Crimean Germans

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Crimean German is the name for an ethnic group of German origin on the Crimean peninsula .

history

When in 1783 the Crimea was annexed "for all time" by Catherine the Great , most of the Crimean Tatars fled to the Ottoman Empire . The area was then populated with Greeks , Armenians , Bulgarians , Balts , Russians and Ukrainians under Prince Grigory Potjomkin . The rest of the Tatar population was pushed back into the sterile areas of the interior of the Crimea.

A manifesto of February 22, 1784, which invited " all nations friendly with the Russian Empire " to settle in Cherson , Sevastopol and Feodosia , apparently remained unsuccessful. Only under Alexander I began a targeted settlement of Germans , Swiss and Italians from 1804 .

In 1915 there were 314 colonies on the peninsula. In 1926 there were 43,631 people of German origin in the Crimea, which corresponds to 6.1 percent of the total population. In 1939, of the then 1.1 million inhabitants, around 60,000 were of German origin, just under 5.5 percent of the total population.

On August 20, 1941, shortly after the start of the German-Soviet war , Stalin had almost 53,000 ethnic Germans expelled from the Crimea "for ever" before the German armed forces units arrived, for fear of collaboration with the enemy ( German Reich ) . In a hurry, they had to pack up the bare essentials and were mainly transported to Kazakhstan , crammed into cattle wagons . Many died from the rigors of the days of driving.

After the invasion of the German troops in 1942, only 960 people of German origin lived in Crimea, who from September 1943 to March 1944 together with German-born settlers from the areas of Kherson, Nikolayev , Nikopol , Kiev , Kharkov , Krivoy-Rog , Melitopol , Mariupol , Dnepropetrowsk , Kirovograd and Zaporozhye were resettled as administrative resettlers in the Warthegau .

After the reconquest by the Red Army , another 181,000 Tatars were deported on May 18, 1944 , who were accused of collaborating with the Germans. They were followed in June by around 14,500 Greeks , 12,000 Bulgarians , 11,300 Armenians and, on June 24, the last ten families of Italian descent from Kerch who had escaped the raids on January 28 and 29 and February 8 to 10, 1942 (a total of around 2,000 people). The monument "against cruelty and violence" at the Kerch train station commemorates the mass deportation of ethnic Germans, Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians. The approximately 2,000 Italians who lived in Kerch after two waves of emigration (1820 and 1870) were forgotten.

It was not until the perestroika of the 1980s that Crimean Germans were able to return to Crimea. After the Russian annexation of Crimea , President Vladimir Putin signed a decree in April 2014 according to which the deported Germans, Tatars, Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks should be "rehabilitated" and their descendants should be compensated. The Federation of Expellees reported instead new repression in the Crimea.

Of the approximately 2.5 million inhabitants of the Crimea, around 3,000 are of German origin. According to the 2001 census, 255 people speak German as their mother tongue. The German association “Wiedergeburt” has had a member of the Crimean parliament since 1994.

Yuri Gempel , chairman of the Association for Rebirth in the Crimea, announced in 2016 that 1,200 families of Crimean German descent had applied for return migration from abroad. 400 of them came from resettlers in Germany. The trigger for this was the decree of the Russian President signed in 2014, in which, due to a rehabilitation, i. H. De-Stalinization, a return of the ethnic minorities of the Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Crimean Tatars and Russian-Germans deported from the peninsula in the Stalin era was approved. Land is made available to the deportees and their descendants in the village of Koltschuhyne (formerly Kronental) near Simferopol ; The returnees have to pay for the construction costs themselves.

Most recently, the Crimean minority of Italian origin was assured of rehabilitation and thus the right to return home (as of 2016).

Settlements

Mother colonies

Settlement areas of the Crimean Germans around 1890
  • Friedental (today Kurortne / Курортне)
(founded in 1805 by 25 families from Württemberg and seven families from Switzerland )
  • Heilbrunn (today Prywitne / Привітне)
(founded in 1805 by 40 families from Württemberg)
  • Herzenberg (today Pionerske / Піонерське)
(founded 1804)
(founded in 1810 by 57 families, five of which came from Württemberg and 52 from Baden )
(founded in 1806 by 36 families, 27 of which came from Württemberg)
  • Rosental (today Aromatne / Ароматне)
(founded in 1806 by families from Baden)
(founded 1805)
(founded in 1805 by 16 families from Württemberg)
(founded in 1805 by 49 families from Switzerland)

Daughter colonies

(founded in 1890 by Swabians from Berdjansk )
(founded 1871)
(founded 1874)
(founded 1849)
(founded 1879)
(founded 1885)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Detlef Brandes: Adopted by the Tsars, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich, 1993, p. 29
  2. ↑ Germans from Crimea in Labor Camps of Sverdlovsk District English
  3. ^ Karl Stumpp: Die Russlanddeutsche. Two hundred years on the way. Publishing house Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russia, Stuttgart, 1965 (34)
  4. ↑ Administrative resettlers were approx. 228,000 ethnic Germans who, according to an order of the military and civil administration of the Third Reich in the occupied territories of the USSR ( Reichskommissariat Ukraine , Romanian Transnistria), resettled in the years 1942–1944 in the Warthegau or the Old Reich without an intergovernmental contract were. Almost all of them had been granted German citizenship by the end of the war.
  5. ↑ Tim Neshitov: Our peninsula. Stalin drove them from the Crimea in cattle wagons - first the Germans, then the Tatars, the Armenians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks. Putin now wants to compensate them . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 20, 2014, p. 11.
  6. ^ Repressions against Germans in Crimea , Die Welt, December 26, 2014
  7. ↑ Distribution of the population in the regions of Ukraine by mother tongue (English)
  8. ↑ The German colonies in the Crimea ( Memento of the original from May 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed September 28, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.icehouse.net
  9. ↑ List of mother and daughter colonies in the Crimea , accessed on September 28, 2014