Forgotten prisoners of the tsar

Abstract

This chapter is about a forgotten story from World War I: the deportation of thousands of civilians from East Prussia, a province of Germany, to Russia by soldiers of the Russian army. During an eight-month period at the beginning of World War I, between August 1914 and March 1915, about 13,600 inhabitants of East Prussia were deported to Russia. This multiethnic group, which was composed of Germans, Lithuanians, and Masurians (Poles who belonged to the Lutheran faith), spent the war, and, in some cases, part of the Russian civil war that followed interned at sites throughout Russia under very harsh conditions. Although they received assistance from local residents at internment sites, governments, and private relief organizations, only 8,300 returned. Contemporary accounts of the deportations in Lithuanian and German, and the relatively few scholarly works that have been published on the subject usually focus narrowly on the experiences of a single ethnic group among the deportees, either marginalizing or completely ignoring the presence of other ethnic groups. Using published and archival sources in six languages (English, German, Lithuanian, Russian, French, and Italian), this chapter challenges these accounts of the deportations by going beyond the paradigm of national suffering and, more broadly, correcting some misconceptions about civilian internment during World War I. It shows that civilian prisoners were not just held in internment or concentration camps during the war and deportation was not always “synonymous with concentration camps.” Like the much larger group of enemy aliens in Russia, most deportees from East Prussia appear to have been interned in cities, towns, and villages. The chapter also argues that the deportation of civilians from Russian-occupied East Prussia was not genocide.