Ethnic Germans from Kyrgyzstan sent from the Red Army to the Labor Army

In the fall of 1941 the Stalin regime removed almost all ethnic Germans from the Red Army and sent them to the labor army. The vast majority of these loyal Soviet citizens came from the Volga since the Soviet government had stopped conscripting ethnic Germans from other regions in 1939 (German and Shul'ga, fn. 4 p. 31). Despite this fact there were still ethnic Germans from other regions of the USSR in the Red Army in 1941. Among these men were a number of ethnic Germans from Kyrgyzstan.This post will deal with five of them.  Egor Yakovlevich Mohr was serving in a cavalry unit at the start of the war. He was demobilized from the Red Army in September 1941 and then mobilized into the labor army in Sverdlovsk Oblast. Aleksandr Ivanovich Hizbrecht served in the Red Army in Ust'-Kamenogorod in Kazakhstan in 1941 and 1942 as a senior sargent. In 1942 he was demobilized from the Soviet military and then mobilized into the labor army and sent to work in Bakallag in Chelyabinsk Oblast. Walther Fernandovich Hertel had been mobilized into the Red Army from the old German settlements in Leninpol' Raion, Talas Oblast. He was then sent to the labor army in Chelyabinsk. He was arrested while in the labor army and sentenced to seven years imprisonment on 2 September  1943 under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Vasilii Andreevich Alles served in the Red Army from 1938 to 1941. In May 1941 he was removed and sent to Sverdlovsk Oblast as a special settler. In 1942 he worked as a miner in a quarry. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Frick was serving in the Red Army in Novosibirsk Oblast in 1941 when he was demobilized from active military service and conscripted into the labor army. In 1942 the NKVD transferred him to Omsk Oblast (Shtraus and Pankrats, pp. 160-161). The systematic removal of loyal ethnic Germans from the ranks of the Red Army and their mobilization for forced labor in Bakallag and other camps applied to those both in the front and the rear. The Germans in Kyrgyzstan like their brethren in the Volga were not immune from this racially motivated repression.

Sources:

A. German and I. Shul'ga, "'Ne byvat' fashistskoi svin'e v nashem sovetskom ogorode.' Sovetskie nemtsy na fronte i v tylu vraga,"  Rodina, no. 5, 2010, pp. 28-31.

A. Shtraus and S. Pankrats, Svidetel'stva prestuplenii (Bishkek: Ilim, 1997).