Let Us Just Call it "Anti-German"

There is no doubt that the ethnic German population of the USSR suffered a great deal of persecution and suffering from 1918 until 1955 in various waves. These include the events of the 1918-1921 Civil War, the 1921-1922 famine, the mass dekulakization of 1930-1931, the 1932-1933 Holodomor, the 1937-1938 Great Terror, and finally the mass internal deportations, special settlement restrictions, and mobilization into the labor army from 1941 to 1955. It is these last three events starting with the order to deport the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan on 26 August 1941 that are commemorated on the 28th of August. The difference of two days is due to the fact that the SNK (Council of People’s Commissars) and Central Committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) issued a secret order to deport the Volga Germans on 26 August 1941 while the public decree by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was promulgated on 28 August 1941. This second decree was published in Russian in Bolshevik and German in Nachrichten on 30 August 1941. The public commemoration of the mass persecution of the ethnic Germans in the USSR during World War II is thus officially recognized on August 28 each year. It has been an official day of mourning and rememberance in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1982.

The nature of the Soviet persecution of ethnic Germans and other targeted nationalities in the USSR has been the subject of some debate. A debate that I am increasingly considering to be a diversion. There is no doubt that the Soviet government especially under Stalin persecuted ethnic Germans because they were Germans. That the repression had to do solely with who they were and not with anything they did is blatantly apparent. Whether one wishes to categorize this oppression against Germans for being Germans as racial, ethnic, national, or something else seems to be unimportant in comparison. Certainly none of the Germans deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan and then mobilized into the labor army cared much if the Soviet government considered them a race, ethnicity, or nationality. The fact is that the regardless of whether the persecution was racial, ethnic, national, or something else it was definitely Anti-German. In this sense Viktor Krieger’s reference to the repression as simply Anti-German rather than racial or ethnic was way ahead of its time in cutting the Gordian Knot of the various semantic defenses of Stalin’s crimes against the group. No matter how militantly people like Amir Weiner and Francine Hirsch defend the Stalinist deportation of whole ethnic groups as not being racially motivated they can not deny that the Soviet round up and forced relocation of the Volga Germans in 1941 was Anti-German. The term Anti-German is both much more precise and encompassing than the terms racism or racial discrimination when it comes to describing the deportations, special settlement, and mobilization into the labor army of German in the USSR. In this sense it has the advantages of the analogue term Anti-Semitism which describes acts against Jews regardless of whether Jews are considered a race, an ethnicity, a nation, a religion, a people, all of them, or something else.  From the point of view of the persecuted and oppressed whether they are being targeted for their race, ethnicity, peoplehood, or something else is completely irrelevant.

The terms race, racism, and racial have largely been made useless by academic abuse. More precise terms regarding specific groups like Anti-Black, Anti-Semitism, and most notably Anti-German, however, still describe real historical phenomena. The Soviet crimes against its citizens of German ancestry especially from 1941 to 1955 were obviously Anti-German. Unlike arguments over the cognates of the word race no amount of sophistry can deny this simple fact. The Germans were targeted for persecution for being German. Whether German in this case was part of a larger category of race or ethnicity or nation or some sort of combination that transcends all of these terms changes nothing.