Genocide of Germans in Russia (1915 - 1955)
Research by Samuel Sinner

Samuel Sinner, former AHSGR Village Coordinator for Schilling, is a student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He completed work on a Master's degree in German at the end of the Spring Semester 1998. His work has been published in the book The Open Wound: The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1915-1949 and Beyond. The Open Wound is a dual-language volume in English and German. It examines all the available statistical data from Soviet archives released after Glasnost relating to the number of Russian Germans who perished under the Soviets. Based on these and other archival sources from Germany and America, Samuel Sinner concludes that between 1915 and 1949, about one million Russian Germans needlessly perished under the last Russian Tsar, Lenin and Stalin. The deaths resulted mainly from mass deportations, executions, man-made famines, and enforced labor in the Gulag. The book also presents numerous gripping eyewitness accounts from Russian-German survivors and genocide victims.

The book is available from the NDSU Library in hard or soft cover.

Samuel has been gathering evidence to demonstrate that starvation and deportation were used as instruments of deliberate murder by Stalin, and the Czar Nicholas II was responsible for the deaths resulting from the deportation of Volhnian Germans. About 90% of the source material that Samuel has gathered is in from Russian and German language sources, with the Russian data providing the most statistical information.

Samuel's research included the examination of each documented atrocity (deportation, enforced starvation, mass execution) and labels such as mass murder, genocide, etc., will be assigned to the atrocity. A bibliography in his thesis will show which scholars (from all ethnic backgrounds: Jewish, German, German-Russian, etc.) argue that Soviet Germans, at some point between 1915 and 1955, suffered genocide or were victims of genocidal policies. Samuel names Yehuda Bauer, Lyman Legters, James Mace and Robert Conquest as a few non German-Russian scholars who have provided evidence of genocide. These scholars represent various political tendencies, but come to the same conclusion.

Samuel wrote in the 1996 Schilling an der Wolga Newsletter that the estimates of those who died in the genocide include the enforced starvation years of 1921-22 and 1932-33 when under the regimes of Lenin and Stalin 650,000 German Russians were purposely starved to death, 50,000 Volhynian Germans murdered during the 1915 deportations, and 300,000 German Russians murdered during the 1941-1946 deportations. So from 1915 to 1946 (a span of 31 years) a minimum of 1 million German Russians were murdered by the Russian Governments of Czar Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. Samuel asks how many more German Russians were murdered during the Red Terror of Lenin, the deportations of the late 1920's and early 1930's, during the Great Stalinist "Purges" of the late 1930's, and the hundreds of thousands murdered in the Worker's Army and Gulag from 1941 to 1955 - will the full number of the victims ever be known.

On November 7, 1996, a Memorial Service for German-Russian victims of Soviet genocide was held in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Nebraska press was helpful in advertising the event, as well as the story of the mass murder of over 1 million German-Russians in the Soviet Union. A front page article, with picture, was in the Lincoln Journal Star on the Monday before the event. A revised version of the article ran in the Omaha World Herald on November 14, 1996. The story of the Memorial Service also made the front page of the Daily Nebraskan, the University of Nebraska newspaper. When speaking to the audience during the Memorial Service, Samuel reminded the audience to remember not only the murdered German-Russians, but also the 6,240,000 who died of starvation in Russia under Lenin (1920 - 1924) and the over 20 million murders ordered by Stalin.

The German Russian choir of Lincoln sang "Es gibt eine Heimat im himmlischen Licht" (There is a homeland in the Heavenly Light). During a candle lighting ceremony that followed, Clara Wertz lit a candle in memory of he grandmother who died of deliberate starvation in Beideck, and her brother (village leader) who was buried alive with his head left above the ground in Beideck because he refused to turn over the village's food.

Admiral Jake Sinner (liberator of Dachau and translator at the Nuremburg trials) lit a candle in honor of his father's relatives who died and disappeared in Russia, never to be heard from again. Then Elma Kehling (her late husband Paul Kehling from Kukkus, Russia died in early 1996) lit a candle in memory of her late husband as well as her own parents who all fled Russia during the enforced starvation of the 1920's. Ed Herstein lit a candle in memory of his relatives who were starved to death in the Soviet Gulag, and who were executed by shooting. The crowd was then addressed by Rev. Fred Wolff, a Lutheran pastor, who spoke of how he observed the shame put upon German-Russians in the various parishes he had served. He reminded people of how the German-Russians were often called 'Rooshians' in a racially derogative sense. The Memorial Service concluded with "So nimm denn meine Haende" (Take my hand O Father), sung by the German-Russian choir of Lincoln.