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...