Media Release
July 10, 2006

NDSU Libraries produces new Germans from Russia DVD documentary

This thirty minute documentary is a searing chronicle of a forgotten genocide and a lost people, whose " ... misery screams to the heavens." The lost people are the ethnic German minority living in Soviet Ukraine, who wrote their American relatives about the starvation, forced labor, and execution that were almost daily fare in Soviet Ukraine during this period, 1928-1938.

Ronald J. Vossler

"We'll Meet Again in Heaven" is part detective-story, part historical research, and part travelogue. Narrator and scholar Ron Vossler guides the viewer from the small North Dakota town where he found the first letter, down the "blood-dark corridor of ethnic history" to former German villages in Ukraine and Moldova that were the source of numerous immigrants to the American prairie frontier.

Based on a decade of research, including on-location footage in Ukraine and Moldova, this film draws upon hundreds of personal letters, written from German villages in Ukraine to the Dakotas, and brought to public attention for the first time. These wrenching personal letters, along with compelling survivor interviews, detail an odyssey of hunger and destruction in Soviet Ukraine. Noted historian Robert Conquest, author of "Harvest of Sorrow", has called these letters "...virtually the only absolutely contemporary first-hand testimony from those actually suffering the famine as they wrote."

Villagers weep " ... hundreds of thousands of gallons of tears, tears, tears." People kill themselves. Forced into cattle cars for almost certain death in Siberia, their children taken from them, parents tear the hair from their heads in grief. At night, the regime's secret police gather victims. During the day, collective leaders threaten villagers with starvation and execution if grain quotas aren't met.

This documentary, with its focus on the treatment of the ethnic German minority, helps clarify the Soviet regime's intent to solve aspects of its nationalities problem with depopulation and ethnic cleansing, and also to punish with starvation and forced labor the small landholders in Ukraine for resisting collectivization.

Major funding provided by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota. The documentary scriptwriter and narrator is Ron Vossler; producer is Bob Dambach; and executive producers are Michael M. Miller and Bob Dambach.