Archive for the ‘german’ Category
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
Imagine. Millions of individuals are researching their ancestors. Hundreds of professional researchers have come into being to assist in the reconstruction of these family histories. Original registers are being imaged and indexed to broaden access and facilitate the process of research.
No, not 2011 in North America or Britain or Australia, but the mid-1930s in Nazi Germany.
From April 1933, all citizens in Germany were required to research and document their family tree, at least back to the level of their grandparents, and to obtain as evidence the corresponding certified copies of entries in birth and marriage registers (while SS officers had to zealously research their pedigree back to 1750 and other high level Nazi Party functionaries had to go back to 1800).
The reason for this rush of interest in genealogy was, of course, to validate one’s Aryan credentials, or determine one’s degree of Aryan purity, as the case may be. And one’s genealogy had grave consequences, for those who were non-Aryan (by which was meant Jewish) and for the great many who were Mischlinge or of mixed blood – at the very least, discrimination and persecution. Determining the status of each individual was not as straightforward as one might now think, and such factors as Jewish conversion to Lutheranism or Catholicism, or dropping out of the Jewish community without conversion to Christianity (Austritte), or illegitimacy, or disputed parentage, meant that the state had to interpret and decide upon tens of thousands of moot cases.
Various official Nazi bodies were involved in the process. Foremost was the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung (the “Reich’s Centre for Genealogical Research”). Once the necessary tree had been recreated and register entries had been found and authenticated, the documentation had to be submitted to the Reichsstelle, where bureaucrats would then rule as to whether one was Aryan, three-quarters Aryan, half-Aryan, quarter-Aryan or non-Aryan.
In 1934 the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung embarked upon an ambitious project to microfilm parish registers, both to preserve the originals and to make the material more readily available to the state. Accordingly, registers were called in from the churches to a central micro-reprographics studio in Berlin. A copy was returned to the incumbent of the church, and the master held in the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung archives.
The Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung also created a massive central card index system for ease of reference. This comprised abstracted births and baptisms, with particular attention paid to the baptisms of converted Jews, from which it constructed its own handy Jüdische Personenstandsregister. This Register comprised the so-called Judenkartei, the index cards relating to Jewish converts. In fact there were two copies of these particular index cards. The original Judenkarte remained in the Reichsstelle’s archives, while a copy was gifted to the Evangelical Lutheran Church – the latter is now housed at the Evangelische Zentralarchiv in Berlin.
During the meticulously orchestrated Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, the Nazis not only razed or damaged synagogues, smashed Jewish property and assaulted Jews, but also carefully removed Jewish vital records from the synagogues, so these could be put to use by the state. Likewise, in 1939, the Reichsstelle für Sippenforschung took over the Jewish genealogical record collection of the Gesamtarchiv der Deutsche Juden. The Gesamtarchiv had been collecting original birth, marriage and death registers from synagogues across Germany for over 30 years, held vital records for hundreds of local communities across Germany and had also created a card index of Jewish births in Berlin (where the sheer size of the community and number of synagogues made it difficult to find a particular record unless one already knew the exact place of registration).
Within seven years, mandatory genealogy had affected the lives of millions in Germany and, of course, impacted in particular upon the lives of the hundreds of thousands of German Jews. Today we do genealogy for a different reason, to affirm identity and heritage, but it is perhaps wise to remember that genealogy can also be put to sinister uses in the hands of eugenicists, racial supremacists and ultra-nationalists.
This blog article owes much to Prof Deborah Hertz. For further information on the uses to which the Nazis put genealogy, see Prof Hertz’s 1997 article “The Genealogy Bureaucracy in the Third Reich” published in the periodical Jewish History (Vol 11, No 2).
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine
Zhytomyr, or Zhitomir (also Shitomir in German), is a Ukrainian provincial capital, seat of the Zhytomyr oblast, but is of immense significance for family historians with German-Ukrainian roots and specifically for those from Ukrainisch Wolhynien. This is the region of Volhynia to the west of Kyiv formerly dense with German settlements and colonies founded during the 19th century. The German population was particularly concentrated in the triangle between the towns of Zhytomyr, Novohrad-Volynskyi (or Nowograd-Wolhynsk, previously known as Zwiahel or Swehl) and Korosten.
Ukraine operates, in theory if not always in practice, a 75-year “modern era” closure period, meaning that records from before 1936 (at the time of writing) should be on open access in state archives rather than closed, for reasons of data protection and personal privacy, in register offices (known by the acronym RAHS and administered by the Ministry of Justice).
The state regional archives in Zhytomyr are one of the most efficient and cooperative in Ukraine. Among their holdings is an important collection of German Evangelical Lutheran parish registers for Wolhynien. These vital records all date from before 1936, of course, and are particularly strong for the period from about 1900 to 1920. The collection is not complete but includes, among others, births/baptisms, marriages and deaths/burials for the parishes of Emiltschin, Heimthal, Radomysl, Tutschin, Shitomir itself and Nowograd-Wolhynsk. There are also name indexes in the archive and a collection of police files which contain biographical information on individual inhabitants.
The same archive also houses a number of records of interest to those with German Baptist roots, e.g. in Tutschin.
Bluebird Research offers research services at Zhytomyr state archives and is also able to assist at other locations which hold Wolhynien Lutheran records, such as the St Petersburg archives which hold the bishop’s transcripts for the years 1836-1885 (the original parish registers being lost, only these contemporaneous copies survive).
Please contact us for a free assessment if you are interested in professional family history research assistance in Ukraine or Russia.
The former Russian Empire gubernia or province of Volhynia, part of the region which Poles know as kresy, was divided at the Treaty of Riga in 1921. The western side was joined to newly re-independent Poland, while the eastern side became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Towns such as Lutsk and Rivno became officially Polish Łuck and Równe; Zwiahel and Żytomierz became formally Ukrainian Novohrad-Volynskyi and Zhytomyr. In the Imperial Russian era, Poles had made up a minority of the overall population across Volhynia but held disproportionate influence, usually forming the local elite in both town and country areas.
The situation on the ground was not so straightforward, however. Volhynia was an ethnically mixed region, home to Germans (for whom it was Wolhynien), Jews (who called it Vohlin in Yiddish), Poles (who called it Wołyń) and Ukrainians (Volyn), with a corresponding mix of religions. Even this does no justice to the granular complexity. For example, Roman Catholics, unless they were German, were usually regarded as Poles, even if they spoke only Ukrainian; but it was a moot point as to whether they were Poles who had lost their mother tongue over time, or Ukrainians whose ancestors had converted due to Polish landowner or clerical pressure. Moreover, while the population may not have been especially literate, many peasants and other villagers were bilingual.
Furthermore, there was little national consciousness. Just as in neighbouring Polissia immediately to the north, also split after WW1 between Poland and, in this case, the Belarusian SSR, the peasantry identified themselves primarily by their religion or by their social estate as peasants: many, when questioned by early Soviet ethnographers, stated that they were “locals” and spoke the “local” language.
Of course the Soviets, having gained formal control over Ukraine at the Treaty of Riga, sought to modernise and develop what was still a largely traditional society, religious, insular and self-sufficient. The Soviets wanted the backward periphery to acquire the new forward-looking Soviet consciousness. One way in which the USSR of the 1920s and early 1930s tried to achieve this was through recognising and encouraging national minorities. This involved tidying up the particularities of “local” cultures – for example, Poles had to be Poles and, if they were not sufficiently Polish, they must be polonised, meaning that Ukrainian-speaking Roman Catholics were classified as Poles and encouraged to learn proper Polish. Each national minority was acknowledged and appropriate local administrative structures were put in place to develop and of course to try to Sovietise each national group. Within Zhytomyr okrug, a special Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region (Marchlewszczyzna in Polish) was set up in 1925, centred around the Polish village of Dołbysz (re-named Marchlevsk after the Polish activist Marchlewski), during this phase of Soviet enthusiasm for the minorities. However, this was not to last.
The Soviets found that the local population in Marchlevsk and elsewhere in Volhynia was not compliant. The locals were averse to collectivisation, they failed to fulfil command economy quotas, they persisted in their old ways of life, preferring to remain upon their scattered homesteads and in their small hamlets rather than congregate in efficient centralised nuclear villages and towns. The experiment in encouraging national minorities backfired, not on the Soviets but on the minorities themselves. Increasingly they began to be seen as wreckers, saboteurs, conspirators, collaborators, spies; not good Soviet citizens but consciously or subconsciously working for capitalist Poland or Nazi Germany.
Volhynia didn’t really have any fat exploitative kulaks to purge but, nevertheless, in 1930 some 15,000 “kulaks” and “enemy Poles” were identified. In 1935 the Marchlevsk polraion was dismantled. Some 35,000 Poles were deported to eastern Ukraine, and 4,000 volunteer eastern Ukrainian families brought in to take their place. In the following year, 1936, there were mass summary deportations of approximately 70,000 Poles and Germans from Volhynia to Kazakhstan. In 1937/38 an estimated 56,000 Poles and German were arrested, charged and then imprisoned or deported.
The deportees became so-called special settlers in the remote semi-arid northern reaches of Kazakhstan. By 1945 the number of national minority special settlers in Kazakhstan had reached 900,000, including minorities from Karelia, the Caucasus and the Russian Far East as well as from the kresy. They were expected to cultivate the previously uncultivated steppe grazing lands of the Kazakh nomads (who themselves had been deprived of their traditional manner of life, forced into collectivised or urban existences). The new special settlements each comprised a founder population of 1,500 people, and initially were simply numbered rather than named. Later, the settlers named them, often reflecting their places of origin (such as Podilske or Volynka). The conditions imposed on the special settlements were not entirely punitive but there were restrictions upon travel and a requirement to register monthly with officers of the NKVD, the state apparatus which managed them. Special settlers were not in receipt of internal passports – from 1932, when they were re-introduced by the Soviets, until reforms in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, these were granted only to Soviet citizens in towns or working on state farms, not to peasants or collective farm workers.
The national minorities were encouraged to assimilate and to become Homo sovieticus. Mixed marriages were commonplace. Native language fluency diminished at the second or third generation. A new Soviet identity was forged. Today one must expect there to be a resurgence of interest in roots, in ancestry and in the historic homeland, among these peoples who were made to colonise Kazakhstan, just as, in an entirely different context, the growth of identity politics since the 1970s in the melting pot of USA has led to an increased desire to understand one’s family history and the specificity of its immigrant experience.
*This blog owes much to Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place (Harvard University Press, 2004), to which the reader is referred for more on Marchlevsk Polish Autonomous Region and also on its German equivalent, the Pulin German Autonomous Region.
London’s Olympia again hosted the annual Who Do You Think You Are? Live exhibition last weekend. I attended on both Saturday and Sunday and spoke with many family historians from all sorts of backgrounds and with the full range of experience from complete beginner to jaded and cynical old-timer.
Comparing this year’s WDYTYA event to last year’s, one has to say that the trends I wrote about in this blog have continued. All exhibition space was taken and there were some new exhibitors (such as Genes Reunited) and some returnees (Lincolnshire Family History Society, I believe). There has been no diminution in interest in family history in Britain. The show was busy every day and certainly it looked as though family historians were spending as if there were no recession.
The American giant Ancestry hoovered up even more floor space than last year and seemed to be sporting taller stands. It is now floated on the US stock exchange and preparing to register offshore so as to evade UK corporation tax (a wheeze already employed by S&N Genealogy, with its myriad misleading web domains).
This year is the Society of Genealogists’ centenary year and it was good to see them with a big footprint at the show and reasserting themselves at the heart of the world of British family history where they belong.
It is always fun to check out the more niche stallholders, to meet with the nice folk at the Anglo-German Family History Society stand, to browse through the second-hand book shelves, and to boggle one’s mind at the astonishing volume and variety of records which have been indexed or transcribed by the unsung heroic family history society volunteers.
This year, as last, the majority of the questions I took from family historians with roots outside the British Isles related to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors from Russian Poland, usually via London’s East End. The problems brought to me were identical to last year’s too, as of course they would be, because this is necessarily the defining question of all such research: how to find out exactly where in Russian Poland an ancestor came from. The 1911 census of England & Wales too rarely gives a specific place name, although this year I was pleased to see a census return where the place of birth was recorded by the householder as “Lodge”, meaning Łódź (briefly renamed Litzmannstadt by the Nazis and the sad site of a notorious ghetto). It is a sobering and depressing thought that each of these family historians of Jewish descent with whom I spoke last weekend is perhaps only here through luck, by virtue of an ancestor having the means, or the pluck, or the desperation, to get out of Poland before the Nazis rolled in.
Incidentally, there is truth in the suggestions about the English Census Office producing both German language and Hebrew language 1911 census forms. Recently, I have seen one German and two Hebrew forms, the German one completed in German by the head of the household but the Hebrew ones filled in in English. However, this tiny number may represent the sum total of those German and Hebrew returns completed by householders in 1911, meaning that a great many unused foreign language forms printed by the Census Office must have been pulped. I wonder if one hundred years ago questions were raised in parliament about the waste of public funds…
In 1862 A A Paton published volume 2 of his Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic, about his experiences travelling in the Hungary (and elsewhere) in 1849. This was before the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise, which established the Dual Monarchy and gave Hungary dominion over lands which today are in Croatia, Romania and Slovakia, for example.
Paton visited the town of Szeged, or Szegedin in German, which lies in SE Hungary today but was more or less centrally located within the Hungarian Kingdom up until the country, defeated in WW1, was severely truncated by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
He remarks on the impact of the ascendant Hungarian culture on the minority nationalities of Szeged:
“Most of the shop-signs in the public place of the Palanka have German names, but the designation of the trade and baptismal name is in Magyar. During the mania for Magyarisation, none were so keen to identify themselves with the Magyars as the small German shop-keepers… Magyarism was very naturally more or less associated with the idea of aristocracy and supremacy and, while the Croats and Serbians, and the great majority of Slovaks, much to their honour, were rather proud of their nationality than ashamed of it, these German tradesmen… were anxious to throw off their own names and adopt Magyar ones. Not one, two, or three, but hundreds of such instances have occurred. For instance, a German whose name is, let us say, Johann Hoffman, dubs himself Remeny Janos, because Remen is the Magyar word “to hope,” and Janos is the Magyar for John.”
The “Palanka” in this account is the core of the old town of Szeged.
It is not clear how far individuals such as the fictitious János Remény would have travelled along the road of assimilation. Over the next two generations, their families might have become completely magyarised, or they may have retained a German identity for their private lives, with the new Magyar identity used primarily for business and social advantage. In any event, the family historian researching their apparently bona fide ethnic Hungarian roots should be alive to the possibility that at some point the family name may disappear from the documentary record.
Hungary became an equal partner with Austria in the Dual Monarchy following the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise. Ironically, Hungary, which had been struggling for national self-determination and parity of recognition, then pursued policies which, in trying to consolidate its own nation state, failed to recognise properly the rights of the national minorities within its borders.
A policy of magyarisation was pursued vigorously, with view to welding all regions and peoples into a single nation state, as had been achieved in, for example, France. However, unlike France, Hungary contained within its border almost entire nations, such as the Croat and Slovak, and very significant populations of, for example, Romanians and Serbs living in regions very sparsely populated by Hungarians. The magyarisation project was therefore a doomed enterprise and its measures – for instance, to make Hungarian the exclusive official language of state and the language of instruction in schools, with church services to be held and parish registers kept in Hungarian – quickly aroused resentment and opposition.
The pressure upon non-Magyar Hungarian subjects to assimilate included pressure to change patently non-Hungarian or insufficiently Hungarian surnames. The legal process of change of name was simplified to the submitting of a petition. The fee was reduced from 5 forint to 50 krajcár (half a forint), meaning that poverty could not be pleaded as a good reason to retain one’s true name. These cheap “shilling names” were adopted by many among the professional and business classes. Robert Seton-Walsh, writing in his Racial Problems In Hungary of 1908, states that the “demoralising custom” of change of name “has played havoc with the family history of the Hungarian middle classes; and few countries will supply such a puzzle to the genealogist of the twenty-second century”.
Among the examples he gives:
the Oriental scholar Hermann Bamberger taking the name Ármin Vámbéry; the banker Eierstock taking the name Tőkőlyi; the historian Frankl taking the name Vilmos Fraknói; the ethnologist Hundsdorfer taking the name János Hunfalvy; the painter Lieb taking the name Mihály Munkácsy; the banker Löwenmuth taking the name Báthori; the poet Petrović taking the name Sándor Petőfi; the literary critic Franz Schedel taking the name Ferenc Toldy; and the politician Weinberger taking the name Soma Visontai.
The campaign intensified and was particularly directed at those in official positions, such as local authority civil servants, school teachers, railway employees and post office staff, with a clear implication that those not complying could at the very least not expect promotion within the service. Seton-Walsh also cites a document issued by the Royal Inspector of Schools showing exemplary official changes of name among teachers in Bihar county in 1881, designed to encourage colleagues to follow suit:
August Bruckenthal of Haimagi taking the name Bihari John Modora of Olosig (known as Érolaszi in Hungarian) taking the name Tinodi Nicholas Radovich of Cuzap (Középes in Hungarian) taking the name Keti
Urban German and Jewish Hungarians – who of course were not pushing for their own independent nation state as the Croats and Slovaks were – assimilated more readily than the rural populations of Romanians and Slavs and those family historians with German and Jewish roots from Hungary should be alert to the possibility of a change of name in the nineteenth century whenever research results are not achieved under the expected family name. However, anyone with ancestors from Hungary should be mindful of the change of name campaigns and their possible impact upon their family history research.
Bluebird Research offers professional family history research across Ukraine, including:
- officially recognised Displaced Persons who were resettled from Europe after World War Two
- former members of the Galizien (Halychyna) Division and Ukrainian National Army, many of whom were settled in Britain after the end of WW2
- western Ukrainian (Galician) Greek Catholic, Lemko, Boyko, Hutsul and Roman Catholic (latynnyky) emigrants to North America, especially the waves of Canadian immigrants from 1891 to 1914 and from 1920 to 1939
- families with roots in Kyiv and in Left-Bank Ukraine
- German ancestors from Black Sea, Gluckstal, northern Bukovina, Volhynia etc
- Hungarian families from Transcarpathian Ruthenia (part of Czechoslovakia between the Wars) now Zakarpats’ka oblast’
- Jewish communities from across Ukraine including Galicia, Podolia and Volhynia
- Polish families from western Ukraine (Małopolska Wschodnia: the former województwo lwowskie, stanisławowkie, and tarnopolskie)
For an opinion or estimate of costs for research in any area of Ukraine or any speciality, please feel free to contact us.
By the time Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, there were no fewer than 45 Waffen-SS Divisions, although seven of recent formation were not up to strength. Each Division was numbered and named.
Central and Eastern Europeans featured in several of these Divisions (as of course did Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians and so on):
VII Prince Eugen – Volksdeutsche recruits from the Balkans
XIII Handschar – Bosnian Muslims
XIV Galizien – western Ukrainians
XV and XIX – Lettische, or Latvian Legions
XVIII Horst Wessel – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XX Estnische – Estonian Legion
XXI Skanderbeg – Albanian Muslims
XXII Maria Theresa – Volksdeutsche recruits from Hungary
XXIII Kama – Bosnian Muslims and Croatians
XXV, XXVI and XXXIII Hunyadi or Ungarische – Hungarians
XXIX and XXX Russische – Soviet PoWs
XXXI Böhmen-Mähren – Volksdeutsche recruits from Czechoslovakia
XXXII 30 Januar – Balts from Courland
For more details, see Norman Davies, Europe: A History, Oxford University Press, 1996.
It should be immediately apparent that the men in these units would have had very different reasons for joining the Waffen-SS. While the ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and, say, the Hungarians may have shared many or all of the tenets of Nazi supremacist ideology, including anti-Semitism, it is much less clear that this would have been the case for some of the others. For instance, the soldiers in the Galizien Division (called the Halychyna Division in Ukrainian) almost certainly saw themselves primarily as fighting against Soviet communism and its expansionism, and for an independent Ukraine, not for the Nazis. The same could be said of the Latvians, for example, who were justifiably fearful of the Soviet Union destroying their short-lived pre-War independence (as, of course, was to happen): veterans, their families and supporters marched last week in Riga to commemorate the Latvian Legion, sparking the annual controversy as to whether they were nationalist freedom fighters or Nazi sympathisers. Among the men in the two Russische Divisions, joining may have been an alternative to languishing in prison camps, or a matter of compulsion.
In these circumstances, it is best not to rush to make value judgements if, during the course of your family history research, you discover that a grandfather, or an uncle, fought in one of these Divisions, as it is not possible to know with any confidence what his underlying motivations may have been at the time.
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the middle class was small. The landed and ruling elite was separated from the peasantry and the labouring classes in the towns by a great gulf, rather than there being a sizeable middle class in to which both upper and lower echelons gradually shaded by imperceptible degrees. Of course, during the course of the long 19th Century, this traditional feudal structure changed with industrialisation and increased social mobility, and a recognisable and increasingly influential bourgeoisie began to emerge. What is striking about the traditional Eastern European society, however, was that the middle class was composed disproportionately of people regarded by both the landowners and the peasantry as non-indigenous, even if their families had lived in the vicinity for generations.
Karl Marx described how these people in the middle – the lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, tax collectors, merchants, traders, innkeepers, shopkeepers and so on – occupying the Lücken-Positionen, the gap in between, were overwhelmingly “non-indigenous” (Ivan T Berend, Decades of Crisis, University of California Press, 2001). Depending upon region, these roles might be filled by Armenians, Germans, Greeks or Jews. They were vulnerable for many reasons. They were regarded with distaste by the landowners and with resentment by the peasantry, although or because they were needed by both alike. Their religion usually marked them out as different and foreign. In the countryside they might live in isolation and even in the towns their communities were often small and occupied distinct quarters. This vulnerability became more pronounced at a time of national awakening (or re-awakening, as the case might be) and whenever assertive nationalism required an adversary it was likely to be turned against the perceived alien in the midst. Similarly, class consciousness was also likely to be directed against the moneyed middleman to whom both the upper and lower class turned in times of need.
These communities are one of the fascinating features of Eastern Europe up to the First World War. This is why the family historian may find Greek ancestors in Romania or Ukraine, and German and Jewish ancestors across the entire eastern half of the European continent and European Russia. Many towns, or quarters of towns, became German or Jewish settlements apart, islands in a sea of native peasantry. In such places, German often became the lingua franca of the town (certainly so in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Baltic gubernia of Imperial Russian) and would be learnt and spoken by all other elements in civic society, such as the Poles or Latvians in their respective lands.
Some of the people in the middle, such as the Armenian community in Poland, assimilated and only relicts remain. Elsewhere, for the reasons indicated above, the German and Jewish middle classes were subject to distrust, victimisation, deportation and worse over the course of the 20th Century and this distinctive element of Eastern European society has all but disappeared.
Up to six million civilians are thought to have been displaced within the Russian Empire between 1914 and 1917. Up to 30% of the inhabitants of Russian cities in wartime were refugees: places like Ekaterinoslav, Kharkiv, Kiev, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov, Rostov and Samara, received tens of thousands of displaced persons. Refugees flooded into central, black earth and Volga basin gubernia, while many others crossed the Urals into Siberia, or found themselves deposited in Tashkent or elsewhere in Central Asia.
There were three broad types of refugee.
Firstly, there were refugees who fled the advancing German army as it threatened and occupied the Russian territory on which they lived.
Secondly, the Russian military authorities evacuated the population in the path of advancing German forces and as the Russian army was forced to retreat, usually operating a scorched earth policy to prevent resources (manpower, settlements, farms, crops) falling into enemy hands and transporting livestock and machinery behind their own lines to assist the war effort. This pattern also applied to Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, which the Russian army occupied in 1914 but was then forced to withdraw from: Austrian subjects either fled or were evacuated to the Russian interior.
Given the rapid advance of the Germans through the lands of what are today Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and western Ukraine, these first two types of refugee merge one into the other: if the population did not flee the Prussian military machine, they were evacuated by the Russians. Neither type can be said to have migrated voluntarily; both were displaced in response to irresistible forces. Nearly all found themselves with limited or no means of support by the time they arrived at their destinations in Russia.
As men of fighting age had often been conscripted into the Russian army already, the refugees of these two types were overwhelmingly the women, children and elderly.
The third type of refugee formed a tiny minority. This was the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie who were able to escape to the Russian interior in a more pre-planned way, making their own private transport arrangements and reaching the relative safety and comfort of a major city such as Moscow or St Petersburg. Even those who started out with money might find themselves in reduced circumstances as the war wore on for years without resolution.
Given their origin, most of the refugees were non-Russian. they were, for example, Jews (never trusted by the Russian army command), Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians (not to mention German subjects of Russia, who were deported as soon as possible to the interior, often to Siberia or Central Asia, for reasons of national security). Where possible, the different peoples tended to form their own refugee communities in Russia and this was one of the various factors which crystallised national consciousness and precipitated demands for independence in their homelands in the wake of the War.
In all likelihood, any genealogist whose family history lies in the borderlands of the Russian Empire either occupied by the German army or regarded as a military zone by the Russian army during the years 1914 to 1917 is likely to find their family history research disrupted. Black holes in the documentary evidence are probable; family timelines will appear obscure. Births, marriages and deaths may not have taken place in the expected village or town of origin but somewhere along the long route that the refugees travelled into Russia, or at one or more of the places at which they were temporarily stationed or settled. In conditions of wartime poverty, hunger and disease, untold numbers of refugees died great distances from home and the family historian may never be able to identify when or where such deaths took place and were registered (if, indeed, they were registered at all). Instead, you will find no trace of a death which you know must have taken place, or of the birth or baptism of a child you know to have been born, in these years. The war was also a period of family rupture: even when a nuclear family unit did not become separated during the chaos, the more extended family is likely to have become dispersed to different locations and there cannot have been many families where one or men of fighting age were not conscripted and separated from the families for years.
So this is one of the frequent challenges of Eastern European family history research. You cannot apply without reservation what you know from your experience of undertaking genealogical research in Australia, or Canada, or New Zealand, or UK, or USA. You should expect discontinuities in the family timeline and gaps in the surviving documentary record. You may never know where key family members were at certain dates. But the challenges are one of the many reasons why family history research in Eastern Europe is so interesting and rewarding, as each breakthrough does not come with the relative ease and certainty with which you may be accustomed from undertaking your research in the English-speaking world.
The German state brought calamity upon the German people, as it did on all peoples of Europe, and elsewhere, during World War Two. While it may be difficult to muster sympathy for the great mass of Nazis and their sympathisers in Germany proper and Austria, millions of ethnic Germans – the Auslandsdeutsche, or Volksdeutsche – resided in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.
Nazi Germany over-ran Poland in September 1939 and large regions were annexed as Reichsgaue, becoming Danzig-Westpreußen (which comprised Polish Pomorskie) and Wartheland (Poznań and the eastern half of Górny Śląsk). The Nazi policy here was twofold and implemented immediately: to deport all Jews and Poles, and to import Volksdeutsche to settle the farms and properties of the dispossessed. Agreements were reached quickly with the governments of the three Baltic countries, Italy and Soviet Russia to arrange the patriation (it cannot really be called repatriation) of the Volksdeutsche. An estimated 75,000 Baltendeutsche came from Estonia and Latvia alone. In 1940, tens of thousands followed from the so-called Generalgouvernement (hitherto central, southern and eastern Poland), Bessarabia, Bukovina and elsewhere.
Of course, an unknown proportion of these ethnic Germans must have been Nazis or sympathisers, particularly perhaps those who had been landowners amid otherwise non-German populations, and the petit-bourgeois burghers of larger, predominantly ethnic German towns. Plenty joined the Waffen SS later on in countries such as Hungary. However, many of the Volksdeutsche in rural areas, the long-established agricultural colonists in regions such as the Banat, Bessarabia, Galicia and Volhynia, probably felt no affinity with the Reich and no inclination to be disturbed from the soil which their families had cultivated for generations. They too were swept up and sent packing by the frontline activists of the resettlement or Umsiedlung organisations: entire villages of German smallholders and artisans were unceremoniously evicted and forced to plod west by horse and cart.
Just as the Nazis over-reached themselves militarily in the depths of Russia, so they over-stretched themselves and over-estimated their competence at resettling their Volksdeutsche. Up to half a million may have been settled on hitherto Polish farmland in the Reichsgaue, where they faced the understandable animosity of as yet unevicted Poles, but for at least that number the reality of Lebensraum was languishing in ever more crowded camps for the duration of the War. The number of the displaced kept rising too. As the defeated German army retreated from the Eastern Front towards Berlin, many of the Volksdeutsche in their path felt that they had no alternative but to accompany them or risk vengeance at the hands of the Red Army and the inhabitants of the resurgent nation states which Nazi Germany had conquered.
Significant records relating to the Baltic and Eastern European Germans were removed to Germany during WW2 but others remain in archives in the lands where they were created. Bluebird Research can help and advise in German family history research across Eastern Europe: contact us for an opinion.