History of the Russian Mennonites

Johann Jantzen was born in 1823 in Neuteichsdorfsfeld, West Prussia, resided in Neuendorf near Danzig, and migrated late to Russia (1869), then Central Asia, and finally in 1884 to Nebraska, USA. He died in 1903. Decades later his descendants translated his diary of notable annual highlights, entitled: Accounts of various Experiences in Life. A Diary begun in the Year 1839 ( note 1 ). The little West Prussian villages he names regularly are familiar place to many with Russian Mennonite family history: Schönau, Neu Münsterberg, Schönsee, Lakendorf, Neuteicherwalde, etc. While most Russian Mennonite families left Prussia much earlier than Jantzen, his diary offers a picture of the typical rhythm of life that Mennonites lived in West Prussia over generations. It also offers something I did not expect. The revolutions across Europe in 1848 had a local impact which he mentions, and he gives us a hint as to the other political highlights and episodes of civil unrest that were on the mind

After 35,000 Mennonite were evacuated from Ukraine in 1943-44, they were all brought to German-annexed Poland where after a few months they were naturalized as German citizens. This process included racial and genetic-biological assessment by so-called race experts of the Immigration Central Office (EWZ). Nazi Germany was especially interested in their “Nordic blood purity,” absence of mixed marriages, racial fecundity and their long commitment to German language and culture while living in the east ( note 1 ). The naturalization process for Mennonites was almost always unobjectionable, even hundreds with “Jewish names” like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Sarah were “strongly encouraged” to officially adopt Germanic names ( note 2 ). In 1956 Gerhard J. Klassen wrote to the Canadian Mennonitische Rundschau recalling his close call with death at a Nazi-SS run resettler camp in April 1944 at Hermannsbad, Warthegau ( note 3 , today Ciechocinek, Poland). And he also noted the experienc

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