Resettlement, Evacuation and Displacement circumstances of their relocation, at the end of the war they all faced displacement and expulsion – and being housed in camps once again. For many of them, the resettlement initiated by the Nazi authorities turned into an odyssey. The Schillers from Lithuania, for instance, were relocated by special train in the summer of 1941. The train also served as a rolling office, processing en route the paperwork required for naturalisation. The German officials had some doubts about the Schillers’ ethnicity: Were they German or Lithuanian? Neither granted German citizenship nor sent to the annexed Polish territories, the Schillers ended up in Bütow, a small town in Pomerania, where Georg Schiller took a job with the German Reichsbahn, the national rail. In February 1945, the family fled from the approaching Red Army to the Baltic port of Gotenhafen (pre-1939: Gdingen, post-1945: Gdynia). There, they were separated. While Georg’s wife Anna and their youngest son Hans reached Denmark by boat, Georg and Eduard, their oldest, ended up in Swinemünde/ Świnoujście. It was only in October 1948 that the family was finally reunited. Deportation, Displacement and Evacuations during the Retreat on the Eastern Front The Wehrmacht’s retreat from the Eastern front after its defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 was accompanied by forced recruitment, deportations and the evacuation of the civilian population. From the autumn of that year the Nazi authorities began evacuating hundreds of thousands of Germans, primarily from Ukraine and the Black Sea region and relocating them to the Altreich and the Warthegau. There, Soviet troops caught up with them in early 1945. Those ethnic structures disintegrated. On top of this, many realised that the promised farmsteads did not materialise and that they would have to sit and wait in camps for years. Only about half of the resettled were given homes and farmsteads, having benefitted from the prior expropriation and expulsion of their Polish and Jewish owners. Although the experiences of the resettled varied according to place of origin and the time and RUSSO-GERMAN HYMNBOOK Saratov (Russian Empire), 1913 For Maria Kußmaul, an ethnic German from the Odessa region, this hymnbook was an important keepsake, reminding her of her father Andreas Kußmaul. His name is written in Kurrent script on the reverse side of the flyleaf. A kulak, he was deported by the Soviet secret police in 1929 and sent to Archangelsk, where he died. Maria managed to keep hold of the hymnbook despite her own multiple displacements. She took it with her when she was permitted to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Germany in 1976.
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