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.

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 3: Rehabilitated 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.

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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.

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