History of the Russian Mennonites

They walked in one end as Soviet citizens, proceeded through a few wagons, and emerged out the other end as naturalized citizens of the German Reich . Below is a newspaper article marking the completion of the registration and naturalization of some 35,000 Mennonite resettlers—plus other Black Sea Germans. By July 1944 all the treks or transports had arrived from the Black Sea region into Greater Germany [most in Warthegau], and almost all were now registered for a more permanent settlement situation in German-annexed Poland—or so they thought. The translation is important because it offers a clear account of the process of naturalization, application and assessment. While not all Mennonites evacuated from Ukraine 1943-44 were naturalized in one of the visiting mobile Immigration Central Office trains, most were. The article and photos fill a gap in our knowledge of that experience in Nazi Germany and how naturalization was approached and experienced by some 30,000-plus Mennonites.

She was only six, but my mother Kathe Bräul’s most vivid recollections of the trek out of Molotschna in 1943 are the lice-infested barns that they slept in—an experience shared by thousands of Mennonites. Katie Friesen recalled how her mother and friends tried to sleep sitting on pails with their skirts pulled up “so that the parasites at least could not crawl up on them” ( note 1 ). “We were full of lice, in our hair and up and down the seams of all our clothes,” a slightly older neighbour in Marienthal—Albert Dahl—recalled when my mother and I met him for coffee a few years ago. There were many indignities suffered by those evacuated from Ukraine, and lice are part of that story. But so is the memory of public nakedness when they were deloused upon entry into “Greater Germany” at Litzmannstadt ( Lodz ). All were required to be disinfected and deloused in large facilities outside the city at the rail junction in Görnau (Zgierz) or Pobianitze. About 1,600 persons could be deloused in

Recently I noted to someone born in the Soviet Union that my uncle starved to death in a Soviet gulag after the war. She immediately asked how I knew this. Good question! It is a sad but also surprising, almost unbelievable, story. In 1946, prisoners of war (POWs) and interned German civilians occupied 267 forced labour camps, 392 labour battalions and 178 “special hospitals” over the whole territory of the Soviet Union. The forced labour of Germans was considered by the USSR to be part of the German war reparations for damage inflicted during the war. A decade later with the political transition from Stalin to Khrushchev, the remaining POW labour camps were closed and the last German POWs were released. My mother’s brother Franz Bräul Jr. had been imprisoned in one of these camps after being captured in German uniform in 1945. Just before my uncle died (1954), he instructed his fellow POW Fritz (Franz) Müller, “If you are able to write to your relatives, then please ask them t

Waldemar Janzen, my former German professor and advisee, turned eleven years old in 1943. He and his mother and 3,900 others from Chortitza and Rosenthal (Ukraine) were evacuated west to the ethnic German resettler camps in Gau Danzig-West Prussia in October that year (see Part I; note 1 ). Years later Janzen could still recall much from this childhood experience—including the impact of the visit by Professor Benjamin H. Unruh a few weeks after their arrival. “He was a man who had extended much help to his fellow Mennonites ever since they began to emigrate from Russia during the 1920s” ( note 2 ). Unruh was a father-figure to his people, and his arrival at their camp in West Prussia signaled to the evacuees that they were in good hands ( note 3 ). Unruh’s impact on 7,000 other Chortitza District villagers in Upper Silesia would be the same some weeks later ( note 4 ). Surprisingly Unruh’s West Prussian camps visit left an equally indelible impression on the Gau’s Operations Commande

In October 1943, some 3,900 Mennonite resettlers from “Operation Chortitza” entered the Gau of Danzig-West Prussia. They were transported by train via Litzmannstadt and brought to temporary camps in Neustadt (Danzig), Preußisch Stargard (Konradstein), Konitz, Kulm on the Vistula, Thorn and some smaller localities ( note 1 ). The Gau received over 11,000 resettlers from the German-occupied east zones in 1943. Before October some 3,000 were transferred from these temporary camps for permanent resettlement in order to make room for "Operation Chortitza" ( note 2 ). By January 1, 1944 there were 5,473 resettlers in the Danzig-West Prussian camps (majority Mennonite); one month later that number had almost doubled ( note 3 ). "Operation Chortitza" as it was dubbed was part of a much larger movement “welcoming” hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans “back home” after generations in the east. Hitler’s larger plan was to reorganize peoples in Europe by race, to separate

Little surprises me when I write about Russian Mennonites caught “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” A 1944 letter I found recently from Mennonite Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh however offers a new and disturbing snapshot of this leader and the Russian Mennonite community under the umbrella of the Third Reich ( note 1 ). It is not too much to say that this larger-than-life leader stands at the centre of almost every significant Russian Mennonite story between 1915 and 1945, including community decisions during the revolution, the formation of MCC, the emigration of 20,000 Russländer, the miracle release of thousands gathered at the gates of Moscow, 1929-30, the creation of the Paraguayan Fernheim Colony, famine relief in the 1930s, the Canadian debates about identity and worldview in Der Bote and the Rundschau papers, and almost everything that happened with Mennonites in Ukraine from 1941 to 1945. His importance for the Mennonite story cannot be understated. Even for many contempor