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She wants to keep history alive. Yunna Kinereish, 22, is studying public relations in Kazakhstan’s modern capital, Astana. She describes herself as a Kazakh German.
“I am German by ethnicity. But I also feel that I’m Kazakh, because I keep the traditions with my family, and I have this mentality,” she told DW.
Kinereish, who belongs to the Wiedergeburt (Revival) Association of Germans in Kazakhstan, is one of 223,000 Kazakh Germans living in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan today.
Kinereish recently acted in a play at the association’s youth theater that told the fate of her Russian German forebears.
From the 18th century onward, Germans were incentivized to leave Germany and settle in the Russian empire, including in Ukraine’s Black Sea region.
But after the armies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet dictator Josef Stalinstarted deporting hundreds of thousands of Germans living in Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Collective punishment
Innocent people who had nothing to do with Nazi Germany’s invasion and atrocities were collectively held responsible by the Soviet power and denounced as spies and collaborators.
There were more than a million deportees, of whom at least 200,000 died as a result of expulsion, hunger, and forced labor.
“My family is part of this history, these terrible times. They were driven out of the Ukrainian village Kleinwärter, a settlement of ethnic Germans in Ukraine.”
Yunna Kinereish says she was very moved by the personal stories she and her friends had brought to the stage at the House of Friendship, where the association has its office. “It’s not easy for me, because it all touches my heart very deeply. I actually feel like crying. But when I’m on stage …, I have to be strong.”
Culture and remembrance under one roof
The modern-looking House of Friendship in the capital Astana is the center for German culture in the city. Financed primarily by the German government, it offers language courses, engages in social work and fosters a culture of remembrance, focusing on the themes of deportation and repression under the Soviet regime.
Yunna Kinereish doesn’t only present the history of her people on stage: She is also documenting it on film. In 2025, she made a film about German women incarcerated in ALZhIR (Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland), among the most infamous in the Soviet Gulag system.
During Stalin’s brutal campaign of political repression and state-sponsored terror in the 1930s, a period known as the Great Terror, the Soviet Union established its biggest camp system in Kazakhstan. 18,000 women passed through the ALZhIR camp alone. These women were imprisoned there only because their husbands had been convicted of being traitors or enemies of the people. Among them were 167 ethnic German women, whose stories are told in the film.
The memorial for the ALZhIR women’s camp is located just outside the gates of Astana, which only became the capital in 1997.
Astana’s roads are permanently clogged with traffic. There are almost no pedestrians, and no cyclists at all. The city is growing, with new buildings shooting up all along the outskirts of the city. Beyond them is the barren steppe; the village of Akmol is about an hour’s drive away.
Before entering the actual ALZhIR museum, the visitor passes through the Arch of Grief, a huge steel construction that commemorates the suffering and forced labor the women endured. The museum itself contains personal items that belonged to the female prisoners, models of their primitive quarters, original documents and photographs.
Representative stories
One of the photos is of Gertrud Platais, a woman with German roots who spent years incarcerated in ALZhIR. Platais was a print worker from Lower Silesia, part of modern-day Poland. She married Karl Eduard Platais and became a Soviet citizen. In 1938, during the Great Terror, her husband was arrested. Gertrud was convicted, too as a “relative of a traitor to the homeland.”
She was transferred to ALZhIR, in a region where temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in summer and minus 40 degreees Celsius in winter. Here, she was forced to work as an embroiderer until 1946. After this, she was banished for life to the huge Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp, known as Karlag. Gertrud Platais wasn’t rehabilitated until 1956. Hers is just one story documenting the terror of the Soviet system on Kazakh soil.
Karlag was by far the biggest camp system and its complex covered an area about 22 times the size of New York City. Karlag was not just a prison camp, but a huge economic and agricultural complex. Almost one million people passed through it between 1931 and 1959.
Around 10,000 prisoners are believed to have died here between 1940 and 1950 alone: of starvation, cold, sickness, and the effects of forced labor.
Staged remembrance
The museum sits in the middle of the Kazakh steppe, near the city of Karaganda, about 250 kilometers south of Astana. It is located in the building that used to house the camp system administration. Visiting German historians and specialists are slightly puzzled: People were not tortured or tormented in this building, it was simply where the administration was done.
Here, interrogation and torture cells have been reconstructed, and everything is underscored by melodramatic music pouring from ubiquitous loudspeakers. It comes across as staged rather than authentic. As at the ALZhIR memorial, the Karlag museum has few visitors. Even well-educated young Kazakhs probably don’t know about it.”
Many people in Kazakhstan, and certain areas of politics, have almost no interest in coming to terms with the country’s often brutal history,” says Katherine M. Erdman. An American anthropologist and archaeologist at the Nazarbayev University in Astana, she has been researching the Gulag system for about a decade now.
“The landscape has been shaped by forced labor”
“We wanted to find out where exactly the camps were, and how they can still be recognized today.” Erdman and her students relied on modern technology such as drone flights, but conducting interviews and research on the ground was also a part of it.
“In many regions, the landscape has been shaped by forced labor,” Erdman says. Factories were often constructed alongside the primitive living quarters. Houses were built using bricks made by forced laborers.
The researchers share their findings directly with neighbors and with local administrations. “Often we’re just met with apathy, or flat-out rejection,” says Erdman. At a time of economic and social advancement, many don’t want to be reminded of the inglorious aspects of the past.
Erdman says there is a desire to demonstrate to the international community that the country is dealing with the dark side of its history, but that she often experiences lack of interest and even rejection. The academic has been conducting research in Kazakhstan for a decade, but there is no state funding for a further lectureship.
The Kazakh German Yunna Kinereish is one of the young people in Kazakhstan who want to ensure that the past is not forgotten. “My ancestors survived the Gulag system in Kazakhstan,” she tells DW. “So it’s important to me that we don’t forget our roots, and that what our forefathers experienced and suffered is passed on.”
This article, originally published in German, was written in the context of a study trip organized by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany. Since 1998, the foundation, funded by the German taxpayer, has dedicated itself to studying and reappraising the former communist dictatorships in Germany, the GDR, and other countries.
