Germans From Russia Just another NDSU Library weblog

The GRHC now offers Family Recipes from German Tradition. The cookbook is available for $20.00 plus shipping and handling. Click here to find out more about this cookbook.

In the April 2003 edition of North Dakota Living, Jo Ann Winistorfer writes about German-Russian iron crosses.

It was the winter of 1891-92. Diptheria had invaded the rural sod home of Mercer County pioneers, Gottlieb and Dorothea (Habelmann) Krukenberg. Note the spelling variation on Kruckenberg-Krukenberg surname.

Their youngest child–7-year-old Friedrich–had been severely stricken by this deadly disease. Symptoms included high fever, swollen glands, and a thick, choking coating in the throat that made breathing and swallowing difficult. Already this winter, diphtheria had taken the lives of others in the area. The nearest doctor lived in Bismarck, too far away to help.

Trying to save her “little Friedele,” as she called him, Dorothea likely tried various folk remedies she had learned from her female German-Russian ancestors back in Bessarabia, Russia, their former homeland: throat swabs; powdered alum administered to the back of the throat; a hunk of salt pork wrapped up in a woolen sock and tied around the neck. And, most certainly, prayers. Lutheran prayers, recited in German.

Yet despite these efforts, death stepped in to claim little Friedrich on January 15, 1892.

Looking back through the veil of time and tears, one can imagine the grieving father hand-hewing a small coffin to hold his boy.

Diggers wielding pickaxes and shovels, building fires over a pit, coaxing a grave from the frozen earth.

Horse-drawn sleighs carrying mourners to St. Peter’s Cemetery. Relatives and neighbors bidding their last goodbyes. And wafting over the scene, the sad German funeral hymn: “Wo findet die Seele die Heimat, die Ruh?” (Where Does the Soul Find its Home, its Rest?”)

A century and a decade of years after Friedrich’s death, an iron cross in a peaceful country graveyard north of Hazen still marks his resting place.

Click here to continue read the entire article.

Winistorfer, Jo Ann. “Iron Crosses: Sentinels of the Prairie.” North Dakota Living, April 2003, 18-20.