The victory of the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774 ensured its expansion into the Caucasus. It also created a need in populating these lands with Russian subjects in order to hasten their exploration.[4] In the late 18th century, the government permitted families of Volga Germans to settle in the Kuban. However, poor infrastructure, lack of organization of the officials responsible for the settlement and the refusal of the military personnel to have these lands populated by non-Russians were an obstacle to the steady and constant migration of the Germans. In 1815, while participating in the Congress of Vienna, Russian TsarAlexander I visited Stuttgart, a city in his mother's native Kingdom of Württemberg. Upon witnessing the oppression that local peasants were undergoing either due to belonging to different non-Lutheran Protestant sects or to their participation in separatist movements, he arranged for their settlement in Russian Transcaucasia in order to form agricultural colonies.[5]
On September 21, 1818, the first German settlement in Transcaucasia, Marienfeld, was established by a group of Swabian Germans near the Georgian capital Tiflis (Tbilisi), along the Kakheti highway, now part of Sartichala. Two months later, another group of colonists founded another settlement in Georgia on the bank of the Asureti River and named it Elisabethtal, after the Emperor's wife Elizabeth Alexeievna (now Asureti in the Georgian province of Kvemo Kartli). Within the next year, five more colonies were established in eastern Georgia: New Tiflis (later Mikhailovsky Avenue, now part of David Agmashenebeli Avenue in Tbilisi), Alexandersdorf on the left bank of the Kura (now the vicinity of Akaki Tsereteli Avenue in Tbilisi), Petersdorf (near Marienfeld, now part of Sartichala) and Katharinenfeld (now Bolnisi).[6] Three more colonies were founded in Abkhazia: Neudorf, Gnadenberg and Lindau.
By the late 1840s, there were five German colonies in the North Caucasus. The migration waves (especially to the Don Host Oblast) grew beginning in the second half of the 19th century with the capitalist influence on farming in Russia. Germans would immigrate not only from the regions adjacent to the Volga River but also from the Black Sea region and Germany. The majority of these Germans adhered to various branches of Protestantism: most were Lutherans, Mennonites, or Baptists. Roman Catholics formed a minority and lived in six colonies.[7]
In the winter of 1818–1819, 194 Swabian families primarily from Reutlingen arrived in Elisabethpol (Ganja) in eastern Transcaucasia from Tiflis. They were granted land 6 kilometres to the west of the city and founded the town of Helenendorf (Goygol) in the summer of 1819. Another German settlement, the town of Annenfeld (later merged with the city of Shamkir) was founded almost simultaneously 40 kilometres away from Helenendorf.
Baltic German explorer Friedrich Parrot visited Katharinenfeld and Elisabethtal during his expedition to Mount Ararat in 1829.
Germans became an active and well-integrated community in Russian Transcaucasia. Unlike the settlement of Russian religious minorities, German colonies were located in "places that were more economically advantageous, close to cities or important transportation routes."[8] It became "typical for Caucasian administrative centers to have a satellite agrarian German colony."[8] According to Charles King, "rows of trees lined the main streets" of the German colonies near Tiflis. "Schools and churches, conducting their business in German, offered education and spiritual edification. Beer gardens provided the main entertainment."[9] In eastern Transcaucasia, German colonists were overwhelmingly bilingual in Azeri, while Russian was formally taught in schools starting in the late 19th century.[10]Dolma, a traditional dish in the Caucasus and the Middle East popular among all Caucasus nationalities, became as common with the Caucasus Germans as traditional German dishes.[11]
The Baltic German naturalist and explorer Friedrich Parrot encountered Swabian settlers near Tiflis on his expedition to Mount Ararat in 1829. He listed their settlements and personally visited Katharinenfeld and Elisabethtal, describing them:
These colonies may be known to be German at first sight from their style of building, their tillage, their carts and wagons, their furniture and utensils, mode of living, costume, and language. They contrast, therefore, strongly with the villages of the natives, and very much to their advantage, particularly in the eyes of one who has lived for some time, as was the case with us, wholly among the latter. [...] At last, after riding for five hours, I espied, high on the left bank of the river [i.e. the Khrami], symptoms not to be mistaken of the German colony: these were, regularly-built white houses, with good windows, doors, and ridge stone on the roof. I joyfully rode up, and found that this was Katharinenfeld.[12]
The colonies suffered during the Russo-Persian War of 1826–28. Many of the settlements had been raided by marauding Kurds in 1826 who, according to Parrot, killed 30 people of Katharinenfeld's 85 families and captured 130 more.[13] Half of those had not yet returned at the time of the naturalist's visit in 1829. While visiting the great bazaar in Erivan (Yerevan) with Khachatur Abovian (the Armenian writer and national public figure), Parrot encountered "two Württemberg women, with five children" who "talked to one another in true Swabian dialect."[14] They were from Katharinenfeld and Parrot resolved to tell their relatives back home about their location.[14] When Parrot visited the village and told the colonists the news, he was very well received. The two women who he met in Erivan returned from comparably benign captivity with a "wealthy Tatar chief" where they had been pressured to convert to Islam. Parrot surmised that others might have been sold into slavery deeper into Turkish territory. Furthermore, he told of a case where a man received a letter from his wife who had married a Persian cleric in captivity and therefore allowed him to remarry.[12]
Typical half-timbered German house in Asureti, Georgia (historic Elisabethtal)
Some Germans moved voluntarily further south to Russian Armenia. Those who came from Württemberg were inspired by the concept of meeting the end of the world at the foot of Mount Ararat.[15] On the invitation of Parrot, the Armenian writer Abovian attended the German-speaking University of Dorpat (Tartu) in present-day Estonia. He became a Germanophile and, after his return to the Caucasus, married a German woman, Emilia Looze, in Tiflis.[16] They moved to Abovian's native Armenia and "established a complete German household."[17]
During his travels to the Caucasus during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829, the celebrated Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin visited one of the German colonies near Tiflis and recorded his experience in his Journey to Arzrum. He ate dinner there, but was unimpressed by the food and the beer. "We drank beer which is made there, with a very unpleasant taste, and paid very much for a very bad dinner," he wrote.[18]
In 1843, during his visit to Russian Transcaucasia, German Baron August von Haxthausen also visited the German colonies of Georgia and the Tiflis region and extensively described their agricultural practices. He related an account from Moritz von Kotzebue about an unsuccessful religious pilgrimage of German colonists to Jerusalem, led by a woman who "knew the whole Bible by heart, from beginning to end" and who "exercised a kind of magical influence on all around her."[19] During his travels in the Caucasus, Haxthausen was accompanied by Peter Neu, a Swabian colonist from the Tiflis area who had "a remarkable genius for languages and knew a dozen European and Asiatic tongues,—German, French, Russian, Circassian, Tatar, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Persian, Kurdish, etc." In addition, he "possessed a rich gift of poetical imagination and had an inexhaustible treasury of märchen, legends and popular songs, gleaned from all the countries he had visited."[20] Neu accompanied Haxthausen, Khachatur Abovian and Abovian's uncle Harutiun on a visit to the Yazidi community of Armenia.[21] Haxthausen, Abovian and Neu also visited the center of the Armenian Apostolic Church at Etchmiadzin and Neu accompanied Haxthausen on an excursion to the area of present-day South Ossetia.[22]
Germans from Helenendorf (present-day Goygol, Azerbaijan) in the 19th–early 20th century
Late imperial era
Additional German colonies were established in eastern Transcaucasia during the latter half of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. In the Tiflis Governorate as of 1926, a total of 9,000 Germans lived in the colonies of Alexandersdorf (now part of Didube, Tbilisi), Alexandershilf (now Trialeti), Blümenthal (later Chapaevka, now Kavta), Elisabetthal (now Asureti), Freudenthal (now part of Sartichala), Georgsthal (now Dzveli Kanda), Gnadenberg (now Dziguta), Grünthal (later Akhali Ulianovka, now Ruisbolo), Hoffnungsthal (now Akhalsheni), Katharinenfeld, Lindau (now Lindava), Marienfeld (now part of Sartichala), Marnaul (now part of Marneuli), Neudorf (now Akhalsopeli), Neu Tiflis (now part of Kukia and Chughureti, Tbilisi), Petersdorf (now part of Sartichala), Steinfeld (now Kotishi), Traubenberg (now Tamarisi), Waldheim (now Ipnari), and Wiesendorf (now Akhali Marabda).[23]
Beginning in the 1880s, in addition to Helenendorf and Annenfeld, six more German colonies were formed the Elisabethpol Governorate: Georgsfeld in 1888, Alexejewka in 1902, Grünfeld and Eichenfeld in 1906, Traubenfeld in 1912 and Jelisawetinka in 1914. They became populated mostly by the descendants of the Germans from the two older colonies of Helenendorf and Annenfeld. By 1918 according to the German consul in Constantinople, there were 6,000 Germans living in these colonies overall. Helenendorf became the primary spiritual center for the Germans of the eight colonies. The oldest Lutheran church in present-day Azerbaijan, St. John's Church, was built in this town in 1857. Other Lutheran churches were built in Gadabay, Shamakhi, Elisabethpol, Baku and Annenfeld in 1868, 1869, 1885, 1897 and 1911 respectively. The ceremony of laying the first stone of Baku's German Church of the Saviour was attended by Emanuel Nobel, brother of Alfred Nobel, and other members of the city's elite.[24]
Baku's booming oil industry attracted many people from all over the Caucasus. By 1903, the German population of the city had grown to 3,749 (2.4% of the city's entire population at the time) and consisted mostly of natives of the original German colonies.[25] Nikolaus von der Nonne, an ethnic German who had been working in Baku since 1883, was the mayor of Baku from 1898 to 1902.[26] Notably, Richard Sorge, the famous ethnic German-Soviet spy, was born in a suburb of Baku in 1895. His father was a German mining engineer who worked for the Caucasus Oil Company. Sorge is considered to have been one of the best Soviet spies in Japan before and during World War II and he was posthumously declared a Hero of the Soviet Union. The city of Baku dedicated a monument and park to him.[27]
Commonly referred to as nemsə or lemsə[28] (from the Russian немец – "German") by the local Azerbaijani population, Germans in the Elisabethpol Governorate were traditionally engaged in farming. However, starting from 1860, viticulture was becoming more and more important in the life of the German agricultural communities. By the end of the 19th century, 58% of the region's wine production was manufactured by the Vohrer Brothers and the Hummel Brothers of Helenendorf.[29]
In 1865 and 1883, Siemens built two copper smelteries in Gadabay and a hydroelectric station in Galakand. In the 1860s, it initiated cobalt extraction in Dashkasan and built two power stations in Baku.[30] The Siemens smelteries were officially closed down in 1914 when the Russian Empire entered World War I fighting against Germany and the tsarist government banned all German businesses in Russia.[31]
Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Imperial Russia annexed the Kars region from the Ottoman Empire. The tsarist government launched a campaign to populate the newly established Kars Oblast with perceived "reliable" populations, including Germans.[32] In 1891, a number of German families were resettled in Kars from the colony of Alexandershilf near Tiflis and established the village of Petrovka.[33] Its population remained relatively low and consisted of about 200 people by 1911. Another two colonies in the province, Vladikars and Estonka, were founded between 1911 and 1914. These settlements were short-lived. Due to the Russian-Ottoman military confrontation at the start of World War I, most of the remaining German settlers from the Kars Oblast were evacuated to Eichenfeld. The Kars region itself was eventually annexed by Turkey in the treaties of Moscow and Kars.[34]
A cartoon on the perception of the German colonists with the headline "We, the local Armenians and the German colonists" from the Armeniansatirical magazine Khatabala (1907, No. 43/71)
From 1906 to 1922, Baron Kurt von Kutschenbach published the German-language newspaper Kaukasische Post in Tiflis. It called itself the "only German newspaper in the Caucasus." The editor-in-chief was the writer, journalist and Caucasus scholar Arthur Leist.[35]
After the outbreak of World War I, Russian government attempts to Russify the German colonies in the Caucasus created a local backlash.[5] Following Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the formation of the Transcaucasian Federation, German colonists formed the Transcaucasian German National Council (Transkaukasischer Deutscher Nationalrat), with its seat in Tiflis. In May 1918, the Transcaucasian Federation dissolved and the short-lived republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia were established. The German colonists strove to maintain their communities amid the upheaval of the Russian Civil War in the Caucasus. In the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the centenary of Helenendorf was marked by a public celebration within the community. The German community was also represented in the parliament of the republic by Lorenz Kuhn, a Helenendorf-born oil industry businessman.[36]
Soviet era
View on Annenfeld (within present-day Shamkir, Azerbaijan) ca. 1900
Following the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War and the Sovietization of the Caucasus, the new Soviet government initially demonstrated a favorable attitude toward multiculturalism in the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The cultural and linguistic rights of ethnic groups were promoted by Soviet authorities in accordance with the korenizatsiya (nativization) policy of Soviet nationalities. In 1926, there were seven public primary schools in Soviet Azerbaijan with German as the language of instruction.[37] The First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union in 1926 showed that 93,915 Caucasus Germans lived in the North Caucasus region of the Russian SFSR.[38] Within the Transcaucasian SFSR, 13,149 lived in the Azerbaijan SSR, 12,047 in the Georgian SSR and 104 in the Armenian SSR.[39] The situation changed with the rise of Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government gradually ordered all German-sounding place-names to be changed by the mid-1930s.[40] The forced collectivization of agriculture under the first five-year plan and the resulting famine of 1932-33 hit the North Caucasus and the local German community very hard.[41]
After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in June 1941, the Caucasus Germans were internally deported by Soviet authorities to Central Asia and Siberia on the pretext that their loyalties were with Germany, even though this was not the case.[42] According to scholar Pavel Polian, most of the Caucasus Germans (approximately 190,000 people) were deported from the North and South Caucasus to Kazakhstan and Siberia from September 1941 to June 1942.[1]
The deportees were allowed to take very little luggage, hardly any food and then had to undergo a voyage across the Caspian Sea to the camps of Central Asia. They were told the voyage would only be for several days but many ships went back and forth for months, resulting in mass death from starvation and the climate, especially among children, the elderly and the sick. On one ship carrying deportees, about 775 Germans froze to death. Evidently, maritime officials had no clear instructions to land the deportees at a particular destination and were prohibited from landing them anywhere else. They eventually arrived by rail in the Lake Balkhash area, in Kazakhstan. This torment can be ascribed, in part, to the confusion caused by the war, but also, more importantly, to the typical callous treatment of political prisoners by the Stalin regime, which did not care if prisoners lived or died. The following eye-witness report relates a harrowing story of evacuation by ship:
For two months ethnic Germans from the Caucasus were pointlessly dragged back and forth on the Caspian Sea, and more people, especially children, were dying of starvation. They were just thrown overboard. My four-year-old son was thrown there as well. My other son, seven years of age, saw that. He grabbed my skirt and begged me with tears in his eyes: 'Mummy, don't let them throw me in the water. I beg you, leave me alive, and I will always be with you and take care of you when I grow up'... I always cry when I remember that he also died of starvation and was thrown overboard, which he feared so much.[43]
The only ones not subject to deportation were German women (and their descendants) who were married to non-Germans. Soon after Stalin's death in 1953 and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev to the Soviet leadership, the ban for the majority of the deported peoples to return to their homes was lifted. However, relatively few Germans returned to the Caucasus region.[2] By 1979, there were only 46,979 Germans living in both North and South Caucasus.[44]
The 2014 census recorded only two Germans living in the Bolnisi municipality.[45] The German town cemetery was leveled under Stalin and is marked today by a memorial honouring the memory of the German colonists. Recently, there has been increasing interest in Georgia on the part of local youth to find out more about their German heritage. Often this desire is closely related to Protestant beliefs, so as a result the New Apostolic Church works intensively with these young people as part of its regular youth programs.
Azerbaijan
In Azerbaijan, the remaining Germans are concentrated in the capital city of Baku, and many belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Community restored and officially registered in the early 1990s. The last German resident of Goygol (Helenendorf), Viktor Klein, died in 2007.[46] The city has nowadays over 400 buildings whose construction dates back to the German period. In 2015, according to Klein's will, his familial house, built by his grandfather in 1886, was turned into the Museum of Caucasus German History.[47] The former Lutheran church of Ganja has housed the Ganja State Puppet Theatre since 1986.[48] In 2009, the non-functioning Lutheran church in Shamkir (and into which Annenfeld was absorbed), which had been used as a community centre in the Soviet era, was renovated and turned into a museum.[49] Yunis Hajiyev, born in 1928 to an Azeri father and a German mother, and his descendants are said to be the last family of German origin still residing in Shamkir as of 2018.[50] Gadabay's German population left by 1922 after the exhaustion of the copper industry. The Lutheran Church of the town was razed by the Soviet government in the 1920s.[31]
Armenia
Already small compared to the historical German communities of the neighboring Georgia and Azerbaijan, Armenia's remaining German population declined following the country's independence in 1991 due to economic factors. Many of the country's Germans emigrated to Germany.[15] In recent years, the German community has been working closely with the German Educational and Cultural Center of Armenia to help organize German-language schools and cultural events.[15]
Turkey
The expert book is enriched with selected graphics and illustrations. In addition, the views of the Kafkas Postası (the newspaper of the Caucasian Germans between 1906 and 1914) about Turkey are also conveyed; for they show the Caucasian Germans' insight into one of their neighbors, the Ottoman Empire. At the end of this publication there is an addendum about a small branch of the Caucasian Germans near Kars and Ardahan, now in eastern Turkey, near Ararat.The last German resident of the Estonka colony (the present-day village of Karacaören in the Kars Province of Turkey), Frederik Albuk, died in 1999 in his native village, survived by his wife Olga Albuk of Russian-Estonian ancestry, who died there in August 2011. The 150-grave Lutheran cemetery where they were buried is the only remnant of the German community's presence in northeastern Turkey.[51] Of the 60 families of Estonian origin who were settled in the village of Karacaören in the center of Kars by the Russians during the Ottoman-Russian wars in 1877, only August Albuk has survived.
Kars is a city in northeast Turkey. It is the seat of Kars Province and Kars District. As of 2022, its population was 91,450. Kars, in classical historiography (Strabo), was in the ancient region known as Chorzene, part of the province of Ayrarat in the Kingdom of Armenia, and later the capital of the Bagratid Kingdom of Armenia from 929 to 961. Currently, the mayor of Kars is Türker Öksüz. The city had an Armenian ethnic majority until it was re-captured by Turkish nationalist forces in late 1920.
The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic was a short-lived state in the Caucasus that included most of the territory of the present-day Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, as well as parts of Russia and Turkey. The state lasted only for a month before Georgia declared independence, followed shortly after by Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The Caucasus campaign comprised armed conflicts between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, later including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Mountainous Republic of the Northern Caucasus, the German Empire, the Central Caspian Dictatorship, and the British Empire, as part of the Middle Eastern theatre during World War I. The Caucasus campaign extended from the South Caucasus to the Armenian Highlands region, reaching as far as Trabzon, Bitlis, Mush and Van. The land warfare was accompanied by naval engagements in the Black Sea.
Russian Armenia is the period of Armenian history under Russian rule from 1828, when Eastern Armenia became part of the Russian Empire following Qajar Iran's loss in the Russo-Persian War (1826–1828) and the subsequent ceding of its territories that included Eastern Armenia per the out coming Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828.
Khachatur Abovian was an Armenian polymath, educator, scientist, philosopher, writer, poet and an advocate of modernization. He mysteriously vanished in 1848 and was eventually presumed dead. Reputed as the father of modern Armenian literature, he is best remembered for his novel Wounds of Armenia. Written in 1841 and published posthumously in 1858, it was the first novel published in the Modern Armenian language, based on the Yerevan dialect instead of Classical Armenian.
The Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828 was the last major military conflict between the Russian Empire and Persia.
The Battle of Baku was a battle in World War I that took place between August–September 1918 between the Ottoman–Azerbaijani coalition forces led by Nuri Pasha and Bolshevik–ARF Baku Soviet forces, later succeeded by the British–Armenian–White Russian forces led by Lionel Dunsterville and saw Soviet Russia briefly re-enter the war. The battle was fought as a conclusive part of the Caucasus Campaign, but as a beginning of the Armenian–Azerbaijani War.
The Erivan Governorate was a province (guberniya) of the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire, with its centеr in Erivan. Its area was 27,830 sq. kilometеrs, roughly corresponding to what is now most of central Armenia, the Iğdır Province of Turkey, and the Nakhchivan exclave of Azerbaijan. At the end of the 19th century, it bordered the Tiflis Governorate to the north, the Elizavetpol Governorate to the east, the Kars Oblast to the west, and Persia and the Ottoman Empire to the south. Mount Ararat and the fertile Ararat Valley were included in the center of the province.
The German Caucasus expedition was a military expedition sent in late May 1918, by the German Empire to the formerly Russian Transcaucasia during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I. Its prime aim was to stabilize the pro-German Democratic Republic of Georgia and to secure oil supplies for Germany by preventing the Ottoman Empire from gaining access to the oil reserves near Baku on the Absheron Peninsula.
The Kars–Gyumri–Tbilisi railway line is a railway line that runs from the city of Kars in Turkey to the Armenian city of Gyumri, and from there on to Tbilisi, Georgia.
The Russian conquest of the Caucasus mainly occurred between 1800 and 1864. The Russian Empire sought to control the region between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. South of the mountains was the territory that is modern Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Iran and Turkey. North of the mountains was the North Caucasus region of modern Russia. The difficult conquest of the intervening mountains is known as the Caucasian War. Multiple wars were fought against the local rulers of the regions, as well as the dominant powers, the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran, for control. By 1864 the last regions were brought under Russian control.
The Georgia–Germany relations are the diplomatic, economic and cultural ties between Georgia and Germany, which go back several centuries. Germany pushed for the independence of the First Georgian Republic following the First World War and was one of the first countries to recognize the newly formed state in 1918, making it the protectorate of the German Empire. The bilateral relations were interrupted due to Georgia's forcible incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1922, but were restored on 13 April 1992 following the dissolution of the USSR.
Goygol is a city, municipality and the capital of the Goygol District in northwestern Azerbaijan. It is around 10 km (6 mi) south of Azerbaijan's second-largest city, Ganja. The city of Goygol has a population of 37,200. The municipality includes the city of Goygol and the village of Qızılqaya.
The Transcaucasian Seim was a representative and legislative body of state power in the Transcaucasus, convened by the Transcaucasian Commissariat in Tiflis on 23 February 1918. Its members consisted of Russian Constituent Assembly deputies elected in Transcaucasia, as well as representatives of the various political parties of Transcaucasia. Its chairman was Nikolay Chkheidze of the Social Democratic Party of Georgia.
The Caucasus Viceroyalty was the Russian Empire's administrative and political authority in the Caucasus region exercised through the offices of glavnoupravlyayushchiy and namestnik ("viceroy"). These two terms are commonly, but imprecisely, translated into English as viceroy, which is frequently used interchangeably with governor general. More accurately, glavnoupravlyayushchiy is referred to as the High Commissioner of the Caucasus, and namestnik as Viceroy.
The Surmalu uezd was a county (uezd) of the Erivan Governorate of the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire. It bordered the governorate's Etchmiadzin and Erivan uezds to the north, the Kars Oblast to the west, Persia to the east, and the Ottoman Empire to the south. The district made up most of the Iğdır Province of present-day Turkey. As part of the Russian Transcaucasus, the Surmalu uezd possessed economical importance for its abundantly rich salt mines in Kulp (Tuzluca), and spiritual importance to Armenians as the location of the culturally significant Mount Ararat. The administrative centre of the county was Igdyr.
The Declaration of Independence of Azerbaijan is the pronouncement adopted by the Azerbaijani National Council meeting in Tiflis on 28 May 1918, declaring the independence of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.
Germans have lived in Azerbaijan since the 1810s, with a large concentration of them once found in the western part of the country. The community grew out of two original settlements founded by German settlers from Württemberg who settled here in 1819. During World War II, it virtually ceased to exist as the Soviet government, which ruled Azerbaijan at the time, grew wary of the ethnic Germans potentially sympathising with the advancing army of the Third Reich and deported them to Central Asia in 1942.
The Baku uezd was a county (uezd) within the Baku Governorate of the Russian Empire and then of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Azerbaijan SSR until its formal abolishment in 1929. The uezd was located in eastern part of the Baku Governorate, bordering Caspian sea to the east, Shemakha uezd to the west, Kuba uezd to the north and Lenkoran uezd to the south. The administrative center of the uezd was the village Sarai.
↑ (in Russian)The Arrival of Germans in the North Caucasus by Anzor Ostakhov. Previously available online at Eirpd.ru
1 2 Tsutsiev, Arthur (2014). Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus. Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov. New Haven: Yale University Press. p.45. ISBN9780300153088.
↑ Fred Zimmer (1901). The Colony of Helenendorf, Elisabethpol Governorate. A Collection of Materials for the Description of Locales and Peoples of the Caucasus, #29. Department of Caucasus Education District Publ.
↑ Dr. K. Stumpp «Die Auswanderung aus Deutschland nach Russland in den Jahren 1763 bis 1862». Tübingen. 1974.
↑ Haxthausen, Baron August von (2016) [1854–55]. Transcaucasia and the Tribes of the Caucasus. Translated by John Edward Taylor. Introduction by Pietro A. Shakarian. Foreword by Dominic Lieven. London: Gomidas Institute. p.78. ISBN9781909382312.
↑ Merten, Ulrich (2015). Voices from the Gulag: The Oppression of the German Minority in the Soviet Union. Lincoln, Nebraska: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. pp.180, 181. ISBN978-0-692-60337-6.
M. Friedrich Schrenk: Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien. In: Geschichte der deutschen Kolonien in Transkaukasien. Tiflis 1869
Paul Hoffmann: Die deutschen Kolonien in Transkaukasien. Berlin 1905
Werner Krämer: Grünfeld, ein deutsches Dorf im Südkaukasus. o. O., o. J.
Max Baumann, Peter Belart: Die Familie Horlacher von Umiken in Katharinenfeld (Georgien)
Andreas Groß: Missionare und Kolonisten: Die Basler und die Hermannsburger Mission in Georgien am Beispiel der Kolonie Katharinenfeld; 1818–1870. Lit, Hamburg 1998, ISBN3-8258-3728-9
U. Hammel: Die Deutschen von Tiflis. In: Georgica. Bd. 20 (1997), pp 35–43
Immanuel Walker: Fatma. Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland, Stuttgart, 1966 3. Edition
Mammad Jafarli: Politischer Terror und Schicksale der aserbaidschanischen Deutschen. Baku 1999
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