The Deportation of Germans from Estonia in 1945: Who was Banished from Where and on What Basis
The deportation of the Germans in 1945 was the only ethnic repression organised in Estonia by the Soviet regime. The following questions are examined in this article: how the deportation lists were drawn up, how the nationality of those who were to be deported was ascertained, the gender and age distribution of the deportees, what their origin and family background was, what their occupations were, which Estonian regions they were from, and what their connections were to Estonia and Germanness. This paper largely corrects and specifies our hitherto existing knowledge regarding deported Germans.
The operation to deport Germans was carried out on 15 August 1945. In the course of this operation, 407 people were deported to Russia, of whom 261 were registered as Germans. In most cases, notations regarding nationality in identification documents or in some other documents affirmed the nationality of the deportees. Where documentary affirmation was missing, oral affirmation could also suffice. The brunt of the operation was directed against Tallinn, from where 105 people were deported as Germans. Most of the people banished from elsewhere in Estonia were rural folk.
A little over two thirds of the people deported as Germans were women. The typical deportee was a woman over 50 years old. That explains why the employment rate among the deportees was relatively low – about two fifths of the deportees did not work. There were slightly more skilled workers than unskilled workers among the remainder but there were almost no management level employees.
A migratory background characterised the deportees. Most of them were born outside of Estonia but quite a few of those who had been born in Estonia had returned to their Estonian homeland at the end of the era of tsarist rule or at the start of Estonian independence. Germans from Volhynia who had come to Estonia before the First World War were the most numerous among the Germans who were not of local origin. Together with their descendants, the Volhynia Germans were the largest category of deportees. On the other hand, only two of the deportees had come from Russia during or at the end of the Second World War. The deportees were largely in mixed marriages with Estonians. Quite a few of them were of Estonian origin by way of their father, mother, or both grandmothers but identified themselves as Germans. Real German families, so to speak, whose children had been born in Estonia and were already assimilating with Estonians due to their Estonian-language environment, were nonetheless deported from rural regions. Even so, the vast majority of people deported as Germans were also to a greater or lesser extent connected to the local German community, such as belonging to German-language congregations or the German cultural self-administration that operated in the era of the independent Republic of Estonia. Nevertheless, they were almost completely unaffected by the Umsiedlung – none of them left in the first wave in 1939–1940. Only three people who were deported as adults had resettled in Germany in the second wave in 1941. On the other hand, some Germans who lived in rural regions of Estonia went along with the campaign for Estonianising names in the 1930s that swept up many Estonians. These Germans changed their names to Estonian names, which nonetheless did not save them in 1945 from the deportation that was carried out based on nationality.