Abstract
In: Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung 2015. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, pp. 217–236.
More than a decade before deporting communities of the German minority in Russia and the Ukraine to Western Siberia or Kazakhstan in 1941/42, the Soviet authorities confiscated the farms and small businesses of German settlers. Often they refused to prolong their residence permits, thus compelling them to leave the country. In this way, their land and equipment were made available for the forced formation of agricultural cooperatives. Those who had not left the Soviet Union before the Great Terror in 1937/38 were usually arrested and, subsequently, expelled. Victims of this sort of repression, which is an under-researched topic, amounted to several thousand immigrant families had lived within the borders of the Soviet Union for up to five generations. Testimony to this repression is provided by a huge collection of interrogation protocols, which were produced by the Gestapo during the late 1930s. This collection, which is located in the Political Archive of the Foreign Office in Berlin, has not previously been exploited by historians – although it includes some 1,000 protocols detailing the experience of return migrants of German descent. For the Nazi regime, these interrogations were an instrument of examining the political stance of those returning to Germany and, at the same time, of gaining insight into the political, social and military structures of the Soviet Union. Today they offer additional information about the period of collectivisation and the fate of the minority of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union, who had not opted to become Soviet citizens.
Über den Autor
Wilhelm Mensing, Dr. jur., geb. 1935 in Werl/Westf., 1955 bis 1958 Studium der Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften in Münster/Westf. und München, Promotion 1963. 1964 bis 1997 im öff. Dienst; freier Mitarbeiter des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat an der FU Berlin bis 2006. Veröffentlichungen u. a.: SED-Hilfe für West-Genossen. Die Arbeit der Abteilung Verkehr beim Zentralkomitee der SED im Spiegel der Überlieferung des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit der DDR (1946–1976), Berlin 2010; Von der Ruhr in den GULag. Opfer des Stalinschen Massenterrors aus dem Ruhrgebiet, Essen 2001; Nehmen oder Annehmen. Die verbotene KPD auf der Suche nach politischer Teilhabe und Wir wollen unsere Kommunisten wieder haben … Demokratische Starthilfen für die Gründung der DKP, Zürich 1989; Maulwürfe im Kulturbeet – DKP-Einfluß in Presse, Literatur und Kunst, Zürich 1983.