The deportation of the Germans minorities from Romania to the USSR

On January 6, 1945, almost 4 months before the end of the Second World War in Europe, the Romanian government received a notice from the USSR asking it to draft all Germans who were Romanian citizens (men between 17 and 45 years old, women between 18 and 30 years old, except pregnant women and those with children under 1 year old), who were fit for work, to be deported to the USSR.

The deportations began on January 13, 1945, in the cities of Bucharest, Brașov and Timișoara, and between January 14-16, approximately 33,000 Schwabs from the Banat were put on freight trains to Soviet mining centers.  

Although the Romanian authorities officially protested, about 70,000 ethnic germans were deported to labor camps in the USSR. There they worked for 12 hours a day and lived in inhuman conditions.  It was not until 1948 that the first deportees returned home and the labour camps were abolished in 1949, with an estimated 5,000 deportees losing their lives.

In 2015, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the deportation of ethnic Germans to the USSR, a marble memorial was unveiled in the courtyard of the Adam Müller Guttenbrunn House in Timișoara.

Excerpt from Kovacs, Zoltan: Calendar Timișorean File din istoria orașului. Timișoara: Central Dabasi Nyomda Zrt 2022.

Editor: Nicolae Șerban  

Translator: Nicole Olariu