This page was begun 15 June 2001 -- rak.
Usually when I tell people my dad's ancestors were from Russia they look at me with disbelief and say something like "Gee, Kraus sure sounds German!" And when I tell them that my dad's people were in fact German, among the thousands of Germans living on the Volga in Russia, in totally German villages, speaking only German, marrying only Germans ... they look at me as if I have lost my marbles -- "Never heard of such a thing! You must be joking."
Well it's no joke. Today, like myself, millions of Americans, in both North and South America, are descendants of these intrepid folk. Many thousands more are still in Russia and even larger numbers have now returned or are now returning to Germany from which their ancestors, like mine, left in 1765-67.
The Volga-Deutsch of course were not the only large group of Germans in Russia. Somewhat later thousands more were settled in the Ukraine and the south of Russia -- in the Crimea, on the Black Sea and into the Caucasus mountains. These too, in the thousands, ultimately joined the flow of immigrants to the Americans in the last part of the 19th and the early 20th century.
So, who is responsible for the Volga-Deutsch going to Russia?
Ultimate responsibility probably lies with Martin Luther. Had he not nailed those pages to the Wittenberg church doors in 1517, perhaps Germans would not have spent significant parts of the next 250 years killing each other in the name of religion. Geoffrey Barraclough writes in his The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 373, 375:
"A religious movement which, for a short generation, seemed to offer a new bond of unity to the German peoples ... was transformed instead ... into a new cause of division; particularly during the Thirty Years War [when] the breach between Lutherans and Calvinists opened nearly as wide as the chasm between Catholics and Protestants. Confessional dualism allied itself with territorial fragmentation ... territorial churches became pillars supporting princely power ... all churches, Lutheran, Calvinist and Catholic, in their struggle for power developed rigid canons of orthodoxy."
The culmination of this process was the Thirty Years War. Barraclough pp.373, 384 and 395 says:
"Finally Germany suffered the ravages of civil war and the miseries of a Franco-Spanish war fought with unbelievable brutality on German soil. The Thirty Years War [1618-1648] decimated the population (it is estimated that the Germans fell ... from more than 16,000,000 to less than 6,000,000), depressed the peasants and ruined the towns ... The territorial settlement of 1648 ... [left] a Germany divided into 234 territorial units, all claiming sovereign independence and at loggerheads among themselves.... Thus for a century and more after 1648 Germany stagnated."
But the political aftermath of Luther's work with untold millions of Germans killing each other in the name of religion was not sufficient to drive our people to Russia. Frederick the Great of Prussia was necessary too.
Frederick was determined to unite fragmented Germany and to do it he fought much of Europe in the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Although he "won" by not being ultimately defeated much of Germany was physically destroyed by armies marching back and forth. Even Frederick's greatest ally, Great Britain, contributed to this devastation in defense of Frederick. During and following the War, areas of Germany that escaped physical destruction saw a collapse of all aspects of the economy. Depopulation, impoverishment and suffering were the order of the day. Many of those Germans who managed to live through the ordeal were ready to escape despite prohibitions from the overwhelming majority of German governments against migration.
Frederick had succeeded in laying the foundations of a modern unified German state, but the price was horrific so he also laid the foundations for many German migrant families, including my father's people.
However, without the work of two Russian Czars, our people still would not have gone to Russia. Click on Peter and Catherine to check that out.