Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 28 – Seventy-eight
years ago today, shortly after Hitler invaded the USSR, the Soviet government
liquidated the German Autonomous Republic and deported all ethnic Germans from its
territory as well as many but far from all ethnic Germans then living in other
parts of the Soviet Union.
Over the course of two months,
Moscow deported roughly 440,000 ethnic Germans to Siberia, Kazakhstan and
Central Asia, but in the chaos following the German invasion, officials did not
handle the operation especially well either in terms of identifying and
rounding up those to be deported and in dispatching them to the east.
For example, in Ukraine, there were
roughly 800,000 ethnic Germans in 1941; but in one oblast, the authorities
deported only slightly over half of the Germans there. Those who remained were eventually
taken to Germany where after 1945, they became part of the army of displaced persons
(“DPs”).
But the chaos and confusion of this
operation was even more noticeable in the way in which ethnic Germans from west
of the Urals were treated in terms of their ultimate destination. Florentina
Hiber, one of their number, recounted in 1997 her experiences to Tomsk
historian Yakov Yakovlev. He has now published her testimony (sibreal.org/a/30037396.html).
It is both a deeply moving human
document and a useful reminder that the Soviet authorities were not behaving in
1941 like the efficient, well-organized and tightly controlled bureaucracy they
are often assumed to have been and that the consequences of the deportation
lasted far beyond the end of the war or the death of Stalin.
Florentina who was forced to Russify
her name as Valentina and whose last name changed to Zauer as a result of
marriage, was among the Germans living in Ukraine in 1941. Born in 1925, Florentina
saw her father and two brothers swept up in the Great Terror in 1937. Then in
1941, she, her three sisters and her mother were deported.
They were put on freight cars for a
month and travelled from place to place. First, they were sent to Kazakhstan
but officials there didn’t want them. Then, they were sent to Novosibirsk where
people came out and stared at them because they had heard that “the Germans are
coming” and that Germans had only one eye.
But many Russians were supportive
because they knew that Germans were good workers and expected them to help the economic
situation in Siberia, Florentina continued.
She worked in a sovkhoz where officials sought to encourage them to
produce by saying that each kilo of food they raised would represent another
bullet that could be used against the Germans.
Eventually, Florentina was able to
move to a job in a factory and got married lest she be returned to the
farm. Over this period, she and her
relatives more or less fully stopped speaking German and shifted to Russian,
lest they continue to attract attention as “fascists,” the term of abuse
Russians typically used about them.
The deportee lived on until 2009, and
for most of that period, her deportation cast a shadow over her life and that of
other ethnic Germans. Many of them,
having been deported, were given a new status n 1948, that of “special settlers,”
a group with severely limited rights and effectively sentenced to eternal exile
from their native places.
As Yakovlev points out, the 1.2 million
Germans in this category weren’t given passports, their young men weren’t drafted,
they couldn’t be hired for most government positions, and they were restricted
in their access to higher education, medical care, and cultural institutions.
That arrangement continued until
August 1954, the Tomsk historian recounts, when most of these restrictions were
lifted – except for their designation as German collaborators – that was lifted
only in 1964 – and their right to return to their native places – which became
possible only in 1972.
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