5 The Expulsion from Volhynia
July 1, 1915
For the German colonists of Volhynia — families like the Rapps who had migrated from Baden-Württemberg through Poland and built new lives over two generations — the outbreak of the First World War set in motion a catastrophe. By 1914, some 160,000 Germans lived peacefully in the rolling farmland northwest of Zhytomyr. Within a year, they would be driven from their homes.
5.1 The Black Year
The vastness of Russia attracted Germans again and again in the 18th and 19th centuries. Farmers set out in horse carts from southern Germany and settled in the Russian Empire. Around 1860 a group of Germans chose a region in western Ukraine as their second home: Volhynia.
The settlers made the land arable and initially lived peacefully with the Russian population. In 1915, one year after the beginning of the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II ordered the expulsion of Germans in Volhynia. They were expelled to Siberia in July.
That was the beginning of a series of expulsions of Russian Germans in the 20th century. At the end of this, many of them returned to Germany, the homeland of their ancestors. (Dänzer-Vanotti, n.d.)
On August 1, 1914, the German Kaiser declared war on Russia, and the idyll was over. For Volhynian German men, there was no question where they belonged — in the army of the Tsar. They fought for Ukraine, for their homeland, against Germans. But Tsar Nicholas II did not trust them for long.
In early 1915, the Russian government passed laws to liquidate German land ownership within 100–150 kilometers of the front lines. On July 1, 1915, the order came: German colonists of non-Orthodox confession living outside the cities were to be resettled. Within ten days, people were to leave their districts. The authorities took German pastors and judges as hostages to ensure compliance. Houses were confiscated. The rye harvest had already begun, but the Germans were forbidden to cut another stalk.
A contemporary pastor, Hugo Karl Schmidt, described the scene:
These wagon caravans of the resettled were truly transports of misery. In the most terrible conditions, often for weeks without shelter, without adequate nourishment, thousands of elderly, women, and children wandered on the roads, on foot through Volhynia, toward Kyiv, deeper into Russia. Soon epidemics broke out, which claimed hundreds of victims. (Dänzer-Vanotti, n.d.)
Some 170,000 people were driven eastward — loaded onto trains in Kyiv and sent to Kazakhstan, the southern Urals, and western Siberia. Many died along the way, especially children and the elderly.
5.2 The Rapp Family’s Flight
The Rapp family’s experience diverged from most. Rather than boarding the trains headed deep into the Russian interior, they fled south — all the way to the Caucasus, near the Turkish border. As Ewald later recounted, “the war front came so close to my home my family had to flee for our lives with only the things we could carry. All our property was lost.”
It was during this flight, on September 29, 1914, that Michael and Amalie’s fourth child, Sara, was born — on a ship while the family was fleeing from the Russians.
In the Caucasus, the family found shelter with a German farmer named Schwartz, who had a large farm. Michael and his eldest son Julius found work there. Young Ewald and his brother Ludwig were put in charge of Schwartz’s large flock of geese, driving them into the harvested fields to forage each day. Eventually the family moved on — through Egypt or Turkey, the details uncertain even in Ewald’s own memory — before finally being sent back to Germany by the German military government.
The journey was harrowing. At one train station along the way, Ewald’s eldest brother Julius — known as John — wandered away from the family. He was about fourteen years old. When he came back, the train and his family were gone. He managed to catch up with them several hundred miles further on, but the terror of that separation stayed with the family.
5.3 Return to Germany
In 1918, the Rapp family arrived in East Prussia — not as conquerors but as refugees. Insterburg, a critical railway hub, had become a center for the Fürsorgeverein für Rückwanderer (Welfare Association for Returnees). The Prussian government, facing wartime labor shortages, settled many of these “Russian-German” refugees on estates and farms throughout the region.
The family’s first home was at a large ranch in Grunwalde belonging to Michael’s brother-in-law, Carl Kemmling, who was married to Amalie’s sister Pauline. But when Kemmling tried to pay Michael and Julius less than the regular workers — despite their working just as hard and as many hours — Michael refused. He went looking for work on a Sunday, something he had never done before, and found employment on the Hoffmayer farm in Storchenberg, where the family stayed until around 1920.
They had lost everything — their farm, their livestock, their marriage certificate, their place in the world. Years later, when Michael needed to prove his marriage for emigration papers, he could only offer a sworn affidavit: “As we are refugees from East Prussia, we lost our marriage certificate in the war.” But they had survived, and they had each other. Michael and Amalie would rebuild their lives in this new German homeland, and it was here that their son Ewald would grow up, learn a trade, and begin a life of his own.