Ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan face legacy of the Soviet Union

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 Stalin started deporting hundreds of thousands of Germans living in Russia and Ukraine to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

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.

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