Molotschna Liberation, October 1941

On October 12 and 13, 1941, as many as 10,000 Mennonites at two Molotschna-area train stations--awaiting deportation to Kazakhstan--were liberated by German military and were free to return to their homes (note 1).

Ten days earlier most had been ordered to pack and be ready within two hours to be taken by wagon to the Stulnewo train station (between Hamberg, Klippenfeld and Waldheim) or the station at Nelgovka, east of Franzthal.

Advance German reconnaissance spies were active in the Molotschna villages, some in NKVD (Soviet secret police) uniform seeking hidden Soviet military assets. In the villages men “armed with manure forks and pitchforks,” as well as Russian activists and party members in Gnadenfeld with semi-automatic weapons, for example, were sent out in the early mornings to scout for armed German paratroopers (note 2).

German spy planes also air-dropped leaflets written in both German and Russian: “Jews and Communists, flee! Not one of you will survive. We will find you even in the remotest corner” (note 3). Memoirs recall that trains east were jammed with Jewish families, and a stream of Jewish refugees flowed through the Molotschna as well—“with their possessions piled on their wagons” (note 4).

There they were organized into village groups each large enough to fill a box car. Rumour was that they were to be taken to Kazakhstan or Siberia before the arrival of German troops; some had already left two days earlier.

“We saw hundreds of little groups of people camped on the barren ground. … we dug 6 ft. by 4 ft. by 2ft. deep holes in the still soft soil, using our suitcases or boxes as walls, and blankets or tarps as roofs” (note 5). Rockets lit up the night sky; as they waited at Stulnevo all witnessed an unforgettable day-time aerial “dog fight.”

"The retreating [Soviet] army began to blow up railway tracks. Though pieces of rail, some several feet long, whizzed above and around us, we were uninjured … . All the granaries of wheat were set afire. … A Russian aircraft flew low above our heads and landed a short distance from us. As the plane again took to the air and came flying towards us, we were terrified. … Like bolts of lightening in a clear sky, two German planes suddenly appeared, and the Russian aircraft was sent hurtling to earth. It contained the incendiary bombs which were to destroy us." (Note 6)

Vulnerable and cold, “there was a lot of praying and singing under the open sky with a morning worship service and hymns including ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’ … ‘Out of the depths I cry to Thee,’ and many more” (note 7). Various memoirs recall gratefully that Stulnewo’s stationmaster saved many lives by loading crates instead of people on a few of the trains that stopped; in turn he was later rewarded by the German Wehrmacht with special rations (note 8).

The same was happening at the Nelgovka station with the remaining residents of the south-east corner of Molotschna, including Marienthal and Pordenau (numbers uncertain, but smaller). Again, police on horseback had come to each house, knocked on the window, and told the families to bake and cook and be prepared to evacuate the next evening. “When our wagon train was past the hedge out on the open prairie, a frightening noise roared towards us. They were ‘enemy’ planes swooping over us,” so close that one could “count the pilot’s teeth,” one Marienthaler recalled (note 9).

Here too the first trains were delayed; others did not stop, which meant that evacuees had to wait on the open field for multiple nights. A few found space in an empty grain elevator, but the station master ordered it blown up the next day. “We were in the waiting room … when suddenly a Russian soldier appeared,” Albert Dahl recalled. “And as he walked past he said loudly to himself so that those nearby could understand: ‘Get out of here, this will soon be burning.’ We had hardly reached the fields when everything went up in flames. Cold, wet snow was falling, and we lay there all night.” 

My then four-year-old mother could still recall how her brothers and others gathered the larger pieces of sheet metal for shelter (note 10).The station master approached one of the Marienthal families with a request: “He said he had done us a favour by not stopping that last train because he thought we would rather wait here for the Germans than go East;” he wanted a horse to make his getaway. Another Red Army soldier asked for civilian clothing for his flight (note 11).

Soon after the tracks were bombed, an advance group of three “finely dressed” German soldiers on motorcycles and side-cars arrived—“they looked to us as if they had arrived out of another world—so self-confident,” and they “greeted and addressed us as ‘comrades,’” Marienthaler Albert Dahl recalled (note 12).

The 11th German Army under General-Oberst Erich von Manstein and the Panzer (Tank) Group Kleist surrounded two Russian armies in Molotschna (note 13). According to Horst Gerlach, “dozens” of West Prussian Mennonites were in the 60th Motorized Division and the Panzer Group Kleist, which arrived in the Mennonite areas in 1941 (note 14).

The German victory in the city of Melitopol and Molotschna was completed on Monday, October 6, but it took another week before all would be home.

A German Rear Army Command Division (Korück) was established in Melitopol and was responsible to secure supply routes, pacify the newly occupied territory, and create transit camps for prisoners of war. Its captain Hauptmann Rottendorf ordered that ethnic German mayors be appointed and that the villages and be posted with clear signage as a “German Colony (village).” In Gnadenfeld the military command appointed a mayor who was a "well-known drunkard, illiterate, and a person of weak character”, according to scribe, Jacob Neufeld (note 15).

Rottendorf was concerned with infractions by allied Romanian soldiers, the plundering of factories, warehouses and facilities in towns, and to arrest deserters and “politically unacceptable elements” (note 16). The latter were delivered directly to the S.D. in Melitopol, typically responsible for executions. The predominantly Mennonite village of Lichtenau handed over the bookkeeper of their oil press—“presumed to be a Jew”—to Rottendorf, who on the same day turned over 75 Jews to the S.D. (note 17).

On October 11, some 2,000 Jews were killed in Melitopol (note 18).

Soon those who had dug tank traps west of the Dnieper returned home. “[M]any walked barefooted; others wrapped rags around their feet to ease some of the soreness and keep them warm. As they followed the German army they begged for food from the Ukrainian people and slept in straw stacks” (note 19). A group returned to Wernersdorf on October 10; on October 12 Rottendorf found a group of “36 ethnic German refugees” in Gnadenfeld (Bogdanowka) “who had been forced by the Russians to do fortification work near Kachowka and were on their way back to their home villages” (note 20).

My mother’s oldest brothers Franz and Heinrich Bräul were among those who found their way back to Marienthal during these days. Mennonites were in shock and overwhelmed, while tremendously happy to be free fom the NKVD and Stalin's Bolshevik reign of terror. 

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Otto Dirks, Memories that Shape the Future: An Autobiography (Self-Published; no date), 23.

Note 2: Horst Gerlach, Die Rußlandmennoniten: Ein Volk unterwegs, vol. 1, 5th edition (Kirchheimbolanden, Pfalz: Self-published, 2008), 89; Gerhard Lohrenz, ed., Lose Blätter, III. Teil (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1976), 128; Anne Giesbrecht Fast and Hans Fast, Two Lives, One Faith. The Memoirs of Anne Giesbrecht Fast and Hans Fast (Waterloo, ON: Self-published, 2006), 59.

Note 3: Johann Rehan, “Etwas aus der Vergangenheit” 1992/1995. Copy of hand-written memoir in author’s possession. Rehan was living in Schardau.

Note 4: Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 37; also Helene Dueck, Durch Trübsal und Not (Winnipeg, MB: Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1995), 35, https://archive.org/details/durch-truebsal-und-not/mode/2up.

Note 5: Dirks, Memories that Shape the Future, 21.

Note 6: Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 17f.; cf. also Jacob A. Neufeld, Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, edited by H. L. Dyck, translated by H. L. Dyck and S. Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 214f.

Note 7: A. A. Toews, ed., Mennonitische Märtyrer der jüngsten Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart, vol. 2: Der große Leidensweg (North Clearbrook, BC: Self-published, 1954), 189; also reported in Gerhard Lohrenz, ed., Lose Blätter, vol. 3 (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1976), 128f.

Note 8: Horst Gerlach, Die Rußlandmennoniten: Ein Volk unterwegs, vol. 1, 5th edition (Kirchheimbolanden (Pfalz): Self-published, 2008), 90; Elisabeth Heidebrecht Steffen, “Wernersdorf.” Mennonitische Geschichte und Ahnenforschung, 1, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/kb/wernd7.pdf; Dirks, Memories that Shape the Future, 22.

Note 9: Selma Kornelsen Hooge and Anna Goossen Kornelsen, Life Before Canada (Abbotsford, BC: Self-published, 2018), 50.

Note 10: Hooge and Kornelsen tell the same story (Life Before Canada, 52).

Note 11: Hooge and Kornelsen, Life Before Canada, 52.

Note 12: Albert Dahl, interview with author, July 26, 2017.

Note 13: For a map of military movements with commentary, cf. Gerlach, Rußlandmennoniten I, 89.

Note 14: Gerlach, Rußlandmennoniten I, 90.

Note 15: J. Neufeld, Path of Thorns, 220.

Note 16: Rottendorf, Korück 553, Sonder-Befehl, October 17, 1941, Bundesarchiv RH 23/78, no. 30 [60], https://invenio.bundesarchiv.de/invenio/direktlink/f45f2bf5-8a76-4fb2-b85a-e36717dd72af/. Cf. related memoirs, e.g., Hooge and Kornelsen, Life Before Canada, 54.

Note 17: Rottendorf, Korück 553, Telegram to Nikolajew, October 16, 1941, Bundesarchiv RH 23/78, no. 37 [74].

Note 18: Alexander Kruglov, “Jewish losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, edited by Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 255.

Note 19: Helmut Huebert, Molotschna Historical Atlas (Winnipeg, MB: Springfield, 2003), 181, https://archive.org/details/MolotschnaHistoricalAtlasOCRopt. See also account by Anna Braun who with two other women and six men moved 700 head of cattle east across the Dnieper from Neu-Chortitza, but also escaped back (“Neu-Chortitza [Baratov] Dorfbericht,” 10, in Stumpp, “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp,” BA R6/623, Mappe 184, May 1942, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Rayon%3A+Sofijevka%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Neu-Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Nowo-Chortitza+&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%823_510-593%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=0).

Note 20: Rottendorf, Kontrolle des Strassenverkehrs, October 13, 1941, BA RH 23/78, no. 55b [111]; Steffen, “Wernersdorf,” 2.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Molotschna Liberation, October 1941," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), November 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/11/molotschna-liberation-october-1941.html.