Ukraine Emigration and Immigration: Difference between revisions

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[[File:Volga German area.gif|300px|thumb|right|<span style="color:DarkViolet">'''Click to enlarge.'''</span>]]

*The '''Volga Germans''' are ethnic Germans who settled and historically lived along the Volga River in the region of southeastern European Russia around Saratov and to the south.  

*In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many '''Volga Germans emigrated to Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas, California, Washington''' and other states across the western United States, as well as to '''Canada and South America (mainly Argentina and Brazil''').

*After the '''German invasion of the Soviet Union''' in 1941 during World War II, the Soviet government considered the Volga Germans potential collaborators, and deported many of them eastward, where thousands died. After the war, the Soviet Union expelled a moderate number of ethnic Germans to the West. In the late 1980s and 1990s, many of the remaining ethnic Germans moved from the Soviet Union to Germany.<ref name="history">"History of Germans in Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Germans_in_Russia,_Ukraine_and_the_Soviet_Union, accessed 12 July 2021.</ref>

*The Black Sea Germans - including the Bessarabian Germans and the Dobrujan Germans - settled the territories of the northern bank of the Black Sea in present-day Ukraine in the late 18th and the 19th century.  

*Catherine the Great had gained this land for Russia through her two wars with the Ottoman Empire (1768–1774) and from the annexation of the Crimean Khanates (1783).

*The area of settlement did not develop as compact as that of the Volga territory, and a chain of ethnic German colonies resulted. The first German settlers arrived in 1787, first from '''West Prussia''', followed by immigrants from '''Western and Southwestern Germany''' (including Roman Catholics), and from the '''Warsaw area'''. Also many Germans, beginning in 1803, immigrated from the northeastern area of '''Alsace''' west of the Rhine River. They settled roughly '''30 miles northeast of Odessa (city) in Ukraine''', forming several enclaves that quickly expanded, resulting in daughter colonies springing up nearby.<ref name="history"/>

*From 1783 onward the Crown initiated a systematic settlement of '''Russians, Ukrainians, and Germans''' in the '''Crimean Peninsula''' in order to dilute the native population of the Crimean Tatars.

*In 1939, around 60,000 of the 1.1 million inhabitants of Crimea were ethnic German.  

*Two years later, following the end of the alliance and the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union, the government '''deported ethnic Germans from the Crimea to Central Asia''' in the Soviet Union's program of population transfers. Conditions were harsh and many of the deportees died. It was not until the period of Perestroika in the late 1980s that the government granted surviving ethnic Germans and their descendants the right to return from Central Asia to the peninsula.<ref name="history"/>

*The migration of Germans into '''Volhynia '''(as of 2013 covering northwestern Ukraine from a short distance west of Kiev to the border with Poland) occurred under significantly different conditions than those described above.  

*By the end of the 19th century, Volhynia had more than 200,000 German settlers. Their migration began as '''encouraged by local noblemen, often Polish landlords, who wanted to develop their significant land-holdings in the area for agricultural use'''. Although the noblemen offered certain incentives for the relocations, the Germans of Volhynia received none of the government's special tax and military service freedoms granted to Germans in other areas.