On the morning of October 21, 1941, the custodian of Odessa's Museum of Western Civilization summoned twenty-three-year-old Eugenie AnissimoffFootnote * and her middle-aged mother to lead an unusual and most demanding tour group. Having fled the besieged metropolis weeks earlier to their former residence in suburban Odessa, the two women had returned to their bombed-out apartment in the recently occupied city. Homeless, the pair had sought refuge with the museum's caretaker, an old family friend. Unable to communicate with the delegation of SS and Wehrmacht officers who queued for admission, the Russian-speaking janitor hoped that the two Volksdeutsche women would help to disarm the menacing visitors by granting them a German-language tour. Although ostensibly to inspect the building for booby traps, the visit's true purpose became clear as the Germans began loading paintings, rugs, and even a golden saddle into their vehicles. At the conclusion of the tour-cum-robbery, the group's leader, SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Klaus Siebert, thanked the two women and complimented their excellent German.Footnote ¹ Hearing of their dire situation, Siebert advised Anissimoff and her mother to register for support at the local SS-run Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic German Liaison Office (hereafter VoMi), bureau in a former music conservatory on Novovlaskaia Street.Footnote ²

The following evening, October 22, a Soviet time bomb destroyed the Romanian military's general headquarters in Odessa's former Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or Peoples' Commissariat for Internal Affairs, building. In retaliation, Romanian forces unleashed an orgy of violence against the city's Jews. Likely discouraged by the recent events from venturing outdoors, Anissimoff proceeded to the VoMi office three days later. Upon entering the former music school's foyer, Anissimoff passed the flag-draped casket of the unit's former commander, SS-Untersturmführer Walter Güldner—a casualty of the recent explosion—whose body was lying in state.Footnote ³ After paying her respects, Anissimoff proceeded to the unit's Volksdeutsche registration office. Taking Siebert's advice to downplay the fact that her Russian father, Nikolaus Anissimoff, had been a tsarist army officer, she used her mother's maiden name and registered as Eugenie Beck. As she would do until 1945, Beck omitted reference to her two-year marriage to a Jewish scientist during the late 1930s. Captivated by the attractive, educated, young woman's polyglot skills, the VoMi's “Volksdeutsche classifier,” SS-Oberscharführer Erich-Meinert Claasen, issued her a Volkstumsausweis, or ethnic German identification card, and hired her as his assistant.Footnote ⁴ During the next four years Beck's responsibilities expanded from classifying Odessa's denizens and serving as an interpreter for the SS to working for the VoMi's propaganda apparatus—and even participating in counterinsurgency deployments.Footnote ⁵

This article reconstructs VoMi efforts in Odessa to identify local ethnic Germans, such as Beck, and to marshal them for future German territorial expansion in the Soviet Union. The article's aims are two-fold. First, it recovers the VoMi's attempts to mobilize local Volksdeutsche as a demographic counterclaim to long-term Romanian designs in southern Ukraine—a project that has received little previous scholarly attention. Second, and more centrally, it uses fragmentary wartime German documentation and the records of criminal investigations in the Federal Republic of Germany to probe how the Third Reich struggled to layer its demographic plans over the Soviet Union's multiethnic reality at the local level. This article argues that the friction between the VoMi's racial fantasies and Odessa's ethnic multiplicity moved local German officials to murder even when doing so fell outside their bailiwick and superiors' orders discouraged them. Charged by their superiors with “culling” racially “pure” Volksdeutsche from one of the Soviet Union's most cosmopolitan cities—a task that local reality would hamstring—VoMi officers used innovative, if counterproductive mechanisms to identify Odessa's ethnically German denizens. Unable to guard access to the Volksgemeinschaft through classification, local SS officials in Odessa emulated their colleagues' genocidal campaign in the surrounding countryside by deploying a miniature death squad to catch and murder suspected Volksdeutsche imposters. Armed with their own terror apparatus, Odessa's VoMi officials exploited their purview over Volksdeutsche matters to contest the formal control of their Romanian allies.

This article offers three primary historiographical contributions. First, it highlights a previously understudied dimension to the occupation of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁶ In contrast to the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, on which both German and Ukrainian specialists have recently published, wartime Odessa and especially the VoMi's role there remain understudied.Footnote ⁷ Alexander Dallin's half-century-old RAND Corporation report—still the standard work on occupied Odessa—consciously glossed over the city's VoMi unit, which appeared peripheral to him.Footnote ⁸ Recent scholarship has focused on the Holocaust in Transnistria—a Romanian-German genocidal project in which Odessa's VoMi office played only a marginal role—and concentrated on the area's Romanian occupiers.Footnote ⁹ Owing to their dependence on the VoMi's fragmentary surviving documentation in German and North American archives, specialized studies merely touch on the VoMi's activities in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory and overlook its plans for the future.Footnote ¹⁰ Although central to long-term SS designs on the region and a hurdle to cooperation between Transnistria's occupying powers, the VoMi's violent and ultimately failed plan to nazify Odessa's Volksdeutsche remains a scholarly lacuna.

Second, drawing on insights from recent research on Nazi “Volksdeutsche” policy in east central Europe, this article updates existing scholarship on Soviet ethnic Germans by exploring the practice of Nazi ethnic classification in the Soviet Union. During the early 1980s, Meier Buchsweiler and Ingeborg Fleischhauer published detailed monographs on Soviet ethnic Germans under Communist and National Socialist rule.Footnote ¹¹ Largely unaided by the records of postwar German and Soviet police investigations that have since become available, Buchsweiler and Fleischhauer's remarkable studies recovered wartime German policy toward Soviet Volksdeutsche and underscored the suspicion with which German officials treated area ethnic Germans. More recent study of Nazi Volksdeutsche policy, particularly by Doris Bergen, systematizes Buchsweiler and Fleischhauer's earlier observations by analyzing the tenuousness of “Volksdeutsche” as an ethnic classification category for the Third Reich.Footnote ¹² Empirically focused on Poland, Bergen argues that German officials populated the ambiguous category based on their own predispositions and the Nazi regime's need to find the demographic foundation for its planned conquests.Footnote ¹³ Applying these insights to a study of Odessa's VoMi office, this article probes how the SS “made” and “unmade” ethnic Germans in one of the Soviet Union's most cosmopolitan urban centers.

Lastly, this article contributes to growing scholarship on the involvement of Soviet Volksdeutsche in the Holocaust, an area that has received comparatively little historical research. In addition to Buchsweiler and Fleischhauer's seminal studies, which address Soviet ethnic German participation in the Holocaust, more recent research by scholars, such as Andrej Angrick, Martin Dean, and Wendy Lower, recovers the role of individual ethnic Germans or Volksdeutsche units.Footnote ¹⁴ Focusing on area Volksdeutsche, and especially ethnic German women, whom the SS employed in Odessa, this article probes how local Volksdeutsche participated in and periodically steered the machinery of destruction in one locale.

* * *

Lower has dubbed German ambitions in Ukraine “the most radical colonization campaign in the history of European conquest and empire building.”Footnote ¹⁵ The Third Reich's appetite was not limited to German-occupied Ukraine, but extended into Transnistria—territory Adolf Hitler had promised his Romanian allies.Footnote ¹⁶ Notwithstanding the August 12, 1941, agreement that designated the region between the Dniester and the Bug a Romanian occupation zone, German authorities began preparing to mobilize the region's 130,000 Volksdeutsche as part of a competitive population policy to secure long-term German influence there.Footnote ¹⁷ Even as German negotiators were hashing out the treaty's details, the SS had begun equipping a VoMi unit at its Stahnsdorf training facility near Berlin.Footnote ¹⁸ Pursuant to Heinrich Himmler's July 11, 1941, order that created the VoMi's Amt VII, the so-called Sonderkommando R (or Special Command Russia) was to take charge of the Soviet Union's Volksdeutsche in both the German and Romanian occupation zones.Footnote ¹⁹

Sonderkommando R was a departure from the VoMi's recent institutional experience. Prior to Operation Barbarossa, the VoMi had relocated Volksdeutsche from the Baltic, Volhynia and Galicia, and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. By contrast, Himmler charged Sonderkommando R with succoring local Volksdeutsche to ensure that they remained in the occupied Soviet Union as a demographic claim—and in Transnistria as a counterclaim—to Soviet territory.Footnote ²⁰ Second, Himmler subordinated Sonderkommando R not to the VoMi's nominally independent hierarchy, but directly to his own SS and police apparatus.Footnote ²¹ Whereas in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine Sonderkommando R reported to Higher SS and Police Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann, in Transnistria the absence of an SS hierarchy left Sonderkommando R to report directly to Himmler, making it his personal colonization enterprise.Footnote ²²

Although the German legation in Bucharest informed the Romanian government that it would be sending a small SS detachment to aid local Volksdeutsche temporarily, the SS's plans were neither modest nor ephemeral.Footnote ²³ When Sonderkommando R departed suburban Berlin in September 1941 for the multi-week trek to Ukraine, its initial convoy encompassed more than one hundred cars and trucks. Outfitted with field kitchens, police-band radio transmitters, mobile offices, medical equipment, and portable repair shops, the yellow-brown camouflaged caravan formed an infrastructure to cultivate Germandom's seeds in the occupied Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁴

Traveling via Łódź, Sonderkommando R reached Kiev in mid-September, establishing its headquarters for the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and nominal overall command post for the region. Sonderkommando R's Transnistria detachment separated from the main unit, and under SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Klaus Siebert, departed via Zhytomyr for Romanian-occupied territory.Footnote ²⁵ Arriving in Shyrokolanivka, or Landau, a German-speaking village roughly fifty kilometers northwest of Nikolaev, Siebert and his eighty subordinates established Sonderkommando R's Transnistrian headquarters later that month.Footnote ²⁶ After a brief refitting, Siebert's staff fanned out to eighteen preassigned Bereichkommandos, or area commands, in Odessa and among Transnistria's 230 Germanophone villages, which subsequent agreements with Romanian authorities permitted the SS to govern with almost complete independence.Footnote ²⁷

The staff that Siebert assigned to Odessa's Bereichkommando XXV—the largest and most elaborate of his subunits—mirrored Sonderkommando R's hodgepodge composition. After the bombing of the Romanian military headquarters mentioned above, Ernst Güldner was replaced by SS-Untersturmführer Hans-Joachim Goerbig, both a longtime National Socialist and an experienced VoMi officer.Footnote ²⁸ A member of the NSDAP since 1929 and of the SS since 1938, his superiors lent him temporarily to the VoMi at the beginning of the war. Except for a brief stint in the Wehrmacht in 1940, over the next two years Goerbig participated in all of the VoMi's major “resettlement” campaigns to relocate Volksdeutsche from eastern Europe to German-occupied Poland. When the SS reassigned him from his duties registering Volksdeutsche in Poland's General Government to the newly established Sonderkommando R, the thirty-year-old Goerbig numbered among the VoMi's veterans.Footnote ²⁹

For Goerbig's deputy in Odessa, SS-Unterscharführer Erich-Meinert Claasen, service with Sonderkommando R provided a jumpstart to a lackluster military career. A convinced Nazi who conceded his political loyalties to the West German police even in the 1960s, Claasen had joined the SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in 1934.Footnote ³⁰ After participating in the invasion of Poland in 1939, Claasen's battlefield career ended in 1940, when he was wounded in Arras, France, and transferred to a dead-end posting in one of the SS Germania Division's reserve battalions. Following friends' advice that service with the VoMi could be a ticket to a commission, Claasen transferred there in October 1940 and took part in the population transfers of ethnic Germans from the Baltic, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. A “real ‘Siegfried’-guy,”Footnote ³¹ as one of his Volksdeutsche subordinates later described him, the twenty-five-year-old Claasen hoped that service in the east would fast-track his SS career.Footnote ³²

In contrast to their superiors, Bereichkommando XXV's rank-and-file members were on average both older and less ideologically committed to National Socialism. For example, thirty-seven-year-old Herbert Kirschstein, who had floated through various food service and hotel jobs during the Weimar Republic, joined the VoMi because it permitted him to avoid military service. While managing a restaurant near Berlin's Tiergarten in September 1941, Kirschstein bemoaned a possible Wehrmacht draft notice to one of his regular customers, a member of the VoMi. On his patron's recommendation, Kirschstein volunteered for what he later described as “the lesser evil.”Footnote ³³ Starved for personnel, the VoMi overlooked the fact that Kirschstein was neither a Nazi Party nor an SS member and had no experience with Volksdeutsche matters.Footnote ³⁴ Within weeks the VoMi deployed him to Transnistria as an SS-Unterscharführer.Footnote ³⁵ Although Kirschstein's colleagues later groused about his primitive grasp of Volksdeutsche affairs, limited education, and “waiter's manners,” within a few months he was spearheading the unit's death squad.Footnote ³⁶

Arriving in Odessa immediately after the Romanian Army in mid-October 1941, Bereichkommando XXV's staff encountered a once-thriving Black Sea metropolis that had undergone violent changes in the preceding months. The city's two-month siege and Soviet evacuation took a toll on its local population. In addition to the physical damage caused by military operations, the Soviet government had evacuated much of the city's industrial and human capital as well as rendered its port inoperable. By October 1941, Odessa's remaining residents—a mere half of the prewar population of 600,000—faced dire prospects even before the harsh winter of 1941–1942 precipitated a food shortage. According to fragmentary postwar testimony, prior to quitting the city, the NKVD executed a number of ethnic German men and attempted to dynamite the prison.Footnote ³⁷

Although not targeted as a potentially hostile group, ethnic Germans suffered increasingly under Odessa's new Romanian rulers. At least initially the Romanians interred all men of military age. In many instances this included Volksdeutsche who endured weeks in jail. Moreover, Romanian troops plundered Volksdeutsche property as well as that of everyone else during the first weeks of occupation. Front-row witnesses to the Romanian Army's murderous campaign against the Jews both in Odessa and the suburb of Dalnik, Volksdeutsche had few illusions about their new overlords.Footnote ³⁸ An embattled population without other prospects for relief, Odessa's Volksdeutsche welcomed the SS's much-needed aid. As one ethnic German woman explained a generation later, “The VoMi shielded [us] from the Romanians. We were therefore very grateful to the Germans and the VoMi in Odessa and happy to be finished with Russian rule.”Footnote ³⁹

Aiding Odessa's Volksdeutsche brought Sonderkommando R a Trojan horse for its demographic project.Footnote ⁴⁰ The plan was simple: Bereichkommando XXV's staff would erode Romanian influence by helping local Volksdeutsche achieve a dominant economic position and by developing cultural institutions to mobilize them for National Socialism. As one of its former officers explained to interrogators from the Second Ukrainian Front's counterintelligence unit in August 1944, “Sonderkommando R was created to improve the lives of [ethnic] Germans at the expense of the oppression of the majority of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians.”Footnote ⁴¹ This was, he noted, “the basis of Hitlerian ‘politics.’”Footnote ⁴²

The VoMi's aid program assumed three primary forms. First, Sonderkommando R established an elaborate, independent infrastructure for feeding the city's Volksdeutsche. The bearer of a Volkstumsausweis had easy access to German ration cards, redeemable at Odessa's two Volksdeutsche grocery stores as well as its butcher shop, bakery, and oil and flour mills.Footnote ⁴³ The SS apparently provisioned Odessa so well from SS-administered ethnic German collective farms that it was necessary to hire a full-time worker to make crates just for the foodstuffs that Bereichkommando XXV's staff smuggled back to Germany.Footnote ⁴⁴

Given wartime inflation and food scarcity—particularly during the occupation's first winter—the city's Volksdeutsche desperately needed VoMi victuals.Footnote ⁴⁵ The following summer, after the supply situation stabilized somewhat, economic advisors at the German Embassy in Bucharest were still grumbling to Transnistria's Romanian administrators that “in Odessa the prices for groceries … are two to five times as high as in Bucharest.”Footnote ⁴⁶ During winter 1941, inflation was so severe that Transnistria's senior Wehrmacht commander, Lieutenant General von Rothkirch, voiced concerns to his Romanian allies about the ability of German soldiers to supply themselves with food on the open market.Footnote ⁴⁷ To placate von Rothkirch, Romanian administrators argued that “with the evacuation of the Jewish population, the market will hopefully be controlled.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Odessa's VoMi staff was not as optimistic and took measures to ensure that its Volksdeutsche charges weathered the food crisis.

Second, the SS assisted Odessa's Volksdeutsche in acquiring apartments previously owned by the city's Jews.Footnote ⁴⁹ Although in postwar statements many Volksdeutsche claimed that the SS had simply “issued” them apartments, Beck noted that, in many instances “the unit merely helped ethnic Germans keep apartments they had themselves procured.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Bereichkommando XXV's efforts to reallocate Odessa's prime real estate to the city's Volksdeutsche dovetailed with Romanian efforts to eliminate the city's Jews. In mid-February 1942, for instance, three homeless Volksdeutsche petitioned the city's Romanian prefect to “kindly place three Jewish apartments at our disposal.”Footnote ⁵¹ Perhaps to streamline the process the VoMi encouraged local ethnic Germans to denounce the few Jews who remained in their apartments after ghettoization and deportation in late 1941 and early 1942. After Romanian officials arrested the Jews, the SS stepped in to reward the ethnic German whistleblower with the deportees' apartment.Footnote ⁵² Area Volksdeutsche snapped up this property so quickly that in September 1942 the SS bent to Romanian pressure and ordered ethnic Germans to pay rent for their purloined apartments to, and to “purchase” their household furnishings from, the Romanian administration.Footnote ⁵³

Third, Odessa's VoMi unit sought to enrich local Volksdeutsche by giving them the personal effects of murdered Jews.Footnote ⁵⁴ Subordinated to the VoMi's Wirtschaftsgruppe (Economic Group) rather than to Bereichkommando XXV, the SS administered a warehouse in Odessa that served as a clearing center for clothing and other personal items sent by train from Poland's Lublin District.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although in postwar interrogations erstwhile Volksdeutsche asserted that their new clothing had come from German donors, many fondly remembered their “good Jewish clothing,” some of which Bereichkommando XXV distributed to its Volksdeutsche employees for Christmas in 1941.Footnote ⁵⁶ Beyond providing for the basic needs of ethnic Germans in Odessa, the SS ensured that local Volksdeutsche shared in the ill-gotten fruits of the Third Reich's genocide.

Sonderkommando R also launched an intense effort to nazify local ethnic Germans. Owing to its urban infrastructure, Odessa soon became the node for the VoMi's educational and propaganda apparatus in Transnistria. Under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Fritz Dankert, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher from Magdeburg, Sonderkommando R's Sachlichegruppe set the VoMi's education policy for both the city and the surrounding countryside.Footnote ⁵⁷ Until the SS could establish a facility for Volksdeutsche teachers in rural Transnistria, ethnic German Volksschule instructors completed continuing education courses at Odessa's teacher training institute. Relying on Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg's tomes as general instructional materials, Sonderkommando R's curriculum offered ideological education for Volksdeutsche teachers.Footnote ⁵⁸

Beginning in 1942, Sonderkommando R established its own Odessa newspaper, Der Deutsche in Transnistrien (The German in Transnistria) to trumpet its efforts on behalf of the area's ethnic Germans.Footnote ⁵⁹ Assisted by Beck and two other Volksdeutsche women, SS-Sturmbannführer Friedrich Hallenberger, a longtime Nazi propagandist, edited the weekly that the SS distributed throughout the region.Footnote ⁶⁰ Advertising the VoMi's cultural work, ethnic German marshal prowess, and even tea parties for the city's Volksdeutsche women, Der Deutsche in Transnistrien served as the SS's primary local mouthpiece.Footnote ⁶¹

The SS also established a well-equipped cultural center for Odessa and its environs in the recently confiscated Jewish theater at Gretseskaia Street 46, a few minutes' walk from Bereichkommando XXV's headquarters on Novosel'skaia. The Deutsches Haus (German House) opened its doors during a lavish ceremony on June 13, 1942, to which Sonderkommando R's head, SS-Oberführer Horst Hoffmeyer, invited Transnistria's Romanian Governor, Professor Gheorghe Alexianu.Footnote ⁶² The building sported a lecture hall, a cinema (complete with Volksdeutsche ushers), a library, a restaurant, and even an extensive German-language record collection—all of which were accessible only to German and Volksdeutsche patrons.Footnote ⁶³ To keep Volksdeutsche up with the Reich's latest propaganda, Goerbig personally supervised weekly screenings of the Deutsche Wochenschau, Nazi Germany's official newsreel.Footnote ⁶⁴ Over the next two years, the Deutsches Haus served as Sonderkommando R's choice conference location for SS and Volksdeutsche meetings and added considerable flair to Sonderkommando R's nazification project.Footnote ⁶⁵

* * *

Given the SS's efforts to underpin local Volksdeutsche, the question remains who among Odessa's residents should partake in these heady endeavors? The SS, somewhat surprisingly, had little idea. Even though the VoMi had had extensive practice relocating ethnic Germans from earlier population transfers, it proved unable to conceive viable litmus tests for a category as slippery as ethnic identity.Footnote ⁶⁶ Previous experience led the SS to use factors that included ancestry and language skills, as well as cultural and political orientation, in an otherwise nebulous scheme that relied on Gestalt. Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, the VoMi knew, or at least thought it knew, an ethnic German when it saw one.

Despite Himmler's efforts to codify classification criteria in March 1941, the established methods for discerning individuals of German ethnicity disintegrated on the other side of the Soviet frontier.Footnote ⁶⁷ On December 28, 1941, Hoffmeyer circulated the first of many staff orders on how to classify Transnistria's Volksdeutsche population. Inspired by, but explicitly separate from, the multitiered categories of the Deutsche Volksliste used to classify Volksdeutsche first in occupied Poland, Hoffmeyer's new schema jettisoned criteria other than ancestry.Footnote ⁶⁸ Siebert articulated why Sonderkommando R developed uniquely simplified Volksdeutsche criteria for Transnistria a year later in a follow-up staff order. As he explained:

The VoMi's realization that its standard Volksdeutsche identification criteria were ill-suited for use in the pre-1939 boundaries of the Soviet Union left Sonderkommando R in Transnistria with an ad hoc and diluted classification schema.

For Sonderkommando R, Odessa's Volksdeutsche remained especially suspect. Even before arriving in the city, the SS had concluded that the situation of the city's ethnic Germans was “catastrophic.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The origins of this perception were four-fold. First, as prewar Odessa had the highest proportion of Jews of any Soviet city, the SS suspected that earlier interaction between the city's Volksdeutsche and Jews had eroded the racial “purity” of local ethnic Germans.Footnote ⁷¹ Second, in rural Transnistria many Volksdeutsche affiliated with the Soviet state or in “mixed marriages” with local Jews had anticipated harsh treatment at the hands of the Germans and had voluntarily evacuated with the Red Army. Odessa's two-month siege, by contrast, had prevented a similar escape.Footnote ⁷² Third, unlike Volksdeutsche in rural Transnistria, Odessa's ethnic Germans had avoided earlier SS efforts to murder what it considered racially and politically “undesirable” elements. Whereas in the Transnistrian countryside Einsatzgruppe D had murdered perhaps hundreds of remaining Volksdeutsche “communists” or members of “mixed marriages” with Jews, the city's ethnic Germans were spared the SS's first fatal selections.Footnote ⁷³ Finally, in the first days of the Romanian occupation, Sicherheitsdienst (SD) personnel attached to the Romanian Special Intelligence Service (SSI) had distributed provisional Volksdeutsche identification papers to Odessians without checking to see if the recipients met any of the SS's criteria. Arriving on the SD's heels, Bereichkommando XXV's staff had to rubber stamp—quite literally—these temporary ID cards to extricate Volksdeutsche from Romanian custody.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Odessa, the SS thus confronted an exceptionally suspect local Volksdeutsche population.

Rather than offering guidelines on how to proceed, Sonderkommando R's leaders' orders only underscored their suspicion of Odessa's Volksdeutsche. To prevent further Volksdeutsche “contamination,” the SS in Shyrokolanivka banned ethnic Germans in rural Transnistria from migrating to the city.Footnote ⁷⁵ As for Volksdeutsche already in the metropolis, Sonderkommando R's leaders could only wring their hands. Hoffmeyer's December 1941 guidelines, for example, explicitly ordered Bereichkommando XXV not to use Sonderkommando R's new Volksdeutsche classification schema in Odessa.Footnote ⁷⁶ Barred from employing Sonderkommando R's new Volksdeutsche identification guidelines, Bereichkommando XXV's staff developed, under Claasen's guidance, its own fly-by-night criteria that, in his words, were “not implemented completely systematically.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Not subject to the VoMi's guidelines, the Volksdeutsche ID cards that Claasen distributed remained valid only in Odessa. According to Sonderkommando R's regulations, Volksdeutsche who registered with the VoMi's Odessa office and then moved to rural Transnistria were to be reevaluated and have a permanent record of their residence in the city.Footnote ⁷⁸ While the VoMi remained convinced that it could identify ethnic Germans in eastern Europe, and after a fashion even in Transnistria, it considered the candidates in Odessa so questionable that it failed to offer the city's SS personnel any guidelines on how to proceed.

The material privileges that Bereichkommando XXV afforded Odessa's Volksdeutsche and the SS's inability to translate its racial fantasies into an operational definition of a Volksdeutscher invited many Odessians to apply for a Volkstumsausweis. Bereichkommando XXV's staff was terrified by the prospect of Jews passing as Volksdeutsche to avoid deportation and murder. As an anonymous February 1942 denunciation sent to the VoMi's Odessa office warned, “In our city there are still very many Jews with German and Russian passports … Above all pay attention to cleansing the city … Volksdeutsche … because at most fifty percent of them are Germans and the rest are Jews.”Footnote ⁷⁹ While the informant blamed the Jews' German-sounding surnames and accents for their ability to slip into the category, the reality was probably more prosaic. As Bereichkommando XXV's staff suspected—probably correctly—Romanian authorities pilfered Volksdeutsche identity papers and sold them to Jews and other eager customers on the black market.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even if the number of Odessa's Jews cloaked as Volksdeutsche remained small, they constituted a perpetual boogeyman for local SS officials. In his postwar testimony, for example, Goerbig noted that while many Volksdeutsche inhabited Odessa, “sixty percent of them were Jews.”Footnote ⁸¹ Experience identifying, relocating, and evaluating the racial “worth” of other Volksdeutsche groups failed to provide Bereichkommando XXV's staff with a viable means of identifying Odessa's Volksdeutsche. It did, however, equip it with a deep suspicion of local ethnic Germans and a rabid fear of Jewish “infiltration.” Even if local VoMi officials could not fashion a definition of a Volksdeutscher, their experience told them that their initial selections had failed.

Dissatisfied with the results of its preliminary efforts to identify Volksdeutsche, Bereichkommando XXV hit upon an ingenious solution: if it could not find the city's ethnic Germans, it would simply hire local employees who could. Although retained as administrative support staff, the VoMi's local employees—who were overwhelmingly local Volksdeutsche women—soon received expanded responsibilities that included interviewing and classifying the more than 8,000 OdessiansFootnote ⁸² who responded to Bereichkommando XXV's newspaper, placard, and loudspeaker invitations to apply for Volksdeutsche status.Footnote ⁸³ When the SS deployed its new classification scheme is unclear, but within weeks of retaining her services, Claasen assigned Beck to begin selecting Volksdeutsche for him. In drawing the crucial distinction between Odessa's Jews and Volksdeutsche, the VoMi granted its female helpers considerable latitude. As Edith Herrlich, Beck's successor as Claasen's secretary, later recounted, “an acquaintance of mine, a teacher named Else A., applied for a Volkstumsausweis from Claasen. Because Claasen construed the last syllable of her surname ‘son’ as the Jewish name ending ‘sohn,’ she was not going to receive a Volkstumsausweis. It was also the case that she had a slightly curved nose. Since I knew her parents from the Baltic, I could verify that she was not of Jewish ancestry. She therefore received the ID card.”Footnote ⁸⁴ As Herrlich's anecdote demonstrates, while Claasen and other SS officials were present during the selection process, the unit's female Volksdeutsche employees often remained the ultimate arbiters of “Germanness” in Odessa.

Recruiting its Volksdeutsche classifiers from the initial candidates who applied for a Volkstumsausweis, the VoMi had significant choice in whom to hire as a Volksdeutsche evaluator.Footnote ⁸⁵ In addition to being women, Bereichkommando XXV's interpreter-classifiers fit a three-point profile. First, because of their job's multilingual requirements, Bereichkommando XXV's interpreters frequently had university training, making them better educated than most of the unit's Reich German personnel. Second, like many Soviet Volksdeutsche, they had suffered under Soviet rule. And third, despite the fact that most interpreters had lived in the region for some time and maintained a command of the area's ethnic topography, many of them retained family ties to other Volksdeutsche groups.

Like Beck, Claasen's second assistant, Herrlich, typified these trends. Born in Moscow and a longtime local resident, the thirty-four-year-old's parents were members of Riga's Baltic German bourgeoisie, who moved to Odessa after her father's German employer transferred him there in 1908. Attending Odessa's German primary school, Herrlich then studied at the short-lived German Lyceum that the Kaiserreich's occupiers established during their brief control of the city at the end of World War I. With the Russian Revolution, civil war, and concomitant closing of Odessa's German schools, Herrlich enrolled in a two-year pedagogical course at Odessa's Institute for Literature and Language and embarked on a teaching career. Shortly after marrying in 1930, Soviet authorities arrested both her husband and her father, who died in prison the following year. Following her spouse into exile in Poltava, their new circumstances frayed their relationship and she returned to Odessa. They divorced in 1935. Working as a teacher in Odessa until the city's occupation in 1941, Herrlich registered with Bereichkommando XXV and “from its first days” served on its staff.Footnote ⁸⁶ Capable, unemployed, and embittered, Herrlich was eager to help the VoMi identify the city's Volksdeutsche.

Retaining members of a suspect population to define its own limits proved disastrous for the amorphous category's integrity. Bereichkommando XXV's Volksdeutsche assistants used their new authority to help fellow Odessians navigate the VoMi's complex and lethal classification quagmire. In addition to mistranslating and vouching for a candidate's ethnic credentials, Bereichkommando XXV's Volksdeutsche helpers divulged confidential selection guidelines to applicants.

Volksdeutsche with Jewish spouses profited from insider information on a key loophole in Bereichkommando XXV's classification criteria. Although officially barred by Hoffmeyer from applying Sonderkommando R's Volksdeutsche classification procedure to Odessa, Claasen and his staff eventually did precisely that.Footnote ⁸⁷ According to Hoffmeyer's instructions, Sonderkommando R's personnel were to distribute a Volkstumsausweis to Volksdeutsche with two “purely” ethnic German parents and to Volksdeutsche who lived with “a purely foreign race or predominately foreign race individual.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the latter case, Hoffmeyer directed his subordinates “to decide on a case by case basis” according to their “overall impression” of the family.Footnote ⁸⁹

When, for example, the SS ordered Beck's former English instructor, an Australian-born Volksdeutscher, to register his family at the VoMi's Odessa office, he asked Beck how to proceed. Apparently denounced by a local informant, Beck's former teacher feared revealing his Jewish wife and half-Jewish son to the SS. Aware that Jewish relatives would doom his application, Beck suggested that he present his Russophone wife as an ethnic Russian.Footnote ⁹⁰ With a gentile “foreign race” spouse, the man stood a good chance of presenting a positive “overall impression” at the interview and receiving a Volkstumsausweis that would shield his family from murder. By helping their non-German and even Jewish acquaintances obtain ethnic German identity cards, the VoMi's female helpers sabotaged the SS's efforts to identify Odessa's Volksdeutsche—the precise task that the SS had recruited them to perform.

Despite the SS's dependence on its Volksdeutsche interpreters, postwar testimony indicates that they were not above suspicion. Beck's rapid advancement in the VoMi from Claasen's translator to Goerbig's secretary to Hoffmeyer's interpreter, combined with her haughtiness toward both Volksdeutsche and low-ranking SS personnel, annoyed her coworkers.Footnote ⁹¹ Her colleagues began to spread rumors about her Jewish former husband—now allegedly an NKVD officer—and her half-Jewish child hidden at her family's former summer residence in nearby Lustdorf. Kirschstein took these rumors seriously enough to hunt for the imaginary child in suburban Odessa while Goerbig, Beck's protector, was away.Footnote ⁹²

Notwithstanding these reservations, the unit's female employees remained indispensable to the SS for romantic reasons. In contrast to ubiquitous casual liaisons between the unit's German personnel and local Volksdeutsche women, Odessa's VoMi administrators maintained long-lasting relations with the unit's office staff.Footnote ⁹³ Soon after starting as his secretary, for example, Beck began a very public affair with the married Goerbig.Footnote ⁹⁴ She was not only his frequent guest at high-level social events at Odessa's German Consulate, but she even accompanied him to official functions, such as the opening of the Deutsches Haus.Footnote ⁹⁵ Beck ordered a local jeweler to smelt gold rubles into two ersatz wedding rings that she presented to Goerbig in 1942.Footnote ⁹⁶ After the Germans and many of the ethnic Germans evacuated Odessa in March 1944, Goerbig tracked Beck down in the VoMi's Gymnasialstrasse Resettlement Camp (Umsiedlungslager) in Ostrowo, Poland, and whisked her off to a romantic getaway in Vienna, where they conceived a child.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, after her stint as Claasen's assistant, Herrlich began a relationship with her supervisor, the head of Sonderkommando R's accounting office, SS-Oberscharführer Hans Franck.Footnote ⁹⁸ The two married after the war.Footnote ⁹⁹ Kirschstein's distain for Beck did not extend to Bereichkommando XXV's other female interpreters. Soon after deploying to Transnistria with the unit, he began a relationship with Ingeborg Hirsh, the multilingual daughter of the prewar German vice consul to Kichenev (Chişinău) and sole Reich German secretary assigned to Bereichkommando XXV.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When Hirsch and the still-married Kirschstein evacuated Odessa, she was four months pregnant.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Focused on matters of the heart, the VoMi's SS staff overlooked—either intentionally or unintentionally—continued abuses of its ad hoc identification procedures by its Volksdeutsche interpreters.

Although retaining local women who resembled the Baltic Germans that Bereichkommando XXV's staff had encountered in earlier assignments reassured the unit's German personnel, it also granted the VoMi's female employees the opportunity to participate in and guide the SS's murderous ethnic classification enterprise at the grassroots level. Focusing on predominately male local auxiliaries in the Soviet Union, recent research has largely overlooked the important role that local women played in the Nazi occupation regime.Footnote ¹⁰² As scholars such as Elizabeth Harvey have noted, German women were important agents of Nazi Germanization plans in the east—a position that expanded their freedom of action beyond the Third Reich's gendered constraints.Footnote ¹⁰³ As Lower's recent research indicates, this latitude permitted some German women stationed in the east to murder.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While there is no evidence that Volksdeutsche women attached to Bereichkommando XXV killed, their language skills and familiarity with Odessa's ethnic topography afforded them exceptional input in the SS ethnic classification process. Area Volksdeutsche women played a significant role in identifying “authentic” ethnic Germans in need of aid and Volksdeutsche “imposters” to face the SS's brutality. Nevertheless, as the above examples demonstrate, Bereichkommando XXV's female helpers used their influence over ethnic German classification to privilege their friends and acquaintances even when doing so willfully undermined their SS superiors. Confronted with the untidy realities of the city's ethnic multiplicity, Bereichkommando XXV underpinned its embattled ethnic classification efforts with local Volksdeutsche women, whom it permitted to participate in and ultimately to undermine its broader demographic project.

* * *

Unable to distinguish Volksdeutsche from the rest of the city's population either themselves or through local intermediaries, the VoMi's Odessa office emulated Sonderkommando R's other Bereichkommandos and began murdering racially suspect Odessians caught applying for or carrying a Volkstumsausweis. Bereichkommando XXV's decision to solve its classification quagmire through murder was distinct from Sonderkommando R's mass killing of Jews in rural Transnistria. During the winter of 1941–1942, Romanian occupation authorities deported Jews housed in ghettos on Odessa's environs to Berezovka. There, Romanian forces and their Ukrainian auxiliaries marched the Jews into the surrounding VoMi-controlled countryside. On the initiative of local commanders and eventually with Berlin's blessing, Sonderkommando R's Volksdeutsche Selbstschutz (ethnic German militia force) murdered some 60,000 Jews through mass shooting.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Bereichkommando XXV's involvement in the VoMi's carnage in rural Transnistria was tangential. Although aware of their colleagues' crimes, Odessa's VoMi office lacked both the personnel and the authority to participate in the killing.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ As initial Romanian deportations surprised VoMi officials in rural Transnistria, it is unlikely that Bereichkommando XXV knew about the deportations until they were already underway. Goerbig and his staff's role was limited to facilitating subsequent negotiations between Hoffmeyer and Alexianu in which the two discussed murdering Jews.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While not directly implicated in the killing, the murders signaled to Bereichkommando XXV's staff that using violence to overcome local obstacles to its Volksdeutsche project was now Sonderkommando R's modus operandi.

Bereichkommando XXV's killing operations evolved from its efforts to excise Romanian influence from Odessa's Volksdeutsche affairs. Prior to discussing the institutional development of the VoMi's Odessa death squad, a few words on Romanian-German relations in Transnistria are in order. At least initially, the region's Romanian occupiers accepted the SS's Volksdeutsche policy. A September 1941 agreement between Hoffmeyer and Alexianu assigned control over Volksdeutsche matters to the SS.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Despite such accords and high-level directives to cooperate with Romanian authorities, local relations between the SS and the Romanians soured as the former arrogantly overstepped its agreements and as the latter grasped the long-term consequences of German plans.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the countryside, where Romanian-German agreements designated German-speaking hamlets Sonderkommando R's exclusive bailiwicks, the SS could muster militia forces to deter Romanian meddling and even engage the Romanian military in occasional shootouts.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While Sonderkommando R and the Romanian occupation regime could agree after a fashion on murdering Jews, at the local level they vied for long-term influence in the region.

In Odessa, this conflict assumed a different, albeit no less acrimonious form. There VoMi's dozen Reich German staff members administered thousands of Volksdeutsche spread throughout a major city under foreign occupation. Unable to concentrate its ethnic Germans geographically or field a militia unit, Bereichkommando XXV lacked the strength to deter Romanian interference in its affairs, to say nothing of challenging Romanian authorities.Footnote ¹¹¹ With the Germans at their weakest and the Romanians at their strongest, Odessa became a lightening rod for tensions between the two allied powers.

Despite high-level directives urging restraint, pervasive Romanian retaliation against local Volksdeutsche prompted Goerbig to establish a special detachment to contest specific instances of perceived Romanian meddling.Footnote ¹¹² Well-connected via telephone hotline at the VoMi's Odessa command post, Bereichkommando XXV's self-styled Rechtsabteilung (Judicial Section) and responsible Gerichtsoffizier (court officer) afforded Volksdeutsche round-the-clock protection from the city's Romanian occupiers.Footnote ¹¹³ Assigned to the post, Kirschstein—the unit's self-proclaimed “gofer” (Dienstmädchen)—later conceded that these elevated titles were a bit pompous for a one-man operation housed in a back room marked with a cardboard sign.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Kirschstein nevertheless had his hands full. As he later noted, “the Romanian police often looked for an excuse to rip off Volksdeutsche ID cards, food, and vehicles.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In instances of simple attempted robbery, Kirschstein confronted the Romanian perpetrators directly. As Pauline Zimmermann later recounted, “Sometime in the summer of 1942 Romanian officers attempted to take away my concert grand piano. After I notified the [Ethnic] German Liaison Office, [Kirschstein] came and prevented its removal. [Kirschstein] admonished the Romanians that they were not to set foot in my apartment again. He then attached a sign to the apartment door indicating that no one was to enter my apartment again.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Perhaps in retaliation for the continued Romanian theft of Volksdeutsche property, Bereichkommando XXV's staff—possibly under Kirschstein's supervision—reportedly began carjacking Romanian employees. As a local tow-truck driver for Odessa's Romanian administrators complained to Wehrmacht investigators in early March 1942, while he was transporting a commandeered car back to the garage for service, “he was chased out of the [tow] truck by German soldiers, and the truck with the car attached was driven into the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle's courtyard.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the event that Odessa's Romanian authorities arrested Volksdeutsche on real or trumped-up charges, Kirschstein intervened in Romanian court proceedings and boasted that he was even able to obtain stays of execution for condemned Volksdeutsche.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Whether Kirschstein wielded such authority is unclear—as Beck later noted, he was “a poser.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Be that as it may, as the unit's court officer, Kirschstein ran interference with Romanian officials on matters ranging from securing food shipments to obtaining buildings for Volksdeutsche use from the Romanian housing administration.Footnote ¹²⁰

Realizing in spring 1942 that their efforts to distribute ethnic German identification cards to only Odessa's “real” Volksdeutsche had failed, Goerbig and his colleagues decided to expand Kirschstein's purview to include murdering racially suspect applicants.Footnote ¹²¹ Whether Goerbig's superiors consented to Bereichkommando XXV's decision to murder or whether this is another example of the SS's “on the spot” decision making “in the east” remains unclear.Footnote ¹²² Although distinct from Sonderkommando R's mass shootings in the surrounding countryside, Bereichkommando XXV's staff presented its local initiatives as a component of the VoMi's mass murders in rural Transnistria.Footnote ¹²³ As Kirschstein embellished in his 1944 Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RuSHA, or Race and Resettlement Main Office) autobiography, his duties included “the liquidation of Jews in the Odessa area.”Footnote ¹²⁴ At precisely the time that the large-scale murder of Jews in the Transnistrian countryside concluded, Bereichkommando XXV's personnel began pursuing racially suspect Odessians.

The VoMi's initial murders in Odessa targeted Jews who had obtained a Volkstumsausweis illicitly. Its first documented killing occurred in early March 1942, shortly after Kirschstein doubled the Rechtsabteilung's staff by recruiting Friedrich Hummel, a twenty-year-old ethnic German from nearby Michaelsfeld, as his assistant.Footnote ¹²⁵ Apparently on the lookout for Volksdeutsche imposters, Claasen detained “a red-haired, unshaven, medium-sized, Jewish-looking man” when he appeared at the VoMi's office with a Volkstumsausweis.Footnote ¹²⁶ After a brief staff meeting, Goerbig ordered Kirschstein to imprison the man in a temporary basement detention cell for interrogation the next morning. Overnight the man escaped Kirschstein's flimsy dungeon, only to be recaptured by a VoMi patrol the following day.Footnote ¹²⁷ The man's subsequent questioning was brutal. As Kirschstein later described, during interrogations he frequently pummeled suspects with his fists and rubber hoses.Footnote ¹²⁸ Satisfied that the man was a Jew, Bereichkommando XXV's staff decided to murder him.

On Goerbig's orders, Kirschstein and Hummel loaded the man into a captured Soviet staff car to transport him to what would become the unit's preferred execution site. Although Hummel and Kirschstein described their Jewish victim as a Russian to conceal their racial motives for the killing from the West German police—motives considered sufficiently “base” as to carry murder charges during the 1960s—their postwar testimony provides the most vivid account of what transpired.Footnote ¹²⁹ As Hummel recounted, “Kirschstein ordered me to keep an eye on the Russian and to guard him during the drive. For this reason I was armed with a Russian percussion revolver. Kirschstein drove the car past Odessa's main train station and in the direction of the sanitarium that had housed the NKVD headquarters prior to the war. At a side entrance to the sanitarium Kirschstein stopped the car.”Footnote ¹³⁰ As Kirschstein continued, “Hummel, the Russian, and I got out. As Hummel looked for the SD shooting pit, I followed [him] with the Russian. The Russian sensed that he was about to be shot. As he walked next to me, he hit me with his right hand … [and] … I lurched to the side. As I drew my pistol, the Russian was already thirty to forty meters away and running. I fired at him … [and] … Hummel heard my shots. He kneeled on the ground and fired with his elbow propped up… . The Russian was hit … and fell to the ground. I fired a final shot in his chest through his heart.”Footnote ¹³¹ Prior to returning to Bereichkommando XXV's headquarters Hummel and Kirschstein took turns posing with the body for photographs, which Kirschstein showed to his friends and relatives a few weeks later while home in Berlin on leave for Easter.Footnote ¹³²

By the time that Kirschstein returned to Odessa in April 1942, murder had become routine and applied also to women and children who “had obtained an ID card fraudulently.”Footnote ¹³³ Although Bereichkommando XXV's primary targets were Jewish Volksdeutsche “imposters,” the SS also targeted gentiles who attempted to benefit from privileged Volksdeutsche status. After repeatedly arresting a local woman for impersonating an ethnic German without adequate proof to act, for example, Kirschstein finally obtained evidence of her Jewish ancestry and had her arrested.Footnote ¹³⁴ As Rudolf S., a Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps (NSKK, or National Socialist Motor Corps) member lent to Bereichkommando XXV in mid-1942, recounted, “On the day of her interrogation, I watched from a neighboring room as Kirschstein brutally beat her with a rubber trungeon. The next morning she was yanked into a car to be liquidated outside Odessa. Along with NSKK-Scharführer Erwin Nießner,Footnote ¹³⁵ I drove behind them and witnessed Kirschstein murder the woman through a shot to the neck (Genickschuß). Near the scene of the murder there were several large open graves that were already partially filled with corpses. The woman's body was kicked into one of the graves and doused with gasoline from a container that they had brought along to incinerate the body immediately. The arrival of a motorized field police (Feldgendarmerie) patrol, however, prevented the cremation. The members of the field police fired warning shots to announce their arrival and yelled to Kirschstein, ‘don't shoot, the woman is a Romanian.’ Kirschstein responded that it was already too late.”Footnote ¹³⁶ As the woman's death demonstrates, posing as ethnic Germans could prove deadly to Jews and non-Jews alike.

To provide the necessary manpower for expanded operations, the VoMi's fledgling terror apparatus recruited additional young Volksdeutsche men. Among the new hires was Kirschstein's “right hand,” twenty-seven-year-old Johannes Volk.Footnote ¹³⁷ As his Volksdeutsche coworkers noted after the war, Volk had earned a deservedly “bad reputation” prior to joining the unit.Footnote ¹³⁸ Born in Baden, an ethnic German enclave sixty kilometers north of Odessa, Volk attended German-language school until the age of thirteen or fourteen, when he enrolled in a movie projector operator course in nearby Selz. After working as a projectionist for a traveling cinema troop and in a state-run fruit store, Volk became Baden's postmaster in 1938. Presumably because of his assumed reliability as a state employee, Soviet officials exempted him from deportation in August 1941.Footnote ¹³⁹ During its sweep of the area a few weeks later, Einsatzgruppe D recruited the polyglot Volk—one of the area's few remaining ethnic German men—to serve as an interpreter. According to the testimony of Einsatzgruppe D's former members, by the time that it reached Sevastopol, Volk's unit was taking part in the mass shootings.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Based on Volk's German naturalization application from 1944, he acclimatized to the new Nazi order. Not only did he list his religious affiliation in Nazi terminology as “deistic” (gottgläubig), but he also named his second son, born in February 1942, Adolf.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Returning from his Crimean deployment to Baden, Volk relocated to Odessa in search of work.Footnote ¹⁴² Impressed by his track record as one of the Third Reich's killers, Kirschstein recruited Volk for the VoMi's terror apparatus.Footnote ¹⁴³ Clad as an SS-Unterscharführer and armed with both a pistol and a submachine gun, Volk reprised his role as one of Nazi Germany's henchmen for the duration of Odessa's occupation.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Assisted by an experienced group of Volksdeutsche killers, Bereichkommando XXV further overstepped its mandate in fall 1942 and pursued criminals who began preying on the city's Volksdeutsche in the midst of a breakdown of law and order.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Although aware that criminal matters fell under Romanian jurisdiction, given its acrimonious conflict with Odessa's Romanian occupiers, Bereichkommando XXV's Judicial Section doubted that their allies would take action against the alleged perpetrators.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Resolved to stamp out crimes against Volksdeutsche themselves, Bereichkommando XXV launched a punitive campaign against Odessa's criminals. For example, after hearing that a pair of Russians had kidnapped a young Volksdeutsche woman, raped her, and stolen her clothes, Kirschstein and his staff apprehended the culprits.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As Kirschstein later recounted, “since the two of them refused to confess in the beginning … I hit them during the interrogation. What I later found out was hair-raising. Incensed by their outrageous crimes, I drove with them to the outskirts of Odessa…. At a dip near the catacombs I shot both Russians from behind. The bodies were left at the entrance to the catacombs.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Committed to expanding the VoMi's sovereignty over Odessa's Volksdeutsche affairs, Bereichkommando XXV refused to tolerate common criminals threatening the city's Volksdeutsche.

Perhaps nothing typifies the VoMi's determination to use its authority over Volksdeutsche affairs in Odessa to expand its influence in the city more than its 1943 anti-partisan mission against Soviet forces in the city's catacombs. Some 200 kilometers in length and with more than 160 entrances, Odessa's catacombs provided the ideal lair from which Soviet agents could launch a sustained underground campaign against the city's occupiers.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Although quasi-dormant after mid-1942, Soviet partisans in Odessa's catacombs remained a thorn in the side of the city's occupiers that Romanian forces only periodically engaged.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ When a young Volksdeutsche woman appeared at Bereichkommando XXV's command post with a fantastic story about her service with the city's subterranean fifth column, Goerbig and his colleagues pounced on the opportunity to resolve Odessa's partisan problem.

As Beck later recounted, the very pregnant former medical school student had conceived a child with her Russian husband, a Red Army lieutenant stationed in the catacombs. In exchange for prenatal care for her in Odessa's VoMi-run hospital, her husband agreed to surrender and work as a double agent. Reinforced with Sonderkommando R personnel from Shyrokolanivka, the entirety of Bereichkommando XXV's staff—including its Volksdeutsche auxiliaries, Hummel and Volk—cordoned off Sobornaya Ploshad', the prearranged location for the Red Army lieutenant's surrender. So as not to spook the man by the sight of uniformed SS personnel, Goerbig assigned Beck to accompany the woman to the meeting point and to wait with her for her husband on a park bench. When the man arrived, they proceeded to Bereichkommando XXV's headquarters. Under the supervision of Odessa's chief Abwehr officer, Oberstleutnant Johannes Schindler,Footnote ¹⁵¹ the Soviet officer used his prearranged radio frequency and codes to spread misinformation to his Red Army superiors, who recognized the ruse.Footnote ¹⁵² Although unsuccessful, Bereichkommando XXV's foray into anti-partisan measures underscores the unit's effort to use its limited authority over Volksdeutsche matters as an entrée to expanded influence in Odessa.Footnote ¹⁵³

While the VoMi's Lilliputian terror apparatus inserted the SS into the bailiwick of Odessa's Romanian occupiers, its efforts to police “Germandom's” boundaries were ineffective. As the VoMi prepared to evacuate Odessa in early March 1944, Bereichkommando XXV's staff implemented a final selection that ironically attempted to punish Odessians who denied being Volksdeutsche. Relaying the evacuation order through its local ethnic German precinct captains (Obmänner), the VoMi commanded all Volksdeutsche to report to the city's German school with their luggage for evacuation to Poland. As one of the evacuees later testified, “it was made clear to us that those who did not follow the order would be shot.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Anecdotal evidence suggests that the VoMi carried out its threat.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ When Odessa's Volksdeutsche baker refused to separate from his ethnically Russian wife and evacuate with the Germans, for example, Bereichkommando XXV's death squad allegedly gunned him down.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Threatening the city's denizens who resisted evacuation as Volksdeutsche undermined the SS's mission to identify Odessa's ethnic Germans by diluting the category's racial and political “purity.” Given that ethnic German status provided Odessa's residents with an opportunity to flee the Soviet advance, escaping the city as a Volksdeutscher proved attractive to many Odessians who might not otherwise have chosen to be identified as such. As the evacuees were to colonize German-occupied Poland, impressing reluctant and often suspect Volksdeutsche into evacuation transports merely further threatened the Nazi population project. Confronted with an ethnic reality that the VoMi could not control, Bereichkommando XXV's increased coercion became self sabotage.

* * *

Bergen has noted that “the essential tenuousness of the concept [of ‘ethnic Germanness’] contributed to the production of anti-semitism in Eastern Europe.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ This same tenuousness also shaped the VoMi's bloody attempts to “make” and “unmake” Volksdeutsche in Odessa. The city's ethnic German inhabitants presented the SS with tantalizing prospects for a future German outpost to challenge long-term Romanian influence in southern Ukraine's entrepôt. Dispatching its largest and most sophisticated Bereichkommando in Transnistria, the VoMi attempted to succor Odessa's Volksdeutsche through special access to food, housing, and looted Jewish property and to nazify the city's ethnic German residents through intensive propaganda and educational initiatives. Nevertheless, the SS feared that Odessa's fluid ethnic boundaries threatened its entire demographic project by degrading the racial “worth” of the city's Volksdeutsche residents. To identify members of the Volksgemeinschaft in Odessa, the SS, aided by local Volksdeutsche women, undertook an extensive, but ultimately failed, ethnic classification campaign. Unable to separate Volksdeutsche from their fellow Odessians through classification, the VoMi, again assisted by local ethnic Germans, expanded earlier efforts to frustrate area Romanian authorities to murder systematically suspected Volksdeutsche “imposters.” Staffed with personnel for operations against local criminals and partisans, Odessa's VoMi officers used their purview over Volksdeutsche affairs to insert German influence into the bailiwick of the city's Romanian occupiers. Not only did the VoMi's expanded activities fail to dislodge Romanian influence, but using coercion to police Germandom's boundaries in retreat threatened to dilute further the “purity” of the city's ethnic German population by encouraging even reluctant residents to flee with the SS.

Beyond recovering a previously understudied dimension to the history of the German occupation of the Soviet Union, an analysis of VoMi ethnic German policy, and especially the practice of Volksdeutsche classification, underscores three broader trends. First, disregarding superiors' orders to maintain good relations with the Third Reich's Romanian allies, local SS officials used their authority over ethnic German matters to expand German influence in Odessa dramatically. Second, when confronted with a local ethnic reality that proved exceptionally difficult to classify, even in comparison to earlier and tortured SS Volksdeutsche registration efforts elsewhere, the VoMi selected murder as a technique to police Germandom's imaginary boundaries “in the east.” And finally, Odessa's VoMi unit's rapid evolution from a Nazi Volksdeutsche welfare agency, to an ethnic classification unit, to a death squad provided opportunities for area residents, and particularly local women, to contribute to, and in some instances, to help to guide the machinery of destruction at the grassroots level.