Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 08:51:07 -0500 Reply-To: H-NET List on German History Sender: H-NET List on German History From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers Subject: Re: Victimization Submitted by: Roland Wagner In a previous posting I referred to the "innocent ethnic Volksdeutsch" who experienced a holocaust of their own at the hands of Stalin during the war. Michael Hughes commented that the ethnic Germans "...had acquiesced in or supported enthusiastically the German war effort..." I want to be clear here about the events that happened to these people. The ethnic Germans who settled in numerous colonies in modern Rumania, along the north shore of the Black Sea, in the Crimea, and along the Volga were rounded up at gunpoint by Stalin's soldiers, shipped east to Siberia in unheated cattle-cars to work-camps. Many people starved, froze to death, or died of disease and exhaustion. Women were not allowed to bury their babies -- stories are told of how they had to throw the bodies from the doorways of the boxcars. These people lost all their property and possessions, without ever receiving compensation. They were wrongly accused of being fascist sympathizers, a charge which the Soviet Union later acknowledged as false. Some of the ethnic Germans north of the Black Sea were saved from the Soviet forces by the rapid advance of the German army in 1941. Later, after the Soviets counterattacked, these ethnic German farmers were also rounded up and shipped off to Siberian slave labor camps. These people were finally officially "pardoned" (for crimes they never committed) in the mid 1960s, and they were allowed to filter south into Kazakhstan and western Siberia. Today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of nationalism in the eastern republics, the ethnic Germans are being excluded from universities, public office, and political representation. Once again they are a population on the move. These people *were* innocent victims of the war, and they remain so today. They were not followers of Hitler. Despite the official pardon (without compensation) they are still called "fascists" by many Russians. There are millions of stories of tragedies suffered by ethnic Germans in eastern Europe that could be told -- indeed, that *should* be told, as part of the objective historical record. Some of these tales have emerged only recently. One wonders why it has taken so long. .