History of the Russian Mennonites

My grandmother was four-years old when her parents moved from Petershagen, Molotschna to Schardau in 1908. This story is larger than that of Schardau, but tells how this village and many others in Molotschna were evacuated by Stalin days before the arrival of German troops in 1941. -ANF The bridge across the Dnieper at Chortitza was destroyed by retreating Soviet troops on August 18, 1941 and the hydroelectric dam completed near Einlage in 1932 was also dynamited by NKVD personnel—killing at least 20,000 locals downstream, and forcing the Germans to cross further south at Nikopol. For the next six-and-a-half weeks, the old Mennonite settlement area of Chortitza was continuously shelled by Soviet troops from Zaporozhje on the east side of the river ( note 1 ). The majority of Russian Germans in Crimea and Ukraine paid dearly for Germany’s Blitzkrieg and plans for racially-based population resettlements. As early as August 3, 1941, the Supreme Command of the Soviet Forces received noti...

When thousands of Mennonites were evacuated from Molotschna to German-annexed Poland in 1944, they travelled the final leg by train to Litzmannstadt (Łódź), where they entered the Reich. After delousing and an initial screening, they took the train again to the districts in which they would be settled. Upon arrival the paramilitary SA helped them unload the wagons. Resettlers typically received bread and butter, coffee and a soup, and basic health care from the German Red Cross. Schools, firehalls or warehouses were used for refugees until the quarantine period expired. Their luggage was normally locked up for 21 days for delousing. On Heinrich Himmler’s direct orders, the resettler camps were given the status of “convalescent camps,” which entitled resettlers to twenty percent more rations than average Germans ( note 1 )—and much more than Poles. In the camps the adults and youth were also fed a steady stream of political and racial lectures to fill their time, and provided with nat...

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...