On-line forum for Germans from Russia Researchers

hi folks.......

I am interested to know if there are lists of people who stayed in the Bessarabian villages and towns in 1940 - instead of being repatriated back to Germany. I guess there would be some folks who remained for various reasons and some who could not be repatriated ie: because they were not German. Thanks, Ray Broneske.

Hi Ray,
I don't know if there are lists of those who stayed behind, but it wasn't very many. According to Ute Schmidt's book on Bessarabia, only about 2,000 stayed behind (about 2% of the German population).

At the time of the resettlement, Bessarabia was part of Romania. But every village had friends and family in villages on the other side of the Dniester River in the Soviet Union. They'd heard the stories of how collectivization had devastated farming, of how the kulaks (well off farmers like the Germans) had been persecuted, how they'd been starved and deported and executed. The Bessarabian Germans knew what life under the Soviet Union was likely to be like - and had no desire to experience it.

As preparations were made the resettle the Germans, the Soviet authorities moved in. Although Schmidt's book says the Germans in Bessarabia weren't persecuted during that time, their "affluent Russian, Jewish, or Bulgarian neighbors were hauled off to interrogations - mostly at night - and often never heard of again." (Schmidt, pg 306) So any that were wavering about leaving soon saw how they would be treated under the USSR.

Of course some did stay. In traveling there, I've met a couple of people (or their families) that did. One was married to a local woman and stayed. Another family apparently gathered up all their belongings to go, but in the end, the woman I met said her father just couldn't bear to leave and they settled in Beresina.

I have a 2c1r cousin I found via DNA, from a family of Stefan's descendant also from the Hoffart family in the Roman Catholic colonies of Odessa Ukraine/Russia (Mannheim perhaps?). She lives in Israel now with her daughter.

She was full Black-Sea German (both Stefan and Hoffart lines full ethnic Cathoiic German) and they didn't emigrate during the wave migration of the early 1900's. When WWII broke out, they were not repatriated to Germany, but rather her family, and her Neighbor's families were forcibly relocated to far eastern Russia/USSR to an area around the city of Khabarovsk. She remained there until her daughter (my 3c, half BS-Ger, half Russian) married a Jewish man, and when the iron curtain came down, they took the opportunity to emigrate to Israel.