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.
--
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.
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