The Volhynian Germans:Their Hundred-Year Story 1843-1943 and History

by Arthur Grenz

Even now it is different in Russia than in the United States. Even if someone was born two times in Russia, his nationality would still be identified as that of the original homeland.

We kept warm as we slept in the woods, never better than before 22 June 1941.

Was die Wahrmacht erworben hat, hatte die Hitler Horde bald verdorben [what the armed forces won, Hitler’s gang soon destroyed].

“The tyrant is one and the same, only now he wears a different hat.” This was the beginning of the partisan effort.

The men got together and organized a resistance movement. These were the partisans.

A heavy fate met the colonists who still remained on the collectives. The partisans attacked them at night, brutally murdering and shooting people out of hate because the SS had burned

down villages where the partisans were sheltered. Thousand managed to get to Poland with a family conveyance and a cow in the cold winter of 1943. They reached Warthegau [translator’s note: an administration district established by the Germans in Poland which included Posen, Lodz, Warsaw] where they were received by Hitler’s brown shirts [translator’s note: the SA, or Sturmabteilung, forces wore brown shirts] and were forced to work in miserable businesses under the direction of a commissar, to farm properties that had been swindled from the Poles who were then forced to work as hired hands on their own land. The situation reversed two years later when the Volksdeutsche had to work for the Poles but most of the Germans were murdered.

Did you not contribute to the fact that although churches were not being built because it was not permitted to do so, more than 100,000 Evangelical and Baptist communities existed under the most challenging difficulties?

If Hitler had stayed, then the Christians would have met the same fate as the Jews.