Volga German

The Volga Germans were ethnic Germans living near the Volga River in the region of southern European Russia around Saratov and to the south, maintaining German culture, language, traditions and religions: Evangelical Lutheranism, Reformed and Roman Catholicism. Many Volga Germans immigrated to the American Midwest, Brazil and other countries in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Catherine the Great

After she displaced Peter III from the Russian throne, his wife, German princess Sophie Fredericke Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, a native of Stettin, took the vacant imperial throne under the name of Catherine II (the Great) in 1762. Catherine published two manifestos inviting Europeans to immigrate and farm Russian lands while maintaining their language and culture. The first in 1762 got little response. The second in 1763 improved the perks that were offered and was much more successful. In addition to land development, an important consideration for Catherine was the provision of a buffer zone between her native Russians and the nomads to the east. Germans responded in particularly large numbers due to poor conditions in their home regions. People in other countries such as France and England would be more inclined to migrate to the colonies in North America than to the Russian frontier. Other countries, such as Austria, forbade emigration. Those who went to Russia had special rights under the terms of the Manifesto. These were later revoked when the need for conscription into the Russian army arose in the latter part of the 19th century. The Germans, who had little commitment to the Russian Empire, often emigrated to avoid the draft, though many did remain behind.

The 20th century

After the Russian Revolution, the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Autonome Sozialistische Sowjet-Republik der Wolga-Deutschen; Автоно́мная Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респу́блика Не́мцев Пово́лжья) was established from 1924–1942 with the capital in Engels (known as "Pokrovsk" before 1931).

As the Nazis advanced into the USSR towards Volga, Joseph Stalin became worried about the possibility of Volga Germans collaborating with them. On August 28, 1941, he ordered a 24-hour relocation of Volga Germans (and Germans from a number of other traditional areas of settlement) eastwards, to Kazakhstan, Altai Krai and other remote areas. (Similar deportations happened for other ethnic groups, for example Poles, North Caucasian Muslim ethnic groups, Kalmyks and Crimean Tatars.) In 1942 nearly all the able-bodied German population was conscripted to the Labor army.

The present day

The Volga Germans never returned to the Volga region. After the war, many settled in the Ural Mountains, Siberia, Kazakhstan (2% of today's Kazakh population are recognized as Germans - approximately 300,000), Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan (appr. 16,000 = 0.064%). Decades after the war, some talked about resettling where the German Autonomous Republic used to be, but this movement met with opposition from the population resettled to their territory and did not gain momentum.

Since the late 1980s, many Volga Germans have emigrated to their ancestral homeland of Germany, taking advantage of the German Law of return, a policy which grants citizenship to all those who can prove to be a refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such a person. This exodus has occurred despite the fact that most Volga Germans speak little or no German. In the late 1990s, however, Germany made it more difficult for Russians of German descent to settle in Germany, especially for those who do not speak some of the Volga dialects of German. Today there are approximately 600,000 Germans in Russia (Russian Census 2002), a number that increases to 1.5 million when including people partly of German ancestry.

Volga Germans in North America

Volga Germans emigrated to the United States and Canada and settled mainly in the Great Plains; Alberta, eastern Colorado, Kansas, Manitoba, Minnesota, eastern Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Washington, and often succeeding in dryland farming, a skill learned in Russia. Many of the emigrants who arrived after between 1870 and 1912 spent a period doing farm labor, in northeastern Colorado and Montana in the sugar beet fields.

Bernhard Warkentin, a German Russian, was born in a small Russian village in 1847, and traveled to America in his early 20s. Interested in flour mills, he was especially impressed with the wheat growing possibilities in the United States. After visiting Kansas, Warkentin found the plains much like those he had left behind in his native Russia. Settling in Harvey County, he built a water mill on the banks of the Little Arkansas River - the Halstead Milling and Elevator Company. Warkentin's greatest contribution to Kansas was the introduction of hard Turkey wheat into Kansas, which replaced the soft variety grown exclusively in the state.

Modern descendants in Canada and the United States refer to their heritage as Germans from Russia. In the United States, however, they tend to have blended to a large degree with the much more numerous "regular" Germans who dominate the northern half of the United States.

Volga Germans in South America

Germans from Russia also settled in Argentina (see Crespo) and in Brazil (see German-Brazilians).

External links

Ethnic groups in Europe | Russian and Soviet Germans