Russian Germans in North America are descended from the many ethnic Germans from Russia who immigrated to North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Russian Germans frequently lived in distinct communities and maintained German language schools and German churches. They were primarily Volga Germans from the lower Volga River valley; Black Sea Germans from the Crimean Peninsula/Black Sea region; or Volhynian Germans from the governorate of Volhynia in what is Ukraine. The smaller villages were often settled by colonists of a common religious denomination who had come from the same area and so a town is made up of German-speaking Catholics, Lutherans. The people often settled together from the same region of Germany and so spoke the same German dialect.
Originally recruited and welcomed to the Russian Empire in the 18th century, when they were promised to be allowed to practice own language and religions and to be exempted from compulsory military service, the Germans from Russia found increasing hardship. With changes in politics, the Russian government took back some of the privileges that had been granted, economic conditions grew poor. Those conditions led to German mass migrations from Russia.
After the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, particularly under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, conditions for the remaining Germans in Russia declined considerably. The subsequent rise of Nazi Germany, with its concern about ethnic Germans in other lands and proselytizing to the German Volk, led to suspicions of any Germans in Russia. In 1932 and 1933, the Soviet authorities forced starvation among the Volga Germans according to Western observers. Soviet authorities seized food supplies under the pretext of famine in the rest of the Soviet Union, and they ordered the breakup of many German villages.[1]
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin ordered the deportation of Russian Germans to labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia, as he was suspicious of potential collaboration with the invaders.[2] In some areas, his forces attempted to bulldoze the German churches and reused their tombstones for paving blocks. Many Germans in the Americas sent donations back to their communities, but others permanently lost contact with their relatives during the social disruptions of the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's Great Purge, and World War II.
Areas of immigration
Unlike many other immigrants to the Americas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germans from Russia wanted to continue farming and settled in agricultural areas, rather than industrial cities. Primary areas of settlement were in the Great Plains since it resembled the flat terrain of the Russian steppes. In addition, the upper Great Plains still had arable land available for free settlement under the Homestead Act. In the 2000 Census, North Dakota reported 43.9% of the population identified as having German ancestry.[3] In 1910, 5% of the population of North Dakota had been born in Russia; it is likely that most were ethnic Germans.
Large-scale immigration to the Americas started in the 1870s and continued until the 1917 Revolution, when travel and emigration were stopped.[4][5]
The Volga Germans were heavily involved with the growing sugar beet industry in northern Colorado and western Nebraska. Most Black Sea Germans were affiliated with wheat production in the Dakotas.
By 1990, approximately one million descendants of Germans from Russia lived in the United States.[8] Many of those descendants today often describe their ancestry as simply being German, and have become a subgroup of German Americans.
In 2019, a crowdsourced survey was conducted by Sandy Schilling Payne that analyzed approximately 150 years of migration patterns within the United States. It was reported that California had the highest number of places where Germans from Russia and their descendants resided. Factors such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II prompted many to relocate from hard hit states in the Midwest to California.[9]
Cities
Other Volga Germans made new lives in the industrializing American cities, especially in Chicago, which had an immense upsurge in immigration from Eastern Europe during that time. The largest area of concentrated settlement was in Jefferson Park, on the city's Northwest Side, mostly between 1907 and 1920. By 1930, 450 families of the Evangelical faith were living in that area, most of whom originated from Wiesenseite.[10] Later, during the period of suburbanization, many of their descendants moved out to outlying areas such as Maywood and Melrose Park. Many families living in the Jefferson Park central business district along Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue have Volga German immigrant ancestors.
A community of Volga Germans developed in Portland, mainly concentrated in Albina. Outsiders often described this area as "Little Russia," despite their ethnic German identity.[11]
Another urban center that attracted numerous Volga German families was Denver, specifically the neighborhood of Globeville.[12]
During the first two decades of the 20th century, the Chicago neighborhood of Jefferson Park was the point of initial settlement for many Volga German immigrants.
Wheat
Bernhard Warkentin, born in a small Russian village in 1847, travelled to America in his early twenties. Interested in flour mills, he was especially impressed with the wheat-growing possibilities in the United States. After he had visited Kansas, Warkentin found the Great Plains much like those that he had left behind. Settling in Harvey County, Kansas, he built a water mill on the banks of the Little Arkansas River, the Halstead Milling and Elevator Company. Warkentin's greatest contribution to Kansas was the introduction of hard Turkey Wheat into Kansas, which replaced the soft variety grown exclusively in the state.
Culture
Negatively influenced by the violation of their rights and cultural persecution by the tsar, the Russian Germans who settled in the northern Midwest saw themselves as an ethnic group that was separate from Russian Americans and had an entirely different experience from the German Americans who had immigrated from German lands. The Germans from Russia settled in tight-knit communities, which retained their German language and culture. They raised large families, built German-style churches, buried their dead in distinctive cemeteries by using wrought iron grave markers,[13] and created choir groups that sang German church hymns. Many farmers specialized in the production of sugar beets and wheat, which are still major crops in the upper Great Plains. During World War I, their identity was challenged by anti-German sentiment.
Actors from Germany in film "Als der Tod ins Leben wuchs" of Sebastian Ed Erhenberg as Volga Germans, Sanok 2013
Memory
During the 1970s, Dr. Kenneth Rock, a professor of history at Colorado State University, collected 60 oral histories of Russian German immigrants and their descendants as part of the "Germans from Russia in Colorado" Study Project. He documented life in the ethnic German communities in Russia, the immigration experience, work and social life in the United States, and interaction between the Russian-German communities and the wider society in both Russia and the United States.[14] They were often described as looking like Russians but sounding like Germans.
Canada
Background
In addition to the large population of Germans from Russia that settled on the American prairie, many also settled in the Canadian West. In the early 1870s, the Canadian government had begun to create promotional programs in Europe to entice settlers to the largely-unsettled western areas in what would become Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia.[15] Public policy also served to attract immigration following the passage of the federal Dominion Lands Act of 1872, which provided free grants of homesteads to those who settled on the Canadian prairie.[15] In the early 20th century, many immigrants moved from the United States to Canada in search of inexpensive land and greater social autonomy.[16] Those German-American immigrants brought not only their experience working on the American plains but also their accrued wealth, which gave a much needed boost to the economy of Western Canada.[15]
1875–1918
The Germans from Russia who flocked to Canada in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came from different religious backgrounds, including Lutheran, Catholic, and Mennonite. The last group, named after the founder Menno Simons, was the largest portion of the immigrant population. Those Mennonites were Plautdietsch-speaking people of Dutch descent who in Russia had been the best organized by preparing scouting parties to investigate the prospect of immigration to Canada and the United States. The scouts had been reliant on the assistance of established Mennonite groups such as those found in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and in Ontario. From 1873 to 1879, Mennonites formed block settlements in Manitoba such as the East Reserve and West Reserve, with a total of close to 7,000 members. Most settled in southern Manitoba in the richest part of the Red River Valley.[17] The communities were centered around religious homogeneity, the insistence on the tenets of adult baptism, and the refusal to bear arms or to swear an oath.[18] Many Mennonites had been propelled to leave because of the introduction of extended conscription, which had been put into place in 1874 and was set to take effect in Russia in 1881.
Many Germans from Russia emigrated from the United States to Western Canada from 1890 to 1909. They sought to escape rising land prices and the imposition of laws that had begun to encroach on their relative autonomy. Canada was seen as a new frontier and a place of vast land but little settlement. The immigrants settled mainly in the colonies of St. Peter and St. Joseph, East and West of Saskatoon, in central Saskatchewan.[15] In the 1890s, twelve Catholic families established Rastadt-Dorf, and another twenty-one settled Katherinetal. Additional settlements were begun in Davin, Kronau, and Speyer.[19]
Interwar period
During the interwar period, conditions in Russia worsened, especially after the Revolution and the Great Famine of 1921. Many ethnic Germans sought to leave the Soviet Union but faced opposition from a government that did not wish to see such a large portion of its population leave. The government imposed a fee for obtaining a passport, which led to protests as many would-be immigrants flooded the streets of Moscow.[15] Many Mennonites were eventually able to leave, and between the World Wars, over 20,000 of them left destined for Canada.[15]
From the 1910s to several years after the end of the Second World War, the ethnic background of the Germans made them prey to discrimination in Canada. By 1914, Germany had become Canada's enemy, and the Germans from Russia were not immune from suspicion, even though many families had not lived in Germany for hundreds of years. This period saw the suppression of many German cultural customs, including the suppression of their print media and the closure of German schools. The federal Wartime Elections Act, passed in September 1917, revoked the citizenship of any German naturalized after March 1902. Many settlements were renamed to disguise their obvious German origin.[20]
The 1920s also saw the movement of Germans from Russia within Western Canada as well. Many pushed further west and settled in British Columbia. The area had the appeal of a warmer climate, an escape from the frigid prairie. Other Germans were propelled by economic factors such as the Great Depression, which not only impoverished many but also coincided with a tremendous drought ushering in crop failures. The economy of the Prairies and much of the rest of Canada was dependent on the success of wheat farming. Wheat had been a staple crop for the Germans in Russia and adapted well to the climate of Western Canada. Repeated crop failures meant a large influx of German-Russians to larger cities and towns, which would contribute to the gradual decline of their culturally homogeneous communities. The prairie lands abutting the United States border experienced Dust Bowl conditions, which sent swarms of families to the coastal areas of British Columbia.[21] Throughout the period after World War II, new immigrants joined their families in British Columbia and congregated in the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island.[22]
Legacy
Throughout their history in Western Canada, the Germans from Russia have maintained many of their cultural characteristics, including their dialects, which have been proliferated through Saturday schools and Canadian policies that allowed for cultural freedom. Those schools operated on Saturday mornings for around three hours and became especially vital as German stopped being taught in Canadian public schools after World War I. The Mennonites, unlike most Volga Germans, maintained those schools even after World War II. The Volga Germans' dialects was also maintained by the churches, especially for Mennonite.[23]
Before the Germans from Russia left for North America, they had been regarded as privileged colonists in Russia. When they arrived in the United States and Canada, they found that they were treated the same as any other migrant group from Eastern Europe.[24] The Mennonites may be seen as an exception since they successfully used connections with their brethren in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and in Ontario.[18] Through their hard work on the North American plains, they established themselves as a productive portion of society in both Canada and America.
Language
The Germans from Russia originally spoke German dialects such as the Palatine dialect or Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch) at home. Since the villages in Russia often were populated by settlers from a particular region and isolated from Germany, they maintained their regional dialects. Depending on their specific dialect, some Germans from Russia had difficulties understanding Standard German, which can differ greatly from the dialects.
After emigrating from Russia to the Americas, the Germans kept speaking their dialects. As a result of anti-German sentiment that developed over the course of both world wars, English became the dominant language among many of them. However, descendants of Germans from Russia who choose to stay in touch with their heritage often learn Standard German, especially since modern Hochdeutsch, which stems from Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, had already been the standard written form of the language. Today, German is preserved mainly through singing groups, recipes, and educational settings.
↑ "Archived copy"(PDF). www.census.gov. Archived from the original(PDF) on September 20, 2004. Retrieved January 14, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
1 2 3 4 5 6 HEIER, EDMUND. "The Immigration of the Russo-German Catholics and Lutherans into Canada." Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes 4 (January 1, 1959): 160–175. doi:10.2307/40866073.
↑ Peters, Victor. "Rußlanddeutsche in Der Kanadischen Präire." Globus Spezial (n.d.): 191–192.
↑ Haslam, J. H. "The Canadianization of the Immigrant Settler." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 107 (May 1, 1923): 45–49. doi:10.2307/1014693.
1 2 Moelleken, Wolfgang W. “Diaphonic Correspondences in the Low German of Mennonites from the Fraser Valley, British Columbia.” Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 34, no. 3/4 (December 1, 1967): 240–253. doi:10.2307/40500396.
↑ Anderson, Alan B. "St. Joseph’s Colony, Katherinetal Colony, Kronau-Rastadt, and Odessa (1886–1904)." German Settlements in Saskatchewan: The Origin and Development of German Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Mennonite, and Huttere Communities (n.d.).
↑ Friesen, Gerald (1987). The Canadian Prairies: A History (Student ed.). Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press. pp. 383–417.
↑ Goerz, H. “German Russians in British Columbia, Canada,” n.d.
↑ Magocsi, Paul Robert. Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples. University of Toronto Press, 1999.
↑ Kloberdanz, Timothy J. “The Volga Germans in Old Russia and in Western North America: Their Changing World View.” Anthropological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (October 1, 1975): 209–222. doi:10.2307/3316632.
Gross, Fred William. "Type and Nature of German Publications In North Dakota," Heritage Review (1993) 23#4 pp 34–38.
Iseminger, Gordon L. "Are We Germans, or Russians, or Americans? The McIntosh County German-Russians During World War I", North Dakota History (1992) 59#2 pp: 2–16.
Koch, Fred C. The Volga Germans: In Russia and the Americas, from 1763 to the Present (1977).
Kloberdanz, Timothy J. “The Volga Germans in Old Russia and in Western North America: Their Changing World View.” Anthropological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (October 1, 1975): 209–222. doi:10.2307/3316632.
Mennonites are a group of Anabaptist Christian communities tracing their roots to the epoch of the Radical Reformation. The name Mennonites is derived from the cleric Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland, part of the Holy Roman Empire, present day Netherlands. Menno Simons became a prominent leader within the wider Anabaptist movement and was a contemporary of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Through his writings about the Reformation Simons articulated and formalized the teachings of earlier Swiss Anabaptist founders as well as early teachings of the Mennonites founded on the belief in both the mission and ministry of Jesus. Formal Mennonite beliefs were codified in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632), which affirmed "the baptism of believers only, the washing of the feet as a symbol of servanthood, church discipline, the shunning of the excommunicated, the non-swearing of oaths, marriage within the same church", nonresistance, and in general, more emphasis on "true Christianity" involving "being Christian and obeying Christ" as they interpret it from the Holy Bible.
The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flatland in North America. The region is located just to the east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. They are the western part of the Interior Plains, which include the mixed grass prairie, the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. "Great Plains", or Western Plains, is also the ecoregion of the Great Plains or alternatively the western portion of the Great Plains.
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas, where they founded many towns. In 1914, an estimate put the remaining number of ethnic Germans living in the Russian Empire at 2,416,290. During World War II, ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union were persecuted and many were forcibly resettled to other regions such as Central Asia. In 1989, the Soviet Union declared to have an ethnic German population of roughly 2 million. By 2002, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many ethnic Germans had emigrated and the population fell by half to roughly 1 million. 597,212 Germans self-identified as such in the 2002 Russian census, making Germans the fifth-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation. There were 353,441 Germans in Kazakhstan and 21,472 in Kyrgyzstan (1999); while 33,300 Germans lived in Ukraine.
The German diaspora consists of German people and their descendants who live outside of Germany. The term is used in particular to refer to the aspects of migration of German speakers from Central Europe to different countries around the world. This definition describes the "German" term as a sociolinguistic group as opposed to the national one since the emigrant groups came from different regions with diverse cultural practices and different varieties of German. For instance, the Alsatians and Hessians were often simply called "Germans" once they set foot in their new homelands.
The Midwestern United States is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau. It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It was officially named the North Central Region by the U.S. Census Bureau until 1984. It is between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south.
Over 50 million Americans claim German ancestry, which makes them the largest single claimed ancestry group in the United States. Around 1.06 million people in the United States speak the German language at home. It is the second most spoken language in North Dakota and is the third most spoken language in 16 other states.
The Volga Germans are ethnic Germans who settled and historically lived along the Volga River in the region of southeastern European Russia around Saratov and close to Ukraine nearer to the south.
German Americans are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry.
North Dakota was first settled by Native Americans several thousand years ago. The first Europeans explored the area in the 18th century establishing some limited trade with the natives.
The Russian Mennonites are a group of Mennonites who are the descendants of Dutch and North German Anabaptists who settled in the Vistula delta in West Prussia for about 250 years and established colonies in the Russian Empire beginning in 1789. Since the late 19th century, many of them have emigrated to countries which are located throughout the Western Hemisphere. The rest of them were forcibly relocated, so very few of their descendants currently live in the locations of the original colonies. Russian Mennonites are traditionally multilingual but Plautdietsch is their first language as well as their lingua franca. In 2014, there were several hundred thousand Russian Mennonites: about 200,000 live in Germany, 74,122 live in Mexico, 150,000 in Bolivia, 40,000 live in Paraguay, 10,000 live in Belize, tens of thousands of them live in Canada and the US, and a few thousand live in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
German Canadians are Canadian citizens of German ancestry or Germans who emigrated to and reside in Canada. According to the 2016 census, there are 3,322,405 Canadians with full or partial German ancestry. Some immigrants came from what is today Germany, while larger numbers came from German settlements in Eastern Europe and Imperial Russia; others came from parts of the German Confederation, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland.
Ukrainian Canadians are Canadian citizens of Ukrainian descent or Ukrainian-born people who immigrated to Canada.
This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the German language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken. In addition to the Germanosphere in Europe, German-speaking minorities are present in many other countries and on all six inhabited continents.
The German minority in Paraguay came into existence with immigration during the industrial age. The "Nueva Germania" colony was founded in Paraguay in 1888; though regarded as a failure, it still exists despite being abandoned by many of its founders in the 1890s. Paraguay was a popular place for German leaders accused of war crimes to retreat after the second World War. There are large communities of German descendants living in the department of Guairá, in a town called, the department of Itapúa, mainly in the Departmental Capital, Encarnación and the German towns of Obligado, Bella Vista and Hohenau. Some recent Brazilian immigrants to Paraguay also have German ancestry (Brasiguayos). Notable Paraguayans of German descent include the former president of Paraguay Alfredo Stroessner.
The sod house or soddy was an often used alternative to the log cabin during frontier settlement of the Great Plains of Canada and the United States in the 1800s and early 1900s. Primarily used at first for animal shelters, corrals, and fences, if the prairie lacked standard building materials such as wood or stone, sod from thickly-rooted prairie grass was abundant, free, and could be used for house construction. Prairie grass has a much thicker, tougher root structure than a modern lawn.
The Black Sea Germans are ethnic Germans who left their homelands, and settled in territories off the north coast of the Black Sea, mostly in the territories of the southern Russian Empire.
A block settlement is a particular type of land distribution which allows settlers with the same ethnicity to form small colonies. This settlement type was used throughout western Canada between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some were planned and others were spontaneously created by the settlers themselves. As a legacy of the block settlements, the three Prairie Provinces have several regions where ancestries other than British are the largest, unlike the norm in surrounding regions.
Molotschna Colony or Molochna Colony was a Russian Mennonite settlement in what is now Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine. Today, the central village, known as Molochansk, has a population less than 10,000. The settlement is named after the Molochna River which forms its western boundary. The land falls mostly within the Tokmatskyi and Chernihivskyi Raions. The nearest large city is Melitopol, southwest of Molochansk.
Vistula Germans are ethnic Germans who had settled in what became known after the 1863 Polish rebellion as the Vistula Territory. This territory, so designated by the ruling Russians of the time, encompassed most of the Vistula river basin of central Poland up to just east of Toruń.
Werdersch is a subdialect of Low Prussian, which itself is a subdialect of Low German. This dialect is spoken in Poland and was spoken in the former province of West Prussia. Werdersch is closely related to Nehrungisch and Plautdietsch.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
