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After World War II, many survivors remained in the Ural Mountains, Siberia, Kazakhstan (1.4% of today's Kazakh population are recognized as Germans - around 200,000), Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan (about 16,000 or 0.064%). [41]
Civilian deaths, due to the flight and expulsion of Germans and the forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union, are sometimes included with World War II casualties. During the Cold War , the West German government estimated the death toll at 2.225 million [ 14 ] in the wartime evacuations, forced labor in the Soviet Union as well as the post ...
Born in 1924 as Mariya Limanskaya, she joined the Red Army in 1942, at the height of World War II. She was 18. [3] [4] At that time the Soviet Stavka ("high command") increasingly lacked trained reserves to reinforce the entire 2,000-kilometre (1,200 mi) front, and as a result began to conscript underage boys and girls. [5]
A large number of women were raped and then shot. During this massacre, the Russian soldiers also shot some fifty French prisoners of war. Within forty-eight hours the Germans re-occupied the area. [1] Karl Potrek of Königsberg, the leader of a Volkssturm company present when the German Army took back the village, testified in a 1953 report:
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas (mainly Canada, the United States, Brazil and Argentina ...
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 marked the end of the Volga German ASSR. On 28 August 1941, the republic was formally abolished and, out of fear they could act as German collaborators, all Volga Germans were exiled to the Kazakh SSR, Altai and Siberia. [4] Many were interned in labor camps merely due to their heritage. [2]
During World War II, 3,332,589 individuals were encompassed by Stalin's policies of deportations and forced settlements. [37] Some of the stated reasons were allegedly to "defuse ethnic tensions", to "stabilize the political situation" or to punish people for their "act against the Soviet authority". [38]
A study published by the German government in 1974 estimated the number of German civilian victims of crimes during expulsion of Germans after World War II between 1945 and 1948 to be over 600,000, with about 400,000 deaths in the areas east of the Oder and Neisse (ca. 120,000 in acts of direct violence, mostly by Soviet troops but also by ...