A collection of ealier posts on the deportation of the Volga Germans

Tomorrow is the official day of commemoration for the Stalin regime's deportation of the Russian-Germans in 1941. On this day the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued Ukaz no. 21-160 ordering the deportation of the Volga Germans to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The NKVD ruthlessly rounded up the Volga Germans in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing.  This sudden and violent expulsion took the Volga Germans almost completely by surprise. The Stalin regime quickly followed up this deportation with the systematic removal of Russian-Germans from other areas of the USSR west of the Urals. The exact number of people to suffer this fate is difficult to pinpoint due to inconsistencies in NKVD records.  The precise number of Russian-Germans to perish from Soviet repression during World War II is even more elusive, but the scale was certainly massive. What ever the exact number to perish, the suffering of individual Russian-Germans from the Volga and elsewhere is indisputable.