History of the Russian Mennonites

Post-war Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union feared repatriation to the USSR—for some, more than death itself. Soviet officers had full access to refugee camps throughout all of Germany. Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) was collecting its “lost sheep” as well. Peter J. Dyck, MCC director, offered this first assessment of the Mennonite tragedy under Stalin to his Canadian counterparts: “They are truly like sheep in a wilderness and the women of 36 years look much more like 50 years. They told me that if I thought that I and my parents had witnessed terrible times in Russia during the revolution and the subsequent years of famine they could assure me that that was mild in comparison to what followed since 1927 when we left Russia. They told me one tragedy after another and it appears, if what they say is to be taken as representing the whole of the country and our people there and not only a section, that most of our Mennonites have perished.”  ( Note 1 ) To quickly remov...

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) had hoped to get their refugees into The Netherlands for months. With the support of the Dutch Mennonites in 1946, MCC officials worked to convince the new post-war Dutch government and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) that these refugees were not technically Soviet Germans or Volksdeutsche (ethnic naturalized Germans), but of Dutch origin. MCC's C.F. Klassen argued, not without stretching the facts, that these Mennonites only became German citizens during the war under duress, and that “naturalization had been conducted in a coercive environment” ( note 1 ). MCC’s “Dutch strategy” was shorthand for a complex story. As one refugee remembered: “We were [naturalized] German citizens, but … MCC claimed that we were refugees and that German citizenship papers had been forced on us, and on that basis they considered us ‘ Staatenlos ’, without a country. We all came in under that” ( note 2 ). This was the narrative that was used later i...