History of the Russian Mennonites

They walked in one end as Soviet citizens, proceeded through a few wagons, and emerged out the other end as naturalized citizens of the German Reich . Below is a newspaper article marking the completion of the registration and naturalization of some 35,000 Mennonite resettlers—plus other Black Sea Germans. By July 1944 all the treks or transports had arrived from the Black Sea region into Greater Germany [most in Warthegau], and almost all were now registered for a more permanent settlement situation in German-annexed Poland—or so they thought. The translation is important because it offers a clear account of the process of naturalization, application and assessment. While not all Mennonites evacuated from Ukraine 1943-44 were naturalized in one of the visiting mobile Immigration Central Office trains, most were. The article and photos fill a gap in our knowledge of that experience in Nazi Germany and how naturalization was approached and experienced by some 30,000-plus Mennonites.

She was only six, but my mother Kathe Bräul’s most vivid recollections of the trek out of Molotschna in 1943 are the lice-infested barns that they slept in—an experience shared by thousands of Mennonites. Katie Friesen recalled how her mother and friends tried to sleep sitting on pails with their skirts pulled up “so that the parasites at least could not crawl up on them” ( note 1 ). “We were full of lice, in our hair and up and down the seams of all our clothes,” a slightly older neighbour in Marienthal—Albert Dahl—recalled when my mother and I met him for coffee a few years ago. There were many indignities suffered by those evacuated from Ukraine, and lice are part of that story. But so is the memory of public nakedness when they were deloused upon entry into “Greater Germany” at Litzmannstadt ( Lodz ). All were required to be disinfected and deloused in large facilities outside the city at the rail junction in Görnau (Zgierz) or Pobianitze. About 1,600 persons could be deloused in