Where did the stateless go? The example of Peter Tumanoff: Czarist army officer, anti-Bolshevist, humble farmer hand and much more
This is the third blog post in my series about the Nansenists: people rendered stateless as a consequence of the First World War and eligible for a newly created identity document, the Nansen passport. For my earlier posts see here.
While writer and journalist Joseph Roth was sharing his reflections on statelessness in the newspapers, under his gaze in Berlin thousands of stateless people, mainly former inhabitants of the Czarist empire, presented themselves at the offices of the representative of the League of Nation’s Nansen Office. This started in the early 1920s and continued well into the Third Reich period.
Some stateless people were needing acute assistance because, for instance, their Nansen passport that had allowed them to travel to Berlin expired and needed renewal. Others needed a new Nansen passport to be able to obtain visa to visit family or do business in Poland. Again others requested to migrate on from Germany to a whole range of new destinations, from common ones like France to special ones like Egypt.
Many of these stateless were ordinary people uprooted up by war and trying to make a living. Sometimes they lived with parts of their families from the former Russian or the Ottoman empires; sometimes they had established new families or wandered alone. Some were princes and princesses, diplomats, engineers and officers. Others peasants, bakers, unskilled workers or former POWs from the Czarist army. Men, women and children; people in old age and babies.
One of these thousands crossing Berlin was Peter Tumanoff.
On Wednesday 16 May 1934, with Hitler strengthening his grip on German politics and society after assuming power more than a year earlier, Tumanoff left his temporary lodgings at the Kastanien Allee in Berlin and headed to the Nansen Office a few blocks further on. There, he presented himself and sat down with the local staff to fill in forms about who he was and what he needed.
Tumanoff’s case shows that it was not always the urge to cross national borders or the need of a Nansen passport that instigated a visit to a local Nansen Office.
In his case it was about acquiring documents that would allow him to stay in Berlin for about two months in order to receive treatment at the Russian hospital. Tumanoff had been suffering from stomach illnesses that made it impossible for him to work longer stretches before having to be taken to hospital over and over again.
The treatment he could get at the Russian hospital in Berlin would cure his disease and Tumanoff and the Nansen staff explained extensively in letters to the Police department and other authorities that his stay would be temporary, that he would get shelter and food at the Russian hospital and that in general Tumanoff was of good character.
So…what made a stateless person into a someone of good character?
Tumanoff, born in Gorki in 1895, had studied agriculture and served as an officer in the Czarist army during the First World War. In the documents created on 16 May it is stressed that he continued to fight with the armies of the anti-Bolshevist generals Denikin and Wrangel after the Russian empire collapsed following the revolutions in 1917 and descended into a civil war.
In 1920 when the ‘White’ Russian forces fell apart he fled Russian territory and ended up in Romania.
In 1922 Tumanoff travelled to Czechoslovakia and then moved on to France in 1925. In August 1929 he had come to Germany where he had been working as an ordinary farmers hand in Mecklenburg and Pomerania ever since.
His diligent laboring and humbleness were underscored by the Nansen Office:
A ‘quiet and diligent Refugee’ who ‘despite his earlier career works as a simple workman’ and moreover will not create any costs or liabilities for the Berlin authorities.[1]
Letters were made for the Police department, including a letter from the Russian doctor who would be in charge of the treatment of Tumanoff, and a general statement to show any authority requesting reliable information. Tumanoff could simply present the statement from the Nansen Office to proof any authority he was who he said was and in no way outside the law or a burden on the German state.
There is no more information in this archival folder about what happened to Tumanoff after May 1934. Did he get his treatment and was he cured? Was his story about his past true? Can we find more than this one snipped and get a fuller picture of what stateless people experienced and how the Nansen scheme worked out for them?
Saved in the archive with the May 1934 documents we find a few statements from 1932 related to Tumanoff’s German work permit. Again, as far as the scare sources can indicate, an issue that the Nansen Office staff tried to help out with.
Historical research can shift between huge questions about the effects of war and mass violence to micro histories of individual people who were in the maelstrom of the events. We can get lost on both the macro and the micro level. It’s an art to create the right balance and flow.
After I had stumbled upon Tumanoff as a random example of the people whose experiences I wanted to learn to understand, I couldn’t resist a few further explorations to check whether one random individual could easily be found in other archives as well.
I set the timer: I allowed myself to hang on to Tumanoff for a bit longer and look for him in the files from the Nansen Offices in Romania, Czechoslovakia and France and to ask my colleague Dr Yaacov Falkov from Tel Aviv University to help translating some intriguing looking handwritten statements on the back of the form Tumanoff filled in at the Nansen Office.
Soon, information from the archives piled up, though mostly not on Tumanoff himself but about people in similar circumstances. Other former Russian officers stranded in Romania and trying to move to Czechoslovakia for instance in 1923 and 1924. Those were the early days of the possibility to obtain Nansen passports. Romanian politics at the same time seem to have opted for pushing out as many Russian refugees as possible.
Then there’s Czechoslovakia and France: the League of Nations archive holds huge collections on these local Nansen Offices and their activities. How much time will I allow myself for this simple blog post!? My timer says: you have to move on and revisit later…
I allow myself a few extra minutes.
Tumanoff — his first name Peter changed into Pierre — turns up on a list of Russian refugees selected in France to work in coal mines in 1926.[2] It may well be that from the coal mines he went to Germany a few years later.
Then Dr Falkov emails me with the translation of the handwritten statements.
This is what Tumanoff wrote:
I asked for permission to enter Russia, i.e. registered at the Soviet consulate. My three applications were rejected. I have a Fremdenpass marked “Stattlos”. P. Tumanoff.
And this is what was written by a friend who apparently accompanied him:
I, the undersigned, have known Pyotr Tumanov since December 1920 from the Russian refugee camp in Romania, as a lieutenant of the Don army. I know [him] from Czechoslovakia, as a student of the Russian Cooperative Institute, from France and Germany. Berlin, 16.5.34. Lieutenant Adrian Paukov
In other words, Tumanoff had tried to go back, but had failed. Although that probably implies that he was not active in the White Russian veterans’ movement he still had friends from his army time that were willing to confirm his story. He had served in the Don Army that surrendered to the Red Army in the spring of 1920 — apparently they had escaped captivity and reached Romanian territory.
But now I really need to stop my explorations since reading all the mostly handwritten documents will take too long, even with the help of colleagues! One thing I’ll do in the future is save the scanned documents and work with hand writing recognition (HTR) software to quicken my search and facilitate translation.
Even if I won’t find any more references to the quite randomly chosen example Peter Tumanoff, contextualizing his story via exploring conditions of the army he was part of in 1920, the conditions for Russian officers, soldiers or in general Russian refugees in 1920s Romania, Czechoslovakia and France in the 1920s can give us an indication of the experiences of thousands of stateless people.
Okay, one last quick check to finish our journey with Tumanoff for now. I go to the holdings of the Arolsen Archives.
And there Peter Tumanoff is again — Listed on an early post-Second World War index card for people imprisoned, liberated or deceased during the war. Tumanoff is no longer an officer, nor a humble farmer hand, but described as a ‘Schutzhäftling’ — one of all those people imprisoned by the Nazis without trial or protection.
In 1934 the Third Reich wasn’t dangerous for him yet. Though it turned out to be so. I wonder how the authorities came to understand him primarily in the course of the 1930s and unfolding war: a Russian, an anti-Bolshevist veteran, a stateless person, a Nansenist? Have his Nansen Office papers helped him in any sense when things got really hard? Questions that bring us back to the macro level: the dynamics between war, violence and statelessness.
References
[1] C1222/118/87.2 Nansen Office for Refugees Delegation in Germany (Berlin) — Russian Refugees Case Files — Letters Tu-Usk., 1929–1938, League of Nations Archives, Geneva.
[2] C1241/137/130, Nansen Office for Refugees Delegation in Germany (Berlin) — Transportation of Russian Refugee Workers to Toul, France, 1926 (Creation)
