About Myself & Repression of Germans in South Ukraine

John Philipps writes in the Preface:

"Thousands of colonists from the Southwest of Germany followed the call of the Russian Tsar Alexander I in a manifesto dated February 20, 1804 and, looking for happiness, freedom and peace, entered upon the very difficult journey toward South Russia. Our ancestors, too, traveled through the deep and muddy roads toward the East, toward Russia's newly-acquired regions near the Black Sea."

"My writing is based on personal and experienced facts. It is impossible for me to report on the entirety of German villages between the Rivers Bug and Dnyester, and thus my memories are primarily of the two former districts, Karl-Liebknecht and the Tiligulo-Beresan, which today are part of the Nikolayev administrative region. The tragedy of the Beresan colonies and their residents is neither a historical accident nor an exception. The suffering of all other Germans in Russia following the October Revolution, be it on the land or in the cities, is similar to that of the Beresaners as two drops of water are similar."

"I would first like to describe the development of the mother and daughter colonies, and the geographical aspects of rivers, limans, river deltas and valleys. Dr. Karl Stumpp's maps show that German settlements in the Odessa region consisted of innumerable small villages and chutors minor settlements, the latter no longer in existence after 1917, having been comprised mainly of German estates, whose owners were largely deported or murdered. These estates were usually converted to sovchos state-operated large collectives."

Alex Herzog, translator for this work from German to English writes in the Translator's Comments: "A particularly important facet of expertise John Philipps brings to this and his previous historical books is his training and experience as an agronomist in the Black Sea areas he describes herein. The fact that John Philipps traveled extensively across the Beresan region imparts his descriptions of the German villages and of how the land was worked - in normal and in collective times - with a degree of authenticity that other historical writers might not be able to bring to their work."

This book contains extensive photographs and maps in color and black and white. Pages 83 to 99 includes "Lists (by village) of those exiled or shot to death from Rayon Karl-Liebknecht - Landau, Speyer, Sulz, Karlsruhe, Kathariental, Johannestal, Waterloo, Rohrbach, Halbstadt, Thaelmann-Petrovka; Rayon Mostovsky - Rastadt, Muenchen."