Stalin, supported by his colleagues in the politburo, had by 26 August 1941 ordered the resettlement of the Volga Germans. This was camouflaged as a decision by the central committee of the Communist Party (Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol’sheviki) - VKP(b)) and the Council of People’s Commissars (CPC), i. e. the government. In this top-secret decision, to which only a close circle of party and state leaders were privy, there was no evidence of guilt on the part of the German minority. The directive, comprising nineteen articles and written in an emphatically factual fashion, gives the impression of an orderly planned resettlement. The regions of Altai and Krasnoiarsk, the areas of Omsk and Novosibirsk, as well as Kazakhstan, functioned as reception areas. The complete plan was entrusted to the NKVD.19 The secretly formulated party and government decision to liquidate a Soviet republic which was firmly anchored in the constitution did, however, require permission, if only for a purely formal legal ‘blessing’ from the state apparatus. Thus, the decree, ‘Pertaining to the re-settlement of the Germans in the Volga District’, which was supposed to give the whole operation ‘legitimate’ grounds, was signed two days later on 28 August, by the head of state, Mikhail Kalinin, in the name of the President of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. This decree was only published in the News of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in the local press.20 Through a further decree on 7 September 1941 the annexation of the territory of the Volga German Republic into the bordering regions of Saratov and Stalingrad followed.21 Contrary to the ‘internally’ recorded government and party decisions, hefty accusations against the Germans were raised in the official decree on 28 August 1941. They were accused of harbouring ‘thousands and tens of thousands of saboteurs and spies’ who on a certain German signal would carry out bomb attacks. On the basis of this allegation, the German minority was declared an enemy of the Soviet state and was ‘resettled’ in the eastern parts of the country.
On 9 September 1941, Serov, the leader of the ‘German’ operation and a deputy of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, reported to his boss Beriia that at this time four (!) agents from the German secret service were active in the area. As an example of the anti-Soviet sabotage in the Volga German Republic such grotesque evidence was brought forward as ‘torn pictures of the Soviet leader, of destroyed private gardens or fruit plantings’.22 This did not however stop the secret police in the service of the Bolshevik leadership from retrospectively discovering the presence of thousands of traitors to the fatherland among the deported Germans. In the ensuing weeks, the NKVD began a witch-hunt for the Germans to catch, isolate and deport those who remained unregistered.
Because the registration of the Germans in the town of Tula did not occur with the involvement of the military authority, an undercover operation to track down all the Germans currently resident in the town and territory is being carried out with the help of the housing department. On top of that the same work is also being done by special departments in industry and in the authorities [. . .] and by the undercover informants of the operative department of the NKVD. This work should be finished by 27 September this year [1941].23
Over the next few months the exile of other groups of the German population, who did not enjoy the ‘status of autonomy’ - for example, from the Ukraine, the Trans and North Caucasus, from the towns of Moscow or Gor’kii - followed as a result of the secret decision taken by the state committee for defence (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony - GKO), on the orders of the Council of People’s Commissars, under the command of the NKVD and the various war councils of the individual army fronts. The complete ‘German operation’ was carried out under a press and publicity blackout. According to official figures, by the end of 1941, 799,459 people had been ‘resettled’ from the European territories of the Soviet Union to Kazakhstan and Siberia, including 444,115 Volga Germans.24
World History
