to Mennonites. Anabaptists and so-called “witches” were arrested and tried for related reasons in the Low Countries in the 1500s: namely, as a means to divert God’s wrath. The late-Medievals feared that heresy—in this case ana-baptism and the challenge to other sacraments—invited the wrath of God, and was an instrument for the devil’s own hellish apocalyptic assault. The assumption: the devil's tactics to destroy Christendom included the use of both heretics and sorcerers. Gary Waite writes convincingly that both were seen as “polluting” the community and thus both had to be "excised." "This fear of pollution, or scandalizing God or the saints, also explains why small numbers of peaceable Mennonites were so harshly treated during the second half of the sixteenth century. Plagues, fires, and economic and social crises were often blamed on the presence of even a smal...

Mennonites and the Crimean War (1853-56)

Martin Klaassen was traveling through the Molotschna Mennonite Colony when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 ( note 1 ). His diary notes that the following hymn was sung before the sermon: December 1853 . With regards to the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey, the song, No: 723 “O Lord, the clouds of war are threatening now, above our heads we see them roll” was sung before the sermon” ( note 2 ). As the war effort grew, thousands of troops came through Molotschna: January 14, 1854 . Today our colony has received billets: in Halbstadt about 1,000 soldiers. It is said that Joh. Neufelds have offered liquor ( Branntwein ), naturally without charge. The soldiers are supposed to have marched in with jubilant singing and much hilarity. They had been very happy for the wonderful reception they got, and promised to accomplish great things. In March, England and France also declared war on Russia. March 26, 1854 . At noon today there was suddenly a military transport at ...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog