“In our hearts we felt the sentence of death”: ethnic German recollections of mass violence in the USSR, 1928–48

Journal of Genocide Research ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20 “In our hearts we felt the sentence of death”: ethnic German recollections of mass violence in the USSR, 1928–48 J. Otto Pohl , Eric J. Schmaltz & Ronald J. Vossler To cite this article: J. Otto Pohl , Eric J. Schmaltz & Ronald J. Vossler (2009) “In our hearts we felt the sentence of death”: ethnic German recollections of mass violence in the USSR, 1928–48, Journal of Genocide Research, 11:2-3, 323-354, DOI: 10.1080/14623520903119035 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520903119035 Published online: 18 Nov 2010. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 111 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjgr20 Download by: [University of Ghana] Date: 14 September 2015, At: 14:27 Journal of Genocide Research (2009), 11(2–3), June –September, 323–354 “In our hearts we felt the sentence of death”: ethnic German recollections of mass violence in the USSR, 1928–48 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL, ERIC J. SCHMALTZ and RONALD J. VOSSLER This article seeks to examine the mass violence unleashed by Joseph Stalin and his regime against the USSR’s ethnic Germans. It endeavors to comprehend how Soviet policies of repression progressed and intensified to the extreme detriment of this nationality group. It covers the tumultuous period between 1928 and 1948, when Soviet policies overall coarsened considerably, from the implementation of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan to the government decree banishing several Soviet peoples in their virtual entirety, including the ethnic Germans, to “eternal” exile east of the Urals. This process shifted from class-based reasons to ethnic ones as the 1930s progressed. The increasingly racialized nature of Soviet mass violence targeted the ethnic Germans as a large diaspora community ethnically linked to Nazi Germany, a country perceived as an ideological and military threat. During Stalin’s war against the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s, ethnic German villagers at times felt compelled to conduct mass protests and even revolts against the authorities. Meanwhile, both an emerging ethnic German elite and ordinary German farmers and workers wrote about worsening conditions under Stalin. Besides petitioning the Soviet government, they delivered letters and various writings to friends and relatives by way of a vast underground network at home and abroad, and their relatives sometimes answered in return. A growing body of Soviet archival records and academic literature treating the Stalinist period has generally validated and expanded upon what the ethnic group as early as the 1920s and 1930s had exposed about mass terror under Stalin’s regime. Introduction Materials published from various Soviet archives over the past two decades indicate that following the early 1930s, as Joseph Stalin consolidated his hold over the country, the regime engaged in acts of mass repression and violence against various categories of people. This article seeks to examine the mass violence unleashed by Stalin and his regime against the USSR’s ethnic Germans. It endeavors to comprehend how Soviet policies of repression progressed and intensified to the extreme detriment of this nationality group. To this end, it covers the tumultuous period between 1928 and 1948, when Soviet policies overall coarsened considerably, from the implementation of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan to the ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/09/02–30323-32 # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14623520903119035 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. government decree banishing several Soviet peoples in their virtual entirety, including the ethnic Germans, to “eternal” exile east of the Urals. From 1928 to 1948, the Soviet regime increasingly singled out the ethnic Germans as it steadily escalated the repression and violence against them. This process shifted from class-based reasons to ethnic ones as the 1930s progressed. The Soviet government eventually imposed legal disabilities upon almost the entire ethnic German population living in the USSR. Starting in 1930, a disproportionately large number of ethnic Germans faced deportation to special settlements as kulaks. In 1932 and 1933, a disproportionate number of them died in the Ukrainian terror-famine. In 1935 and 1936, the government forcibly removed a great number of them in Ukraine away from the Polish border on the basis of their nationality. In 1937 and 1938, Soviet authorities conducted the “German Operation” which sought to eliminate German spies in the USSR through arrest and execution. Ethnic Germans comprised almost 70 percent of those convicted during this operation.1 In 1941, the Stalin regime responded to the Nazi invasion by forcibly deporting the entire ethnic German population under its control west of the Urals to Siberia and Kazakhstan and placing them under special settlement restrictions. Special settlers could not leave their assigned place of exile without the permission of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). The NKVD closely monitored the special settlers and controlled their housing and work arrangements. Additional forced migrations and mobilization of much of the adult German population into labor detachments collectively referred to by survivors as the labor army occurred in 1942 and 1943. As a result of these removals and dispersals under poor conditions, deaths outnumbered births in the group until 1948. On November 26 of that year, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet declared the exile of the Germans and other deported nationalities to be in effect “forever.” This banishment represented the culmination of Stalinist repression against Soviet national minorities. This interdisciplinary study incorporates a wide array of published primary and secondary sources, including contemporaneous accounts, memoir literature, survivor and eyewitness interviews, Soviet-era official documents and police reports collected from archives in Moscow, Odessa, Almaty and other regions of the former Soviet Union, and recent academic studies published in Russian, German and English. The synthesis of these sources offers a compelling comparison of Soviet mass violence from the perpetrators’ policy vantage point “from above” and victims’ perceptions “from below.” In addition, this study comprehends the series of repressive actions against various Soviet nationality groups, including the ethnic Germans, in the context of legal scholar and activist Raphael Lemkin’s 1944 original conception of genocide as violence of armed groups against the unarmed. Diplomats and scholars have long tended to restrict Lemkin’s initial definition to the simple physical and biological destruction of certain groups. He, however, properly understood that the act of genocide includes both the physical and cultural destruction of particular targets as viable social entities. On April 26, 1991, the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) acknowledged that Stalin had waged a 324 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE policy of “genocide” (genotsid) and “slander” (kleveta) against the various “repressed and deported peoples,” including the ethnic Germans.2 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 Soviet policies “from above”: Stalinist mass persecution of ethnic Germans in the USSR Stalinist policies did not target or affect all nationality groups equally. Certain nationality groups suffered disproportionately from state actions. In particular, a number of extra-territorial groups living as diasporas in the Soviet Union found themselves subject to severe repression during this period because of their ancestral ties with foreign states. These increasingly vulnerable Soviet nationalities included the ethnic Greeks, Finns, Koreans, Poles, and Germans, among others. The ethnic Germans in fact represented the largest nationality in the USSR descended from immigrant-colonists and associated with a foreign state. Already in the late 1920s, the ethnic Germans started to experience a disparate impact from repressive Soviet policies. Although this disparity had a variety of causes, anti-German prejudices must be taken into account as one of the most important factors. A disproportionate number of ethnic Germans suffered from dekulakization and deportation to special settlements during the forced collectivization of agriculture from 1928 to 1931. Though this campaign of violent population transfer was based primarily upon class criteria, it already contained elements of ethnic repression. In 1929 and 1930, many Soviet officials in Ukraine expressed the opinion that the entire ethnic German population of the republic consisted of kulaks.3 This conflation of Germans with kulaks led to the overrepresentation of its members among those subjected to internal exile in the Soviet Union as special settlers during this time. In 1930 and 1931, the Stalin regime forcibly deported a recorded 1,803,392 persons branded as “kulaks” to special settlement villages.4 The 1926 Soviet census counted just over 147,000,000 people.5 Thus a little over 1.2 percent of the total Soviet population was deported to special settlements during this time. In contrast, Viktor Krieger estimates the number of ethnic Germans deported as “kulaks” from 1928 to 1932 to be around 50,000.6 The registered ethnic German population of the USSR in 1926 numbered only 1,238,549.7 Thus during dekulakization, the Stalin regime deported an estimated 4 percent of the ethnic German population or more than three times the percentage of the whole Soviet population treated in this manner. The ethnic Germans were not unique in being the victims of such attitudes and actions. Other diaspora nationalities, most notably the ethnic Polish population in the USSR, also suffered from similar treatment.8 However, ethnic Germans formed one of the largest and oldest diaspora nationalities in the USSR. Hence, Soviet repression against diaspora nationalities in general possessed a strong anti-German character. The same ethnic prejudices against Germans and other nationalities that resurfaced in the USSR during the collectivization and dekulakization campaigns also contributed to the brutality of the grain requisition in 1932. Soviet policies ensured that the poor harvests of 1931 and 1932 deteriorated into a famine. Not only did 325 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. the Soviet government refuse foreign famine relief, but it continued to export grain and sealed off the internal border between Russia and Ukraine to prevent people in Ukraine from receiving food.9 The 1932 –33 famine disproportionately affected the ethnic German population of the USSR. It struck those regions such as Ukraine, the Volga, the North Caucasus, the Crimea and Kazakhstan that held the largest ethnic German populations. Krieger conservatively estimates that around 150,000 ethnic Germans perished during these two years from hungerrelated causes.10 This figure represents around 12 percent of the ethnic German population recorded in the 1926 Soviet census.11 He arrives at this calculation by extrapolating from the official number of registered famine deaths in 1932 and 1933 in the Volga German ASSR, 45,300.12 He does this kind of calculation because no official figures can be used as a proxy for ethnic Germans in Ukraine. This figure is also quite likely to be an underestimate. A large number of deaths in the Volga region as elsewhere in the USSR were not officially registered during these two years. Furthermore, it is probable that the famine deaths in Ukraine and the North Caucasus were higher among the group than in the Volga. The Soviet government sealed off both of these regions on January 22, 1933 in order to prevent people from fleeing the famine to other regions of the USSR.13 Indeed, out of the more than seven million estimated famine-related deaths in the USSR during 1932 and 1933, only 366,000 occurred in the Volga region.14 Thus the majority of ethnic German famine deaths during these years took place in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. In contrast, the total number of people to perish from famine-related causes in the USSR during this time is estimated by the same author to be 7.2 million.15 This figure is slightly less than 5 percent of the population counted in the 1926 census. The mortality rate among ethnic Germans during 1932 to 1933 therefore exceeded that of the general Soviet population by a factor of more than two. Though the Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Crimean Tatars suffered proportionately equal or greater losses from the famine than did the ethnic Germans, other nationalities such as Russians and Jews did not. The factors of location, urbanization and close association with the Soviet regime shielded these nationalities from the famine’s worst effects. The regime left the burden of the famine to fall upon nationalities tied to traditional rural ways of life, which had long resisted Russification and Sovietization efforts.16 The Soviet repression against diaspora nationalities became even more focused in 1935 and 1936. During these years, the Stalin regime engaged in a number of mass deportations of ethnic Germans, Finns, Poles and other extraterritorial nationalities along its international borders. In June 1936, the NKVD deported 26,778 ethnic Germans and Poles to special settlements in northern Kazakhstan. In September of that year, they moved another 12,975 ethnic Germans and Poles to these settlements.17 These deportations targeted those ethnic Germans and Poles living on the Soviet borders as unreliable nationalities and potential security threats, thus forcibly removing them to Kazakhstan where they suffered under the same legal restrictions as deported kulaks. 326 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE The border cleansing operations of 1935 and 1936 shaded into the national operations of the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. These state efforts targeted alleged spies working for specific foreign governments. Fearful of the activities of hostile intelligence agencies on Soviet soil, the NKVD conducted a whole series of sweeping operations, including a “Polish Operation,” a “Finnish Operation,” a “Latvian Operation,” and a “German Operation.” These special actions in particular targeted the various diaspora communities in the USSR descended from these countries’ emigrants. Many years later, a number of ethnic German survivors from this period can still recall the NKVD’s black-painted trucks or old wagons used to pick up political prisoners at night in the German villages. They called these dark vehicles “Black Marias” or “Black Crows” (Chorny Vorony in Russian).18 The “German Operation” lasted from July 25, 1937 to December 15, 1938, resulting in 55,005 convictions and 41,898 death sentences.19 It is impossible to calculate exactly how many of these convictions consisted of Soviet citizens of German nationality. The NKVD only started recording the nationality of people arrested and convicted on May 16, 1938 after police chief Nikolai Yezhov issued an order requiring that this data be included in official reports.20 Prior to this day, local NKVD officials did not routinely collect and submit this information to their superiors. Thus no statistical records pertaining to the nationality of people arrested by the NKVD exist prior to May 1938. Police records on the nationality of those convicted during the “German Operation” only appear for the period between September 15 and December 15, 1938. During this time, NKVD troikas (three-judge courts) convicted 24,471 people, of whom 16,316 or 66.7 percent were ethnic Germans.21 N. Okhotin and A. Roginsky estimate the number of ethnic Germans arrested and convicted during the “German Operation” at between 37,700 and 38,300.22 Assuming the rate of executions remained the same, then the number of ethnic Germans executed during the “German Operation” numbered between 28,700 and 29,160. In all, Okhotin and Roginsky estimate that the NKVD arrested and convicted between 69,000 and 73,000 ethnic Germans in 1937 and 1938, while executing between 53,000 and 56,000 out of an official population of only 1,151,602.23 Thus the security organs arrested between 5.99 percent and 6.34 percent and shot between 4.6 percent and 4.86 percent of all ethnic Germans in the USSR. In contrast, the figures for the Soviet Union as a whole during these two years were 0.8 percent convicted and 0.4 percent executed.24 The execution rate for ethnic Germans during these two years thus exceeded that of the USSR as a whole by a factor of over eleven times. Despite the rising state violence against ethnic Germans in the USSR during the 1930s, deportation, incarceration and execution only affected a minority of their population. Everything changed for the group as a whole during the summer and fall of 1941, however. In response to the June 22, 1941 Nazi attack on the USSR, the Stalin regime ordered the mass deportation of ethnic Germans to areas east of the Urals. The NKVD forcibly deported the majority of the ethnic German population from their homelands in European areas of the USSR to Kazakhstan and Siberia, placing them under special settlement restrictions. 327 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. The Soviet government justified the deportation of the ethnic Germans as a prophylactic measure to prevent them from collaborating with the advancing Nazi forces. Specifically, the August 28, 1941 decree authorizing the deportation of the Volga Germans is framed as a preventive rather than a punitive measure.25 Despite Soviet fears of potential widespread support of the German invasion by ethnic Germans living in the Volga region and elsewhere, little evidence points to ethnic Germans in the USSR holding any predisposition to side with Berlin against the Stalin regime prior to the deportations. In the months between the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, and August 10, 1941, the NKVD scoured the Volga German ASSR looking for spies and diversionists. Out of an official ethnic German population of 366,68526 persons as of January 1939, authorities found only 145 people of suspect loyalty.27 The ethnic Germans, particularly those living along the Volga, had no political connections with Germany. Insofar as the population had any specific political orientations during the 1930s, they tended to be either non-political or supportive of the Soviet regime. Some ethnic Germans, mostly in occupied Ukraine, were indeed complicit to varying degrees with the Nazi regime after the fact of invasion, but little or no evidence indicates active and widespread complicity before that time. Indeed, many Soviet citizens of different national backgrounds, and not just ethnic Germans, at least initially welcomed the Nazi invaders as their liberators from Stalin’s yoke, only later better discerning the true nature and extent of the New Order’s economic exploitation and racial hierarchy. After the invasion, to be sure, Himmler’s SS Special Command Russia formed police units from the manpower of the ethnic German villages in Ukraine. SS commanders even paid visits to homes of ethnic German villagers in order to convince young men to join. These self-protection squads often enough became willing accomplices between late 1941 and early 1943 in the murder of 70,000 to 90,000 Jews and other so-called “undesirables” in the region.28 Police units from the ethnic German villages of Rastadt, München, Carteica, Lichtenfeld, and others were active and directly involved in the murder of Jews and burning their bodies.29 Ethnic German motivations under Nazi rule varied, however, whether it was their traditional anti-Semitic beliefs,30 the payback syndrome against Jews supposedly being equal to communists,31 the peer pressure of their armed units and neighbors, the greed to collect Jewish clothing and property,32 the belief that human life had simply lost its value and meaning,33 or some combination of the above.34 However, Nazi brutality could also blur distinctions between ethnic Germans and other groups in the area. For instance, a small number of ethnic Germans faced execution squads for questionable political affiliations, marriage to Jews, and so forth. In one recorded incident, the SS shot an ethnic German kolkhoz chairman in the village of Kandel along the Dniester River in August 1941, though this unfortunate communist had only just returned home a few months earlier after serving a six-year prison sentence in a Soviet labor camp.35 In contrast to Soviet claims of treason during the 1940s, a large number of ethnic Germans had already joined such Soviet institutions of power as the Communist Party, Komsomol (Communist Youth League), and Red Army during the 1930s. 328 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE In 1949, a recount of surviving special settlers showed a total of 33,615 ethnic Germans who had previously served in the Red Army.36 During the same recount, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) noted that 2,415 ethnic German special settlers had membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and 5,801 in the Komsomol.37 The total of ethnic Germans in the Red Army, Communist Party and Komsomol before 1941 was undoubtedly much higher, as large numbers of these people perished in the war because of deprivations during deportation, exile and mobilization in the labor army. The loyal service of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to the Soviet state at the time provides a strong counter-argument to the Stalinist charge that the ethnic group had any predisposition toward treason. Indeed, the Soviet government on August 29, 1964 officially admitted that the accusations of mass treason leveled against the ethnic Germans during World War II were completely without basis.38 Despite this formal admission, the Soviet government still never fully rehabilitated its ethnic Germans. The first deportations took place in Crimea on August 15, 1941 and involved 53,000 ethnic Germans.39 The NKVD hastily relocated this contingent to Ordzhonikidze (Stavropol’) Krai and Rostov Oblast. They could only bring with them 50 kg of luggage per person, and they received no receipts for abandoned property.40 Later on, from September 15 to October 10, 1941, the NKVD transported the Crimean Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia along with the other ethnic Germans living in Ordzhonikidze Krai and Rostov Oblast.41 Shortly thereafter, as the Soviet frontlines deteriorated, the Stalin regime ordered the forcible removal of the Volga Germans on August 28, 1941.42 The Soviet government made no exemptions from deportation on the basis of proven political loyalty. The instructions to the NKVD for the deportations explicitly called for the inclusion of members of the Communist Party, Komsomol and families of Red Army soldiers and officers fighting at the front. The Soviet government only exempted from deportation mixed families where the wife was German and the husband non-German.43 Only about 1,000 ethnic German women married to Russian men avoided deportation from the Volga under this exemption.44 The NKVD forced the remainder of the Volga German population onto trains bound for Kazakhstan and Siberia. According to one NKVD report, this wave of deportees consisted of 371,164 persons from the Volga German ASSR, 26,245 from Stalingrad Oblast, and 46,706 from Saratov Oblast for a total of 444,115 Volga Germans.45 This operation lasted from September 3 –20, 1941 and involved 1,550 NKVD operatives, 12,150 Red Army soldiers, and 3,250 members of the regular police.46 The Soviet government then in quick succession deported ethnic Germans from the regions of Moscow, Rostov, Krasnodar, Ordzhnonikidze (Stavropol’), the North Caucasian autonomies, eastern Ukraine, the Transcaucasian republics, Kubyshev (Samara), Kalmykia, Gorky and Voronezh.47 One NKVD report lists the total number resettled between September 1941 and January 1942 at 799,459.48 Thus during this time, the NKVD rounded up and forcibly removed almost the entire ethnic German population of the European areas of the USSR still under Moscow’s control to Siberia and Kazakhstan. 329 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. The long journey into internal exile took place under extremely primitive conditions. The NKVD forcibly loaded the deportees into train wagons not intended for human transportation. The recommended number of people per car was 40, but many train echelons had an average of 42 or 43 people per car.49 People had only a hole or a bucket to use as a toilet. These unsanitary conditions led to the spread of gastro-intestinal and other diseases among the deportees.50 The officials in charge of the deportation trains also often ignored instructions regarding the provision of food and water to the deportees.51 The lack of food and water further weakened the already frail health of many ethnic Germans in transit. The average trip lasted around two weeks, but some train echelons took over three weeks to arrive at their new destinations.52 During this time, official Soviet reports note that a number of ethnic Germans died before reaching their dropoff points.53 The passage by rail to Siberia and Kazakhstan greatly traumatized those who physically survived this ordeal. The Stalin regime confined this deported population to the Asian areas of the USSR and placed them under a series of legal restrictions known as the special settlement regime. Here the NKVD subjected them to forced labor and failed to provide them with adequate housing, food, clothing and medical care. As a result, a rather large number died from malnutrition, disease, exposure and exhaustion. The NKVD also forced most of the adult population capable of physical labor to secondary deportations to work in the fishing, construction, lumber, coal mining, oil extraction and munitions industries. Dangerous, poor and unsanitary living and work conditions for the mobilized ethnic Germans significantly increased the group’s mortality rate. The NKVD at first assigned the deported ethnic Germans to collective farms in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Already on November 25, 1941, a recorded 396,093 ethnic Germans had arrived in Siberia and 315,627 in Kazakhstan.54 By January 1, 1942, the number of ethnic German deportees in Kazakhstan had risen to 385,785.55 On August 28, 1941, the same day the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans, NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria issued a decree “On Organizing the Special Settlement Section of the NKVD USSR.”56 This decree prohibited the ethnic German deportees from leaving their assigned settlements without special permission from the NKVD. The security organs not only severely restricted the special settlers’ mobility, they also controlled their housing and labor arrangements, keeping them under tight surveillance.57 The ethnic German special settlers thus lacked most of the basic rights guaranteed to other Soviet citizens. Extreme deprivation awaited the ethnic German special settlers in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Severe housing shortages prevailed throughout the region. In Altai Krai, 94,799 ethnic German special settlers had arrived by November 25, 1941.58 The local authorities, however, could only provide 10,202 houses for 34,586 or 36.48 percent of the deportees.59 At first, the authorities resorted to housing many ethnic German special settlers in Siberia in barracks, dugouts and hostels.60 Subsequently, they placed many of them in crowded houses and apartments to live with local families.61 In Kazakhstan, similar difficult conditions 330 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE prevailed. The regime placed most of these ethnic Germans in the homes of Kazakh collective farmers under terribly compact conditions.62 In South Kazakhstan Oblast, many ethnic German deportees lived in simple earth huts.63 This substandard shelter contributed much to the ill health of the special settlers by promoting the spread of disease and failing to protect them against the harsh natural elements. In 1942 and 1943, the Stalin regime subjected the ethnic Germans to additional forced dispersal and mobilization for forced labor. On January 6, 1942, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK) ordered the mobilization of ethnic Germans into the fishing industry of the Enisei, Ob, Indirka and Lena Rivers in northern Siberia with Resolution 19ss.64 In accordance with this decree, the NKVD again forcibly relocated 66,763 ethnic Germans from southern to northern Siberia by October 1943.65 Further mobilizations brought the total number of ethnic Germans sent to work in fishing camps in the Arctic region of Siberia’s main rivers to over 80,000.66 This secondary displacement of the ethnic group greatly depressed their already miserable material conditions. Ethnic Germans living and working as special settlers in the northern Siberian fishing camps also suffered from extreme climatic conditions, very poor housing, substandard rations, and dangerous work assignments. Most of them lived in primitive mud huts.67 The damp and crowded conditions of these poor shelters greatly contributed to the spread of disease among their inhabitants.68 The authorities exacerbated epidemics among these special settlers by neglecting to take any measures to quarantine the ill.69 Many ethnic Germans endured these conditions for as many as four years.70 They lacked lighting, heat, sanitation and even a dry floor. Like other ethnic German special settlers, those relocated to fishing camps faced tremendous difficulties acquiring sufficient food to ward off malnutrition. Ethnic Germans working in the fishing trusts received a bread ration of 600 grams a day for fulfilling their assigned quota.71 Many work brigades, however, could not fulfill their quotas and thus received a smaller ration.72 Work assignments consisted of dragging a net in the freezing water of the river to catch fish. The special settlers lacked proper protective clothing and footwear for this work. As a result, many suffered from frostbite and hypothermia.73 Hunger, cold and exhaustion were the daily lot of deportees mobilized into the fishing trusts. Few of the ethnic Germans assigned to this work had any experience in commercial fishing. Moreover, the fishing trusts could discharge the special settlers from their supply rolls, thereby leaving them without any adequate sources of food. On November 1, 1943, the Molchanoskii, Kirovsheinskii and Kolpashev trusts removed 1,502 ethnic Germans from their lists of people to receive bread rations.74 Without these rations, securing food in the sparse environment of northern Siberia proved particularly difficult. The Stalin regime also mobilized most of the able-bodied adult ethnic German population into forced labor detachments to work in the Urals, Kazakhstan, Siberia and other regions during World War II. This system of forced labor went under the name trudarmiia, a contraction of trudovaia armiia or labor 331 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. army.75 The Soviet government at first only conscripted ethnic German men into the labor army, but after October 7, 1942, it included women as well. The labor army units, however, were segregated by sex. The People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO) conscripted ethnic Germans into the labor army in the same manner as it drafted other nationalities into the Red Army. It then turned them over to the NKVD to form labor battalions and detachments.76 In this manner, the authorities managed to condemn hundreds of thousands of people to sentences of forced labor without charging or trying them for any individual crimes.77 Between 1941 and 1946, the Stalin regime inducted a recorded total of 316,600 ethnic German men and women into the labor army.78 Krieger estimates the actual number of this group mobilized into the labor army in these five years to be over 350,000.79 More than 182,000 of these men and women performed their labor army service in Gulag camps under conditions almost identical to that of prisoners.80 The exact number of people to perish in the labor army from hunger, illness, cold and other causes is extremely elusive. The official documents unearthed by A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin show a total of 22,283 (7 percent) deaths among ethnic Germans in the labor army between 1942 and 1944.81 These numbers, however, include no figures for deaths among ethnic German labor army conscripts in NKVD camps in 1943. They also, of course, do not take into account ethnic Germans demobilized from the labor army because of emaciation and who perished shortly after their release.82 Various scholars have estimated the overall number of ethnic Germans to die from their service in the labor army to be much higher than that documented by the Soviet government. Krieger places it at over 70,000, Alfred Eisfeld at around 100,000, and Kazakh historians T.S. Kulbaev and A. Khegai at 118,000.83 At any rate, a large number of ethnic Germans undoubtedly perished in the labor army or shortly after their release as a result of malnutrition and disease without the authorities properly recording the true cause of death. Most ethnic Germans who avoided deportation in 1941, either because of the rapid initial advance of the Wehrmacht or because they were already living in Soviet Asia, also later found themselves placed under special settlement restrictions in 1945 and 1946. Legal circumstances for the ethnic German special settlers also became more restrictive after 1945. The regime systematically reduced the ethnic Germans from the status of a Soviet nation equal with other Soviet nations to a stigmatized source of forced labor. They lost their homelands, their cultural and administrative institutions, their freedom of movement, residency and occupation and even the basic material conditions necessary to guarantee continued physical survival. In 1945 and 1946, the Soviet government expanded the number of ethnic German special settlers in the eastern regions. This sizeable group consisted of repatriates from the west—many of them elderly, women and children, whom the German advance rescued from the NKVD in 1941 and whom the Nazi SS later evacuated to Poland and Germany as the war turned against Hitler in 1943 and 1944. The vast majority of these repatriates had already reached parts of the crumbling Third Reich by the spring of 1945, but American and British 332 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE soldiers under treaty obligations forcibly had to turn over a large number of them from their occupation zones in Germany and Austria to the Soviet forces. For both ideological and economic reasons, the Soviet government claimed these escaped German nationals as Soviet citizens. Only about 70,000 to 80,000 of these refugees were ever permitted to remain in the west after the war.84 Records indicate that the Soviets repatriated 195,191 ethnic Germans from occupied Germany to the USSR.85 These forced repatriations reached a peak in July and August 1945 and greatly declined after March 1946.86 The Soviet government processed all repatriated ethnic Germans through Verification and Filtration Camps (PFLs). After October 11, 1945, all repatriates who had passed through PFLs received the status of special settlers.87 The Soviet Union eventually recovered and placed a total of 203,796 repatriated ethnic Germans under special settlement restrictions between 1945 and 1946, of whom 69,782 or nearly one-third were under age 16.88 The Stalin regime put these new special settlers to work in heavy labor throughout remote regions of the USSR. The Stalin regime divided this postwar contingent of repatriated ethnic Germans into two categories. It initially sent most of those deemed able-bodied to perform tasks such as felling trees, mining ore, repairing ships and manufacturing industrial goods in the Urals, Siberia, the Far North and the Far East. Those deemed unfit for heavy labor in these regions were assigned to work on cotton farms in Tajikistan.89 Official Soviet reports confirm that these special settlers lived under particularly dire conditions. On February 20, 1946, the NKVD reported that in Enisei Raion in Krasnoiarsk Krai the repatriated ethnic Germans only had 1.5 cubic meters of living space per person and that 152 people lived in the basement of the former local church.90 Many repatriated ethnic Germans ended up working in labor camps in Siberia. By October 1, 1948, 48,356 of them worked in labor camps, including 28,431 in the infamous Kolyma gold mines in the extreme northeastern USSR.91 The forced return of ethnic Germans to the USSR after the war predictably ended in the death of many because of poor climatic and living conditions. In Tajikistan, environmental and working conditions for the ethnic German special settlers also failed to meet even minimal standards. A report from the People’s Commissar of Health on January 24, 1946 noted that poor housing, nutrition and sanitation had led to an abnormally high death rate among special settlers in Kurgan-Tiuben Oblast. The regime housed them in buildings with dirt floors and without roofs. It issued the exiles rations of only 200 grams of barley per person each day. Finally, the deportees remained without any soap.92 Before the end of 1948, the number of ethnic Germans in Tajikistan had reached 18,184 people out of a total of 30,630 special settlers in the republic.93Almost all these people lived and worked under wretched conditions on collective farms devoted to the cultivation of cotton. A final category of ethnic Germans whom the Stalin regime placed under special settlement restrictions consisted of those who had lived in Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan and Central Asia before 1941. Between September 18, 1945 and November 6, 1946, the Soviet authorities placed 105,817 out of 209,581 333 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. ethnic Germans living in these areas under special settlement restrictions.94 Almost all those living in Kazakhstan and Central Asia before the war came under special settlement restrictions at this time. This brought the total figure of ethnic German special settlers in the USSR to 1,161,778.95 The imposition of punitive measures upon the large ethnic German populations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan followed Nazi Germany’s defeat, when no possible security concerns could be justified. By 1947, over 90 percent of the ethnic German population in the Soviet Union suffered under special settlement restrictions. The remaining free ethnic German population consisted of 103,764 people not subjected to deportation by the NKVD.96 The vast majority of these people were locals living in eastern regions of the USSR before 1941. The largest concentration lived in Omsk Oblast with 45,255 persons, followed by Altai Krai with 16,437 and Chkalov Oblast with 13,909.97 The reasons for sparing these particular people from the legal limitations of the special settlement regime remain unknown. The Stalin regime further tightened the special settlement restrictions on the remainder of the ethnic German population in the USSR. On November 26, 1948, the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree making permanent the exile of those nationalities deported by Stalin in their entirety as well as those deported from the Baltic states in 1949. The decree applied not only to those special settlers currently alive, but also to all members of the deported nationalities yet to be born. Finally, to enforce this permanent internal exile, the decree imposed a twenty-year sentence of hard labor for all attempts by special settlers to leave their assigned places of residence without NKVD permission. Free citizens caught assisting fugitive special settlers became subject to five years’ imprisonment.98 This decree represented the pinnacle of a long process of restricting the legal rights of ethnic Germans that had begun in the early 1930s. The year 1948 also marked the first occasion when births outnumbered deaths among ethnic German special settlers. The Soviet government, however, did not start recording births and deaths among special settlers until 1945. By this time, a substantial number of ethnic Germans had perished from malnutrition, disease, exposure and exhaustion. Certainly, most of the deaths among ethnic German special settlers occurred between 1941 and 1944. Various NKVD documents give different figures for the number of deaths recorded among the ethnic German special settlers after this date. However, all of these numbers fall between 40,000 to 46,000 for the years 1945 to 1948. Citing unidentified documents (no information other than the TsGAOR (Central Archive of the October Revolution) archive is given, nor does he specify the fond, opis or list where this information is contained), V.N. Zemskov initially noted the figure of 45,275 recorded deaths of ethnic German special settlers up to October 1, 1948.99 It is obvious, however, from an MVD report reproduced by N.F. Bugai regarding the deaths of deported special settlers during the 1940s that the figure first cited by Zemskov does not refer to the total deaths of ethnic German special settlers between 1941 and 1948.100 Rather, the initial Zemskov figures only refer to deaths between 1945 and 1948. The report cited by Bugai notes 334 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE that between 1945 and 1950 the NKVD and MVD recorded a total of 60,655 ethnic German special settler deaths, of which 40,331 took place during the years 1945 to 1948. This document also includes the breakdown of special settler deaths by year. The NKVD and MVD recorded 6,930 deaths versus 1,914 births among the group in 1945, 8,519 deaths and 4,236 births in 1946, and 12,375 deaths and 7,314 births in 1947. Thus during these three years, 27,824 ethnic Germans died as opposed to only 13,464 births, a ratio of over two deaths for every birth. The year 1948 is the first in which births outnumber deaths, with 12,309 recorded deaths versus 17,679 births.101 It is apparent that the recorded NKVD and MVD figures for deaths among ethnic Germans during the 1940s are grossly incomplete. Most notably, no known records of deaths among ethnic German special settlers between the years 1941 and 1944 exist. The official records thus provide only clues, but not definitive answers, to the question of how many ethnic Germans died during the period from 1941 to 1948. Estimates of the total number of ethnic Germans to perish from deportation and exile vary, though they are all quite high. Krieger estimates that a minimum of 70,000 ethnic German special settlers perished in exile between 1941 and 1945, not including at least another 70,000 in the labor army. In all, he places the number of deaths among the group in the USSR resulting from wartime repression at 150,000.102 The Karachai demographer D.M. Ediev calculates the number of excess deaths among ethnic Germans from 1942 to 1952 at 228,000 or 19.17 percent of their total population.103 Gerhard Stricker estimates that the total losses suffered by the ethnic Germans as a result of the deportation, special settlement regime and labor army to be around 300,000.104 Given the paucity of mortality statistics in the special settlements and labor army from 1941 to 1944, it is impossible to present more exact estimates. It remains clear, however, that the human losses inflicted upon the ethnic group during World War II by the Stalin regime were massive. Quite possibly, as many as one out of every four ethnic Germans out of an approximate total of 1.2 million died as a direct result of Soviet government policies from 1941 to 1948. Soviet actions and views “from below”: ethnic Germans experience Stalinism in the USSR Besides Soviet nationality policies “from above,” this critical examination considers Soviet activities and perspectives “from below,” namely those of the German nationality during Stalinism. Over the years, but especially after the Cold War, archival findings have painted a more complicated historical picture about early Soviet life under Lenin and Stalin than is often assumed. As scholar Lynne Viola notes in recent studies based on Soviet archival records, different popular political responses to the Soviet state appeared during the opening phases of the Stalinist era, revealing a wide spectrum of human behavior ranging from complicity to accommodation, subversive acts (passive resistance), violent strikes, and even mass revolts. In some instances, women took the lead in these resistance activities when the male populations had significantly diminished 335 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. under Stalinist deportation and persecution. Contradicting notions that ordinary Soviet citizens, especially those in rural areas, were entirely fatalistic or passive, Viola rightly argues that during the late 1920s and early 1930s, an active resistance movement among farmers across the USSR took place. In other words, a virtual civil war erupted in the countryside between citizens and the state. According to cautious estimates, more than 1,100 Soviet officials were assassinated, more than 13,000 villages witnessed riots, and more than 2.5 million persons—these “peasant rebels,” as she calls them—engaged in myriad forms of opposition to the Soviet regime.105 Armed uprisings and demonstrations already had erupted during the forced grain requisitioning during the Russian Civil War and War Communism eras (1918– 20). During the early phase of the forced collectivization drives in 1929 and 1930, outraged Soviet farmers again reacted bitterly. Rather than lose them to the collectives, many farmers slaughtered their valuable animals. Many also defied the authorities by destroying their seed grain, so that the spring crop might not be planted in 1930. For a brief time, Stalin’s regime was forced to put the brakes on collectivization, but it soon resumed it with particular vengeance, breaking the back of traditional agriculture in the 1930s.106 Like some of their fellow Soviet citizens, a number of ethnic Germans in the USSR also actively resisted Stalinism during this time. For example, in the Kuchurgan (Kutschurgan) Enclave in western Ukraine, the so-called “Women’s Rebellion” erupted in early March 1930, when 500 to 600 ethnic German women from the villages of Kandel, Elsass and Selz demonstrated openly for an entire week against the policy of expropriation of their farms and property. These outspoken women, many of whose fathers, brothers and husbands faced deportation eastward as kulaks, blamed the Soviet regime for the harsh policies and proceeded to reclaim their confiscated farm implements, livestock, and household belongings from the local collectives (kolkhozes). For a brief time, this mass effort led to the kolkhozes ceasing operation.107 In addition, during the early 1930s, residents of the German village Kandel participated in clandestine religious activities with the assistance of the elderly Roman Catholic Bishop Antonius Zerr, a Ukrainian German as well as the longtime head of the expansive Tiraspol Diocese in western Ukraine. Staying at this time at the home of a young widow with her seven children, just as the Soviet persecution of religion intensified, Bishop Zerr continued to ordain young priests while administering to the pastoral needs of the local population in secret. The defiant village, which was predominantly Catholic, attended his funeral in 1934. According to village chroniclers and recently opened Soviet archival records, the Soviet regime regarded this public display of affection for the late bishop as a demonstration of political resistance. According to Odessa police files, the widow who supported the bishop in his dying days was arrested and detained for almost two years. In 1937, she was sentenced to death and shot for her religious dissident activities, one of many millions of victims at the height of Stalin’s Terror.108 In another public incident in the same village enclave, the so-called “Strassburg Class Action” (Strasburgskoye delo) broke out in 1937 and 1938. About 100 males 336 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE from the local villages assembled in Strassburg and were arrested. Since they had earlier supported resistance to Soviet policies, they now received death sentences.109 Peter Goldade recently published a highly detailed compilation of more than 500 pages containing authenticated NKVD records of many of these ethnic German victims from western Ukraine, who fell under the “German Operation.” His book includes translated examples of Soviet interrogations of arrested individuals as well as the entire execution list of about 4,700 ethnic Germans from 1937 to 1938 in the Odessa Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR, including Bishop Zerr’s former caretaker from Kandel.110 During the 1930s, the Soviet regime eventually prevailed in its efforts against the farmers, ultimately crushing open resistance in the countryside. However, other protest alternatives remained for those more outspoken ethnic Germans who still opposed Stalinism. Both an emerging ethnic German elite and ordinary German farmers and workers in the 1930s petitioned Soviet government officials about their growing plight, and they also wrote postcards and letters to family and friends living abroad about worsening conditions under Stalin. Compared with some other Soviet peoples, this ethnic group had already obtained a relatively high degree of literacy by the 1930s. Ethnic Germans eventually lost this status as a result of deportation, dispersal and exile in the following generations.111 Uniquely among Soviet nationalities, literacy in any language fell among ethnic Germans from 1939 to 1989. For instance, the group’s literacy rate in any language across the USSR in 1939 was 93.5 percent.112 By 1989, the literacy rate in any language for ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan (the Soviet republic with the largest German population, as group figures for the USSR as a whole are unavailable) had declined to 91.6 percent.113 In Omsk Oblast, the situation proved even worse with a 1989 literacy rate of 90 percent.114 Between 1939 and 1989, ethnic Germans went from being the sixth most-educated nationality in the USSR to the eighteenth, even falling behind the Chechens, Tajiks and Uzbeks, all nationalities that were more than 95 percent illiterate in 1926.115 Both in real terms and even more strikingly in relative terms the ethnic Germans experienced a decline in literacy as a result of the mass deportations and subsequent discrimination in Soviet public life and institutions. By the time of the last Soviet census in 1989, a slightly smaller percentage of ethnic Germans could read and write than in 1939. Indeed, the 1930s represented the apex of literacy for the USSR’s large ethnic German minority. In the Soviet Union, citizens held the formal right to petition the government. In 1958, Merle Fainsod’s classic study, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, demonstrated that many Soviet citizens of various stripes indeed appealed to the local authorities at this time of tribulation, often as a last resort. The archival records he utilized were made accessible because of the Nazi confiscation of the Smolensk Communist Party archives in mid July 1941. The records offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Stalinist system up to that time, providing a basis for later comparisons with Soviet records in other parts of the country. Though most of the petitions he investigated remained unpublished, his findings revealed that many ordinary people indeed communicated their concerns to the sources of Soviet 337 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. power. Moreover, it appears that the authorities read many of the letters at least in part, as the regime was interested in eliminating certain incidents of abuse, negligence, corruption and inefficiency among Party and government officials. Besides making use of informants, the regime also sought to deflect criticism away from the political center by focusing critical attention on local and district leaders.116 As Fainsod aptly concluded, Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 The [petition] letters provided one of the few direct links which the leadership had with grass-roots experience; the outpourings of the letter-writers and the responses they elicited represented the nearest approximation to a spontaneous dialogue between the leaders and their subjects which the Soviet system afforded.117 Soviet citizens’ frequent use of appeals and petitions suggested their commitment, even under considerable pressures during Stalinism, to work within official, legal channels—to exercise, at least in theory, their rights as responsible members of the socialist community. In the case of the highly literate ethnic Germans, as Goldade documents in considerable detail, family members of individuals arrested, exiled or executed during Stalin’s rule continued to submit formal petitions, requests, and inquiries to various Soviet officials concerning their relatives’ fate or official legal status (for purposes of political rehabilitation) from the 1930s until the regime’s collapse at the beginning of the 1990s. Sometimes even those serving out their sentences in Soviet camps issued formal complaints to the USSR Prosecutor General and other Soviet authorities.118 Soviet petitions also remained the one legal recourse for a small dedicated cadre of ethnic German activists seeking full rehabilitation and autonomy rights for the nationality group in the post-Stalinist era.119 Despite the dangers, more subtle forms of ethnic German resistance occurred under Stalin. During the 1920s and 1930s, ethnic Germans delivered letters and various writings to friends and relatives by way of a vast underground network at home and abroad, and their relatives sometimes answered in return. In some cases, writers on both sides of the border had to employ deceptive language and certain kinds of creative literary imagery in their letters to bypass Soviet censors. These writings helped paint a historical portrait of how the ethnic Germans perceived and responded to mass violence and repression in the USSR under the Stalin regime. Many ethnic German communications from the 1930s in particular provided graphic descriptions of forced collectivization, dekulakization, and the subsequent terror-famine in Ukraine.120 Behind the revolutionary façade, Soviet dissident literature as early as the 1920s percolated in various ways. Even during the relative, but deceptive, calm of the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the mid 1920s, critics of the Soviet regime, many of them with careers and families to consider, had to cope with and survive within a system that was not going away any time soon. They had to contend with the dilemma of somehow trying to work inside the system in order to change it for the better—and perhaps for no better reason than to stay alive. During the mid to late 1920s, ethnic German intellectuals and activists already comprehended the new Soviet society’s inherent contradictions between the 338 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE many promises made by Soviet nationality policies and the harsh reality of Soviet political repression. The loss of family and friends during the early 1920s famines deeply affected them in subsequent years. Ethnic German authors during the uneasy truce of NEP and then during the later growing Soviet persecutions used irony, metaphors, symbols, code words, as well as legends, folklore, mythology and nature imagery from world literature, along with other literary devices, to criticize the regime right under the official censors’ noses. For example, prominent Volga German intellectual, activist, and later Stalin victim Peter Sinner in some of his writings utilized the Russian writer Boris Pilnyak’s “Snowstorm ¼ Revolution” symbolism to describe the persecution, famine and terror of the early Soviet period. In his view, the NEP era represented a “mirage” (Luftspiegelung), a frequent literary theme of his. Similarly, his wife Kamilla Sinner, also an accomplished writer, produced fairy tales as veiled satires of what scholar Samuel D. Sinner calls the “unqualified Soviet proletarian optimism of the mid-1920s.” At other times, the ethnic German elite of the late 1920s and early 1930s expressed ideas in more vivid and direct terms. Prominent writer Rudolf Dirk, for instance, described the Soviet repression of ethnic Germans with universal destruction themes from world literature and mythology. Stalin’s mass purges in the latter part of the 1930s nearly decimated the ethnic group’s emerging elite, however. Decades passed before anything resembling an ethno-cultural recovery began.121 More than an elite or intellectual preoccupation, a sense of foreboding and apocalyptic imagery also appeared in writing among the ethnic German farmers and workers during the years of Soviet famine, forced collectivization and terror. Sometimes a village scribe wrote down for others his neighbors’ experiences under Soviet officials, creating a degree of literary consistency among some letters. As an expression of terror and loss, many of these correspondences detailed the destruction of a people and a traditional way of life. Sometimes with the assistance of certain sympathetic Soviet guards or nearby local residents, countless letters were circulated around the USSR and even smuggled into Germany, Canada, South America, the United States and elsewhere. A fair number of German-language newspapers on the North American Plains also published excerpts of them between 1928 and 1937, including the Dakota Freie Presse (Bismarck, North Dakota),122 Die Welt-Post (Omaha, Nebraska), the Eureka Rundschau (South Dakota), the Wishek Nachrichten (North Dakota) and others. Recently authenticated by scholars, hundreds of letters to relatives during the 1930s even managed to arrive in Saskatchewan, Canada, from Mennonites deported as kulaks to special settlements in the Urals.123 Scholars have also discovered a few letters from labor army conscripts written in 1942 and 1943, providing us with an invaluable source for studying the daily life of these deportees.124 The volume of letters linking co-religionists, relatives and friends in the ethnic German villages of Ukraine, Volga, and the Caucasus with their counterparts in the West is even greater if the number of personal letters sent, but unpublished, is included. Though the Soviet regime until the late 1930s allowed for the regular or occasional exchange of such a large volume of letters to help bring 339 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. much needed foreign currency and commodities into the country by way of the Torgsin-stores (North American relatives of the ethnic German villagers did so over a period of twenty years),125 the letters, either directly or indirectly, gave a sense of the mass violence and repression directed against the German minority in the Soviet Union. The ethnic German letters, which often carried a distinct religious overtone, gave the impression of a traditional rural people caught in a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. If it was not the literal end of the world, then it was the end of a way of life. The letters also provided both direct and indirect clues about Soviet regime violence and repression.126 Such use of religious imagery makes sense, as the first few decades of the Soviet era plunged what was mainly a traditional agrarian people into a rapidly modernizing secular society. Such language and ideas were part and parcel of these traditional communities. Some letter writers lived in fear of the Soviet censors; letters which came from North America with blacked-out sections from the censors were sometimes placed in family Bibles, and even prayed over, with the hope that heavenly powers would reveal the message. Other letters from the USSR offered only the simplest of sentiments about their dire situation: “Remember us. More than that we cannot write.”127 Their kin in America who published the letters, along with the newspaper editors and publishers, omitted place and family names or sometimes included a brief note, such as “From a village in Ukraine,” or just the writer’s initials. Some recipients delivered correspondences that they had received to the local newspaper to print, adding their own comments: “I’m not including names of my family, here or in the old country, because in the old country they shot my brother, and here too in America there are spies.” Other recipients echoed the same sentiment: “[. . .] Bolsheviks in this country can learn how their Bolshevik comrades over there tyrannize people [. . .]. Aren’t Bolsheviks like animals, when they take the last clothing from a person who has lain in bed for a year and can’t help himself?”128 Using rich, figurative language, ethnic German villagers often communicated information by using brief folk sayings, like “Nothing in the pot, nothing under the pot either,” to indicate that they had no food or fuel. Or else by use of frequent religious sayings, or brief prayers, they managed to express what they were enduring: “The larger the cross, the closer God draws us to Him,” or a version of it, recurred often. Frequent references to various Biblical characters appeared, including Adam, Job, Lazarus, or Biblical cities like Sodom, and to specific verses such as “See Revelations 18 if you want to know our situation” or “Read Isaiah, chapter 24, and especially verse 16, for that’s just how things are with us.” These references operated as a kind of short-hand for Biblically versed friends and relatives about the cataclysm which had befallen them, communism. At the same time, the German villagers often compared their situation directly to the fate of the children of Israel.129 Interestingly, the Soviet security apparatus at this time encountered difficulties with this common inclusion of specific Biblical references in such correspondence, as secular state officials did not necessarily have—or perhaps dared not 340 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE possess—Bibles themselves for any kind of reference.130 Some ethnic German writers also resorted to primitive codes, even stating at the letter’s beginning, for example, how the letter’s contents should be read in an opposite manner. Writers active at the time, like Gottlieb Fichtner in Ukraine, seemed to have used code and deception by stating the direct opposite of what was meant in some of their short stories.131 Often expressing deeply held Christian values, ethnic German letter writers begged relatives to pray for them, and also for those harming them. Others viewed collectivization as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Some viewed regime officials as “swindlers,” “Jewish overseers,” part of the “Judeo-commune” and “the Jews who want to make slaves of us,” a group that was not sent into exile as the ethnic German villagers were. Some regime officials happened to be ethnic Jews from the Soviet Union, or even sometimes from elsewhere in Europe. Along with hardened agitators and activists from Soviet factories, they were dispatched into the villages. These squads were sent into the villages, “[. . .] 150 men [. . .] whose job it is to plague [work] us half to death,” and “they are the only law. So sad.”132 This dangerous and unfortunate perception at the grass-roots level in ethnic German villages of Jews supposedly controlling the Bolshevik regime might have predated 1930s Soviet collectivization, according to some letters. The suffering which followed, as well as the deportations, mass starvations, and executions during the Great Terror, might have further reinforced the prejudice. In any event, such sentiments later dovetailed with the Nazis’ crude equation of Judeo-Bolshevism. As desperate as some of the letters sounded, some ethnic German villagers actually might have understated the severity of their own situation for a number of reasons. This attitude stemmed in part from their religious belief system and traditional upbringing, which stressed honesty and forthright behavior; that, along with a certain degree of peasant fatalism and stoicism, made the case for understatement. Letter writers often apologized profusely for even requesting assistance. A widespread belief among ethnic Germans, both in Ukraine and America, prevailed that too much help weakened the recipient. They also shared an acute awareness that Soviet censors read their every word, which surely restrained full expression: “[. . .] a person just cannot write about some things [. . .]”133 Soviet authorities viewed kulaks as “bloodsuckers” and “parasites” standing in the way of the new Soviet society. Kulaks were wealthy farmers or merely those who opposed collectivization. The amount of wealth owned by people accused of being kulaks was frequently only a few cows. Collective farm officials, according to some ethnic German letters, “[. . .] dragged us by the hair so that we should watch how our poor parents were treated [. . .]” Anyone named a kulak was stripped of everything—homes, property, clothing: “The dress that I wore during the day was taken away from me at night, and the clothing and shoes of the children were also taken away.” Soviet officials worked and fed whole families “like animals.”134 As early as 1930, when the collectivization drive intensified, some ethnic German letter writers predicted starvation: “[. . .] they are going to starve us 341 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. all.” Some even predicted cannibalism: “We will eat each other.” Besides trying to turn villagers against each other, the authorities withheld seed supplies and inflated harvest quotas, while taxes became the norm. Soviet officials held numerous meetings in the villages and used coercion and threats to force the villagers onto collectives.135 The Unified State Political Administration (OGPU) targeted kulaks for exile in the early 1930s. This process was further outlined in numerous ethnic German letters, with long lists of people who had lost their rights and their property. Families once known as “[. . .] honorable and thrifty” were awakened, and then “[. . .] forced into the street in thirty-eight degrees of frost [. . .] Many froze to death [. . .] In forty degrees of cold forty sleds passed by, all loaded with those arrested [. . .] We are not able to describe our miserable existence.”136 Friends, neighbors, and relatives of targeted ethnic Germans were also arrested. In some cases, if someone was not home, their neighbor was taken in his place. The “executioners and their henchmen” came at midnight in the “Black Marias” or “Black Crows,” and families were driven from their homes into the cold darkness, sometimes dragged, ropes slung around their necks. “With screaming and crying we left our yard, with only what we could carry in our hands.”137 In one case, two elderly ethnic Germans in Ukraine unable to pay the inflated taxes were chased from their homes, and then “in the cemetery [. . .] they were stripped naked, and on hands and knees forced to carry on their backs two men each, all the way to the church steps, where they were made to kneel and pray [. . .]” One of them was murdered, his corpse strung up in the village to make it look like a suicide, which provoked “[. . .] an uproar of lamenting,” but nothing was done, because, as one letter writer described the communist officials, “[. . .] they do not bite each other, these dogs.” In 1931, a deluge of letters began to appear in the American German-language newspapers with titles such as “Hunger and Annihilation,” “A Cry of Despair,” “Letter from the Banished,” “From the Primitive Forest,” and “A Misery Letter from Siberia.” These articles revealed the brutal conditions in the special settlements. Many writers from the Soviet Far North, echoing statements from letters composed during the earlier Russian Civil War, felt it was the death knell of the German minority. One wrote: “I hope you pray for us, otherwise we are completely lost.”138 In the special settlements, ethnic German accounts revealed a life of Soviet “slavery.” Everyone “from the age of 13 to the oldest is chased out to work,” and they chopped “blood and hunger wood,” which was sold to Western markets. Youngsters and people as old as eighty had to meet their quota of wood, a cubic meter, or else they did not eat. Husbands were torn from their families. Guards were cruel: “Even a stone has more pity than a Bolshevik.” Under the blows of the club, the villagers were driven “like livestock,” deep into the forest to other barracks. Many died rapidly, and one letter claimed that most of the kulaks’ children in one locale had died, and “[. . .] some days when 50 –60 died.” Regretting that they did not emigrate abroad years earlier, the exiles bemoaned their fate to their American relatives: “You Americans are 342 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE already in heaven.” Letters described the fate of those sent to northern swampy areas: Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 Many freeze. They don’t treat us as people [. . .] Many died in the swamps. Woe to any escapee who falls into the hands of the guards. They’ll beat that person terribly, then send him back to the camp, where he will be treated even more cruelly and without mercy. People live in fear and terror.139 In the 1930s, other ethnic Germans described in their letters that “[. . .] our misery screams to the heavens” and “Many have died. More will die soon.” Still others asked their relatives to pray for them, “the forlorn ones.” Life in the villages was little better, as ethnic Germans there “[. . .] live in much fear.” For even the smallest infraction, villagers could be punished and be sent to join relatives and friends in the distant north. Now even using words such as “me” and “mine” was forbidden; they could only watch their own property from afar. Grain was surrendered to the Soviet authorities; villagers ate whatever was left them—the flesh of dead horses, tree bark, acacia blossoms, pets, frogs, and birds. One even admitted that “after the cat is eaten, we are finished [that is the last of our food].”140 Overall, the ethnic German letters revealed Soviet mass violence and repression, but those from 1932 and 1933, written during a widespread famine which starved millions, are “virtually the only absolutely contemporary first-hand testimony from those actually suffering the famine as they wrote.”141 Letters from the time of the worst starvation dispensed with all but the most basic form of greetings and a brief prayer, before launching into a litany of complaints about lost health, hunger victims, starving and hungry villagers with black and yellow faces “who long for death.” A few letter writers, knowing that their deaths fast approached, ended with simple words that evoked and echoed the villagers’ traditional funeral songs, which they had sung as children together: “Live well, live well [. . .]” and “We’ll meet again in heaven.”142 The Stalin regime’s attitude to the ethnic German villagers seemed clear enough to the victims. One letter in 1933 reported: [T]he commandants [of our collective] have told us, “Now [. . .] you will see that wherever you destructive insects have settled in our land, [. . .] that no God will drop manna from heaven to help you, and nowhere will anyone hear your miserable complaints. Hangings, shootings, starvation and freezing—all of those will be done to you if you don’t work to exactly meet the requirements of the predetermined Plan.”143 Another letter from the period, however, claimed that Red Army units were no longer sent to quell disturbances, because in one instance the military, when it saw the villagers’ starvation, shared their rations with the peasants. After that, the writer maintained, the regime sent only hardened secret police units to put down rebellions, because they did not commiserate with the plight of the farmers.144 Though some local Soviet officials and soldiers could be sympathetic, others were extremely punitive, using food as a primary weapon: 343 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. There were stores of potatoes buried in the ground in autumn as provisions for spring, as well as seed potatoes, but the people were commanded in February to uncover them [. . .] That cost many people their lives, for when the great cold came most of the potatoes froze [. . .] and so people remained without provisions, and a full famine raged.145 The authorities put some collective farms on black lists for not meeting grain quotas such as the following one, likely in the ethnic German village of Kassel, Ukraine. One villager there noted: Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 We are treated so cruelly [. . .] Yesterday they drove around and forced all of the sick and crippled onto the steppe to work [. . .] The doctor could only shake his head, but dared say nothing. That is how it goes for us. No bread. Just water soup. People long for death [. . .] The children say there is no reason to live.146 The ethnic German letter writers from 1934 seemed weighed down by survivors’ guilt and were staggered by the enormity of what they had endured: “The human mind is too narrow to be able to grasp the present circumstances.”147 Though the number of letters steadily diminished after that point, as the Stalin regime consolidated its hold on power, the ethnic German diaspora community managed to conduct a significant correspondence on both sides of the Atlantic until 1938 near the end of the Great Terror. By this time of growing international tensions, the Soviet regime severed contact between the ethnic German villagers in the USSR and their relatives in America and elsewhere. In addition, letter writers on both sides at this time had justifiably grown more concerned about inciting further Soviet repression if the letter exchanges continued. Many ethnic Germans in the USSR increasingly feared that their own relatives abroad might write the wrong thing or else send them the wrong item, and thus get them sent into exile. Indeed, Soviet authorities sometimes intercepted these letters from the Americas and Germany, and their contents could then be used as incriminating evidence against relatives in the Soviet Union.148 The Germans from Russia who had immigrated overseas were shaken, grieved, and ashamed by the course of events in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet empire. It seemed that these Germans from Russia immigrants only wished now to carry on with their own lives in the “New World,” with fresh beginnings. As Germans from Russia in the western hemisphere continued to assimilate into their new societies, they mostly remained silent about their heritage following this period of mass persecution. Especially after Stalin, they grew hesitant about relating their history and origins to others, and even more so about acknowledging too much about the mass repression and violence done to their compatriots under communism. At the time, this attitude or perhaps survival mode was understandable in view of the two terrible world wars against a German adversary—and along with it, the stigma of being German—and the rise of a new power to challenge the West during the emerging Cold War, Soviet Russia (and ironically, along with that, the stigma of being associated with Russia). For many years, these immigrants and children of immigrants decided to leave the “old country” behind once and for all—at least until the collapse of the Iron Curtain beckoned younger generations to take another look at what had transpired.149 344 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE Though German émigrés from the USSR in West Germany were more politicized and outspoken against Soviet communism during the Cold War, the terrible legacy of Nazism tainted most things German after 1945, in effect overshadowing much of the Soviet experience. Ethnic Germans from Russia on both sides of the Iron Curtain had in fact found themselves compromised by the recent history of the competing claims of the Red Star and Black Swastika.150 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 Conclusion: remembering the “death scream” amid Soviet mass violence The period of 1928 to 1948 witnessed an escalating level of repression and violence by the Stalin regime against the ethnic Germans in the USSR. The increasingly racialized nature of Soviet mass violence targeted the ethnic Germans as a large diaspora community ethnically linked to Nazi Germany, a country perceived as an ideological and military threat during the 1930s. In 1941, the Nazi threat to the Soviet Union’s survival dramatically increased with Operation Barbarossa. Consequently, after this point the Stalin regime viewed the ethnic Germans not only as a potential fifth column for Berlin, but as a literal extension of Nazi Germany infiltrating strategic areas of the USSR. Hence, the Soviet government sought to excise, isolate and punish this minority group for the crime of being descended from immigrants from “Germany.” These policies involved an extreme level of state violence and repression against an entire civilian population. Later on, the post-Stalinist regime tried to reverse such nationality policies, but did so without generating adequate publicity about past injustices and mistakes or offering any compensation to the survivors. As for the victims’ severe plight during this seemingly “apocalyptic” era, many Soviet records and much of the ethnic German diaspora correspondence succumbed to general historical amnesia until the 1990s. For several decades, much of the evidence and memory lay hidden away in the archived Germanlanguage newspapers and dusty family attics across Germany and the western hemisphere, or in secret Soviet archives locked behind the Iron Curtain. After the Cold War, however, both survivors’ stories and archival evidence started to appear openly in the former USSR and elsewhere, thereby generating renewed interest in Stalinism’s legacy. A growing corpus of Soviet archival records and academic literature treating the Stalinist period has since generally validated and expanded upon what the ethnic group as early as the 1920s and 1930s had exposed about the mass terror and repression. Since the Cold War, scholars and others have begun to consider more carefully the case of Soviet mass violence against the ethnic Germans and other nationality groups. For this study, such letters and other contemporaneous writings hold an advantage over subsequent memoir literature by capturing the moment of Soviet mass terror. Though coming from a certain political vantage point, they do not necessarily suffer from faded memories and later biases, revisions, and additions. Of course, subsequent reflections, oral and written, have certainly added significant crucial context and details to previous records and testimonies.151 In short, these contemporaneous perspectives supplement well the now 345 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. available Soviet state and Communist Party archives, on the one hand, and memoir literature and interviews compiled years and even decades after the relevant events, on the other. Scholars more critical of Soviet-era famine and gulag letters as well as later oral testimonies have argued that such historical artifacts from the period in question are too emotional and tend to express an intense bias in response to historical events still in progress. In other words, they have maintained that such letter writers and victims are “too caught up in the moment” to present an accurate portrayal of the events in question. To be fair, these eyewitness accounts and historical actors are certainly limited in their perspective in time and space, but they still offer us another powerful angle and interpretation of events—presenting “windows” into everyday Soviet life. Soviet archival records are not always accurate or clear either, and they can even be biased, but that does not disqualify them from scholarly use, nor should it. Indeed, using the critics’ own logic, should academicians discredit or ignore other genocide testimonies from other cases in the past century, especially those made during the events in question or even years and decades later? It is notable, however, that other scholars have discerned a degree of consistency between various written and oral testimonies from the Stalinist era and those conducted in the post-Cold War period, including ethnic German eyewitnesses and survivors.152 More recently, respected historian Orlando Figes has emphasized that oral testimony is essential in reclaiming memories of repression and terror in the former Soviet Union. Though he acknowledges that, “like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable,” he maintains that in general oral testimonies prove to be “more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past.” He further argues that “unlike a book, [oral testimony] can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.”153 Whether orally transmitted or written down, either recorded during events as they happened or many years later, these countless Soviet eyewitness reports, petitions, and memoirs in effect have constituted the ethnic group’s desperate “death scream” to the world. It was meant to be a message for posterity never to forget what had happened. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of famed poet and Stalin victim Osip Mandelstam, coined this phrase years ago about the basic, genuine and universal human yearning to be remembered even under the worst circumstances imaginable, when in their hearts they despaired and felt the sentence of death.154 Though desperate and despairing victims and survivors could not have known it at the time, their “death scream” has in fact outlived the Soviet Union. Notes and References 1 N. Okhotin and A. Roginsky, “Iz istorii ‘nemtskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937–1938 gg.,” [From the history of the ‘German Operation’ of the NKVD 1937–1938] in: I.L. Shcherbakova, ed., Nakazannyi narod: Repressi protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev [Repressed people: repression against Russian Germans] (Moscow: Memorial, 1999), pp 70–71. Also see Peter Goldade, ed., Our Relatives, The Persecuted (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris, 346 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE 2 3 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 2006). Goldade’s substantial compilation contains authenticated NKVD records of interrogations of arrested victims as well as an entire execution list of about 4,700 ethnic Germans from 1937 to 1938 in the Odessa Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR during the time of this “German Operation.” Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), pp 18–23; Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet genocide,’” Journal of Genocide Research Vol 7, No 4, December 2005, pp 551– 559. Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief political rival at the time, Boris Yeltsin, signed the law “Concerning the Rehabilitation of the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” in many respects the culmination of previous Soviet rehabilitation resolutions and decrees for nationality groups. It is also important to note that the 1991 decree more closely followed Lemkin’s broader conception of genocide, emphasizing both the physical and socio-cultural destruction of Stalinist Terror. Cf. “Zakon Rossiiskoi Sovetskoi Federativnoi Sotsialisticheskoi Respubliki ‘O reabilitatsii repressirovannikh narodov’ [Law of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic on the rehabilitation of repressed peoples] [April 26, 1991],” Sovetskaia Rossiia [Soviet Russia] No 90, May 7, 1991, p 3. Terry Martin, “The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History Vol 70, No 4, December 1998, p 837. V.N. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy (po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR),” [Special Settlers] Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia [Sociological Research] No 11, 1990, p 3. For an excellent description of the dynamics of “kulak exile” and the early special settlement system, see Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Myron K. Gordon, “Notes on recent Soviet population statistics and research,” Population Index Vol 23, No 1, January 1957, p 5, table 3. Viktor Krieger, “Chronologie der antideutschen Massnahmen in Russland bzw. der UdSSR,” [Chronology of the anti-German measures in Russia and the USSR] Volk auf dem Weg [People on the move] Nos. 8 –9, 2007, p 13. Viktor Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh: Iz istorii nemtsev Tsentral’noi Azii [Rhine, Volga, Irtysh: the history of the Germans of Central Asia] (Almaty: Diak Press, 2006), p 133, table 1. Martin, “The origins of Soviet ethnic cleansing,” pp 837 –838. Michael Ellman, “The role of leadership perceptions and of intent in the Soviet famine of 1931–1934,” Europe-Asia Studies Vol 57, No 6, September 2005, p 829. Krieger, “Chronologie der antideutschen Massnahmen in Russland bzw. der UdSSR,” p 13; Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, p 136. Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, p 133, table 1. Ibid., p 136. Michael Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932–33 revisited,” Europe-Asia Studies Vol 59, No 4, June 2007, p 672. Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, pp 135 –136. Ibid., p 135. Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet famine of 1932– 33 revisited,” pp 676–682. Document reproduced in Pavel Polian, Ne po svoei vole: Istoriia i geografiia prinuditel’nykh migratsii v SSSR [Not by their will: history and geography of forced migration in the USSR] (Moscow: Memorial, 2001), p 89. Goldade, ed., Our Relatives, The Persecuted, p 21; Elizabeth Lenci-Downs, I Heard My People’s Cry: One Family’s Escape from Russia: The True Story of Lise Huebert Toews Gerig (St. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2003), pp 64–69, 74. Okhotin and Roginsky, “Iz istorii ‘nemtskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937– 1938 gg.,” pp 70– 71. Nicolas Werth, “The mechanism of a mass crime: the great terror in the Soviet Union,” in: Robert Gellatey and Ben Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp 236– 237, fn. 83. Okhotin and Roginsky, “Iz istorii ‘nemtskoi operatsii’ NKVD 1937– 1938 gg.,” pp 70– 71. Ibid. Ibid., pp 70–71; Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, p 133, table 1. A. Popov, “Gosudarvennyi terror v sovetskoi rossi 1923–1953 gg. (istochniki i ikh interpretatsiia),” [State terror in Soviet Russia 1923–1953] Otechestvennye Arkhivy [National Archives] No 2, 1992, p 28, table 3. N.F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin—Lavrentiiu Berii: “Ikh nado deportirovat”: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii [Joseph Stalin–Laverntry Beria: “They need to be deported”: documents, facts, commentary] (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992), doc. 3, pp 37–38. Bugai, ed., Ikh nado deportirovat’, doc.1, p 36. Konstantin Isakov, “1941-other Germans,” New Times No 17, 1990, p 38. 347 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. 28 See Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp 187–193. 29 This information is based on Ronald J. Vossler’s various interviews with ethnic Germans from Soviet Ukraine. 30 Valdis O. Lumans points out that ethnic Germans in Ukraine were even more anti-Semitic than the average Reich Germans. See Lumans, Himmler’s Auxiliaries: The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle and the German National Minorities of Europe, 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p 29. In contrast, Meir Buchsweiler contends that they existed in a “latent” anti-Semitic milieu. See Buchsweiler, Volksdeutsche in der Ukraine am Vorabend und Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges—ein Fall doppelter Loyalität? [Ethnic Germans in Ukraine on the eve and at the beginning of the Second World War—a case of double loyalty?] Trans. Ruth Achlama (Tel-Aviv: Schriftreige des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, Universität Tel Aviv, 1984), pp 242– 243. 31 Growing anti-Semitic feelings and the association of Judaism with Bolshevism among ethnic Germans in Ukraine can be found during the early formation of Soviet power. For example, tens of thousands of ethnic Germans fled Ukraine during the Russian Civil War and War Communism eras. One such refugee included a young woman, the daughter of a minister from the ethnic German village Grossliebental near Odessa, who penned these anti-Semitic comments in a letter in 1922: “All of the death is because the final provisions were taken from the store-houses belonging to the farmers. If they’d have been helped to protect the provisions, there’d have been enough to nourish everyone, but the Jews took the food, and the rest starved.” The same writer claimed that a sadistic orphanage director—a Jew—starved the orphans, German children, “just to see how many he can murder,” and then predicted: “This situation will give rise to such a slaughter of Jews as history has never known before. Even babies in their cribs will not be spared, for the Jews will thus have earned their terrible reward.” See Vossler, ed. and trans., The Old God Still Lives: Ethnic Germans in Czarist Russia and Soviet Ukraine Write Their American Relatives, 1915– 1924 (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2005), p 192. 32 Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp 59–88, 226– 227. 33 An Einsatzgruppen commander in Ukraine named Biberstein, under Allied questioning for his role in the killing of Jews, described the rage that ethnic Germans held toward the communists. At one massacre, he noted, he had been “directly terrified” by the blood lust exhibited by students from nearby ethnic German villages, those who had lost their elders to executions by the communists during the 1930s. See War Crime Document No. 4997, Einsatzkommando 6, “Interrogation of Biberstein,” June 29, 1947, Special Collections, War Tribunal Box, Chester M. Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. 34 The ethnic German reaction to this Nazi-led mass violence—with most massacres taking place near their own homes, often directly outside their home villages, the scent of bodies burnt in local lime-kilns wafting through the streets—was muted at best. Survivors often compared, unfavorably, their own substantial suffering to that of Jews: “We could only wish for gas, or a bullet in the back of the head, to die. Instead, we slowly starved.” See Vossler’s tape cassette of phone interview with an anonymous ethnic German from Ukraine, January 1, 2001. Meanwhile, other German depictions of the Nazi-occupation in Ukraine, including “novels, historical studies, films, and a flood of memoirs echoed the portrayal of the Volksdeutschen as the victims par excellence of a war that Germany liked to remind the world had been hell for everyone.” See Doris L. Bergen, “Tenuousness and tenacity: the Volksdeutschen of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust,” in: Krista O’Donnell, Nancy Reagin, and Renate Bridenthal, eds., The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p 281. For additional perspectives on historical memory and testimony, see Robert Moeller, “War stories: the search for a usable past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review Vol 101, No 4, 1996, pp 1008–1048. 35 Anton Bosch, Anton Bertsch, and Michael Wanner, “Excerpt from Odessa Book of Mourning: Stalin’s State Terror against the Germans in the Odessa and Nikolajew Districts of Ukraine, 1928–1953 (Part I),” Merv Weiss, trans., Heritage Review Vol 37, No 3, September 2007, pp 21, 46. Cf. Richard H. Walth, Auf der Suche nach Heimat: Die Russlanddeutschen [In the search of a homeland: the Russian Germans] (Dülmen: Laumann Verlag, 1990), pp 195–238; Richard H. Walth, Flotsam of World History: The Germans from Russia between Stalin and Hitler (Essen: Klartext, 1996). 36 V.N. Zemskov; Spetsposelentsy v SSSR 1930–1960 (Moscow: Nauk, 2003), table 29, p 176. 37 Bugai, “Ikh nado deportirovat,” doc. 44, p 261. 38 Document reproduced in V.A. Auman and V.G. Chebotareva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763–1992 gg.) (Moscow: MIGP, 1993), pp 178 –179. 39 Bugai, ed., Deportatsiia narodov kryma: Dokumenty, fakty, kommentarii [Deportation of peoples of the Crimea: documents, facts, commentary] (Moscow: Insan, 2002), doc. 48, p 79. 348 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE 40 O.L. Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody). Chast’ 2. Deportatsiia nemtsev (Sentiabr’ 1941-Fevral’ 1942 gg.) [Deportation of peoples of the USSR (1930s to 1950). Part 2. Deportation of Germans (September 1941–February 1942)] (Moscow: RAN, 1995), doc. 62, pp 231– 236. 41 Documents reproduced in Auman and Chebotareva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763– 1992 gg.) [History of Russian Germans in documents (1973–1992)], pp 161–165. 42 Bugai, ed., “Ikh nado deportirovat”, doc. 3, pp 37–38. 43 Ibid., doc. 10, pp 43–47. 44 Ibid., doc. 20, pp 165– 169. 45 Ibid., doc. 44, p 75. 46 Ibid., doc. 9, pp 41–43. According to Nina Vaschkau of Volgograd State University in Russia, the Volga Germans did not resist the deportations of August 1941, significantly contrary to what the Soviet authorities had anticipated. Also, some of the Russian wives of Volga German men decided to join their husbands in exile at this time. See Vaschkau, “Deportation of Russian Germans in 1941 and its consequences,” paper presented on July 31, 2008 at the International Convention of Germans from Russia held in Casper, Wyoming. 47 Documents reproduced in Auman and Chebatoreva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763– 1992 gg.) [History of Russian Germans in documents (1763–1992)], pp 161–168; Milova, ed., doc. 8, pp 47–51. In December 1932, the Stalin regime introduced an internal passport system in the country, though most rural residents did not receive such documents at the time. The passport law might have arisen in response to the extensive urban migration following the 1932– 33 famines. In order to protect already strained city rations and supplies, the regime could in this way restrict the incoming number of residents and limit their access to goods and services. It is also possible that the passport system was designed to control the urban population more efficiently. A few years later, during the era of mass deportations, Soviet internal passports based on national affiliation turned into an instrument of state repression and police control, since documentation made it easier for authorities to isolate and remove segments of the urban population who came from certain ethnic groups selected for deportation and exile. 48 Bugai, ed., “Ikh nado deportirovat”, doc. 44, p 75. 49 Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody) [Deportation of peoples of the USSR (1930s to 1950s)], doc. 49, pp 153– 158. 50 G.A. Vol’ter, Zona polnogo pokia: Rossiiskie nemtsy v gody voiny i poslee nee: Svidetel’stva ocheviedetsev [Zone of Total Silence: Russian Germans in the war years and after: eyewitness accounts] (Moscow: L.A. “Varig,” 1998), p 64. 51 Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody), doc. 57, pp 218– 219. 52 Ibid., doc. 50, pp 159– 161. 53 Bugai, ed., “Ikh nado deportirovat”, doc. 30, pp 63– 64, and doc. 36, pp 67–68. 54 Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody), doc. 47, pp 147– 148; G.A. Karpykova, ed., Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana (1921– 1975 gg.): Sbornik dokumentov iz arkhiva presidenta respubliki Kazakhstan [From the history of Germans of Kazakhstan (1921– 1975): Collection of documents from the archives of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan] (Almaty-Moscow: Gotika, 1997), doc. 49, pp 101– 102. 55 Bugai, ed., Ikh nado deportirovat’, doc. 43, p 74. 56 V.I. Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri [Germans in Western Siberia], Vol. II (Topchikha: Topcikhinskaia tip., 1995), p 107. 57 Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody), doc. 63, pp 237– 239. 58 Ibid., doc. 47, pp 147– 148. 59 Bugai, ed., “40-e gody: ‘Avtonomiiu nemtsev povolzhia likidirovat,’” [1940s: Liquidation of the Volga German autonomy] Istoriia SSSR [History of the USSR] No 2, 1991, p 175. 60 Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, p 20. 61 Ibid., pp 23–24. 62 Milova, ed., Deportatsii narodov SSSR (1930-e-1950-e gody), doc. 57, pp 216– 223. 63 Karpykova, ed., Iz istorii nemtsev Kazakhstana (1921–1975 gg.), doc. 45, pp 97– 98. 64 A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941– 1955) [Germans of the USSR in the labor army (1941–1955)] (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), p 40. 65 Bugai, ed., “Mobolizovat’ nemtsev v robochie kolonny. . . I. Stalin”: Sbornik dokumentov (1940-e gody) [“Mobilize the Germans into work colonies J. Stalin”: collection of documents (1940s)] (Moscow: Gotika, 1998), doc. 195, p 269. 66 German and Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941–1955), p 40. 67 Ibid., p 40; Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, pp 103–104. 349 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. 68 German and Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941–1955), p 40; Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, p 106. 69 German and Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941– 1955), pp 41– 42. 70 Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, p 105. 71 Ida Bender, The Dark Abyss of Exile: The Story of Survival, Laurel Anderson, Carl Anderson and William Wiest, trans. (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2000), p 57. 72 Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, p 105. 73 German and Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941– 1955), p 41. 74 Bruhl, Nemtsy v zapadnoi sibiri, p 104. 75 Krieger, “Patriots or traitors?—The Soviet government and the ‘German Russians’ after the attack on the USSR by national socialist Germany,” in: Karl Schlogel, ed., Russian–German Special Relations in the Twentieth Century: A Closed Chapter? (New York: Berg Publishers, 2006), p 150. 76 Bugai, ed., Mobilizovat’, doc. 18, pp 39–40, doc. 19, p 41, and doc. 21, pp 43–44. 77 Krieger, “Patriots or traitors?” p 150. 78 Polian, Ne po svoei vole, p 115. 79 Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, p 216. 80 German and Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941– 1955), p 67, table 5. 81 Ibid., p 114, table 5,. 82 Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, p 195. 83 Krieger, “Einsatz im Zwangsarbeitslager,” [Placement in the forced labor camps] in: Alfred Eisfeld, ed., Von der Autonomiegrundung zur Verbannung und Entrechtung. Die Jahre 1918 und 1941 bis 1948 in der Geschichte der Deutschen in Russland [From the establishment of autonomy to exile and deprivation of civil rights. The years 1918 and 1941 to 1948 in the history of the Germans in Russia] (Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 2008), p 146; Alfred Eisfeld, Die Aussiedlung der Deutschen der Wolgarepublik 1941–1957 [The resettlement of the Germans of the Volga Republic, 1941–1957] (Munich: Ost-Europa Institute, 2003), p 8; T.S. Kulbaev and A. Iu. Khegai, Deportatsiia [Deportation] (Almaty: Daneker, 2000), p 92. 84 Eric J. Schmaltz, “‘The long trek’: the SS population transfer of Ukrainian Germans to the Polish Warthegau and its consequences, 1943– 1944,” Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia Vol 31, No 3, Fall 2008, pp 1 –23. 85 V.A. Berdinskhikh, ed., Spetsposelentsy: Politicheskaia ssylka narodov Sovetskoi Rossi [Special settlers: political exile of the peoples of Soviet Russia] (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005), doc. 9, p 342. 86 M. Iu. Privalova, Sovetskie nemtsy-repatrianty v natsionalnoi politike SSSR v 1940-e-1970-e gg. [Soviet German: repatriates in National Politics of the USSR from the 1940s to the 1970s] (Avtoreferat K.N. diss., Saratov State University, 2008), p 16– 17. 87 Privalova, Sovetskie nemtsy-repatrianty, p 17. 88 Bugai, ed., Ikh nado deportirovat’, doc. 45, pp 75–76. 89 Bugai, ed., L. Beria – I. Stalinu: “Soglasno vashemu ukazaniiu. . .” [L. Beria – J. Stalin: “According to your orders. . .”] (Moscow: “AIRO XX,” 1995), pp 46–50. 90 Bugai, ed., Ikh nado deportirovat’, doc. 52, pp 78–79. 91 Alfred Eisfeld and Viktor Herdt, eds., Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee: Deutsche in der Sowjetunion 1941 bis 1956 [Deportation, special settlement, labor army: Germans in the Soviet Union, 1941 to 1956] (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1996), doc. 296, p 306. 92 Document reproduced in Gul’nara Bekirova, Krymskotatarskaia problema v SSSR (1944– 1991) [Crinean Tatar problem in the USSr (1944–1991)], available at: http://www.krimtatar.com/Books/Bekirova/ krpr2.html (accessed January 2, 2005). 93 Eisfeld and Herdt, eds., Deportation, Sondersiedlung, Arbeitsarmee, doc. 310, pp 317 –318, and doc. 312, pp 319–322. 94 Berdinskikh, ed., Spetsposelentsy, doc. 9, pp 342– 343. 95 Ibid., doc. 8, p 339. 96 Ibid., doc. 9, p. 343. 97 Ibid. 98 Document reproduced in V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR 1930–1960 [Special settlers in the USSR 1930– 1960] (Moscow: Nauk, 2003), p 160. The decree itself mentions “Chechens, Karachais, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Germans, Crimean Tatars and other” nationalities “resettled to distant regions of the Soviet Union.” In June 1949, the MVD issued instructions to the special commandants on which special settlers fell under the terms of this decree and which ones did not. This document is excerpted in Zemskov, pp 160– 161. In point eleven, it specifically notes that the decree applies to “Germans, Karachais, 350 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE 99 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Crimean Bulgarians and Crimean Armenians, Turks, Kurds and Hemshils, and also exiles from the Baltic states (Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians, exiled in 1949).” The following point states that the decree did not apply to special settlers deported from western Ukraine (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist members and their families), Lithuania prior to 1949 or ethnic Russians and Ukrainians accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany in the Vlasov movement. Zemskov, “Spetsposelentsy (Po dokumentatsii NKVD-MVD SSSR),” p. 9, table 6. To be fair, in Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930– 1960 (Moscow: Nauk, 2003), Zemskov provides the full archival citation data for this information. He also reproduces all the data from the document first published by Bugai that shows a year by year breakdown of special settler deaths. Unlike Bugai, he also gives the full archival data for this information. See tables 35 and 36, pp 193–196. However, it should be noted that this book was published thirteen years after his initial article. Bugai, ed., “40-50-e gody: Posledstviia deportatsii narodov (Svidetel’stvuiut arkhivy NKVD-MVD SSSR),” [The 1940s to 1950s: Legacy of the deportation of peoples (Evidence of the archives of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR)] Istoriia SSSR [History of the USSR] No 1, 1992, doc. 30, pp 122–143. Ibid., pp 138–140. Krieger, “Chronologie der antideutschen Massnahmen,” p 14. D.M. Ediev, Demograficheskie poteri deportirovannykh narodov SSSR [Demographic Losses of departed peoples of the USSR] (Stavropol’: Izd-vostGAU “Argus,” 2003), p 294, table 104. Gerd Stricker, “Ethnic Germans in Russia and the former Soviet Union,” in: Stefan Wolff, ed., German Minorities in Europe: Identity and Cultural Belonging (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), p 168. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Cf. Lynne Viola, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); Lynne Viola, et al., The War against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, Annals of Communism Series, Vol. I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Ellman, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Revisited,” pp 664– 665. Based on extensive interviews with ethnic German survivors of Soviet collectivization in Ukraine, Vossler has heard from several eyewitnesses that the massive destruction of property, grain and livestock did not happen at the time, at least not in specific ethnic German settlements where they had lived. Instead, it was claimed that their ethnic group had always placed a great value on property, which, after all, was their own. He has cautioned, however, that though some survivors have made such claims, ethnic Germans in Ukraine, so reserved and scrupulous, and not given to complaint, given their religious background and ethos, did not always readily want to reveal how truly terrible conditions actually had been. They might have also feared that the issue of property destruction could be used as a justification for the Soviet exile of peasants at the time, and so avoided taking responsibility for those actions. Bosch, Bertsch and Wanner, “Excerpt,” pp 10– 12. Cf. Bosch, Bertsch and Wanner, Russland-Deutsche Zeitgeschichte 2006: Band 5: Trauerbuch Odessa: Stalins Staatsterror an den Deutschen in den Gebieten von Odessa und Nikolajew Ukraine, 1928– 1953 [Russian– German history 2000: Volume 5: Odessa book of mourning: Stalin’s state terror against the Germans in the Odessa and Nikolayer districts of Ukraine, 1928–1953] (Nuremberg: Historischer Forschungsverein der Deutschen aus Russland, 2006), pp 53–76. Bosch, Bertsch and Wanner, “Excerpt,” pp 10–12. Ibid. Goldade, ed., Our Relatives, The Persecuted, pp 325– 536. Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, pp 257 –262. Ibid., p 260, table 2. Ibid., p 261, table 3. Ibid., p 262. Ibid., p 258, table 1, p 260, table 2 and p 261, table 3. These rankings do not include those nationalities from territories not part of the USSR in 1939 such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova. Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), pp 378– 408. Ibid., p 407. See in English translation verified file summaries of NKVD interrogations of ethnic Germans conducted in the Odessa Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR from the 1930s and 1940s in Goldade, ed., Our Relatives, The Persecuted, pp 25– 324. Ida Bender, “‘Ich betrachte es als meine Pflicht. . .’: Der Wolgadeutsche Pädagoge und Dichter Dominik Hollmann,” [“I regarded it as my duty”: The Volga German teacher and poet Dominik Hollmann] Heimatbuch 2000 Teil 2 [Book of the Homeland 2000, part 2] (Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 2000), pp 108ff.; Adolf Bersch, Zwischen Leiden und Hoffen: Das Schicksal eines Wolgadeutschen 351 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. 120 121 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 (Erinnerungen) [Between despair and hope: the fate of a Volga German (reminiscenses)] (Augsburg: Negele-Druck, 1997). Samuel D. Sinner, ed., Letters from Hell: An Index to Volga-German Famine Letters Published in “Die Welt-Post”: 1920–1925; 1930–1934, preface by Schmaltz (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2000); Ronald J. Vossler, ed. and trans., “We’ll Meet Again in Heaven”: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their Relatives, 1925–1937 (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2001); and Vossler, Wedding in the Darkness: Three Accounts from Collectivization and the Great Terror, 1928–1938 (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2008). Samuel D. Sinner, Autumn Thoughts—Under Ruins and Snow: An Experiment in Ethnic Anthology, Two Centuries of German-Russian Poetry, Short Stories, and Essays (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraires, 2003), pp xvii– xxi, 20– 23. See also Samuel D. Sinner, “‘Mein Teil ist, ganz in Asche aufzugehen’: Johann Peter Sinner (Petr Ivanovich Zinner, 1879–1935): Russlanddeutscher Autor und Stalinopfer: Sein Werk und Schicksal,” PhD Dissertation, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002. LaVern J. Rippley, “F.W. Sallet and the Dakota Freie Presse,” North Dakota History Vol 59, No 4, 1992, pp 2– 20. Cf. Ruth Derksen Siemens, ed., “Remember Us”: Letters from Stalin’s Gulag (1930–1937): Volume One: The Regehr Family, Peter Bargen and Ann Bargen trans. (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2008). Cf. Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, pp 203– 210. During the 1930s, ethnic Germans from the USSR also communicated with émigrés and others in Germany via the charity organization “Brothers in Need” (Brüder in Not) or through the German Consulate in Odessa for the purpose of requesting money and donations in kind. Cf. Lynne Viola, “The peasant nightmare: visions of apocalypse in the Soviet countryside,” Journal of Modern History Vol 62, No 3, September 1990, pp 747– 770. Viola has rightly touched upon apocalyptic thoughts and rumors during the Soviet collectivization period, including the rise of anti-Semitic thinking, anti-Christ imagery, and feverish rumors of seven-mile-long blankets under which collective workers thought they would have to sleep, etc. Vossler, Heaven, p 172. This recurring theme of remembrance is also prevalent in Derksen-Siemens, ed., “Remember Us”. Ibid., pp 99– 100, 104– 105, 162, 167. Ibid., pp 133, 137–140. Derksen-Siemens has noted this thorny predicament facing Soviet censors at the time with respect to their need to look up Biblical verses that often appeared in ethnic German correspondence. Gottlieb Fichtner, “The inside-out glove: a story,” Ronald J. Vossler, ed. and trans., Heritage Review Vol 37, No 3, September 2007, pp 2 –7. Vossler, Heaven, pp 102, 109, 111, 183, 198. Leonard Leshuk, ed., Days of Famine, Nights of Terror: Firsthand Accounts of Soviet Collectivization, 1928– 1934, Raimund Reuger, trans., 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Europa University Press, 2000), p 227; Vossler, Heaven, p 177. Vossler, Heaven, pp 139, 148, 179–180. Ibid., pp 130 –133. Ibid., pp 115, 131, 136. Ibid., pp 151, 157, 160. Ibid., pp 108, 111, 114, 124–125, 127– 128, 132– 134. Ibid., pp 114, 123, 125, 146, 181. Ibid., pp 169, 197, 210 –211. Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp 281– 282. Vossler, Heaven, pp 169, 198– 199. Ibid., p 198. Ibid., p 163. Ibid., p 163. Ibid., p 214. Ibid., pp 240, 252. Ibid., pp xxxvii–xxxix, 246. Ibid., pp xxxvii–xxxix. As Doris L. Bergen concludes, in comparing their suffering with that of Jews—an attempt to portray what long had been overlooked, the two decades of suffering under the Soviet regime, including mass starvation, 352 ETHNIC GERMAN RECOLLECTIONS OF MASS VIOLENCE 151 152 153 Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 154 deportation, executions, and destruction of an entire way of life—the ethnic German reaction to Nazi mass violence in the early 1940s actually erases, or diminishes, not only their own crimes and complicity with the Nazi regime, but also the ways that they, too, had been “casualties of Nazi brutalization.” See Bergen, “Tenuousness and tenacity,” p 281. For example, consult Nelly Däs, ed., Gone without a Trace: German-Russian Women in Exile, Nancy Bernhardt Holland, trans. (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 2001). Over the years, Vossler has also observed numerous consistencies in both oral and written testimonies, whether made during the Stalinist era or in his own more recent interviews with ethnic German survivors and other witnesses. See also, Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932– 1933: Report to Congress: Commission on the Ukrainian Famine (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1988). The report is also available online at: http://genocidecurriculum.org/category/curriculum-resources/generalarchive/united-states-congressional-commission-on-the-ukrainian-famine/1report-to-congress (accessed June 11, 2009). Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2007), p 636. See also his website online at: http://orlandofiges.com/index.php (accessed June 11, 2009). Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope: A Memoir, Max Hayward, trans. (New York: Atheneum, 1980), pp 42–43. Notes on Contributors J. Otto Pohl is an associate professor of International and Comparative Politics at American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He earned a BA (1992) in History from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and an MA (2002) and PhD (2004) in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. He is the author of two books, The Stalinist Penal System (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997) and Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937– 1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999). He has also written a number of shorter pieces on the subject of national deportations in the USSR. Among the journals that have featured his work are Human Rights Review, Journal of Genocide Research and Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Eric J. Schmaltz is an assistant professor at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, where he teaches Modern European and World History. He earned a BA (1994) in History and German Language with honors at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. After receiving his MA (1996) in History at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, he completed a PhD (2002) in History at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He specializes in Modern Germany and Modern Russia with an emphasis on ethnic and nationality studies. He has contributed a variety of articles and translations to the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the North Dakota State University Libraries’ Germans from Russia Heritage Collection in Fargo. Other articles and reviews have appeared in local newspapers, interdisciplinary journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, Nationalities Papers, and Oklahoma Politics, as well as major international anthologies on the Holocaust by Berghahn Books and K.G. Saur Verlag. He serves as an editorial board member of the AHSGR Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia and as a contributing editor of the GRHS Heritage Review. He is also a member of the 353 J. OTTO POHL ET AL. Downloaded by [University of Ghana] at 14:27 14 September 2015 Board of Academic Advisors at the Center for Volga German Studies at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Ronald J. Vossler is a native North Dakotan and veteran writer, translator, circuit lecturer, and humanities scholar now living in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. He holds a BA in Anthropology from Arizona State University and an MA in English from the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where he served as a Senior Lecturer from 1992 to 2008. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1932 –1933 Holodomor, he was named to the International Committee of the Ukrainian World Congress. A recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, he has contributed many articles to the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. In addition to producing nationally and internationally award-winning film documentaries for Prairie Public TV, he has published a number of groundbreaking translation compilations of Ukrainian German famine letters from the 1920s and 1930s with the North Dakota State University Libraries’ Germans from Russia Heritage Collection in Fargo. He has also conducted a considerable number of formal oral history interviews with ethnic German and other survivors and witnesses of the Soviet Terror and Nazi Holocaust in Ukraine. 354