"Pious and able people ..."

The exhibition with items on loan from the Bessarabiendeutsches Museum in Stuttgart showed the eventful history of the German colonists in Bessarabia from the settlement in 1814 to the present day.

In 1812, the Russian Tsar Alexander I invited German settlers to settle on the Black Sea and promised them land and civil liberties. In the course of their 125-year history of settlement, the Germans developed a flourishing community here. As a small minority in a colorful variety of ethnic and religious communities, they lived in peaceful neighborhood with Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Jews and other groups.

The end came in 1940, when 93,500 Germans were resettled from Bessarabia as part of the Nazi program “Heim ins Reich” and mostly settled in occupied Poland. At the beginning of 1945 they had to flee from there and create a new existence for themselves in a divided Germany.