Using German War Records (Part II)

In Part I of this series, we explained how to search the German war records called EWZ for Mennonites.  Hopefully you have gotten one or more files that interested you.  Now we'll dive into the files.

The files generally contain three types of documents.  The first one gives the personal details of the applicant.  Below we are looking at the file of Katharina (Fast) Warkentin, who was the actual applicant for citizenship in the Jakob Fast file that I mentioned in part I.

Personalblatt (Personal Page) for Katharina (Fast) Warkentin, 27 October 1944, National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, Record Group 242, Records of Einwandererzentralstelle, File #762268, Microfilm Publication A3342, Series EWZ-50, Film I088, Frame 0558 from Mennonite Historical Society of British Columbia, Abbotsford, British Columbia.

With just rudimentary German, you can see that it gives a birth date (Gerburts) of 2 February 1901, and a birthplace (Ort) of Hamberg village and a marriage date (verh.) of 10 September 1922.  Searching in Grandma using her maiden name and birth year reveals that she is #1014733.

Immediately following on the page is the information about her parents:

This gives her parents' names, birth places, birth dates, death dates, and religion (Mennonite).  If we compare to GM, we see that her father Jakob Fast's birth date there is 7 Nov 1867, which makes more sense than 1887, since he would have been only 14 years old when she was born in 1901 if he were born in 1887.

But it gets better.  The next information is her grandparents' names.

Her paternal grandfather was Klaus Fast, and this information is not in GM, so we should submit it as a correction.  The main record database from this time period for Molotschna colony is the school records, so let's search those for a father Klaas Fast and a son Jacob Fast, using the index compiled by Tim Janzen.

In the 1873-1874 school records, we find a Klaas Fast in Ladekopp, and he has two daughters Helena (b. ABT 1863) and Eva (b. ABT 1865).  This is probably the same family, but our Jacob is likely just a year too young to be attending school.  Unfortunately, the family is not listed in any of the other school records, and I can't find Helena or Eva in GM.

Klaas Fast household, school attendance record, Ladekopp, Molotschna, South Russia, 1873-1874, Odessa Region State Archive, Odessa, Ukraine, Peter J. Braun Collection, Fund 89, Inventory 1, File 2184, index compiled by Tim Janzen.  Accessed at http://mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/school/1873-74b.htm on 22 January 2017.

We can't yet say for sure whether the Klaas Fast who is the father of Jacob in the EWZ records is the same one as the Klaas Fast who is the father of Helena and Eva in the school records.  What if there were two Klaas Fasts about the same age both living in Ladekopp at the same time?  I've seen more than one such situation.  Fortunately, there is a list where we can check.  In the fall of 1863, many of the Molotschna villages had a bad harvest, so the villages loaned seed grain to their residents.  The landowners in the village had to sign to authorize the loan and the recipients (landowners and non-landowners alike) signed to receive the grain.  Presumably the lists include all the heads of households in the participating villages, and Ladekopp was one of those villages.

Extract of grain loan records, Ladekopp, Molotschna, South Russia, 22 October 1863, Odessa Region State Archive, Odessa, Ukraine, Fund 6, Inventory 4, File 21178, Pages 55-56, accessed at http://archive.mennonitehistory.org/projects/residents/grain_loans.html on 24 January 2017.

There were only three Fast heads of households in Ladekopp in 1863, which is ten years before the school records above.  And only one of them is named Klaas Fast, so we can be fairly confident that there was only one Klaas Fast in the village and that he was the father of all three children, Helena, Eva, and Jacob.  We should also note the column that indicates "both" - meaning that he both signed the grain loan documents as a landowner and as a recipient.  Since he was a landowner, his tenure in the village would be much more stable, and he would not be as likely to move as non-landowners.

I'm going to submit this information to GM as a correction.

The next question is who were Klaas Fast's parents.  I have a good candidate, but I haven't found sufficiently strong evidence yet, so that will (hopefully) be the subject of a future post.

I hope these two posts have given you a sense of the value of the EWZ records, how they can be used to research Soviet-era Mennonites, and how they can be combined with earlier records to research imperial-era Mennonites as well.

Using German War Records (Part I)

During World War II, the German occupied large parts of Europe, including the area of the Soviet Union where many Mennonite lived.  They attempted to document the ethnicity of all Germans in occupied territory in order to grant them German citizenship.  To accomplish this task, they collected family trees and life stories of all the ethnic Germans in German-controlled areas.  The United States Army seized these records in 1945 at the end of the war and transferred them to the National Archives.  Eventually the records were microfilmed and returned to Germany.  Since then individuals have purchased many microfilms and donated them to various genealogy research centers, where they have been indexed.  The indexes are online and can be searched, so this is an incredibly valuable record.  They are called EWZ records, short for Einwandererzentalstelle or Central Immigrant Office.

There are a few caveats in order.  First, applicants were attempting to prove German ethnicity so that they could receive citizenship from the occupying power, so they certainly had an incentive to shade the truth in some situations.  Second, these documents were collected under wartime conditions and many church and family records had been destroyed first by Soviet repression and then by the vagaries of war.  Sometimes people were recalling details from memory.  Third, many Mennonites had been arrested or scattered before World War II and more were deported to Kazakstan in 1941 by the Soviets - since these were not in German-occupied territory, they did not apply for German citizenship during the war.  Finally, not all microfilms with Mennonites have been purchased from the National Archives and donated to research centers and not all donated microfilms have been indexed.  Despite these very real limitations, this is a fantastic research collection.

It takes a bit of knowledge to find the information you want.  The place to start is the Odessa3 online library's search page.  At the top of the page is Searching the Odessa Library.  Enter your surname of interest or village name as the Query String.  Make sure to select War Records as the Data Category.  I put in "Fast" as an example below.

You'll get a LONG list of results that starts something like this:

On this page, you'll want to click on CTRL-F to open a search box in your browser and then type in a given name or a village or some other keyword to search.  In this case I'm trying to find out if there are descendants of Gerhard Gerhard Fast #45022 (b. ABT 1767) of Ladekopp in the database, so I enter Ladekopp as the search term.  Of course, he was no longer alive by the 1940s, but perhaps some of his descendants who applied for German citizen during World War II (or their parents or grandparents) were born in Ladekopp.  I found a number of results, but here is one that looks promising:

I've marked Jakob Fast in red.  The index gives his birth date of 7 Nov 1887 and village of Ladekopp.  Then it gives a file number of A3342 EWZ50-I088 and frame number 0558.  Notice that listed next is a Sara Fast whose maiden name was Nickel with the same file and frame numbers - she might be his wife.  Note the file and frame numbers because you will need them to order copies.

To order the files, there are a couple places that have the most.  The Mennonite Historical Society of British Columbia has undertaken a massive project to scan many of the films, so they are a good placed to start.  Plus they only charge 0.10 CAD per page.  The Germans from Russia Heritage Society (whose index is on the Odessa3 page that we used) also has many films, but they charge 2.00 USD per page.  The files generally run 10-30 pages, so it can add up if you are getting several files.

Now you should know how to search the indices.  The next post will explain how to use the documents in the file that you will receive.