[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] German Migration to Volhynia

[Paul Rakow]

  Dick,

      I was very interested in your comments about Kostiuk's book,
  and particularly his reference to a decree from 1868, requiring
  settlers to register with the local authorities.

       A couple of years ago, in the "Secret State Archives" in Berlin,
  I found hundreds of requests made by German colonists in Volhynia,
  asking for certificates from Germany, to prove to the Russian
  authorities that they were still Prussian citizens. Even Germans
  born in Congress Poland were given these nationality certificates,
  if they had Prussian ancestry, and had never taken on Russian
  citizenship. Most of these requests were from the early 1870s, so
  it sounds like they may have been connected with these decrees from
  1868 and 1872, discussed in Kostiuk's book.

      I'd been able to find a lot out about the German nationality
  law of 1870, but I couldn't find much on the Russian side to explain
  just what had changed, and made all this paperwork necessary. The
  decrees you mentioned may well fill in that gap.

      I will try to get hold of the German version of Kostiuk. All
  I've seen is the Ukrainian version, which didn't do me much good,
  apart from a short German summary.

            Paul Rakow
             rakow at ifh.de

               Very happy to have finally got home, despite
  Icelandic volcanic eruptions.

===============

  "Richard Benert" <benovich at imt.net> wrote: 
>
> Just when we think we've got it nailed down, maybe we haven't.  I'm looking
> at Mychail Kostiuk's Die deutschen Kolonien in Wolhynien, published recently
> and (somewhat bewilderingly) translated from Ukrainian into German. 
>
  [snip] 
>
> Kostiuk also cites a decree of 1868, which required settlers to register
> with local authorities and took away any tax privileges they may have had,
> although still leaving them with freedom from military service.  Then he
> adds that it allowed these settlers any rights they had in the place they
> had come from (Herkunftsland).  This decree applied to Germans coming from
> "the Vistula area of the German Reich."  The Ministry of the Interior in
> 1872 extended these same "decisions" to Germans coming from Poland.  His
> point here is that to some extent one's status in Volhynia depended on where
> one had come from.  But the implication that freedom from military service
> and from taxation had been granted (by someone)  to at least some Germans is
> clear.  (I think.  Again, if a good reader of German can help with this,
> please do.  And in any case, freedom from military service was ended in
> 1874.)  He then goes on to say that, by this decree, registering with the
> local authorities made German settlers eligible for any other "advantages"
> (Vorteile) that the authorities would care to give on their own.