Ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan face legacy of the Soviet Union

Yunna Kinereish, a 22-year-old Kazakh German studying public relations in Astana, feels both German and Kazakh. She belongs to the Wiedergeburt (Revival) Association of Germans in Kazakhstan and recently performed in a play about her Russian German ancestors' fate. In 1941, Germans living in the Russian empire, including in Ukraine, were expelled to Siberia and Kazakhstan by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Over a million Germans were deported, with at least 200,000 dying due to expulsion, hunger, and forced labor. The modern House of Friendship in Astana, funded primarily by the German government, focuses on German culture and remembrance of the Soviet regime's deportation and repression. Yunna Kinereish also documents her people's history through film, such as a film about German women incarcerated in the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland.

This camp, the biggest in the Soviet Gulag system during Stalin's Great Terror, held around 18,000 women, including 167 ethnic German women. The ALZhIR women's camp memorial, located just outside Astana, features an Arch of Grief and a museum showcasing personal items and documents of the female prisoners. One such story is that of Gertrud Platais, a German woman from Lower Silesia who spent decades in ALZhIR and was banished to the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, known as Karlag, after her husband's arrest for being an enemy of the people.

Karlag, which covered an area about 22 times the size of New York City, was not just a prison camp but also an economic and agricultural complex, with almost one million people passing through between 1931 and 1959. Around 10,000 prisoners died in Karlag from starvation, cold, sickness, and forced labor. Despite the significance of these events, visiting historians and specialists find it puzzling that few people in Kazakhstan, including certain political circles, are interested in acknowledging their country's brutal history.