Memorial Krasnoyarsk Publishes Echelon Registers of Volga Germans Deported in 1941

Memorial Krasnoyarsk has been collecting information about the victims of Soviet terror in Krasnoyarsk Krai since 1988. The group prepared a multi-volume Book of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions. Last year they published the registers of those deported from Lithuania to Krasnoyarsk Krai. Today, we want to talk about our colleagues' work on the echelon lists of Germans deported from the VG ASSR (Volga Germans Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

On Memorial Krasnoyarsk's website, the registers are available to view sorted  by district: original, processed – with corrected names and toponyms, and translated into German. Not all the lists have been processed yet, but there has been much overlap with materials previously collected on the website, such as interviews and newspaper articles. This aids in working on the registers and makes it easier to find information about a person upon request.

In Memorial Krasnoyarsk, the Germans have always been an important subject: as a result of the deportations, there are many Germans still living in Krasnoyarsk Krai. Information about them was collected from letters, interviews, publications, and so forth. At the same time, Krasnoyarsk Memorial was working on the database of the repressed people, and it took most of the time. By the way, the first such database was created in 1988 and was accessible on a DVK-2 computer.

In the 2010s, it became known that, besides the German card index of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Krasnoyarsk Krai, there were also echelon registers of deported Germans from 1941, in the regional archive (GAKK). In 2020, a team of genealogists volunteered to index the lists by entering them into an Excel file. Unexpectedly, it turned out that GAKK had already started scanning the lists and posting them on their website.

Alexei Babiy, Krasnoyarsk Memorial:

There are many descendants of the repressed, including Germans, in positions of power in Krasnoyarsk Krai. State archive employees are ready to work with us but are restricted by "top-down" limitations. However, these are not yet total, thus we can still make some progress.

Volunteer genealogists, scattered over the globe, divided the district lists for indexing. This was only the first stage of the work, and now participants of the Krasnoyarsk Memorial edit the registers – while the genealogists enter them as is, without correcting mistakes. The work on the 1941 lists will continue for several more years. There are many errors in names, toponyms, and abbreviations. To correct them, it is needed to verify information in the directories of the administrative division of the Volga German ASSR, in directories of German names and surnames, and in materials from the forum wolgadeutsche.net.

For example, it took a lot of time to understand that the kolkhoz named Kebuk actually meant Hebung ("uplift" from German), or the surname "Kryer" was actually "Krieger," and so on. The situation is complicated by the fact that the Volga Germans have pronunciation peculiarities because of the Swabian dialect – and the echelon lists were compiled by ear.

There are many difficulties with recovering names: for instance, Andreas and Heinrich could both be recorded as Andrei. Or, for example, the name Bogdan was often encountered, even though it does not exist in the German language. Its German equivalent is Gottfried, which translates to "God-given." Apparently, deported Gottfrieds sometimes named themselves Bogdans to the local authorities.

In all the following documents in the post-deportation period, a person would be listed under such a Russified name, and relatives searched for them by these names in the registers. Therefore, our colleagues decided to keep the Russified names and provide German suggestions in parentheses.

Sybilla Saya from Lübeck, who has been working with the team since 2000, helps to restore correct German spelling. In the first year of the organization's website existence, 1998, she sought help in finding her repressed relatives.

In 2001, Sybilla came to Krasnoyarsk for the first time, and then our colleagues visited her in Lübeck. She offered to translate the site materials into German and English. Regarding the echelon registers, Sybilla not only translates but also has the final say in contentious interpretations of names and toponyms, catching final errors and typos.

There is still a long way to go until the merging of the echelon registers with the main list of the repressed, but both can already be used. Alexei Babiy recounted how a visitor to the website wanted to find a German family that lived in the same village as him. He remembered neither their names nor the surnames, only that there was no father in the family, just two sons. The family was quickly found in the list.

The main problem with information about Germans in district newspapers is that women are always named by their husbands' surnames. Therefore, it was impossible to establish the maiden names under which women were deported. But this problem can be solved now with the echelon lists — with patronymics and other details, it became possible to determine women's maiden names and include them in the main register of the repressed.

Although the flow of Volga Germans was the largest, the topic of the deportation of Germans to Krasnoyarsk Krai does not end here. There was also the deportation of "Leningrad" Germans (and Finns) in 1942 and of the "southern" Germans in 1944–1945. The echelon lists of Leningrad Germans are at least fragmentarily available in GAKK, while the "southern" ones are all in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs – and those are closed for researchers. "However, we have enough work for several years to come, so we do not worry," says Alexei Babiy.