page_title: Bessarabia Germans
section_title: New settlements
hierarchical_section_title: Bessarabia Germans / Place names / New settlements
caption_attribution_description: English: German minorities in Eastern Europe 1925, since a german map
context_page_description: The Bessarabia Germans were an ethnic group who lived in Bessarabia between 1814 and 1940.
  From 1814 to 1842, 9,000 of them immigrated from the German areas Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, some Prussian areas of modern-day Poland and Alsace, France, to the Russian governorate of Bessarabia at the Black Sea. The area, bordering on the Black Sea, was part of the Russian Empire, in the form of Novorossiya; it later became the Bessarabia Governorate.
  Throughout their 125-year history, the Bessarabia Germans were an overwhelmingly rural population. Until their moving to the Greater Germany, they were a minority consisting of 93,000 people who made up some 3% of the population. They were distinguished from the Black Sea Germans who settled to the east of Odessa, and from the Dobrujan Germans in Dobruja.
  The most prominent person of Bessarabian German ancestry is the former German President Horst Köhler. Before emigrating in 1940, his parents lived in the German colony of Rîșcani in northern Bessarabia, being later on moved to Poland, which was by that time occupied by Germany, where Köhler was born.
context_section_description: With the establishment of the last colony (Hoffnungstal) in 1842, the influx of emigrants from Germany ended. Afterwards, a self-colonisation began by private settlement within the country. The boundaries of the twenty-four Mutterkolonies had become limited due to increase in the population. Bessarabian Germans bought or leased land from large Russian landowners and created new villages.
  In 1920, two years after the Union of Bessarabia with Romania, began the Romanian agrarian reform, in which large land owners with more than 100 hectares were expropriated of the land in excess of that. Their property was distributed to the peasants, who each received 6 hectares. Hektardörfer, or hectare-towns sprang up on the free land. Approximately 150 German settlements resulted during the presence of the Germans in Bessarabia between 1814 and 1940.
caption: Distribution of ethnic Germans in Central/Eastern Europe in 1925, also highlighting German settlements in Bessarabia
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