Ethnic Germans in Ukraine During Collectivization, Dekulakization, and the Holodomor 1928-1933
The genocidal man made famine imposed upon the Ukrainian SSR in 1932-1933 known as the Holodomor killed not only people of Ukrainian nationality, but also a large number of people belonging to national minorities living in the territory. This was especially true of predominantly rural ethnic groups such as Germans and Poles. This paper will focus on the collective experience of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine during dekulakization, forced agricultural collectivization, and the Holodomor itself. In total it will cover the years 1928-1933 as a key turning point in Soviet state violence towards ethnic Germans from being predominantly class based in the period from 1918-1922 to mostly being based on ancestral national origin in 1937-1938, and later entirely based upon ethno-racial targeting in 1941-1955. This movement from targeting class enemies to internal enemy nations was not limited to the ethnic Germans. It involved the disproportionate and later almost total repression of a number of ethno-national groups in the USSR during the Stalin regime. A significant number of these targeted groups were diaspora groups with ancestral and cultural origins outside the USSR. These included in addition to the Germans, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Koreans, Chinese, and others. In Ukraine large numbers of Germans, Poles, and Greeks lived before World War II and massive deportations eastward by the NKVD greatly reduced their numbers. Ethnic Germans made up one of the largest and oldest diaspora groups in the USSR and especially Ukraine up until this time. German settlers began arriving in what would become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Soviet era in the late 18th century. This immigration greatly increased in the 19th century starting during the Napoleonic Wars and official policies by Paul I and Alexander I to settle the territory annexed from the defeated Crimean Khanate by Catherine II. German speaking Lutherans, Catholics, and Mennonites settled in the Black Sea region of the Russian Empire in large numbers during the first half of the 19th century and became quite prosperous. Most of them settled in rural areas on land provided by the Russian government and their descendants remained farmers up until the 1941 deportations. During the 1918-1921 Civil War and 1921-1922 famine ethnic Germans both in Ukraine and other areas such as the Volga were targeted by the Bolsheviks and others such as Makhno’s anarchists due to their relative wealth. This would give way to the relatively benign policies of NEP and korenizatsiia (indigenization) from 1923-1928. During this time ethnic Germans in Ukraine had a number of economically successful national districts. The dekulakization, collectivization, and famine of 1928-1933, however, represented a harsh blow to this prosperity. It also represented the first stages in moving from attacking the German communities because they were considered hostile class elements based on economic and social criteria to attacking them because Germans were defined to be kulaks because of their ethnicity.
The history of Germans in Ukraine dates back to the late 18th Century and involved both periods of hardship and prosperity. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution brought first Civil War 1918-1920 and then famine 1921-1922 in it wake. This was followed by a comparative period of favorable treatment during NEP and korenizatsiia and then came collectivization, dekulakization, and finally the Holodomor. German settlements had existed in Ukraine for 167 years when the Holodomor occurred. The current territory of Ukraine started to receive German settlers in the late 18th Century. Most settlers during this time established colonies in the Volga region in response to Catherine II’s manifesto of 22 July 1763 (V.A. Auman and V.G. Chebatoreva, eds., Istoriia rossiiskikh nemtsev v dokumentakh (1763-1992 gg.). Moscow: MIGP, 1993. pp. 18-21). But, one early German colony was established in Belowescher Ukraine in 1765, a year after the first settlement in the Volga region (Viktor Krieger, Hans Kampen, and Nina Paulsen, Deutsche aus Russland gestern und heute: Volk auf dem Weg. Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, 2006, p. 21).The continued existence of the Crimean Khanate in much of southern Ukraine, however, hampered European settlement up until 1783. In that year Catherine II abolished the khanate and annexed the territory to the Russian Empire. In 1786, three years later, the Russian government opened the area up to European immigrants (V.M. Kabuzan, Emigratsiia I reemigratsiia v rossii v XVIII-nachale XX veka. Moscow: Nauka, 1998, p. 47). The next year, Mennonites from near Danzig began to settle in the region (A.A. German, T.C. Ilarionova, and I.R. Pleve, Istoriia nemtsev Rossii. Moscow: MSNK Press, 2005., p. 79). A total of 228 Mennonite families from West Prussia formed eight colonies in the newly acquired lands in 1787 (G.K. Krongardt, Nemtsy v Kyrgyzstane 1880-1990 gg. Bishkek: Ilim, 1997, p. 16 and German et al, p. 81). These early settlements in the 18th Century, however, would be dwarfed by the later influx of Mennonite and other German settlers during the 19th Century.
Like Catherine II did for the Volga region in 1763, her son Paul I and grandson Alexander I issued manifestos facilitating German settlement in the Black Sea region of the Russian Empire. Tsar Paul I issued a charter of privileges for Mennonites settling in the Russian Empire on 6 September 1800. This charter included immunity from military conscription. Within a decade the number of Mennonite settlers in what is now Ukraine had reached 18,000 (Fred Richard Belk, The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880-1884. Scotsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1976., p. 36). On 20 February 1804, Tsar Alexander I issued a new more restrictive manifesto inviting in Christian foreigners to settle in the territories annexed from the Crimean Khanate by his grandmother (Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History. Trans. Alfred Clayton. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2001., p. 51). A huge flood of Lutheran and Catholic German colonists joined the earlier Mennonites to settle in the southern parts of the Russian Empire along the Black Sea coast during the next half century. By the 1860s around 70,000 Germans had settled in this region (Kabuzan, pp. 58-59). Another region of today’s Ukraine settled by German settlers in the 19th century was Volhynia in the northwest near Poland. The 1897 Imperial Russian census counted a total of 1,800,000 Germans in the empire of which 378,000 lived in the Black Sea region and 171,000 in Volhynia for almost 550,000 Germans in the territory that would become the Ukrainian SSR (A.A. German and A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v trudovoi armii (1941-1955). Moscow: Gotika, 1998, p. 18). Subsequent events would substantially reduce their population.
The Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war brought about great hardship for the ethnic Germans in Ukraine. A combination of war, repression, famine, and other causes led to a huge spike in premature deaths among the population. Although lower than in the Volga region, the Ukrainian Germans, nonetheless, lost some 50,000 to 60,000 lives due to these causes from 1918-1922 (Viktor Krieger, Bundesburger russlanddeutscher Herkunft: Historische Schlusselerfahrungen und kollektives Gedachtnis. Munster: Lit Verlag. 2013., pp. 240-242). Additional decreases from migration and the redrawing of the border between Poland and the Ukrainian SSR at the Treaty of Riga in 1920 led to a substantial decline in the German population in the region from its height of 660,000 in 1914 (Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Germans: Past and Present. London: C. Hurst and Company, 1986, p. 21). The first complete Soviet census and the only one before the Holodomor in 1932-1933 took place in 1926. This census counted 393,924 Germans in the Ukrainian SSR (Viktor Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh: Iz istorii nemtsev tsentral’noi azii. Almaty: Daik-Press, 2006, table 1, p. 133). The events of the early 1930s would again result in substantial losses among the German minority just as it did the Ukrainian majority.
The forced collectivization of agriculture starting in 1928 very quickly began to treat certain national minorities such as Germans and Poles more harshly than other national groups. Germans were singled out by name for internal deportation by the Soviet government already in 1929. A decree by the Central Committee of the CP Ukraine (B) on 27 March 1929 bore the title “On Evicting Germans from Nikolaev Okrug” thus providing a national rather than class basis for some of the internal deportations of “kulaks” (V.V. Chentsov, Tragicheskie sud’by: Politicheskie repressii protiv nemtskogo nasaleniia Ukrainy v 1920-e -1930-e gody. Moscow: Gotika, 1998., p. 42). Germans were not the only diaspora nationality to be specifically targeted in this way during collectivization. Poles also became a group deported from certain territories on the basis of nationality. On 5 March 1930, the Soviet Politburo passed a resolution ordering the deportation of 3,000 to 3,500 Polish families from the borders of Belorussian SSR and Poland and 10,000 to 15,000 from the Ukrainian border with Poland (Terry Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. London:Cornell University Press, 2011, p. 322). In the case of both minorities the OGPU displayed an ethnic animus that resulted in them suffering a disproportionately large percentage of their population being branded as “kulaks” and deported to special settlements. That is enemy nations were replacing class enemies as the focus of political repression (Martin, pp. 311-343). The Germans were one of these enemy nations and their transformation from being equal members of the “Friendship of Peoples” to a stigmatized national group begins already in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They were disproportionately targeted for dekulakization in part due to their ethnicity. Below I attempt to ascertain a rough approximation of the numbers involved.
The collectivization of agriculture was accomplished in the USSR through the mass deportation of farmers branded as “kulaks” to special settlements in the Far North and Urals mostly during 1930-1931. In total the OGPU forcibly uprooted and resettled 1,803,392 such farmers in these two years (V.N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSR, 1930-1960. Moscow: Nauka, 2005., p. 16). Ukraine accounted for 63,817 families out of 380,756 registered as internally deported at this time (Zemskov, table no. 1, pp. 17-18) This translates into about 315,000 people deported from the Ukrainian SSR to special settlement villages. Based on the 1926 census the deportations to special settlements during dekulakization encompassed 1.2% of the total Soviet population and 1.1% of the Ukrainian SSR. The percentage of Germans deported as “kulaks” during these years is estimated to be much higher, especially from the Volga German ASSR. The number of recorded deportees from this latter territory was 4,288 families or about 25,000 people (A.A. German and I.R. Pleve, Nemtsy povolzh’ia: Kratkii istoricheskie ocherk. Saratov: Saratov University, 2002., p. 39). This represents about half of the estimated 50,000 Germans deported to special settlement villages as “kulaks” (Viktor Krieger, “Chronologie der antideutschen Massnahmen in Russland bzw. Der UdSSR,” Volk auf dem Weg, no, 8-9, 2007, p. 13).
In percentage terms the OGPU deported 4% of the entire German population of the USSR and 6.6% of the German population of the Volga German ASSR as “kulaks” to special settlements (Viktor Krieger, Rein, Volga, Irtysh, table no. 1, p. 133). In parts of Ukraine the number of dekulakized Germans was also quite high. In Luxemburg Raion with 20,000 inhabitants the OGPU dekulakized 166 German households (about 850 people or 4.25%) during 1930 (V.V. Chentsov, p. 46). If this proportion holds for the entire German population of Ukraine then the number of ethnic Germans deported from the Ukrainian SSR as “kulaks” would be around 17,000. That would leave some 8,000 Germans deported as “kulaks” among the settlements outside the Volga German ASSR and Ukrainian SSR out of a population of around 400,000 or 2%. These geographical differences are notable and can probably be even further subdivided.
The Holodomor is usually associated with Ukrainian victims since the vast majority of victims were ethnic Ukrainians due to its geographical focus on policies imposed by Moscow on the Ukrainian SSR. Nonetheless, not all the victims were ethnic Ukrainians. National minorities, especially those that were predominantly rural such as Germans and Poles also suffered large numbers of deaths due famine related causes. Even more so than attempting to ascertain and estimate the total number of excess deaths in Ukraine during the Holodomor it is difficult to come up with accurate numbers for the number of ethnic Germans to perish as a result of the famine. The official recorded deaths of ethnic Germans from hunger in 1932-1933 by the GPU Ukrainian SSR are ludicrously low given the severity of the famine among the nearly 400,000 Germans in the territory. The GPU Ukrainian SSR gives a recorded figure for 1933 of 1,700 urban and 12,000 rural Germans perishing from hunger (V.V. Chentsov, p. 60). Given the number of ethnic Germans in starving rural areas of Ukraine during this time an excess mortality rate of less than 4% is unbelievably low. This is especially the case considering the much higher number of recorded German deaths from hunger at the same time in the less hard hit Volga German ASSR. Demographic analysis and estimates come up with much higher figures.
Estimates for the total number of Germans to die from famine in the USSR during 1932-1933 vary widely. These figures include not only Ukraine but also the Volga region and Kazakhstan. In 1998 German and Kurochkin put the number of Germans to die of famine related causes in the USSR during the 1930s at 200,000 of which 55,000 took place in the Volga German ASSR. They do not give a figure for Ukraine (German and Kurochkin, p. 23). Viktor Krieger gives considerably lower figures and has significantly revised the number of excess deaths downward in more recent years. In 2006 he calculated that the ethnic German population of the USSR between 1927-1936 suffered 150,000 excess deaths. This included 45,300 recorded famine deaths in the Volga German ASSR. Most of the excess deaths would thus be famine deaths in Ukraine during the Holodomor. Yet he does not provide a separate estimate for these deaths and instead the aggregate figure includes famine deaths in Kazakhstan, deaths of “kulaks” in special settlements, and prisoners in labor camps. He gives a total figure of all excess deaths in the USSR from famine in the 1930s at 7.2 million. This number includes the Volga region with 366,000 deaths and Kazakhstan (Krieger Rein, Volga, Irtysh, pp. 135-136). In 2013 Viktor Krieger substantially reduced his estimate for the total number of German famine deaths in the USSR during 1932-1933 down to 100,000 (Krieger, Bundesburger russlanddeutscher Herkunft, pp. 240-242). Subtracting some 50,000 deaths in the Volga gives us estimates from 150,000 to 50,000 Germans in other regions of the USSR. The number of excess deaths among the ethnic Germans in Ukraine during the Holodomor thus appears to be at least 50,000 or about 12.5% of their population at the time. Although this is only a very rough approximation based upon incomplete data. This percentage is only slightly below that of Ukraine as a whole at 13% using the estimate of 3.9 million excess deaths (Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Anchor Books, 2017., p. 333). Thus it appears that German deaths in the Holodomor were not radically lower than those suffered by Ukrainians proportionately although the absolute numbers were much lower.
The high rate of German deaths during the Holodomor like the high rate for the Ukrainian majority was due to several factors. These included the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population was rural, the low level of integration into the communist apparatus by the German minority, and anti-German prejudices by the OGPU starting with the forced collectivization of agriculture and deportation of “kulaks” to special settlements. These factors counterbalanced things like being able to get assistance from outside the USSR (Applebaum, pp. 334-335). The ethnic Germans in Ukraine like the Ukrainian majority suffered a severe blow from the Soviet policies of agricultural collectivization, dekulakization, and finally artificial famine.
The ethnic Germans in Ukraine appear to have suffered similar percentage losses as the territory’s population as a whole. Unlike more urbanized minorities such as Russians or Jews it does not appear to have been substantially lower than the Ukrainian majority. The Holodomor came on the heels of the mass deportation of “kulaks” to special settlements. During this campaign ethnic Germans were disproportionately targeted compared to the Soviet population as a whole. Later Germans would be specifically targeted in the “German Operation” in the Great Terror of 1937-1938, and the vast majority of them subjected to forced resettlement and special settlement restrictions in 1941. The period 1928-1933 represented a key turning point in the Soviet transformation of the ethnic Germans into an enemy nation.
fantastic article by one of the top scholars on this subject
AG Bridges