Kazakhstan's Ethnic Germans Confront Soviet-Era Deportations and the Gulag's Buried Legacy

Yunna Kinereish is 22 and studies public relations in Astana, Kazakhstan's capital. She calls herself a Kazakh German. "I am German by ethnicity," she told DW, but she also feels Kazakh, because she keeps her family's traditions and shares the mentality. She is one of roughly 223,000 Kazakh Germans living in the country today, and a member of the Wiedergeburt (Revival) Association of Germans in Kazakhstan.

Recently she acted in a play at the association's youth theater, staged at the House of Friendship, where the association has its office. The play told the fate of her Russian German forebears, and her own family is part of it: they were driven out of Kleinwärter, a village of ethnic Germans in Ukraine. Performing it was hard, she said. It touches her heart deeply and she feels like crying, but on stage she has to be strong.

The history behind the play begins in the 18th century, when Germans were encouraged to leave Germany and settle in the Russian empire, including Ukraine's Black Sea region. After Hitler's armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin began deporting Germans from Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan. About 400,000 of them ended up in Kazakhstan. People who had nothing to do with the invasion or its atrocities were held collectively responsible and branded spies and collaborators. More than a million people were deported in all, and at least 200,000 died of the expulsion, hunger and forced labor.

The House of Friendship, a modern building in Astana, is funded mainly by the German government. It runs language courses and social work and promotes remembrance of deportation and Soviet repression. Kinereish also documents the history on film. In 2025 she made a film about German women held in ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, one of the most notorious camps in the Gulag. During the Great Terror of the 1930s, the Soviet Union built its largest camp system in Kazakhstan. About 18,000 women passed through ALZhIR alone, imprisoned only because their husbands had been convicted as traitors or enemies of the people. Among them were 167 ethnic German women, whose stories her film tells.

The ALZhIR memorial lies just outside Astana, about an hour's drive toward the village of Akmol, past the new buildings on the city's edge and into open steppe. Visitors walk under the Arch of Grief, a large steel structure commemorating the women's suffering and forced labor, before entering a museum of personal belongings, models of their cramped quarters, original documents and photographs.

One photograph shows Gertrud Platais, a print worker from Lower Silesia, in today's Poland. She married Karl Eduard Platais and became a Soviet citizen. When he was arrested in 1938, she was convicted too, as a "relative of a traitor to the homeland." She was sent to ALZhIR, where summer temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius and winter ones fall to minus 40, and worked as an embroiderer until 1946. She was then banished for life to Karlag, the Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, and was not rehabilitated until 1956.

Karlag was the largest camp system, covering an area about 22 times the size of New York City. It was also a vast economic and agricultural complex. Almost a million people passed through between 1931 and 1959, and around 10,000 are believed to have died there from 1940 to 1950 alone, of starvation, cold, disease and forced labor. Its museum stands near Karaganda, about 250 kilometers south of Astana, in the former administration building. Visiting German historians were puzzled, since no one was tortured there. Interrogation and torture cells have been reconstructed, and melodramatic music plays from loudspeakers, which makes the place feel staged. Like the ALZhIR memorial, it has few visitors.

Katherine M. Erdman, an American anthropologist and archaeologist at Nazarbayev University in Astana, has studied the Gulag in Kazakhstan for about ten years. She says many people, and some in politics, have almost no interest in confronting the country's brutal past. With her students she used drones, interviews and fieldwork to locate camps and see how they can still be recognized. The landscape, she says, was shaped by forced labor: factories rose beside the primitive barracks, and houses were built with bricks made by prisoners. She shares findings with neighbors and local administrations but is often met with apathy or outright rejection, as many do not want reminders of an inglorious past during a period of economic progress. She sees a wish to show the world that Kazakhstan is facing its history, yet there is no state funding for a further lectureship for her work.

Kinereish keeps going regardless. Her ancestors survived the Gulag in Kazakhstan, she says, and it matters to her that what they suffered is passed on.