History of the Russian Mennonites

Alfred Rosenberg, the German Reich Minister for the Occupied East Territories, visited the predominantly Mennonite settlement area of Chortitza on June 27, 1942; photos and a video capture that day ( note 1 ). Twice Rosenberg also visited the Mennonite German settlements of Halbstadt/Prischib ( note 2 )—though that area was under special oversight of his some-time rival Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. A warm welcome to a very powerful high-ranking visitor with a sympathetic disposition to the repression of Mennonites under Stalin does not tell us much about the Mennonites who gathered in Chortitza to greet Rosenberg. But the Nazi world in all of its dimensions—a comprehensive worldview presented in press and schooling; totalitarian organization of communities; brutally enforced racial policy; centrality of military and its requirements and orders—engulfed the Mennonites fully for three-and-a-half years and with such an intensity that survivors rarely spoke of it afterwards. For next...

The 1943 Chortitza district photographs of a Mennonite village schoolmaster and students bring that world to life in a vivid manner ( note 1 ). Today, archival documents allow us to give background to those photographs—some of which are troubling—and to piece together a fuller story. During German occupation, Johann (Hans) P. Epp was schoolmaster in the Mennonite village of Blumengart, 5 km east of Nieder Chortitza and the Dnjepr River; in April of 1943 Epp was 59 years-old ( note 2 ). According to the 1942 Village Report completed for Commando Dr. Stumpp, Blumengart had 62 families. Each of the families had a typical Mennonite last name with 40 adult males and 73 adult females, and 143 youth under eighteen. Of the 62 families, twenty-one were without a “male head;” in 1937-38, twenty village men were arrested and either executed or exiled, and another seven men were missing since hostilities with Germany began in June 1941 ( note 3 ). The Blumengart village report was written wi...

Mother’s Day ( Muttertag ) was first mentioned in the international Mennonitische Rundschau in May 1912. By 1936, the Rundschau published a Mother’s Day poem by Hitler for its largely Canadian Mennonite readership ( note 1 ). Five years later Mennonites in Ukraine were drawn into the cult-like veneration of the German mother. With falling birth rates in Germany in the 1920s, National Socialism co-opted marriage and motherhood politically. Mother’s Day became a German national holiday in 1934, and any private family purposes of the day were subordinated to the political purposes of Party and nation: “The German people will acknowledge their indebtedness to the racially pure, biologically sound and fecund German family (zur artreinen, erbgesunden und kinderreichen deutschen Familie) … and will accordingly observe the day as a day of honour to the German mother as the preserver and caregiver of a proud progeny (Hüterin und Pflegerin eines stolzen Nachwuchses) . Our schoolchildren sho...

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 ...