Ukrainian Germans: history of the community

Ukrainian Television Film Studio, 1995.

Documentary TV film "This does not concern the Germans" from the series "National Minorities of Ukraine". The heroes of the film are German immigrants in Ukraine.

Ukrainian Germans talk about their lives, the history of the community, traditions, about oppression and deportation by the Soviet authorities to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Director — Serhiy Dudka.

Reference: Before the beginning of World War II, about 880 thousand ethnic Germans lived in Ukraine, who constituted one of the largest national minorities. In 1941, after the Ukrainian SSR left the zone of the Soviet-German pact, on the basis of Stalin's decrees, mass deportations of Germans to Siberia and Central Asia began — as an "unreliable element", despite the absence of a proven connection with Nazi Germany. Almost a third of the deportees died as a result of hunger, forced labor, repression, and inhumane living conditions in special settlements. The Soviet authorities liquidated German settlements, banned national institutions, and the diaspora of Ukrainian Germans virtually ceased to exist by the end of the 20th century.