The deportation of the Volga Germans

On Monday 8 September 1941 long trains of goods wagons had been leaving the sidings of railway stations on the lower Volga for the east for five days. Each carried more than two thousand people: collective farmers, workers, teachers, officials and former party dignitaries, with their children, their old people and whatever belongings they had managed to carry. They all had one thing in common: they were Germans. That day, according to NKVD reports, half of the sixty-one trains dispatched since 3 September were still stuck in traffic jams not far from the stations where they had been loaded, because the Volga region’s railway lines could not cope with the transports. One of the largest deportations in the history of the Soviet Union to that date was under way, in which in less than three weeks the entire German population was removed from the Volga region and the autonomous republic of the Volga Germans was wiped off the map.

Popular chronologies record under 8 September that Stalin ordered the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia. The date needs correcting. The decision had been taken earlier: the joint resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) is dated 26 August, and the public decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR “On the Resettlement of the Germans Living in the Districts of the Volga Region” is dated 28 August 1941. The deportations themselves lasted from 3 to 20 September, so 8 September falls right in the middle of them. The destination also needs qualifying: the deportees were sent not only to Siberia but also to northern and eastern Kazakhstan, where roughly one in four ended up.

The Germans of the Volga

German settlement on the lower Volga began in the 1760s, when Empress Catherine II, herself a German princess by birth, invited foreigners to settle the steppes along the Volga, promising them land, freedom of worship, their own language and exemption from military service. Between 1764 and 1773 settlers, mainly from Hesse and the Palatinate, founded more than a hundred colonies around Saratov, in which for a century and a half they preserved their language, faith and customs.

After the revolution, in October 1918, the Bolsheviks created a German autonomous region here, which at the turn of 1923 and 1924 was transformed into the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian SFSR. Its capital was Engels, formerly Pokrovsk, on the left bank of the Volga opposite Saratov. The republic had its own schools, newspapers and theatre, and its official languages were German, Russian and Ukrainian. At the same time it went through all the misfortunes of the Soviet countryside: the great famine of 1921–1922, which killed tens of thousands of Germans in the Volga region, collectivisation and dekulakisation, the famine of 1932–1933, the closing of churches and the arrest of clergy. During the Great Purge the NKVD carried out a “German operation” directed against Soviet citizens of German origin as an alleged fifth column of the Reich.

According to the 1939 census the republic had a little over 600,000 inhabitants in an area of about 28,000 square kilometres. Some 366,700 of them, or three-fifths, were Germans. Across the Soviet Union as a whole the census counted around 1.4 million Germans.

From propaganda to suspicion

In the first weeks after the German attack on the USSR the Soviet authorities treated the Volga republic as a propaganda asset. Its leaders, Konrad Hoffmann, chairman of the Presidium of the republic’s Supreme Soviet, and Alexander Heckmann, chairman of its government, issued appeals to the German people in July calling for Hitler’s overthrow. As late as 31 July 1941 a court in Engels sentenced a man to six years in prison for calling his German co-workers fascists.

This policy did not last long. The front was moving rapidly eastwards, and reports from the front and from the security apparatus spoke of “defeatist” remarks and of German villages in the territories being overrun welcoming the Wehrmacht. On 3 August the command of the Southern Front reported to Stalin that on the Dniester local Germans had fired on retreating units, and asked for the removal of “unreliable elements”. On this report Joseph Stalin wrote to Lavrentiy Beria: “They must be deported with a bang.” According to the Russian historian Arkady German, author of a monograph on the German autonomy on the Volga, this resolution provided the final impetus for the deportation. In mid-August some 50,000–60,000 Germans were removed from Crimea under the name of an evacuation, and on 26 August the Military Council of the Leningrad Front decided to remove the German and Finnish population from the Leningrad area.

In the post-war years it was repeatedly said that the decision to deport had been preceded by a visit by Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov to the republic, or even by a provocation in which the NKVD dropped parachutists in German uniforms over German villages and shot the inhabitants who hid them. German’s archival research confirmed neither the visit nor the provocation, and a survey carried out in the 1980s by the German historian Alfred Eisfeld among more than 170 deportees from 90 localities of the republic produced not a single eyewitness account. Eisfeld judged these stories highly improbable, and most scholars treat them as legend. Nor has any evidence been found, in either Soviet or German archives, of any organised collaboration by the Volga Germans with the Reich.

The resolution of 26 August and the decree of 28 August

The actual decision was taken by the party leadership. The joint, top-secret resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of 26 August 1941 ordered “the resettlement of all Germans from the Republic of the Volga Germans and from the Saratov and Stalingrad regions”, without exception, from towns and villages alike, and designated the destination areas: Krasnoyarsk Krai, Altai Krai, the Omsk and Novosibirsk regions and six regions of the Kazakh SSR. The deportees could take personal belongings, small tools and food, up to a ton per family in all. Houses, farm buildings, equipment, livestock and grain were to be left behind and taken over by commissions against receipts, in exchange for which compensation in kind was promised at the new place. The deportations were to begin on 3 September and end on 20 September. Overall direction of the operation was entrusted to the NKVD.

A day later, on 27 August, Beria issued Order No. 001158 for the conduct of the operation. An operational group was sent to the area under the command of the deputy people’s commissar of internal affairs, Ivan Serov, who in June had coordinated the deportations from the Baltic states. Some 1,500 NKVD officers, more than 3,000 militiamen and, according to documents collected by German, more than 12,000 NKVD troops were sent to the republic and the neighbouring regions, the first regiments setting off for Engels, Saratov and Stalingrad as early as 26 August. The order called for the advance arrest of “anti-Soviet elements”, for the forcible removal of those who refused to leave, and for action “without noise or panic”.

Last came the act that was to give the whole operation an appearance of legality. The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 28 August 1941, signed by its chairman Mikhail Kalinin and secretary Alexander Gorkin and approved by the Politburo late that evening, declared:

According to reliable information received by the military authorities, among the German population living in the districts of the Volga region there are thousands and tens of thousands of saboteurs and spies who, on a signal given from Germany, are to carry out explosions in the districts inhabited by the Volga Germans. None of the Germans living in the districts of the Volga region has informed the Soviet authorities of the presence of so great a number of saboteurs and spies among the Volga Germans – consequently, the German population of the districts of the Volga region is harbouring in its midst enemies of the Soviet people and of Soviet power.

The decree thus proclaimed the collective guilt of an entire people, infants included, without a single name, fact or piece of evidence. It went on to present the resettlement as an act of solicitude: if sabotage and bloodshed occurred, the government would be obliged to apply repressive measures against the entire German population, and “to avoid such undesirable occurrences” it had been decided to resettle it, with state assistance, in districts “rich in arable land”. The decree was published on 30 August by the republic’s two newspapers, the German-language Nachrichten and the Russian-language Bolshevik, and on 2 September by the official gazette of the Supreme Soviet. On the same day, 30 August, Heckmann asked to be relieved of his post “because his further instructions will carry no authority”. On 5 September the republic’s party authorities formally dismissed all officials of German nationality, from Hoffmann and Heckmann down to the canton officials.

Three weeks of September

Preparations on the ground began on 29 and 30 August. NKVD operational groups drew up registration cards for the families in every village, and each family was notified of its departure date separately; meetings and joint discussions were forbidden. Family members of other nationalities could stay, but in practice most went with their relatives. Those who did not live near a station usually had a day to pack; the inhabitants in the first waves handed over their farms as early as 31 August. Receipts for the property left behind were issued to only some people, and of the promised compensation, as the accounts collected by Eisfeld show, almost no one ever received anything.

On 3 September the first ten trains left ten stations on schedule. No exceptions were made: the chairman of a canton executive committee travelled in the first train from Gmelinka station. The inhabitants reached the stations by lorry and horse-drawn cart, and when there were not enough of these they walked, with their belongings on their backs. When a decree of 7 September divided the republic’s territory between the neighbouring regions, the Saratov authorities took the horses and oxen for field work, and from Balzer canton, 60–80 kilometres from Uvek station near Saratov, many people, women and children among them, went on foot. The inhabitants of several villages on the Volga were taken to the stations by barge and steamer, and the Germans of the Stalingrad region first down the Volga to Astrakhan, from there across the Caspian Sea to Guryev (today Atyrau), and only then onwards by rail.

The operation moved quickly, though not without hitches. Because of the rain some of the deportees were late arriving at the stations, the railway failed to provide wagons on time, and after a few days the Volga lines became jammed: on 8 September half of the 61 trains dispatched were still standing near the loading stations. No one resisted; the NKVD reported that there was not a single family in the republic that had refused to leave. As a “preventive” measure 349 people regarded as anti-Soviet elements were arrested in the three regions. The last trains left Engels and Uvek on 20 September. One deportee recalled that as they left Saratov no one wept, but when the train went onto the bridge over the Volga the whole wagon sobbed, adults and children alike.

According to the NKVD’s report to the Politburo, 446,480 people were deported. The partial figures differ from document to document: from the republic alone, according to various tallies, between about 365,800 and 373,500; from the Saratov region 46,700; from the Stalingrad region 26,200; in all, from the Volga region, according to the most frequently cited tally, 438,700. Arkady German, who reconstructed the lists of all 188 trains, counted some 452,000 people at departure and some 440,000 at unloading; the difference is explained by deaths, people who got lost on the way and counting errors. It was one of the largest operations of its kind that the Soviet security apparatus had carried out up to that time, and in terms of speed probably the largest.

The end of the republic

The republic ceased to exist before its last inhabitants had been deported. A resolution of the government and the Central Committee of 6 September and a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 7 September “on the administrative division of the territory of the former Republic of the Volga Germans” attached the city of Engels and 15 cantons to the Saratov region and the remaining 7 cantons to the Stalingrad region (today the Volgograd region). The very title of the decree spoke of the “former” republic. The cantons were turned into districts, the German names of the villages were soon replaced with Russian ones, and the authorities began moving people evacuated from the western parts of the country into the empty houses. A separate act formally abolishing the republic, as some scholars note, was never issued.

In the east

The journey usually took one to two weeks, but many trains travelled by a roundabout route through Kazakhstan so as not to block the main lines carrying transports to the front, and some families, sent on from station to station, were on the road, according to accounts collected by Eisfeld, for as long as several months. People travelled forty or more to a covered goods wagon, on bunks or on straw, with hot meals handed out irregularly and a constant shortage of water. Dysentery and other infectious diseases broke out on many trains, and it was above all children who died of them. German, who found data on deaths for 44 trains, counted 159 dead among them and estimated that at least 600–700 people died on the journey in all. More than a thousand people were separated at stations and ended up in other transports, which split families for many years.

According to German’s tally, 73 per cent of those deported from the Volga region ended up in Siberia, in the Krasnoyarsk and Altai krais and the Omsk and Novosibirsk regions, and 27 per cent in northern and eastern Kazakhstan. The last trains reached their destinations at the beginning of October. The plan to settle entire collective farms in compact groups proved unrealistic, and as early as 12 September the Politburo allowed them to be distributed a few families at a time. The population of the republic, which had occupied 22 cantons, was thus scattered across 224 districts, often hundreds of kilometres from the unloading stations, reached by river and by cart. At their new places the deportees became so-called special settlers, under the supervision of NKVD komendaturas, with no right to leave their place of residence without permission and with the obligation to report regularly. They lived in dugouts, in barracks and as lodgers with local people, often without the promised land, livestock and grain.

All the Germans of the USSR

The deportation from the Volga region was the beginning, not the end. In September and October 1941 further resolutions of the State Defence Committee ordered the removal of Germans from Moscow, the North Caucasus, the as yet unoccupied regions of eastern Ukraine, Transcaucasia and many other regions. From the Leningrad area only some could be removed before the ring of the blockade closed. By 1 January 1942, according to NKVD data, almost 800,000 Germans had been resettled, and over the whole war, including later deportations, between 900,000 and 950,000 according to various estimates. In the territories the Wehrmacht managed to occupy, several hundred thousand Soviet Germans remained, mainly from Ukraine and the Black Sea coast; the Germans treated them as ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and evacuated them westwards in 1943–1944.

From January 1942 the exiles suffered a further blow. Resolutions of the State Defence Committee of 10 January and 14 February 1942 ordered the mobilisation of men aged 17 to 50, later 15 to 55, into “labour columns”, and a resolution of 7 October 1942 also of women aged 16 to 45, except for pregnant women and mothers of children under three. Thus arose the labour army, which those affected themselves called the Trudarmiya: Germans built metallurgical combines and arms factories in the Urals, felled forests and worked in mines, in camps subordinate to the Gulag, behind barbed wire, under guard and often in worse conditions than convicted prisoners. According to Eisfeld’s estimates, 300,000–400,000 people passed through the labour army and more than 100,000 died in it; other scholars give lower figures, but all agree that mortality in 1942–1943 was enormous.

Place in the war

The deportation of the Volga Germans was the first large one in a series of total deportations of peoples carried out by the Soviet authorities during the war. Earlier, during the Great Purge, the Koreans of the Far East had already been deported in their entirety, but it was the war that made this method a permanent instrument. In 1943 and 1944, on the same principle and with the same accusation of collective treason, the Karachays, Kalmyks, Chechens and Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks and several smaller groups were deported. Historians describe the deportation of the Germans, like the later ones, as ethnic cleansing and the punishment of an entire people for its origins; some scholars go so far as to speak of genocide, which remains a matter of dispute.

The wrong did not end with the war. The labour army was disbanded in 1946–1947, but its members were not allowed to return to the Volga. A decree of 26 November 1948 ruled that all those deported during the war had been exiled “in perpetuity”, and escape from the place of exile was punishable by up to twenty years’ hard labour. Only a decree of 13 December 1955, issued after Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow, released the Germans from the supervision of the komendaturas, but without the right to return or to recover their property. On 29 August 1964 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet declared the accusations of 1941 “unfounded”, and the restrictions on the choice of place of residence were lifted in 1972. The Volga republic was never restored, and attempts to create a German autonomous area in Kazakhstan in 1979 and on the Volga in the early 1990s came to nothing in the face of opposition from the local population. After the collapse of the USSR most Russian Germans emigrated to Germany. The anniversary of the decree, 28 August, is for them a day of remembrance and mourning.

At the moment when the trains from the Volga region were heading east, the Wehrmacht was closing the ring around Leningrad and encircling the armies of the South-Western Front near Kiev. Stalin, who in his radio speech of 3 July had called for a merciless struggle against saboteurs and spies in the rear, declared an entire national group to be enemies, a group that for twenty years had been the showcase of Soviet nationalities policy.