The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Ivanevich Werner in a photo likely taken at the time he became an officer. He is wearing the Budenovka, a distinctive winter hat named after a famous Russian General and still part of the Red Army uniform during the Winter War, but largely phased out by 1941. Ivan sent the photo to his family in Siberia where his sister preserved it. The photo shows evidence of frequent reproduction and this version is from a reproduction that was airbrushed in colour.

  It was always unclear when and in what context Ivan’s promotion to the officer ranks came. Now a combat-hardened “veteran” at age twenty-three or twenty-four, Ivan was promoted to the rank of junior lieutenant that brought with it pay—170 rubles a month. My father had no specific memories, at least not ones he ever told, of why or how this happened. His revelation that he had become an officer was almost accidental and came as part of later stories of his Soviet Red Army experiences. It is clear, however, that the promotion to a junior officer occurred as part of a general reorganization and refitting of the Red Army prompted by the disastrous war against Finland. The army was reorganized, with tank divisions grouped into mechanized corps.

  The tank Ivan drove during the Winter War was likely a B7 or T-26, both early designs of fairly light tanks destroyed in large numbers during the war. Sometime in June 1940, while still stationed at Minsk, his unit received the first of the T-34 tanks that would become famous during the Soviet–German battles of 1943 and 1944. Ivan’s new role was to train recruits in the operation of the T-34. A T-34 tank had a crew of four: a driver who sat in the lower left side of the tank, where he had a small slit to see where he was going; a machine gunner who sat in the right hand side of the tank; a commander in the turret who was also the main gunner; and a crew member in the turret whose task was to load the gun. One of the deficiencies of the Soviet tank forces was the lack of communication between tanks and between crew members within tanks, where only the commander and driver could communicate using an internal radio. The driver’s task was to manoeuvre the tank as per directions from the commander, who tried to coordinate the position of the tank and its rotating turret so that it could fire at intended targets. It was like driving a car without a rear-view mirror, no side windows, and the smallest windshield imaginable.

  Ivan was assigned a group of eight trainees who spent part of their time in the classroom and part of their time in the field learning how to drive the T-34 tank. Ivan was their instructor for the hands-on training in the field. The training continued when the unit was moved to Grodno, a Polish city just inside the Soviet Union on the Soviet–German border as it had been established after the German occupation of Poland. Reorganization of the tank troops meant that Ivan’s unit was now the 29th Tank Division of the 11th Mechanized Corps of the 3rd Army. Although my father had no memory of unit designations, his clear memory that they were stationed right in the city of Grodno suggests that he was assigned to the 29th Tank Division, since it was the only tank unit stationed in Grodno in the summer of 1941.14

  Grodno was only a few kilometres away from the Soviet–German frontier, and up to 22 June 1941 the provisions of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact meant that the two countries were on friendly terms. There were signs, however, that all was not well. Ivan had become friends with a senior officer with whom he had served in the Winter War and who had discovered that he spoke German. The senior officer had been a German prisoner of war in the First World War and had learned to speak some German. The two of them often went for a walk in the woods near Grodno, where the senior officer took the opportunity to practise his German. On one of these walks, he told Ivan that ethnic Germans were being released from active military service and ostensibly were being sent home. He indicated to Ivan that they were not in fact going home but being put into work battalions as virtual slave labour building defence works. The senior officer indicated to Ivan that he had intervened and that Ivan would not be released to suffer the same fate.

  Formal recognition of his knowledge of German meant that Ivan now served in a semi-official capacity as a translator for his unit. Occasionally, and according to my father’s recollection right up to the days before the attack, German officers paid visits to their Russian counterparts, and my father recalled two occasions when he was invited to translate. On one of these visits, officers from the two sides watched a Soviet film about the famous Soviet aviator, Valery Chkalov. Chkalov was a hero of the Soviet Union in part because of his long-distance flight over the North Pole to the United States.15 My father’s memories of this movie seemed to be out of proportion to its importance in his overall story. It might have been his lifelong interest in flying that heightened his retention of the details of the movie. My father recalled the details of the life of the young and mischievous Chkalov and the constant trouble he was in. He remembered how the film portrayed the dashing Chkalov flying between the water and a bridge when he caught sight of his girlfriend on it. While the film was being shown, a German officer leaned over to Ivan and assured him that the Germans also had good pilots. They took the German officers home at about eleven o’clock, and in his recollection the war with Germany began early the next morning.16

  Seldom are we more curious about individual memories than when a person has participated in dramatic and often “historical” events such as wars. Undoubtedly, for most people who made my father’s acquaintance, they would remember most consistently his war stories. In fact, for years they were almost the only stories he told and the only material he had available to hold a conversation of any length. There was little deviation in the narrative structure or details of the stories. As the oldest son, I heard his stories from the time I was old enough to comprehend them until he died when I was fifty, a period of forty or more years. I also interviewed him formally, and throughout all his accounts of war experiences his stories seldom strayed from their scripts. Oral historian Alice Hoffman and others suggest that our memories of the past are scripted: that is, events “are assessed at the time they occur, or shortly thereafter, as salient and hence important to remember.” These events are then “rehearsed or otherwise consolidated” to become part of lasting long-term memory and are usually told in the same way time and again.17

  Map 3. Places where Ivan was stationed as a Red Army soldier.

  Listening to the stories of his first combat experiences in the Finnish war, it was always unclear to me why my father had no specific memories of what must have been tension-filled and emotional weeks for a twenty-two-year-old man experiencing combat for the first time. Hoffman’s analysis of her husband’s memories suggests there is a “primacy” effect in the preservation of war memories. The first occurrence of a life-threatening event, in this case the shelling while still on the train, is often the only one retained in memory even though subsequent events might have been equally dramatic and dangerous.18 It might be, however, that my father never had an audience to whom it was possible to tell stories of his direct participation in the killing of others. He was not likely to tell such stories in my presence when I was a boy. In most of his war stories, something was done to him rather than vice versa. In the context of the pacifist Mennonite social milieu in which he told his stories, accounts of his direct participation in killing might well have been untenable.

  It is also apparent from my father’s stories that his draft into the Red Army began a steady mental and emotional separation from his life in Siberia. A number of turning points marked this separation. The decision to join his friend in Georgia when my father went on leave, the stories that suggest renewed interest in meeting women, and hence the emotional detachment from his wife Anna all point to a new orientation. His rejection for training as a fighter pilot seems to have been the first serious challenge to his sense of being able to thrive under the Stalinist system of the Soviet Union. In hindsight, he marked that event as having paved the way for his reaction to capture by the Germans.

  6

  Johann: Becoming a German

  At three in the morning on 22 June
1941, all hell broke loose. Ivan awoke to a tremendous crash. The air was choked with dust. The barracks where he slept had suffered a direct hit by bombs. Those soldiers who could ran outside, where they were greeted by a terrible scene in the early morning light. The military compound, which also had a tent city of troops, was a mass of confusion and death. As the sky brightened, the air filled with German Stuka dive-bombers. Wave after wave of Stukas tipped their noses into a dive. The siren mounted on the airplane’s belly began to scream as the plane picked up speed and grew in intensity until it released its deadly cargo and broke off its dive. Ivan ran to the garage to his tank, which was always fuelled up at the end of each day’s training, and began manoeuvring through the confused troops to the previously determined assembly point outside the city. He needed to cross the Neman River, but the bridge had already been bombed. He was finally able to cross at an emergency bridge, which brought him to the assembly point in a young forest. Here confusion also reigned. One high-ranking officer rode by on his horse dressed only in his underwear and barking out meaningless orders. Ivan simply advised the officer that there was no way of recognizing him without a uniform. He only seemed to realize then that he had no clothes on. The German artillery could be heard firing in the distance, with each volley coming closer to the forest, now teeming with confused soldiers, tanks, guns, and trucks. The air was full of Stukas. Hiding was almost impossible. Inexperienced soldiers ran out into the open screaming like wild animals, and the airplanes came and mowed them down with their wing-mounted machine guns. Rather than finding even a small bush or hollow to hide behind, they just ran right out into the open. Ivan hid his tank as best he could and crept under its sloping protective armour each time a wave of Stukas descended on their position.

  Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler had named the attack on the Soviet Union, had initially been planned to begin in May but had been delayed because the German army had to assist the Italians in the campaign in Crete. In the weeks before 22 June, there had been a steady build-up of German forces on the border with the Soviet Union. Slowly, over three million soldiers, more than 7,000 guns, and 3,350 tanks inched their way into position during the nights before the massive attack was launched.1

  It took hours that Sunday before any semblance of organization returned to the Red Army or orders arrived to deal with the German attack. It would take until 9:15 p.m. before General Timoshenko’s order for the Soviet armies to attack the invaders arrived at the front. Local commanders were left to their own initiatives, and by 10:00 a.m. the commander of the 11th Mechanized Corps had committed the 29th Tank Division to a counterattack.2 The confusion, however, had disrupted everything, and Ivan took his tank into battle with a crew of recruits who had been trained on anti-tank weapons but had never fired a tank gun. He also became the tank’s commander since there was no one to assume that role. That meant the tank essentially had no main gunner, not as big a problem as it might have been because they were also terribly short of ammunition since the Germans seemed to know where all the ammunition dumps were and systematically blew them up. As a result, Ivan’s tank was issued only five shells for the counterattack. The division, which had assembled southeast of Grodno, was to counterattack in a northwesterly direction together with the other tank division of the corps and its infantry division. Both of these units, however, were some distance away and in an even worse state of organization.

  The 29th Tank Division counterattacked alone, and, though it was later described as one of the more successful Soviet attempts to stem the German tide, it managed only to push the attacker back seven or eight kilometres.3 The division and the rest of the 11th Mechanized Corps did not last long. An operational report on the evening of 22 June suggested the unit was still fighting at 3:45 p.m., had withdrawn by 5:00 p.m., and by the next morning had seemingly disappeared. The headquarters of the 3rd Army had no information on their whereabouts. In my father’s accounts, the counterattack was almost useless. With little ammunition and an inexperienced crew, his tank was soon ineffective, and Ivan retreated to try to get fuel and ammunition. He recalled stops in Lida and Baranavichy, two towns east of Grodno, to try to get ammunition.4

  There were tragedies all around, and Ivan was in the middle of them. In a story not part of my father’s usual repertoire, a Ukrainian soldier in Ivan’s unit named Kulakov, who in his story spoke Mennonite Low German, was struck in the neck by a bullet as the two of them were crossing a road. Ivan assured Kulakov he would be all right as he held him and tried to stop the bleeding. Kulakov died in his arms. In another story, an officer asked Ivan to transport his family to the rear. Although families were to be evacuated on transport trucks, all available vehicles were clogged with people. Since they had less than the normal four-man complement, there was some room, but having the woman and her two young children in the tank complicated everything. The added burden of trying to assure their safety in a war zone added tremendously to the already stressful situation.

  On the morning of 23 June, the crew attempted to drive their tank to Minsk, but by noon they were forced into hiding because of the unending attacks from airplanes. They stopped in a wood, and the woman and her two children decided to walk to a nearby village to get food and supplies. Ivan and his tank crew hid the tank as best they could and waited for nightfall to continue their retreat. By evening, the woman and her children had not returned, and together with an officer from another tank crew they set off to the village to find her. Before reaching the village, they came upon the family. The mother had been shot, likely by strafing airplanes—she was dead. Her two children were at her side crying and begging for their mother. There was nothing left to do but bury the woman and attempt to find someone to care for the children. The other officer went into the village and managed to find a family to take the two children.

  There was little time to appreciate or think about the horror of the scene. Night was falling, and there was evidence all around them that the attacking Germans were steadily advancing and that they were in danger of being surrounded. The only way out was toward Minsk. Ivan and his crew managed to find some fuel and set off to drive east through the night. By this time, travelling on the roads was almost impossible. There were burned-out and abandoned vehicles everywhere. One could not drive on the road for even a hundred metres. Ivan had to drive the tank in the ditch because the road was filled with dead horses, abandoned cannons, vehicles, and people trying to escape from the front. They tried to travel during the day but made only about twenty kilometres before a bomb from a Stuka fell near them, spraying their tank with dirt and gravel. Some stones lodged in the tracks, and they “played dead” until nightfall before prying the stones out so they could continue. They were only able to travel by night, and finding fuel and food became an overriding problem. When they caught a whiff of what smelled like roasting bread, they and everyone else in the vicinity descended on what was left of a burning bread truck. In the fray, Ivan managed to get only one bag of bread, and it was so hard it could not be bitten into. The crew reasoned that, if they saw frogs in the puddles in the ditches beside the road, the water could not be too unhealthy. They brushed aside the slime and dipped the bread into the water so they could eat it. During the night, likely the night of 25 June, they ran out of fuel and were forced to sit in the open in plain sight of German airplanes. In the early dawn hours of 26 June, they peered out of their tank anxiously, watching the sky for airplanes. Suddenly they saw soldiers in the forest a short distance away. In my father’s recollection, there were about twenty of them in black uniforms with a skull and crossbones on their foreheads. Although this suggests they were members of the Totenkopf Division, the feared Death’s Head division of the Waffen SS, there were no Totenkopf Division units in the area in 1941. The black uniforms likely belonged to regular Panzer troops mopping up what had become a huge encirclement of three Soviet armies.

  Map 4. German attack on the Soviet Union, June 1941.

  At first, Ivan’s crew thought the figure
s emerging from the forest were fellow Soviet soldiers, and they were going to get out of the tank to try to get help to continue. Ivan cautioned his inexperienced crew that the Soviet Red Army had no armed units that he knew of with black uniforms. As they approached, Ivan heard the unmistakable sound of German, the language of his childhood and that of his personal thoughts. When he thought he heard discussions among the soldiers about blowing up his tank, he made a quick decision to surrender, a decision suggested to him by his mother before he left Siberia. Stalin’s soldiers were not to surrender. According to my father, they all knew surrender meant instant execution if the long tentacles of Stalin’s iron grip ever caught them.5

  Ivan jumped out through his hatch and rolled into the ditch nearby, landing right near a German soldier, who was too surprised to fire his weapon. He calmed down when Ivan began to speak to him in German. The soldier could not come to terms with what confronted him. “Are you a German spy in a Russian tank?” he asked. Ivan explained that he was a German from Russia. The German called to the others, explaining that they had captured a German. The group decided that he should call for the others to get out of the tank, which he did. They were taken away as prisoners of war, while Ivan was taken to the unit’s command post. It was only about two kilometres from where they had run out of fuel during the night. His first interview with the officer in charge was brief. The officer assured him he would not be treated like a prisoner because they were not fighting against other Germans. The exhaustion and tension of the last few days caught up to Ivan, and he went to sleep.

  After he slept, Ivan was interviewed about his background, and when he mentioned the names of his neighbours in Siberia the officer noted that they were all Mennonite names and offered that his name was Derksen. Although Derksen was also a common Mennonite name, and he seemed to know about Mennonites, the officer did not admit to being Mennonite himself. The next few days were spent in a variety of tasks. Ivan had to show the Germans the features of his T-34 tank and was called upon to interview a group of captured Soviet soldiers who claimed to be Germans. According to my father, the German military investigated his genealogy and a week or so after being captured came back with the suggestion that his grandparents had been married in East Prussia. Ivan was then transferred to the job of translating for the German Army. It captured some 350,000 Red Army soldiers in what is known as the Minsk pocket, and the logistical problems of dealing with them were overwhelming. So that he would not be confused with Red Army soldiers, Ivan was given a German uniform, though it was missing the eagle insignia, and he spent his days accompanying German soldiers who went into the large POW enclosures near Minsk to translate for them.6