History of the Russian Mennonites

Recently I noted to someone born in the Soviet Union that my uncle starved to death in a Soviet gulag after the war. She immediately asked how I knew this. Good question! It is a sad but also surprising, almost unbelievable, story. In 1946, prisoners of war (POWs) and interned German civilians occupied 267 forced labour camps, 392 labour battalions and 178 “special hospitals” over the whole territory of the Soviet Union. The forced labour of Germans was considered by the USSR to be part of the German war reparations for damage inflicted during the war. A decade later with the political transition from Stalin to Khrushchev, the remaining POW labour camps were closed and the last German POWs were released. My mother’s brother Franz Bräul Jr. had been imprisoned in one of these camps after being captured in German uniform in 1945. Just before my uncle died (1954), he instructed his fellow POW Fritz (Franz) Müller, “If you are able to write to your relatives, then please ask them t

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

In October 1943, some 3,900 Mennonite resettlers from “Operation Chortitza” entered the Gau of Danzig-West Prussia. They were transported by train via Litzmannstadt and brought to temporary camps in Neustadt (Danzig), Preußisch Stargard (Konradstein), Konitz, Kulm on the Vistula, Thorn and some smaller localities ( note 1 ). The Gau received over 11,000 resettlers from the German-occupied east zones in 1943. Before October some 3,000 were transferred from these temporary camps for permanent resettlement in order to make room for "Operation Chortitza" ( note 2 ). By January 1, 1944 there were 5,473 resettlers in the Danzig-West Prussian camps (majority Mennonite); one month later that number had almost doubled ( note 3 ). "Operation Chortitza" as it was dubbed was part of a much larger movement “welcoming” hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans “back home” after generations in the east. Hitler’s larger plan was to reorganize peoples in Europe by race, to separate

Little surprises me when I write about Russian Mennonites caught “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” A 1944 letter I found recently from Mennonite Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh however offers a new and disturbing snapshot of this leader and the Russian Mennonite community under the umbrella of the Third Reich ( note 1 ). It is not too much to say that this larger-than-life leader stands at the centre of almost every significant Russian Mennonite story between 1915 and 1945, including community decisions during the revolution, the formation of MCC, the emigration of 20,000 Russländer, the miracle release of thousands gathered at the gates of Moscow, 1929-30, the creation of the Paraguayan Fernheim Colony, famine relief in the 1930s, the Canadian debates about identity and worldview in Der Bote and the Rundschau papers, and almost everything that happened with Mennonites in Ukraine from 1941 to 1945. His importance for the Mennonite story cannot be understated. Even for many contempor

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