Bruckenthal () was a village (a ''colony'') located in what is now
Sokal Raion
Sokal ( uk, Сокаль, romanized: ''Sokal'') is a city located on the Bug River in Chervonohrad Raion, Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. It hosts the administration of Sokal urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. The population is approx ...
,
Lviv Oblast, of
Western Ukraine.
The village was established in the course of the
Josephine colonization by German Catholic settlers in 1786.
In the interwar period the village belonged to Poland, and was a seat of
gmina
The gmina (Polish: , plural ''gminy'' , from German ''Gemeinde'' meaning ''commune'') is the principal unit of the administrative division of Poland, similar to a municipality. , there were 2,477 gminas throughout the country, encompassing over 4 ...
(a municipality) including several other villages. In January 1940 the majority of the inhabitants moved out (
Heim ins Reich
The ''Heim ins Reich'' (; meaning "back home to the Reich") was a foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler before and during World War II, beginning in 1938. The aim of Hitler's initiative was to convince all ''Volksdeutsche'' (ethnic Germans) wh ...
). The empty houses were taken over mostly by local Poles. In the late March 1944 the village was razed by
Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and
Ukrainian Insurgent Army, killing over 200 people.
Refugees
From the early 1910s, regional unrest led to numerous residents leaving for Germany and America, often to the upper American Midwest, joining other
Germans from Russia in the "German Triangle" of the central Dakotas. Others were not so lucky, and ended up as refugees during
WWII. Afterwards, letters and money were sent between relatives on the west and eastern side of the iron curtain, but by the 1970s communication ceased, possibly due to Russian integration of cultural Germans.
Notes
Ghost towns in Ukraine
Villages in Chervonohrad Raion
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