Hegewald was a short-lived German colony during World War II, situated near Zhytomyr in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. It was repopulated in late 1942 and early 1943 by Volksdeutsche settlers transferred from occupied territories of Poland, Croatia, Bessarabia, and the Soviet Union to an area earmarked for the projected Germanization of the Ukrainian lands. Plans were prepared months in advance by the SS, RKFDV and VoMi, but major problems with supplies occurred right from the region's initial establishment. [1] Himmler's original plans to recruit settlers from Scandinavia and the Netherlands were unsuccessful. [2]
Heinrich Himmler announced plans to establish a Volksdeutsche colony at Hegewald in September, 1942. [3] The initial scheme proved difficult to implement for a number of reasons, including reluctance and fear among many Volksdeutsche owing to partisan activities in the Hegewald area. Elaborate guidelines were set up to prepare the locations. [4] The new settlers were to receive the homes of killed or evicted Ukrainian peasants, as well as their furniture, livestock, and food; furthermore, new schools were to be built. [4] This required a massive deportation effort, mostly on foot, [5] carried out in October 1942. [6] Most homes were in terrible shape by German standards. There was a considerable shortage of lumber, and general lack of winter clothing and shoes. [7]
The Ukrainian and Polish German settlers arrived by train, having been forcibly removed from their homes, to be doled out plots of land and informed of their quotas. [8] They received use, but not ownership, of the land assigned to them. [9]
Neither the deported Ukrainians nor the ethnic Germans received more than a few hours' notice of their relocation. [9] Despite damage to the houses, most could be made functional before snowfall. [10] Elaborate Christmas pageants were set up, deliberately irreligious, to celebrate the return of light and to contrast it to the "dark powers" surrounding Germany, and gifts and food were provided. [11]
All did not go as planned. The intended preparations were undermined by filching of craftsmen, and neither food nor clothing arrived as promised. [12] Furthermore, many evicted Ukrainians returned to the area. [13] Efforts were made to continue, with members of the League of German Girls being sent even when they had to receive gas masks and soldier escorts, but by November 1943 the inhabitants were in flight before the Red Army. [14] [15] These were the first of massive flights of Germans from Eastern Europe. [16]
The colony consisted of 27 villages, all renamed in German; they were situated along the Zhytomyr-Berdychiv road. The villages reverted to their Ukrainian names after the war. [17]
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[...] Himmler announced his plans to form a Volksdeutsche colony at Hegewald in September, 1942 [...].
[...] Himmler resolved to establish a small trial colony around his own field headquarters at Hegewald, not far from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. He proceeded with his customary blend of brutality and efficiency. On October 10, 1942, his troops began rounding up 10,623 Ukrainian men, women and children from around Hegewald, packing them at gunpoint into boxcars destined for labor camps in the south. By the middle of the month, many houses in the region stood eerily empty, with dishes still on the tables and linen neatly folded in the cupboards. [...] Soon after, trains began disgorging thousands of new settlers—ethnic German families forcibly removed from villages and towns in northern Ukraine.
In the spring of 1943 it became clear that many of the Ukrainians who had been evicted were filtering back to Hegewald and hiding with unevicted relatives.
The evacuation of the Hegewald settlement was hastily carried out a few weeks before the Red Army arrived in November 1943.
The Final Solution or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to the Jewish question" was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a German politician who was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel, a leading member of the German Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany. He is primarily known for being one of the main architects behind the Holocaust.
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The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermenschen" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.
Mass evacuation, forced displacement, expulsion, and deportation of millions of people took place across most countries involved in World War II. The Second World War caused the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time in history. A number of these phenomena were categorised as violations of fundamental human values and norms by the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war ended. The mass movement of people – most of them refugees – had either been caused by the hostilities, or enforced by the former Axis and the Allied powers based on ideologies of race and ethnicity, culminating in the postwar border changes enacted by international settlements. The refugee crisis created across formerly occupied territories in World War II provided the context for much of the new international refugee and global human rights architecture existing today.
The German–Soviet population transfers were population transfers of ethnic Germans, ethnic Poles, and some ethnic East Slavs that took place from 1939 to 1941. These transfers were part of the German Heim ins Reich policy in accordance with the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The Reichskommissariat Ukraine was established by Nazi Germany in 1941 during World War II. It was the civilian occupation regime of much of Nazi German-occupied Ukraine. It was governed by the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories headed by Alfred Rosenberg. Between September 1941 and August 1944, the Reichskommissariat was administered by Erich Koch as the Reichskommissar. The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, of its resources and people. Adolf Hitler issued a Führer decree defining the administration of the newly-occupied Eastern territories on 17 July 1941.
Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, included the genocide of millions of Polish people, especially the systematic extermination of Jewish Poles. These mass killings were enacted by the Nazis with further plans that were justified by their racial theories, which regarded Poles and other Slavs, and especially Jews, as racially inferior Untermenschen.
In Nazi Germany the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle or VoMi was a Nazi Party agency founded to manage the interests of the Volksdeutsche - the population of ethnic Germans living outside the Third Reich. Ultimately coming under Allgemeine-SS administration, it became responsible for orchestrating the implementation of Nazi Lebensraum policies in Eastern Europe during World War II.
The Deutsche Volksliste, a Nazi Party institution, aimed to classify inhabitants of Nazi-occupied territories (1939–1945) into categories of desirability according to criteria systematised by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. The institution originated in occupied western Poland. Similar schemes were subsequently developed in occupied France (1940–1944) and in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (1941–1944).
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Heuaktion was a World War II operation in which 40,000 to 50,000 Polish and Ukrainian children aged 10 to 14 were kidnapped by German occupation forces and transported to Nazi Germany as slave labourers.
Ukrainian People's Militsiya or the Ukrainian National Militsiya, was a paramilitary formation created by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the General Government territory of occupied Poland and later in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine during World War II. It was set up in the course of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany during World War II was a massive operation consisting of the forced resettlement of over 1.7 million Poles from the territories of German-occupied Poland, with the aim of their Germanization between 1939 and 1944.
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