[2] Due to difficult living conditions, the mortality rates were high, and only 8,300 people returned home after the war.

[2] The deportations had not received much attention from scholars, as they were overshadowed by the much larger refugee crisis in the Russian Empire[5] and the expulsion of Germans after World War II.

[6] Military action began on the Eastern Front on 17 August 1914 with the Battle of Stallupönen during the Russian invasion of East Prussia.

[7] As the German army was concentrated on the Western Front, Russians occupied about two-thirds of East Prussia[5] and stood just 40 kilometres (25 mi) away from Königsberg.

[6] These two waves of Russian attacks were accompanied by two mass population movements in different directions: locals evacuating deeper into Germany and deportations into Siberia.

Even before battles began, MVD issued an order to treat every male citizen of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary between ages 18 and 45 as a civilian prisoner of war.

[12] The deportations started during the first Russian occupation, but were of smaller scale (at least 1,000 people)[6] and targeted primarily men of military age.

[15] Sometimes, the Russian administration provided a few kopeks per day to the deportees but amounts and conditions associated with these payments varied greatly.

[5] In February 1915, Germany and Russia concluded an agreement for the mutual repatriation of civilian prisoners which provided that deportees, except for healthy males ages 17 to 45 that were fit for military duty, could return to their native country.

[5] In March 1917, after the February Revolution, the Russian Provisional Government revoked all extrajudicial punishments thus granting amnesty and freedom of movement to all deportees.

Reports quickly surfaced of German civilians being tortured and murdered, villages and farms set on fire, and the arrest of officials as Tsarist troops poured into East Prussia’s southern and eastern borders.

Just prior to the Battle of Tannenburg, the German deputy chancellor, Clemens Delbrück, reported in a telegraph that the Russians were “annihilating property and lives of population in the occupied areas with unheard-of brutality.”[17] Activists noticed the deportees and their deplorable conditions at the train stations, primarily in Vilnius, and organized help – provided food and clothing, exchanged German marks for Russian rubles, and gave them pre-addressed envelopes enabling them to inform others of their location.

It sent Steponas Kairys and Pranas Keinys to European Russia where they found 1,000 deportees in Saratov, 600 in Samara, 100 in Simbirsk, and a few others in Ufa, Orenburg.

[14] Bortkevičienė toured Siberia for five months searching for deportees in Omsk, Tomsk, Irkutsk, Tobolsk, Altai Krai, Akmolinsk, Yeniseysk, and elsewhere.