Open Wound: The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia and the Soviet Union: 1915-1949 and Beyond. 

by Samuel Sinner

Between 1915 and 1949, Russian and later Soviet troops exterminated literally the entire ethnic German population living in Russia, many for centuries. This genocide encompassed 34 years under three different rulers; Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, and Stalin.

During World War I, Tsar Nicholas II deported close to 200,000 ethnic Germans from Volhynia, Bessarabia, and other western regions of the Russian Empire to Siberia. Between one third and one half of those deported perished.

During the Russian Civil War (1917-1921) Bolshevik forces massacred over 60,000 ethnic Germans in the Volga, Ukraine, Crimea, and Caucasus. Another 300,000 ethnic Germans, 150,000 of them in the Volga region died by being starved to death.

Under Stalin, another 300,000 were starved to death between 1932 and 1937. Finally, Stalin’s forced dispersal of virtually the entire German population of the USSR to special settlements and labor army work sites during the 1940s brought the total death toll of ethnic Germans due to the policies of the Russian and Soviet governments to around one million. This final phase also permanently destroyed the centuries old German communities of the Volga, Ukraine, Crimea, and Caucasus.

As the political left in the West spent decades proclaiming the glories of Soviet Communism, it is important to show that this is all propaganda and lies. Arguments from some academics that the Soviet government never targeted specific groups for mass murder on the basis of their ethnicity is shown to be a lie. The Soviet Union was the world leader in committing genocide against its own people.