January 10 and February 14, 1942 The State Defense Committee of the USSR under the signature "Owls. Secretly "adopted the Decree" On the order of the use of German immigrants of military age from 17 to 50 years "and" On the mobilization of German men of military age from 17 to 50 years, permanently residing in regions, territories, autonomous and union republics. " According to them, all male Germans under the strictest control of the NKVD were enlisted in the “workers' columns”, later - the “labor army”, which is actually a concentration camp, until December 13, 1955, when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree “On the removal of restrictions in the legal position the Germans and their families are on special settlement. "

But the foundation of this labor army was laid much earlier - in the summer of 1941. Three days after the August Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to evict the Volga Germans, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) on August 31, 1941 adopted a closed decree "On the Germans Living in the Ukrainian SSR." It consisted of only two lines: “Germans who are registered as an anti-Soviet element should be arrested; The rest of the able-bodied male population between the ages of 16 and 60 should be mobilized into construction battalions and transferred to the NKVD for use in the eastern regions of the USSR. ”

Within a short time, 13 construction battalions with a total of 18,600 people were formed, which were sent to four NKVD objects: Ivdellah and Bogoslovlag in the Sverdlovsk region, Solikambumlag - in Molotov (Perm) and Kimpersaylag in Aktobe region of the Kazakh SSR, where, by the way I. At the same time, the purging of the Red Army began. The servicemen of the “nationalities of the states at war with the USSR” during 1941-42 Were removed from the front (among these tens of thousands was my father) and were transferred to the rear. First, the construction battalions, special construction units, etc., which were reorganized into working columns subordinate to the NKVD of the USSR on the basis of the Resolution of the State Defense Committee No. 660ss dated September 11, 1941.

The mode of detention of labor soldiers was determined by the order dated January 12, 1942 of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs "On the organization of detachments of mobilized Germans in the camps of the NKVD of the USSR." Worked mobilized at NKVD facilities, as well as in the coal mining and oil industry, at uranium mines, at the construction of railways, at the facilities of people's commissariats of ammunition, construction, heavy and light industry, and logging. In total, during the war and post-war years, the work of the Germans was used at the facilities of 24 people's commissariats in various regions of the USSR.

At first glance, there was nothing supernatural, even considering that “for failure to appear for mobilization, violation of discipline, refusal to work, desertion from working columns”, the NKVD was instructed to “punish the guilty persons strictly, right up to execution”, there was a war. But at the same time, a part of historians, and the indisputable majority of politicians in modern Russia, are silent about the fact that the life and content of labor soldiers, whose whole fault was that they were born Germans, was in fact no different from the lives of prisoners sent to camps on the basis of court sentences.

Housing and moral situation of the Germans, the labor army, was very difficult. Accused of complicity with the enemy, deprived of all property and food supplies, deported to remote areas of the USSR, where there was no rationing system, Soviet Germans were in a difficult financial situation.

Miners Kopeisk, Chelyabinsk region, 1944

Weakened by purposeful moral and psychological pressure (“internal agents of an external enemy”), constant malnutrition, and heavy physical labor, prisoners of the labor army died by the hundreds. For example, in one Bogoslovlage only in 1942, according to the largest specialist in the field, at the Institute of East European History at Heidelberg University Dr. - Dr. Victor Krieger(Dr.Viktor Krieger), according to official data, 2,187 Germans died, or 11.2 percent of 19,496 people sent here during the year. As regards disability and unsuitability to work, 4,140 people or 21.2 percent were demobilized, of which the majority died on the way to the places where their relatives were in the settlement. Thus, in the deep rear, the "losses" among the labor soldiers turned out to be comparable with those of the frontline.

Part of the Soviet Germans, in order to escape from the Gulag hell and "prove loyalty to the cause of Lenin-Stalin," addressed reports to the leadership with a request to send them to the front, to the front. Others in the letters to “dear Joseph Vissarionovich” told about the actual situation of the labor army, the eerie and mess around here.

Special “opermancy” departments were engaged in such “detractors”, “slanderers”, and “provocateurs”. They worked in Stakhanov style. In 1942 alone, in the camps of the Sverdlovsk Region, people were sentenced to long-term terms or 1,313 German labor soldiers were shot. And in the following years, the efforts of the Chekists continued unabated, even after the victorious end of the war, they continued to identify and punish the "German conspirators" at an accelerated pace.

Kopeisk. Mine number 16. Komsomol-youth front-line brigade of dumpers. 1943

On November 7, 1942, the State Defense Committee “mobilized into working columns for the entire war time also German women aged between 16 and 45 inclusive”. True, guided by "humane ideological considerations", pregnant women and children with children under the age of 3 were freed from mobilization, as well as those Germans whose husbands were Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other representatives of the peoples' powers. The mobilized Germans were involved in the same jobs as the men. By the way, I signed this decree of the State Defense Committee, like all previous ones, personally comrade. Stalin.

By the end of the war, 53,000 women were in the workers' columns, of whom 6,436 had children in the places of their mobilization. Without a father and without a mother, many of them were homeless, died, disappeared without a trace. How fate happened miraculously (not to pick up another word) survivors is impossible to answer. At least, official documents, shedding light on this question, have not been found yet. The only managed to get acquainted with until recently, the highly secret, and now carefully ignored "Resolution of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR of November 18, 1942. Questions of the Kazakh SSR."

It was adopted in response to the appeal to the highest authority of the country by the leaders of Kazakhstan, who did not know how to deal with animals belonging to the German collective farmers after they were "mobilized into the labor army", as well as with German ... children.

And here the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, having conferred, decided: “Allow the remaining homeless livestock for personal use of German collective farmers mobilized into labor columns to be transferred to the collective farms of the republic’s livestock farms”.

As for the orphaned children, then: “Ensure the placement of the children of Germans mobilized into labor groups on the Russian and Kazakh collective farms. Children under the age of 8 years should be placed in the appropriate collective institutions of the collective farms, increasing, if necessary, the number of places in them, and children over the age of 8 years in the families of the collective farmers, with the consent of the latter. ” Signed this document deputy. Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars V. Molotov and Chief Executive Officer of the Council of People's Commissars J. Chadayev.

Let me remind you that it was strictly forbidden to leave labor columns to parents of young children. What to visit the places where they mobilized, they were allowed only years later. But suppose they were allowed to take the children with them. And where to take them? In the barracks of the NKVD? No, the humane Soviet government and the comrades personally, Stalin and Molotov could not allow this to happen. And not allowed!

In 1945, NKVD bodies identified and arranged in orphanages for more than 2,900 homeless children from families of labor soldiers. How their further fate was formed remains a mystery, especially since the parts of boys and girls changed their German surnames for Russians, Ukrainian, Tatar.

"Intentional genocide"

Trudarmiya functioned until March 1946. More than 316 thousand Germans and German women were mobilized into it. The death toll, according to official figures, exceeded 60 thousand people. Well, how many cripples and incurably sick died, after the “forced” demobilized, the statistics is silent. In total, as a result of the deportations and mobilization to the labor army, according to various estimates, between 300,000 and 500,000 out of a million and a half Soviet Germans died.

According to most German historians, as well as a number of reputable Russian, Kazakhstan and Ukrainian researchers, “in relation to Russian Germans, the policy of the Soviet state in 1941-1945. had signs of deliberate genocide. "

I was convinced of this not only by getting acquainted with official decrees and decrees, of which there were no less than two hundred (!), But also when I read the work of Dr. Krieger “Witnesses of crimes. Letters of Russian Germans from the Labor Army in 1942-1945. ” Believe me, more sincere and at the same time terrible confessions are not common. Moreover, all the letters included in the book were written in an allegorical manner, since before they were sent to the addressees, they were carefully censored.

At the end of 1955, the Kremlin abolished the regime of “special settlement” for the Germans with regular appearances at the commandant’s office, and only in 1972 did they allow them to choose their place of residence, but again with reservations. In Moscow, Leningrad, other large cities, the Germans were not prescribed. The Baltic republics and the Kaliningrad region were also closed to them.

How did the authorities motivate the deportation and the hell into which the Soviet Germans plunged? The question is far from idle, especially since today few people know that in the old days the Germans in Russia were, perhaps, the most law-abiding people. Their thrift, religiosity, hard work evoked universal respect. The land, which they owned and were the best in the country, exceeded the territory of the GDR, and the ports of Odessa and Berdyansk (on the Sea of ​​Azov) sold grain, which was supplied almost exclusively by German colonists.

The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga region, in terms of area, by the way, equal to the state of Brandenburg, in the 1920s, in terms of the introduction of advanced production methods and crop yields, occupied a leading position in the USSR She was the first in the country to eliminate illiteracy, she was almost officially called "the Stalinist flowering garden on the Volga." Suddenly, the total eviction of all Soviet Germans, imprisonment in camps without a trial, even if formal, only on the basis of nationality. Even against the background of national disasters, it strikes with senseless cruelty and lawlessness. Did they really do it out of one only fear that they were Hitler's “fifth column”?

The leading expert on the history and culture of the Germans of the Russian Empire and the USSR, the executive director of the Gottingen Research Center Dr. Alfred Eisfeld comments on this statement:

“The transfer of the so-called“ unreliable peoples from the European part of the USSR, especially from the frontier zone, to Kazakhstan, Siberia, began in the thirties of the last century. This fact is clearly visible when you get acquainted with the archival funds of the NKVD. Even Hitler was not in power, and the Germans were already called "fascists." But they resettled not only Germans, but also Poles, representatives of other nations, all those who were reluctant to succumb to Sovietization. At the same time, the economic interests associated with the industrialization of Kazakhstan, some regions of Siberia, as well as the development of agriculture there are clearly visible.

Thus, in 1936 alone, the NKVD had at its disposal more than 65,000 people, Poles and Germans, whom he placed and used for his needs in the Karaganda Forced Labor Camp. They were thrown into the steppe - settle yourself! And they, partly perishing, settled down.

Not a secret and the NKVD reports on the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic for the years 1940-1941. They clearly state that no hostile or espionage organizations were revealed there. The arrests took place, but only for anti-Soviet agitation: it was enough to tell a joke, to joke or to say that the sowing plans were stupid, but that somewhere they were preparing an armed uprising - this was not fixed by the NKVD. ”

Therefore, the mass deportation of the Germans, conducted by the NKVD on the instructions of the country's top leadership, their placement in concentration camps, ”concluded Dr. Eisfeld,“ can be considered as genocide.

But, let's be realistic, there are few hopes that the genocide against the Soviet (Russian) Germans will be officially recognized. The Kremlin, historians and politicians loyal to the regime are afraid of a frank conversation, and therefore an objective study of this fragment of our common history. Moreover, from the lips of a number of Russian politicians, in the media recently, frankly biased, deceitful statements of anti-German and anti-German character have sounded. Why and who conducts this process is clear: without the presence of external and internal enemies, it is difficult to explain the unresolved economic problems, and even on the eve of the presidential elections.

Alexander Fitz, 
a member of the International Association of Russian Germans history researchers and culture Munich

Source: rusdeutsch.ru and http://kontinentusa.com/obolgannie-i-deportirovannie/  (Google translated)