History of the Russian Mennonites

Some 35,000 Mennonites evacuated from Ukraine by the retreating Reich German military in 1943-44 applied for naturalization /citizenship once in German-annexed Poland (mostly Warthegau). The applications made through the “EWZ” ( Einwandererzentralstelle ) are easy to attain today ( note 1 ). Much information may be new and useful for families; however just as much is disturbing, including the racial assessments, categorization, and separation of so-called “A-cases” from “O-cases.” What are they?  The EWZ files contain the application for naturalization made by the head of a family unit, the certificate of naturalization, and sometimes correspondence/ claims regarding property and possessions left behind in Ukraine. Each form contains information about the applicant’s spouse and children, as well as a genealogy listing parents and grandparents, and those of their spouse as well; racial background is calculated by percentage (!). Applicants were asked about their citizenship, their e...

Or: How my Aunt Sara became an “Else” I remember as a young adult hearing for the first time that my Aunt Sara’s name was officially “Else”. I was stunned to hear that story. No one had ever told us that! After the “trek” out of Ukraine and upon naturalization as a German citizen in 1944, my 13-year-old Aunt Sara’s name was changed to “Else.” There are many similar examples. Another Mennonite Sara changed her “Jewish-sounding” name to “Agatha;” one Mennonite boy with the name David was given “the sturdy German” name “Albert;” an “Isaak” took the name “Georg;” and an “Abraham” the name “Gerhard” ( note 1 ). Hundreds of Mennonites (minimally) had their “Old Testament names” changed upon naturalization. With the annexation of western Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany began to remove Poles and Jews and to settle the new territory of Warthegau with "Germans". Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had said: “I want to create a blond province here” ( note 2 ). In 1943-44 most of the 35,0...

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...