Eight attackers from Molotschna

The Eight attackers from Molotschna are the men responsible for a series of nighttime attacks on girls and women in the Molotschna Colony, beginning in 2005. Their exposure overturns years of explanations that cast the attacks as supernatural punishment and forces the community to confront violence committed by its own members. The group is described collectively, with only one member named: Gerhard Schellenberg, whose capture reveals the identities of the other seven. The narrative gives little access to the men as individuals; instead, it traces the consequences of their actions through the women, families, and authorities compelled to respond.

Identity and the Attacks

For several years, many people in the colony believed that ghosts or Satan were responsible for the attacks, supposedly as punishment for the women’s sins. The assaults took place at night while families slept. The women were rendered unconscious with belladonna spray used to anesthetize farm animals; they awoke confused and in pain, often without understanding what had happened. The apparent supernatural threat was, in fact, a group of men from the colony.

The scale was extensive. Between 2005 and 2009, more than three hundred girls and women were made unconscious and attacked in their beds, at an average interval of three or four days. The women gathered for the meetings represent three generations of the Friesen and Loewen families, and each has been victimized repeatedly. The account says that nearly every female member of the colony was violated by the group. Many of the attackers were close relatives of the women—brothers, cousins, uncles, or nephews—so the revelation made the violence not an intrusion from outside but a betrayal embedded in family and community life.

Capture and Identification

The group was identified after Leisl Neustadter forced herself to remain awake night after night. She caught a young man trying to pry open her bedroom window with a jug of belladonna spray. Leisl and her adult daughter wrestled him to the ground and tied him with baler twine. When Peters came to the house that morning to confront the captive, Gerhard Schellenberg named the other seven men involved. The capture therefore supplied a concrete answer to a question the community had long misdirected toward demons and divine punishment.

The narrator recalls recognizing one of the men, though barely. They had played together as children; the boy knew the names of the planets, or sometimes made them up, and called the narrator Froag, meaning question. Before the narrator left the colony with his parents, he had wanted to say goodbye, but his mother said the boy was ill and confined to his bedroom. The narrator later wonders whether that explanation was true. The recollection does not identify the man by name or establish what he did as a child; it places one of the accused within an earlier, ordinary intimacy that the later revelation makes newly uneasy.

Detention and Escalating Danger

Because the colony policed itself, Peters initially planned to keep the men in a shed for decades. That plan soon seemed unsafe: the accused were at risk from the anger of the victims’ male relatives. After Salome Friesen discovered that her granddaughter Miep had been attacked two or three times, she went to the shed with a scythe and tried to kill the men. She later said that she had asked forgiveness for her outburst and that the men had forgiven her, but neither Peters nor anyone else witnessed this exchange. Her attack helped convince Peters to call the police and have the accused arrested and taken to the city, ostensibly for their own protection.

The danger did not end with their confinement. One of the men was hanged by male relatives of the victims, who were drunk and angry. They left him hanging from a tree branch by his hands and passed out in a nearby sorghum field; he died there. The account does not name the man who died. His death, alongside Salome’s attack, shows how the violence had precipitated retaliatory violence and made the shed detention untenable.

Bail, Forgiveness, and the Women’s Choice

After the arrests, the remaining men of the colony went to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers, hoping they could return to Molotschna while awaiting trial. Peters and the elders framed the women’s response in religious terms: if the men returned, the women would have the opportunity to forgive them, an act presented as necessary to secure everyone’s place in heaven. If the women refused, they would have to leave for an outside world they knew nothing about. They had only two days to organize their response.

This pressure determines the attackers’ continuing role in the narrative even while they are away. Their actions are the cause of the meetings, but the immediate decision is placed on the women: whether to accept a prescribed forgiveness or leave the colony. The colony’s men act collectively to secure bail for the accused, while the women must deliberate under the threat of exile. The evidence establishes that the attackers are arrested and awaiting trial; it does not provide the outcome of that trial. Their decisive significance lies in the exposure of violence within the community and in the coercive choices that follow from it.