Skip to main content

The Executioner of Dnepropetrovsk, 1937-38

Naum Turbovsky likely killed more Mennonites than anyone in the longer history of the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement.

This is an emotionally difficult post to write because one of those men was my grandfather, Franz Bräul, born 1896. In 2019, I received the translation of his 30-page arrest, trial and execution file. To this point my mother never knew her father's fate.

Naum Turbovsky's signature is on Bräul's execution order. Bräul was shot on December 11, 1937. Together with my grandfather's NKVD/ KGB file, I have the files of eight others arrested with him. Turbovsky's file is available online.

Days before he signed the execution papers for those in this group, Turbovsky was given an award for the security of his prison and for his method of isolating and transferring prisoners to their interrogation—all of which “greatly contributed to the success of the investigations over the enemies of the people,” namely “military-fascist conspirators, spies and saboteurs.” Turbovsky’s commendation notes that he had “personally executed 2,100” convicted prisoners, for which he received the Order of the Red Star (note 1).

In the largely Mennonite settlement of Molotschna (Ukraine) some 1,800 arrests occurred between Fall 1936 and December 1938 in a population of 20,000 people. Peter Letkemann has determined that the arrest ratio among Mennonites "was at least four times higher than the national average" as revealed in KGB statistics (note 2).

Much happened in 1937 and the tensions between Germany and the Soviet Union were stretched to the breaking point. Soviet Ukraine closed the German consulates in Kharkov and Odessa on November 15.

On November 28, “Black Raven” NKVD cars visited 13 families in the Marienthal-Pordenau-Schardau-Elisabethtal cluster of villages.

The 13 arrested (note 3) were: David M. Balzer (IV, 24f.); Jakob H. Barg (II, 40); Franz H. Bräul (II, 81); David J. Dick (II, 214); Heinrich F. Dick (IV, 194); Jakob J. Friesen (IV, 610); Heinrich D. Hildebrandt (II, 163f.); Franz A. Isaak (II, 290f.); Peter J. Martens(II, 430); Johann H. Peters (II, 517f.); Gerhard A. Regier (IV, 495); Heinrich J. Tessmann (III, 639); Heinrich G. Wall (II, 95f.) 

The median age of those arrested was 39; all were German-Mennonite and old enough to remember pre-revolutionary Russia and young enough to stir trouble.

On November 30, the Bräul home was searched by a local inspector of the Rot-Front Rayon Office and one item—a “personal book”—was confiscated (note 4).

Three more locals were arrested, and in the next days 11 others in nearby Mennonite villages. These men together with two arrested a few days earlier were transported from their local cell in Waldheim, Molotschna to the city of Dnepropetrovsk, 175 kilometres north, via Melitopol.

November 30 to December 3: Paperwork was created for each case with upwards of 30 pages per file, including a largely falsified confession (Q & A)—written in someone else's hand. The shaky signature on the bottom of most pages—my grandfather's file for example—suggest they signed under duress. The torture inflicted in these larger regional prisons is well documented (note 5).

December 3: These 27 men, together with two other Mennonites were tried by the NKVD troika (tribunal) in Dnepropetrovsk.

The charge laid against each was the same: “conducted counter-revolutionary nationalist propaganda”—a criminal offence under Article 54-10 of the Ukrainian Soviet Criminal Code. By 1937, the article had come to include a broad range of activities which might have a counter-revolutionary motive (note 6). Each of these men was found guilty.

December 11: All but three were executed by shooting in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. Three were given arguably more lenient, 10-year sentences. One of those died in prison on September 14, 1942 (no place given), and another died in a correctional labour camp in north-eastern Siberia on April 30, 1942.

Meanwhile on December 3 with a large empty jail cell in Waldheim, Molotschna, the Black Raven had made its rounds again with 34 more arrests, and each under the same charge. The men in this group came from 20 different villages all situated in the eastern half of the Molotschna.

Almost all of the ministers were long exiled or killed; churches had been shuttered four to five years earlier.

In recent years, a number of voices have cautioned against the use of the “martyr” category for telling the Mennonite story generally and this one in particular. The arrests and death arose from multiple factors, mostly political. Specifically, they were ethnic "Germans” who lived too close to the USSR’s western borders.

Yet from the Soviet perspective, Mennonites were certainly among the most radical in their attachments to anti-Soviet values, most unresponsive or opposed to the new worldview—despite many exceptions—and they stubbornly identified with their extensive web of international connections (note 7).

The Soviets equated their high religiosity and strict adherence to Christian precepts generally with their cultural Teutonic (German) background (note 8) and saw those “cultural” characteristics as evidence of their flagrant, collective counter-revolutionary disposition.

In 1937, Naum Turbovsky and my grandfather Franz Bräul were both forty-one years old. Both were raised in a closely-knit, religious-ethnic community in Ukraine—Bräul a German Mennonite, Turbovsky a Jew. Both remembered life before the Revolution and both were common people. In 1918, Turbovsky fought in the Red Army against Denikin’s forces, and Bräul was accused of taking up arms with the White Army and Denikin. Both apparently fought against the anarchist Nestor Makhno. Both came from a large family, and each had siblings in North America.

While there is so much more to process and write, minimally, perhaps, we can agree that Anabaptist-Mennonite history cannot be written without the name Naum Turbovsky, the executioner of Dnepropetrovsk. The task is not to forget, but also to forgive—lest we become bitter.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

For a larger reflection on these events, see: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "A new examination of the 'Great Terror' in Molotschna, 1937-38," Mennonite Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (2021), 415-458, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/bitstream/handle/20.500.12730/1571/Neufeldt-Fast_Arnold_2022a.pdf.

See also related posts: https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/purge-sampler-arrests-of-kliewer.html

Note 1: Dmitry Voltchek, “Лично расстрелял 2100 человек. История палача и его жертвы” [Personally shot 2,100 People. The Story of the Executioner and his Victims]. Радио Свобода [Radio Liberty]. https://www.svoboda.org/a/29591642.html. Cf. also Turbovsky’s complete NKVD/ KGB file (Ukrainian): https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/%D0%A2%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%83%D0%BC_%D0%A6%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87; and https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w4-z93FqafQhogV9qATactGjP1rrszeH.

Note 2: Peter Letkemann, “Mennonites in the Soviet Inferno, 1929–1941,” Mennonite Historian 24, no. 4 (1998) 7. More recent documents indicate 1,575,000 people were arrested and sentenced in the Great Terror of 1937–38, of which 800,000 were executed (Nicholas Wert, “Mechanism of a Mass Crime: The Great Terror in the Soviet Union,” in The Spector of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003] 217f.).

Note 3Rehabilitated History: Zaporizhia Region. Books I–VI (Zaporizhia: Dniprovskij Metalurg, 2004–2013) [РЕАБІЛІТОВАНІ ІСТОРІЄЮ: Запорізька область], http://www.reabit.org.ua/books/zp/See the Mennonite extraction list: "Verbannte Mennoniten im Gebiet Saporoshje," https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/Sapor.pdf.

Note 4: “Search Record,” in "Case no. 314: On Accusation of Bräul, Franz Heinrichovich with Crime Stipulated in Article 54-10 of the Criminal Code of Ukrainian SSR,” People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Department of National Security. From State Archives of the Zaporizhzhia Region, Collection 5747, Inventory 3, File 4595. Translation by Olga Shmakina. In author’s possession.

Note 5: Cf. esp. Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Note 6: Sarah Davies, “The Crime of Anti-Soviet Agitation in the Soviet Union in the 1930s,” Cahiers du monde russe 9, 1–2 (1998) 149–167.

Note 7: See for example an assessment and report of the “Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine” in May 1925," in John B. Toews and Paul Toews, eds., Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage in Ukraine (1922–1927). Mennonite and Soviet Documents, translated by J. B. Toews, O. Shmakina, and W. Regehr (Fresno, CA: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 2011) 269-271, https://archive.org/details/unionofcitizenso0000unse.

Note 8: A. A. Herman, “Repression as an integral part of the Bolshevik policy regime,” Symposium on Repression against Russian Germans in the Soviet Union in the Context of the Soviet National Policy, Moscow, http://www.memo.ru/history/nem.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "The Executioner of Dnepropetrovsk, 1937-38," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-executioner-of-dnepropetrovsk-1937.html.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Vaccinations in Chortitza and Molotschna, beginning in 1804

Vaccination lists for Chortitza Mennonite children in 1809 and 1814 were published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic with little curiosity ( note 1 ). However during the 2020-22 pandemic and in a context in which some refused to vaccinate for religious belief, the historic data took on new significance. Ancestors of some of the more conservative Russian Mennonite groups—like the Reinländer or the Bergthalers or the adult children of land delegate Jacob Höppner—were in fact vaccinating their infants and toddlers against small pox over two hundred years ago ( note 2 ). Also before the current pandemic Ukrainian historian Dmytro Myeshkov brought to light other archival materials on Mennonites and vaccination. The material below is my summary and translation of the relevant pages of Myeshkov’s massive 2008 volume on Black Sea German and their Worlds, 1781 to 1871 (German only; note 3 ). Myeshkov confirms that Chortitza was already immunizing its children in 1804 when their District Offic...

"A Small Town near Auschwitz” – Chortitza Mennonite Refugee/ Resettlement Camps

Simple proximity to a place of horrors does not equal knowledge or complicity. Many Gnadenfeld-area Mennonite refugees were, for example, temporarily housed 20 km. away from the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp where 15-year-old Anne Frank died ultimately of typhus ( note 1 ). The day after liberation by British troops on April 15, 1945, camp survivors began to flow through neighbouring villages. “What a sight they were! They had been tortured and starved, and were swollen from lack of food. … We could hardly believe that the glorious country of Germany could commit such crimes against people,” Susanna Toews wrote ( note 2 ). My mother was only seven, but she remembers overhearing shocking descriptions given by their host family’s teenaged girls forced by the British to clean some of the camp buses. What about the much larger death camp at Auschwitz? There is a book entitled: A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. It is about an administrator living near the ...

“Operation Chortitza” (Part II) – Resettler Camps in Danzig-West Prussia, 1943-44

Waldemar Janzen, my former German professor and advisee, turned eleven years old in 1943. He and his mother and 3,900 others from Chortitza and Rosenthal (Ukraine) were evacuated west to the ethnic German resettler camps in Gau Danzig-West Prussia in October that year (see Part I; note 1 ). Years later Janzen could still recall much from this childhood experience—including the impact of the visit by Professor Benjamin H. Unruh a few weeks after their arrival. “He was a man who had extended much help to his fellow Mennonites ever since they began to emigrate from Russia during the 1920s” ( note 2 ). Unruh was a father-figure to his people, and his arrival at their camp in West Prussia signaled to the evacuees that they were in good hands ( note 3 ). Unruh’s impact on 7,000 other Chortitza District villagers in Upper Silesia would be the same some weeks later ( note 4 ). Surprisingly Unruh’s West Prussian camps visit left an equally indelible impression on the Gau’s Operations Commande...

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...

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 ...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 1 (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 accuarte and carefully considered. ~ANF American Mennonite leaders who supported Trump will be responding to the election results in the near future. Sometimes a template or sample conference address helps to formulate one’s own text. To that end I offer the following. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mennonites in Germany sent official greetings by telegram: “The Conference of the East and West Prussian Mennonites meeting today at Tiegenhagen in the Free City of Danzig are deeply grateful for the tremendous uprising ( Erhebung ) that God has given our people ( Volk ) through the vigor and action of [unclear], and promise our cooperation in the construction of our Fatherland, true to the Gospel motto of [our founder Menno Simons], ‘For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.’” ( Note 1 ) Hitler responded in a letter...

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 ...

Sesquicentennial: Proclamation of Universal Military Service Manifesto, January 1, 1874

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago Tsar Alexander II proclaimed a new universal military service requirement into law, which—despite the promises of his predecesors—included Russia’s Mennonites. This act fundamentally changed the course of the Russian Mennonite story, and resulted in the emigration of some 17,000 Mennonites. The Russian government’s intentions in this regard were first reported in newspapers in November 1870 ( note 1 ) and later confirmed by Senator Evgenii von Hahn, former President of the Guardianship Committee ( note 2 ). Some Russian Mennonite leaders were soon corresponding with American counterparts on the possibility of mass migration ( note 3 ). Despite painful internal differences in the Mennonite community, between 1871 and Fall 1873 they put up a united front with five joint delegations to St. Petersburg and Yalta to petition for a Mennonite exemption. While the delegations were well received and some options could be discussed with ministers of the Crown, ...

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...

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...