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

by Arthur Grenz

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.