ON THIS DAY · 28 AUGUST 1941

Deportation of the Volga Germans

28 Aug 1941 — A decree accused the Volga Germans of hiding “thousands and tens of thousands of saboteurs and spies” and abolished their republic. About 440,000 people were deported east from its capital Engels and the Volga, part of some 900,000 Soviet Germans moved by 1942.

The moment in context

The shift from promoting nations to deporting them began on the borders, where nationality and foreign policy met. Soviet planners worried that minorities with homelands abroad, such as Poles, Germans, Finns and Koreans, could serve an enemy in war. In 1936 tens of thousands of Poles and Germans were moved from Ukraine’s western border zone to Kazakhstan. In August 1937 a decree ordered the removal of all Koreans from the Far East, where Japan threatened from Manchuria, and in September and October about 172,000 people were loaded onto trains for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as the longest arrow on the map shows. The “national operations” of the Great Terror, the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38, targeted minorities suspected of spying for a foreign state, and the Polish operation alone shot about 111,000 people. A whole people could now be treated as guilty by association, and that logic drove every deportation that followed.

From Stalin’s ethnic deportations, chapter 7 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953 (1944).

The place: Deportation of the Volga Germans — map and full story →

The atlas that shows it

The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP