| The Great Famine - Genocide in Soviet Ukraine
The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia And The Soviet
Union (including Ukraine), 1915-1949 -- And Beyond (Der Genozid
An Russlanddeutschen 1915-1949), by Samuel D. Sinner, Ph.D., Germans
from Russia (including Ukraine) Heritage Collection North Dakota
State University Libraries Fargo, North Dakota, 353 pages, 2000,
hardcover and softcover (English and German languages)
Short excerpts from the book "The
Open Wound"
FOREWARD-------------------------------------------Page V
I would like to dedicate this book to my relative Peter Sinner
(Petr Ivanovich Zinner), Saratov and Leningrad professor, poet,
and early 1930's Stalin victim, as well as to my late father's uncle
and aunt Joshua and Pauline Davidian, whose Armenian people lost
an even greater percentage to genocide than did the Russian (ed:
including Ukraine) Germans. Indeed, I have borrowed the phrase "The
Open Wound" from an Armenian author, Robina Peroomian, describing
her nation's holocaust.
CHAPTER TWO----------------------------------------Page 15
The Age of the Great Massacres, 1917-1921
After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 25, 1917, the ethic Germans
of the former Tsarist empire (Russia and Ukraine) were immediately
confronted by an organized campaign of terror. The best documented
reports detailing the atrocities committed against these various
groups of Germanic heritage cover the Volga, Ukrainian, and North
Caucasus regions...........(page 15)
...........The eruption of massacres manifested itself in a combination
of small and large killing operations involving, among other cruelties,
the mass rape of the elderly, women and children, mass drownings,
prolonged torture sessions, mutilations, hacking up of bodies, mass
shootings of
hundreds, even thousands in a single action, the holocaust of entire
villages---including the burning of all inhabitants and building
structures, and the complete robbery of entire villages in the name
of "requisition" and extermination of the "German
kulaks, big farmers and counter-revolutionaries." (page 15)
"Better to die fighting than to starve slowly to death,"
was a common cry of the Russian Germans as they armed themselves
with shovels and rakes. (Page 16) ...........
The argument is often made, even by some Russian-German authors,
that the Germans, especially in Ukraine, were targeted solely for
economic reasons, namely on account of their extensive land holdings.
This overlooks the fact, however, that to label an entire ethnic
group as "rich" or as "kulaks" is in itself
a racial slur. For instance, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, the Ukrainian
anarchist from Gulyai Poyle, who wrecked more havoc in the German
villages than any other single individual, was, according to Ingeborg
Fleischhauer, from childhood on an "embittered hater of Germans."
(page 16)
Fleischhauer remarks that as a child, he had worked as a shepherd
for wealthy Germans in the Yekaterinoslav region, noting that it
was at that time his hatred for and envy of the Germans and their
land holdings began. After being in independent anarchist, Makhno
joined forces with the Red Army in the first months of 1919. He
and his followers were strongly nationalist oriented. Johannes Philipps
writes concerning his activities: "No population in Ukraine
suffered as much under them as did the Germans......What they couldn't
take with them, they destroyed." Those who resisted ".....were
harassed, beaten, and not seldom, the male head of the household
was shot. Women were raped repeatedly." Johannes Schleuning
writes, "Makhno went through the land wreaking vengenance on
the Germans." (page 16-17)
CHAPTER THREE---------------------------------------Page 35
Enforced Starvation, 1920-1925
...................Indeed, in order to stress the terror of the
famine of 1932-1933, some authors claim that nature was responsible
for the 1921 famine. In the light of available evidence, however,
this argument is untenable. Thus, Donald Raleigh correctly criticizes
V. V. Kondrashin for naively emphasizing failed harvest and droughts
as the main causes of the 1921 famine. Any arguments for an unqualified
exclusiveness with regard to the "man-made" famine of
1932-1933, be it in Ukraine or in the Volga-German ASSR, are shown
to be untenable in light of the above testimonies stemming from
an entire decade earlier. (page 40)
The requisition of 1917-1921 also gave rise to a crisis threatening
the very existence of the Ukrainian-German villages. In Kandel,
450 were starved to death. In GroBliebental, 16 to 20 died every
day and were buried in mass graves. In Franzfeld, 45 perished from
starvation. Another 151 died in Josephtal. In Landua, over 350 died
from starvation.
During this mass starvation, approximately 10,000 Volga-German
children were forcibly taken from their parents and transferred
to Slavic families in Ukraine. The parents were told that conditions
were better in "brotreich" Ukraine. The government was
fully aware, however, that conditions were even worse in some areas
in Ukraine than in the Volga region. (Page 40)
CHAPTER FOUR-----------------------------------------Page 51
Starvation, Deportation, Execution, 1930-1939
The loss of human life during collectivization again in the late
1930's was not caused solely by starvation. Mass executions and
deporatations also claimed the lives of thousands of German village
inhabitants......... (page 64)
The exact number of the Russian Germans (Russia and Ukraine) who
fell victim to the Stalinist "purges" still remains unknown.
However, in 1991, an NKVD list of 1937-1938 executed citizens of
Odessa was published. The list reveals that, whereas the ethnic
Germans in the city represented only 8.3 percent of the population,
they nevertheless constituted 28 percent of those shot........(page
64).
With regard to the deportations of the early 1930's, eyewitness
reports substantiate Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn's claim that the intent
behind the kulak expulsions was murder. According to a letter from
April 18, 1930: And everywere, when one asks about demanding their
children back, the answer is received: "Just as you never got
to see Nikolai II again, so those deported will never be returned
to you." They proclaim openly: "We have sent the people
out there so that they will die in misery."
A similiar report reads: "Soon it will be as a Communist told
me: "You should die a wretched death! We can't kill you all,
but you will all die a wretched death!" Therefore a planned
extermination, a cold-blooded murder of many thousands." According
to Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov, around one-fourth of the
deported kulaks died in the space of a few months, and an additional
one-fourth within only a year. (page 65).......................
According to Richard Walth, 350,000 Russian Germans (in Russia
and Ukraine) perished in the famine of 1932-1933. Heinz Ingehorst
puts the figure at 300,000 for the entire collectivization period.
Working independently of Ingehorst, the author of this essay, using
the 1937 census and other Soviet materials as a data base with certain
additional modifications, arrived at the same figure. The number
of all Russian Germans in 1930, on the eve of the catastrophe, can
be calculated at 1,390,000 to 1,400,000. Therefore between 1930
and the beginning of 1937, the Russian Germans lost approximately
one-fourth of their entire population---one out of every four was
exterminated through deliberate starvation, deportation, or shooting.
(page 65)
On the collectivization famine in the Volga-German ASSR, Volga-
German professor Adolf Gersch writes, "The.....famine, which
had been knowingly prepared by the Soviet leadership and the Communist
Party, and which had as a consequence mortality on a massive scale
among the Volga-German population, was also a planned mass murder.
This statement is corroborated
by Khrushchev himself, who admitted the famine of 1933 was an act
of "murder"on the part of the government. In 1990, the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine confessed that
the famine had been deliberately created by the Soviet leadership.
Yet some historians still argue that the famine of 1933 should not
be classified as murder. (page 65)
CHAPTER SIX--------------------------------------------Page 97
The Historiography of the Genocide of Russian Germans A Critical
and Interpretative Analysis
Enforced Starvation, 1920-1925
Regarding the 1920's enforced starvation, Matthias Hagin wrote
in 1981 of how the Russian government blamed the famine deaths on
draught, despite the fact that the government alone was responsible
for the catastrophe. Under the heading, "The Destruction of
a Class," Heinrich Roemmich wrote in 1958: "The famine
of 1921 vividly showed the Communist leaders what the destruction
of the propertied class and the violent carrying out of Socialism
leads to. Stressing that the government's requisition policy was
the main, if not sometimes the sole cause of starvation--especially
in the Volga-German area--R. J. Rummel writes that in accordance
with standard legal theory and definition, the deaths of the early
1920's should be labeled "murder." Professor Kohnstantin
Emich writes of the "organized famines of 1921-1922,"
Professor W. R. Durow-Wasenmuller writes similarly: "The famine
of 1921 was well planned and successfully carried out. The drought
merely intensified the famine. Volga-German author Adolf Bersch
states that the 1921 famine was "artificially prepared"
by the Communist regime........(Page 102)
In much of the historiography on the 1932-1933 famine during Stalin's
collectivization campaign, the starvation crisis is labeled "man-made,"
whereas the 1921 famine is often explained as the result of drought.
Available evidence, however, demonstrates that the main cause of
the 1921 famine among the Russian Germans was the requisition policy
of the government, not the failure of crops or drought. Thus Donald
J. Raleigh correctly criticizes the argument that the main causes
of the 1921 famine were drought and bad crops. The historian Charles
M. Edmondson holds that the repressive nature of both the Lenin
and Stalin era famines is comparable. (Page 103)
Collectivization under Stalin
Aleksandr J. Solzhenitsyn writes that the kulaks were deported
in the 1930's during collectivization "with murderous intent."
Of all the Volga Germans exiled to Kazakhstan, he writes: "(B)y
the spring of 1932 the children and the old had all died of dysentery
and mal- nutrition." The extermination of the peasants during
collectivization is prefaced by the statement, "Hitler was
a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: his murder camps have
made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all."
(page 104)
Lyman Legters argued in 1984 that the extermination of the kulaks
during collectivization, characterized as it was by an overrepresentation
of national minorities, fits the definition of genocide as found
in the United Nations Genocide Convention. (page 104)
Recently, the argument has been advanced chiefly by Stephen Wheatcroft
that the 1933 famine was not an act of murder. The falsity of the
argument is made clear by a confession to the contrary by Khrushchev
himself, as well as by a 1990 admission from the Central Committee
of the Ukrainian Communist Party....(page 104).
......In 1970, Johannes Schleuning wrote on collectivization and
the Russian-Germans: "The German peasants recognized instinctively
in these measures the complete hopelessness of their situation.
They saw that it was planned with a view of their complete destruction
as an ethic body, for everything that until then had been sacred
to them, and which had constituted their was of life--family, faith,
customs, possessions, individual freedom---they way everything doomed
to destruction." (page 104)
Germans from Russia (including Ukraine) Heritage Collection Website
http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc
"The Open Wound"
A Book Review By J. Otto Pohl http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/general/sinnerreview.html
How to order the book "The
Open Wound" by Samuel Sinner http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/general/sinner.html
How to order the book "We'll
Meet Again In Heaven"..Germans In the Soviet Union Write
Their American Relatives 1925-1937" by Ronald J. Vossler. Most
of the letters are from the German Ukrainian villages in southern
Ukraine http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/nd_sd/vossler2.html
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