History of the Russian Mennonites

This month (April 2023) we celebrated my aunt’s 97th birthday—Adina Neufeld Bräul. Queen Elizabeth II and Aunt Adina were born within hours of each other, April 20-21, 1926. She once told me—in somewhat different words—that this makes her wonder about God’s providence … In 1944 in German-annexed Poland, my 16-year-old uncle Walter Bräul was required to report for military service. His first thought: no good soldier should be without a girlfriend! Before leaving for training, he asked one of the girls from "the trek" on a date to see a movie in Exin. Seven years later they would marry in Paraguay. Adina and her mother and sister were on the same trek or group (Gnadenfeld/ Molotschna) out of Ukraine as Walter and my mother (in the 2023 photo). Adina’s most terrible memory of the trek was when their wagon almost tipped over into a deep ravine. She was 17—a year older than Walter—and it was Walter’s 17-year-old brother Peter who literally jumped from his wagon to physically stop

These photos are from German propaganda material filmed in Molotschna (called "Halbstadt") in 1943—just a few months before the evacuation from Ukraine and trek to German-annexed Poland (Warthegau). Not all of the film is of the Mennonite settlement, however, but much of it is. Below are some frames from the film. The edited shorter version is of higher quality and designed as propaganda to be consumed by Germans in the Reich and to secure their approval .  The scenes are marked by cleanliness, orderliness and discipline. There is economic activity, a model Kindergarten, and always happy ethnic German people in the newly occupied territories. A predominantly Mennonite Cavalry Regiment (Waffen-SS) guarding Ukrainian and Russian workers is also highlighted. This hard to see and disturbing. Anything that may have been good here for Mennonites meant enslavement, hunger and death for untold numbers of others. Two versions of the film are available: Shorter (edited for l

In the 1820s, Jacob Bräul (b. 1803) was a young teacher in Einlage, Chortitza. He had been a pupil here under the well-known teacher Heinrich Heese, his predecessor. Because a teacher’s salary was generally between very low and tolerable—30 rubles a year plus some produce was the average—Bräul spent the summers as clerk and bookkeeper at the municipal ferry that crossed the Dnieper River from Einlage (Kitschkas) to Alexandrovsk / Zaporoschje. The crossing formed part of the mail and stagecoach route to Crimea, and the ferry was large enough to carry horses and wagons. Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had been a “well-ordered police state” ( note 1 ) with a passport system to collect information and control movement within the empire; at the Einlage ferry-crossing passport numbers were recorded and runaway serfs and occasional scuffles reported. Here Bräul had opportunity to develop his Russian fluency. The crossing was constructed in 1801 by the government and given to the

Molotschna Mennonite District Chairman David Friesen was invited to represent the Mennonites at the coronation of Tsar Alexander II in 1856. The extravagant pictures below are from the official coronation album ( note 1 ). I have translated the courtly letter of congratulations on behalf of “the entire Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia” signed by all nine church elders (but not Kleine Gemeinde) and two district chairmen ( note 2 ).  "Most serene and supremely powerful Emperor! Most Gracious Emperor and Lord! May your Imperial Majesty, Most Gracious One, be willing to accept our heartfelt congratulations and thankful feelings, which we are so bold to lay down before the feet of the Most High's illustrious throne in all humility, All Gracious One. In the happy knowledge that we, the whole Mennonite Brotherhood in southern Russia, with sincere hearts and filled with thanksgiving, are true subjects of your Imperial Majesty, we gladly follow with all our soul the inner drive of

Danzig-West Prussian Mennonites generously embraced and cared for the religious and political challenges faced by Mennonites on the “trek” out of Ukraine (1943-44). A year later the Prussians would also flee the advancing Soviet armies, losing all. Memoirs capture that trauma—including multiple family suicides with weapon or poison ( note 1 ). After the war many settled in Uruguay and later in Canada as well. Siegfried Bartel—a Mennonite Prussian military captain—became an evangelist for non-resistance in his later years ( note 2 ).  More recently historian Colin Neufeldt has explored his mother’s family story in an essay on “Mennonite collaboration with Nazism.” His “Ratzlaff family” was from the Mennonite community of Deutsch-Wymyschle (annexed Poland). Writing was difficult “especially when your family is on the wrong side of history and actively collaborated with the Nazis,” Neufeldt confessed ( note 3 ). These Mennonites in Poland were among the first to be “liberated” by the Germ

For Mennonites the dramatic and massive invasion of USSR by German forces in Summer/Fall 1941 meant liberation from Soviet state terror and answer to prayer. Nazi Germany spared neither money nor personnel to free, feed, cloth, protect, heal and educate the Soviet Union’s ethnic Germans—and Mennonites in particular. Mennonite memoirs, village reports and EWZ (naturalization applications) autobiographies are consistent with praise for the German Reich and its leader. From the highest levels, goodwill, care and patience towards ethnic Germans was policy. Reichsführer -SS Heinrich Himmler was also named by Hitler as Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood . This authorized Himmler and his para-military SS to oversee and coordinate the Germanization, resettlements and population transfers which came with the invasion and partial annexation of Poland (Warthegau), and later occupation plans for parts of Ukraine and Russia. The VoMi ( Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle )

The Molotschna Mennonite Colony was established in 1803; 140 years later its villages were evacuated by retreating German armies. A map of the larger German operation of 1943 and the various "Trecks" is attached. The tens of thousands of evacuees included some 35,000 Mennonites. Nazi Germany had utterly failed Ukrainians, but continued to have plans for their "ethnic Germans" in the east. On Sept. 8, 1943 , the Red Army successfully took Donetsk (Stalino), 230 km east of Molotschna. The next day, S.S. administrators gave orders that every Molotschna family should load one wagon with their possessions and prepare for an orderly evacuation. Hitler was intent on holding Crimea, and sought to set up a defensive line from Zaporizhzhia to Melitopol and south to the Sea of Azov. Evacuation plans east of this line were in place since late June—initially to be resettled “somewhere” west of the Dnieper; on Aug. 17 first steps were taken to move 8,000 hospital beds west o

A collection of simple artefacts like shoes can open windows onto the life and story of a people. Below are a few observations about shoes and boots, or the lack thereof, and their connection to the social and cultural history of Russian Mennonites. Curiously Mennonites arrived in New Russia shoe poor in 1789, and were evacuated as shoe poor in 1943 as when their ancestors arrived--and there are many stories in between. The poverty of the first Flemish elder in Chortitza Bernhard Penner was so great that he had only his home-made Bastelschuhe in which to serve the Lord’s Supper. “[Consequently] four of the participating brethren banded together to buy him a pair of boots which one of the [Land] delegates, Bartsch, made for him. The poor community desired with all its heart to partake of the holy sacrament, but when they remembered the solemnity of these occasions in their former homeland, where they dressed in their Sunday best, there was loud sobbing.” ( Note 1 ) In the 1802 C