In this densely packed, fact-filled volume, Jonathan Otto Pohl, an established chronicler of repression and ethic cleansing in the Soviet Union, sets out to describe “the experience of the ethnic Germans in the USSR from 1941 to 1955” (8). In the introduction, Pohl succinctly summarizes the book's key contents: “The main focus is on the uprooting of the German communities in European areas of the USSR, their material and legal conditions as special settlers east of the Urals, their mobilization into the labor army, and their release from the special settlement restrictions in 1955” (8–9). Although Pohl deals primarily with the violently transformative decade-and-a-half from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, he also covers the earlier history of large-scale ethnic German settlements in the Russian empire from the eighteenth century onwards as well as the coda of the post-Stalin years, including the mass emigration of ethnic Germans that ensued from the late 1980s, overwhelmingly to the Federal Republic.
The study is based primarily on two types of primary sources: extensive archival materials from the Russian state archives, many of them produced by the NKVD, and a small number of interviews that Pohl managed to conduct with elderly ethnic Germans in Kyrgyzstan in the early 2010s. Pohl admits that this source base poses problems. The archival record is far from complete, and documents that originated from within the Stalinist state machinery need to be critiqued and contextualized with particular care. Similarly, a handful of interviews with old and frail survivors of Stalinist repression, conducted several decades after the actual events, yielded results that were “far less impressive than I had initially hoped,” to quote the author's admirably frank admission (13).
Nevertheless, Pohl has managed to put together a detailed and highly informative account of the deportations of ethnic Germans within the Soviet Union. His approach is roughly chronological and primarily descriptive. Individual chapters cover different stages of the deportation process and their human and societal consequences, as well as the longer-term aftermath of the forced migrations in the post-WWII years. Much of the analysis draws on statistical data contained in contemporary Soviet documentation, which at times results in rather long and breathless paragraphs full of seemingly precise facts and figures. However, Pohl also casts light on the many challenges and problems that the USSR's ethnic cleansing measures faced, the numerical data notwithstanding. At the same time, he also offers a vivid portrayal of the chaos and human suffering that the deportations caused at the grassroots level. The overall result is a solidly researched and very useful account of an under-studied chapter in the tragic history of eastern Europe's twentieth century forced migrations—a treasure trove of information about the main events and their consequences.
However, whereas the extensive factual information contained in the study is highly useful, the wider interpretative framework within which Pohl places his study in the brief concluding chapter seems baffling at best. To quote him at some length: “. . . the US and UK are still immersed in their own Years of Great Silence regarding much of World War II. In particular, addressing any Allied, including Soviet, crimes during the war and immediately afterwards against ethnic Germans remains strongly discouraged and overshadowed by a mythic construction of the war in which all Germans are demonically evil and their political and military enemies morally infallible. Given this predominant popular myth even research into the fate of the much larger and in many ways easier to research groups of Germans expelled from eastern Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia has remained extremely limited in the English-speaking world. The fate of the smaller groups of Germans that remained trapped behind the Iron Curtain thus has received very scant attention in the English language literature” (273–74). These sweeping and simplistic claims fail to do justice to the sophisticated and diverse English-language historiography of the Second World War and the forced migrations associated with it that has emerged over the past decades. They lend a somewhat sour and polemical note to what is in many ways a valuable study. The reader is best advised to focus on the empirical core content of Pohl's monograph and to disregard his concluding polemics.
