Confusing Times

Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, was launched on June 22, 1941. 

When the invasion started, the Soviet authorities immediately began to relocate valuable machinery and industrial goods eastward. Recognizing that the Germans of the region could become an enemy of the state, the Soviet government began to deport them to the far east, to places such as Siberia and Kazakhstan. Fortunately for many of the Black Sea Germans, the invaders came at such a rapid rate that  many of them were spared deportation. The southern front, which included the German villages, was overtaken by Germany's ally, the million-strong Romanian army. After the occupation, this part of Ukraine was called Transnistria and was under Romanian control.

The Romanian forces were not kind to the Germans, pillaging their fields and requisitioning livestock and machinery, whether it be from the collective farms that had been established during the collectivization period of the last decade, or from the villagers' personal possessions. Villagers that resisted were beaten and killed, and rape was not uncommon. To protect themselves, the villagers formed loosely organized local militias, called Selbstschutz.

The horrors of the holocaust did not escape this region. The Romanians' focus was to drive the Jewish people eastward, and killing them en-mass was merely a by-product of this effort.  Temporary camps were established with the eventual goal of moving them to the far reaches of the Soviet Union, as more of these regions were conquered. 

September of 1941 saw the arrival of the German SS Einsatzgruppen. The purpose of these units was to begin the process of ethnic cleansing, in preparation for the establishment of the Third Reich in these frontier regions. As such, they were seeking the extermination of the entire Jewish people. Along with that, they sought out anyone who had collaborated with or was sympathetic to the previous Soviet government. Until they could prove their loyalty to the Third Reich, the German settlers were held under suspicion. They had had little contact with the German homeland and were not indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda. The arrival of the SS, followed closely by 'Sonderkommando R', which had the longer-term task of indoctrinating the German population, or Volksdeutsche, with Nazi ideology, gave some of the settlers an opportunity to exact revenge on the neighbors who they felt had slighted them or had aligned themselves too closely with the hated communist government.

Even though the area of Transnistria was still officially under the control of the government of Romania, the Sonderkommando exerted a tremendous amount of influence, particularly when it came to oversight of the German villages. The Germans of the region - those that had proven their loyalty to the Reich - were treated as the vanguard of a new society. Land and livestock that had been confiscated during the collectivization years was gradually returned to their previous owners, and  food, clothing and other much-needed goods were dispersed freely to the German population in an effort to win them over.

Sadly, many Germans, especially the younger men, became willing recruits of the Sonderkommandos, first as part of the local Selbstschutz, then later as part of the Sonderkommando. We can not escape the reality, borne out by post-war interviews and other records, that some of these men may in fact have taken part in the atrocities committed against jews and other enemies of the Reich.

Later, in 1942 and 1943, as the war had turned against Germany and her allies and losses were mounting, young Volksdeutsche were heavily recruited for newly-established SS Panzer Divisions (not to be confused with the SS Einsatzgruppen). My father enlisted in 1943, at the age of twenty-four.