History of the Russian Mennonites

Tens of thousands of Mennonites died prematurely in the 1930s and -40s under Stalin and Hitler. It is a loss to families and the larger Mennonite community not to record or learn from their stories. Without the dignity of a funeral or obituary, the risk that they become “dust in the wind” is real. This is an obituary for my uncle. His is a difficult story; though he died a soldier around his twenty-first birthday, I want to piece that together with a few more episodes of his life in such a way, that his story can spur further thought about the larger Mennonite story in the twentieth century. Heinrich Franz Bräul was born in 1924 in Marienthal, Molotschna. He was six when their small farm was collectivized. Their church in Pordenau—literally across the ditch that separated their yard from the neighbouring village—was shuttered in 1933 when he was nine. His younger brother Walter recalled their father’s determination to teach the children some scripture in the home on Sundays, but the ...

The quasi-scientific, Nazi-German racial hocus-pocus about “blood” and the Reich ’s tireless effort to quantify percentages of “Nordic” or “Slavic” or “Jewish” blood in order to separate and rank individuals and racial groups hierarchically, and in turn to deny basic human rights to most--justified by some bizarre correlation to “racial” resilience, health, cultural vitality, and achievement by some mythical German racial corpus--is nothing short of repulsive. These theories had horrific outcomes. Yet somehow it was compelling in the 1930s and 1940s to think, speak, and act in this way. Mennonites were part of that story—one which is not so easily unraveled. At best this post can add one or two new elements to that story. I begin in Canada . In two issues of the Winnipeg-based Mennonitische Volkswarte in 1936 Heinrich Hajo Schröder—born in Halbstadt and a one-time student of Benjamin H. Unruh—offered extensive explanations of Aryanism and its supporting racial "theory"—e...

My grandmother Helene Bräul (age 42) with my mother and her sister crossed into The Netherlands on February 21, 1946. My uncle Walter and his friends—seventeen-year-old decommissioned German soldiers at war's end—crossed a few days later. Peter J. Dyck, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Europe Director offered a 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 ) Dutch Menno...

My mother’s brother Peter Bräul was seventeen years-old on the 1,100-kilometre refugee trek out of Ukraine, 1943-44. After two months in German-annexed Poland (Warthegau) and as a newly naturalized German citizen, Peter now eighteen eighteen-years-old, volunteered as a Black Sea ethnic German for the Waffen-SS. Peter Dueck of Margenau, Molotschna was the same age as Peter Bräul and recalled this “remarkable incident” at boot camp in Warthegau. “A German officer questioned the young recruits: ‘And who of you would not serve the Third Reich voluntarily?’ I think it was a shock for all of us. Out of 500 only 3 men lifted their hand. They were asked to come to the front. Officer: ‘And what reason do you have not to serve the Third Reich voluntarily? Their answer was: ‘We as Mennonites, we believe in nonresistance.’ Officer: ‘We have no use for such people. We all defend our Reich.’ They were led out to the back door and to this day I would still like to know what was their verdict.” (...

Katharina Esau offered me a home away from home when I was a student in Germany in the 1980s. The Soviet Union released her and her family in 1972. Käthe Heinrichs—her maiden name (b. Aug. 18, 1928)—and my Uncle Walter Bräul were classmates in Gnadenfeld during Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and experienced the Gnadenfeld group “trek” as 15-year-olds together. Before she passed, she wrote her story ( note 1 )—and I had opportunity to interview my uncle. Käthe and Walter both arrived in Warthegau—German annexed Poland—in March 1944 ( note 2 ), and the Reich had a plan for their lives. In February 1944, the Governor of Warthegau ordered the Hitler Youth (HJ) organization to “care for Black Sea German youth” ( note 3 ). Youth were examined for the Hitler Youth, but also for suitability for elite tracks like the one-year Landjahr (farm year and service) program. The highly politicized training of the Landjahr was available for young people in Hitler Youth and its counterpart the League of G...