Franz Bräul Jr., 1922-1954. Death in Soviet Gulag

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 to find my mother and siblings and tell them that I died.”

In 1956 this friend inquired by a family near the prison (many Russo-Germans had been forcibly settled in that region) if they knew anyone with the name “Bräul”. They did not, but nonetheless he gave them a slip of paper with the notice of Franz’s death before leaving for Germany.

Sometime later a Mennonite woman named Maria Duerksen came from a neighbouring village to visit this family. A child was playing with a box of papers. Maria Duerksen happened to glance down at one of the papers and said, “Where did you get this from? I know him, I went to school with him!” She had been in school with Franz in Marienthal many years earlier.

A small miracle? What are the chances!

She took that paper with her and could eventually contact a Marienthal family in British Columbia, Canada. My mother and grandmother arrived from Paraguay to Canada in 1955; in 1957 they received a letter from that B.C. family telling my Oma that they had received a note from this former Marienthaler in the USSR indicating that Franz had died. My uncle Walter remembered that when the news came “it was so sad – as if he had just died.” Unfortunately, there is no picture of Franz as a teenager or adult, but there is this fragmentary story.

Apparently he was captured by the Americans, was handed over to the Soviets and then sent to a Siberian POW forced labour camp.

The extremely harsh and brutal conditions of the gulags are well-documented. In the German military Franz was trained as a medic with skills to aid, heal and comfort others. Perhaps he was able to help other POWs who shared his horrible fate. Thankfully in prison he had a friend who clearly cared for him and his memory.

Otherwise we know nothing about these nine years as a POW; perhaps over time more information may be forthcoming.

My mother was 15 years younger than her brother Franz; he was the oldest and she the youngest (b. 1937).

In early Fall of 1944, Franz’s division was active in the Germanic Siebenbürger Sachsen region (Transylvania) of Romania where the Red Army was making significant in-roads. During this time he sent his little sister (my mother) the postcard below, “zum Angedenken,” that is, to remember him.

Their cousin Aron Bräul who was in the same unit recalled the care he received from Franz for his shrapnel wounds. Franz received the “Iron Cross” for outstanding bravery above and beyond the call of duty because he pulled his wounded commanding officer out of the line of fire; he also received the “War Merit Cross” for outstanding and exceptional medical service (note 1).

Because he saved the life of his commanding officer, Franz was awarded a special three-day leave of absence to visit his family in the latter half of 1944. Only a few hours after Franz’s visit had ended joy turned to grief: an express letter arrived at his mother’s home sent from the front from brother Heinrich (also in the same unit) warning Franz not to return to their last posting because the Soviet army had advanced. The warning was too late and Franz’s train had left. My grandmother was devastated.

From a military dispatch we know that on September 27, 1944, Franz was wounded in Lechnitz (Lechinta), Romania on his right knee and lower leg by an explosive missile fragment. Ten days earlier on September 17, 1944 this ethnic-German village (about 400 kilometers east of Budapest) was evacuated by the German military due to the rapidly advancing Red Army. The dispatch notes that Franz remained with his unit.

In those weeks Soviet forces roared through Romania to the Hungarian border (note 2). In Budapest Franz’s division was involved in extremely heavy fighting. On February 11, 1945, the division was wholly destroyed.

The Molotschna cavalry regiment of which my uncle Franz Bräul, his brother Heinrich and cousin Aron had been members was partially disbanded in April 1944 upon arrival in German-annexed Poland. One hundred and eighty were selected from this number to be sent to Warsaw and to become part of the cavalry division “Florian Geyer”. The division had three regiments and each regiment had six squadrons.

From the military dispatch we know that Franz had been a member of the “2nd Squadron Armoured Vehicle Reconnaissance Unit No. 8,” attached to the “8th Cavalry-Division Florian Geyer” (note 3). There was a certain irony for Mennonite boys to be placed in the “Florian Geyer” division; Geyer was a radical leader during the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation who joined with Thomas Müntzer (note 4)—an early Anabaptists!—to fight for more than just clerical reforms. Some leaders like Menno Simons refused to take up arms; Florian Geyer however established a cavalry division to fight on the side of the peasants.

Reconnaissance (or “scouting”) units rarely engaged in open battle but operated ahead of the main division—sometimes twenty to forty kilometres into “enemy territory”—to collect data and information to determine the actions and intensions of the opposing army. Their goal was to remain undetected and thus avoid any contact with the “enemy”. “Mostly the cars were well camouflaged and used all available natural cover” (note 5). Soon Franz was promoted to the rank of “Storm-trooper.”

We do not know exactly how he was captured. Isaac Regehr, one of the Molotschna soldiers in the same division who survived the war, does tell briefly how the American troops delivered as many 18,000 prisoners to the Soviets in that area. Regehr recalled that the Soviet guards demanded that all Russian-born “traitors who had fought in the German army were to rise … . Some eighteen men rose to their feet [Regehr remained seated] … . By the end of the day the ‘traitors’ were shot” (note 6).

Similarly Eduard Reimer of the same regiment wrote that by many accounts the fate of German POWs in the Soviet Union was worse than death, especially for those born in the east like Franz. “Those who finally did fall into the hands of the victorious Soviets had to empty the cup of suffering to the very dregs. Merciless beatings and in many instances a cruel death was their lot” (note 7).

Though the description of Franz’s war years are the most detailed in his life story, they are only three years, from age twenty to twenty-three. It would be misguided to glorify these years, as adventuresome as they were. 

Franz Bräul Jr. was born at the height of the 1922 famine in Molotschna—saved by MCC aid—, survived the famine of 1932, and died of starvation at the age thirty-two. Franz lived his whole life enmeshed in the inhospitable webs spun by Hitler and Stalin, and was directly damaged, drawn into, and ultimately destroyed by their schemes.

Eduard Reimer described his generation as “the Lost Generation.” Franz’s life and finally his death in a Soviet gulag sadly embodied this descriptor.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: From the Deutsche Dienststelle für die Benachrichtigung der nächsten Angehörigen von Gefallenen der ehemaligen deutschen Wehrmacht, Berlin, Germany regarding an inquiry about Franz Bräul (File: VI111 Bräul, Franz, Fritz; 10.09.1922) to Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, dated Feb. 22, 2008.

Note 2: For a detailed first-hand account by a fellow Mennonite soldier, cf. Eduard Allert [pseud., Abram Reimer], “The Lost Generation,” The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), ch. 6 (“In Hungary”).

Note 3: A short book with pictures has been published recently on this division: Charles Trang, Florian Geyer Division (Heimdal, 2001).

Note 4: Cf. GAMEO.org and Wikipedia on Thomas Müntzer and Florian Geyer.

Note 5: Cited in Bryan Perret, German Armoured Cars and Reconnaissance Half-Tracks 1939-45 (Osprey New Vanguard, September 1999).

Note 6: Isaac Regehr, in Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering, edited by Harry Loewen (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2000), 111.

Note 7: Allert, “The Lost Generation,” 6f.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Franz Bräul Jr., 1922-1954. Death in Soviet Gulag," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), October 21, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/10/franz-braul-jr-1922-1954-death-in.html.