Cruel World by Lynn H. Nicholas

Author:Lynn H. Nicholas [Nicholas, Lynn Holman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79382-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

In January 1935, all Germans living in a sixty-mile-wide strip along the western borders of the USSR were rounded up and sent to remote Murmansk. In other areas, they were carefully removed from jobs in strategic industries and services, and many were put under surveillance. Once the Nazis invaded, ethnic German men aged sixteen to sixty in the western battle zones were evacuated east in the very first convoys, along with the livestock and industrial matériel. Their wives, teenaged daughters, and young children stayed behind to work on fortifications and then were also sent east, not necessarily to the same places as their male relatives.

Rounding up ethnic Germans in the combat zones was necessarily haphazard, and many were left behind, but in the case of the Autonomous Volga Republic, farther to the east, where two-thirds of the population was of German descent, many of their families having lived in the region since the days of Catherine the Great, the deportation was highly organized and complete. In early July 1941, NKVD units moved into the capital and major towns and isolated them. Communications and transportation were closed down. German community leaders were shot, and commando units took control of houses and farms. Incidents were fabricated to imply that the German residents were saboteurs and spies. The first transports left in late July, and by the end of September the area had been completely cleared of its 500,000 or so German settlers and the Autonomous Volga Republic dissolved.32 Within days of the departure of each relay, refugees and evacuees from the war zones, including a large group of Spanish Civil War children, were brought in and placed in the abandoned houses and institutions of the Volga Germans. Here too, half-eaten meals on tables, miserable unmilked cattle in the barns, and other evidence of the rapid departure of the former owners shocked the new residents.

More deportations in the usual cattle cars would take place from every German enclave, and as the summer passed and the cold set in, death stalked these groups as it did all others. In one train sent from the Caucasus in November 1941, 400 children died. And, like the Poles before them, the deportees who survived were billeted in the mud huts of long-exiled kulaks and found little to sustain life at their remote destinations.33

This apparently precautionary deportation of ethnic Germans was only the beginning of Stalin’s campaigns against minority groups of which he was suspicious and whose cultures he was determined to obliterate. Later on, in even more brutal circumstances, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, the Kalmyks, and many other groups would suffer the same fate.

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