The Discovery and Arrest of the Molotschna Assailants is the turning point at which a prolonged campaign of assaults inside the Molotschna Colony is exposed and the accused men are transferred from community custody to the police. Leisl Neustadter’s capture of Gerhard Schellenberg reveals the identities of the group, but the arrests do not resolve the women’s predicament: Peters still makes their place in the colony depend on whether they forgive the men.

Causes and Discovery

The arrests follow years of attacks in which girls and women were rendered unconscious in their own beds. August Epp records that, between 2005 and 2009, more than three hundred women and girls were attacked, at an average interval of three or four days. The assaults were thus both recurrent and difficult to confront as a single public event; the discovery of a perpetrator came only after Leisl Neustadter deliberately tried to catch him.

Leisl forced herself to stay awake night after night. When she finally caught a young man prying open her bedroom window, he had a jug of belladonna spray in one hand. Leisl and her adult daughter wrestled him to the ground and tied him with baler twine. The captured man was Gerhard Schellenberg. Brought to the house that morning, he named the other seven men involved, turning a single nighttime intrusion into the identification of an eight-man group.

From Community Custody to Police Arrest

The Molotschna Colony was self-policed. Peters initially planned to confine the accused men in a shed for decades, but the community’s own response soon made their safety precarious. Salome Friesen attacked one man with a scythe. In a separate act of vigilante violence, male relatives of the victims, drunk and angry, hanged another accused man by his hands from a tree branch. They passed out in the sorghum field beside it, and the man died there, apparently forgotten.

After that killing, Peters and the elders called in the police, who arrested the accused men and took them to the city. August presents the decision as being made, presumably, for the men’s protection. The shift does not amount to a simple replacement of one system of justice by another: the colony’s leaders had first controlled the men’s confinement, while police intervention moved the case beyond that local arrangement.

Consequences for the Women

The men’s removal brings immediate pressure rather than security for the women. Peters says that, when the accused return, the women will be given an opportunity to forgive them, thereby guaranteeing everyone’s place in heaven. If the women refuse, he says, they will have to leave the colony for an outside world they know nothing about. They have only two days to organize their response. The arrests therefore expose the gap between criminal accountability and the religious demand placed on the victims: the men are taken away, but the women must still decide whether to submit to forgiveness or risk expulsion.

The prospect of bail keeps the case tied to the colony’s economy and male authority. The remaining men of Molotschna, apart from the senile or decrepit and August, go to the city to post bail for the imprisoned attackers, hoping the men can return while awaiting trial. Later, Klaas Loewen tells August that he, Anton, and Jacobo have returned from the city to obtain more animals to sell for bail money. The arrests are thus not a settled endpoint; efforts to bring the accused back intensify the pressure on the women as their meeting and decision approach.

The Arrests as a Recorded Turning Point

August’s account places the discovery within a record being made for women who cannot write the minutes themselves. Ona Friesen asked him to record the meetings, and he explains that the women speak Plautdietsch, which he must translate into English as he writes. His account of Leisl’s capture and Gerhard’s naming of the other seven men is therefore part of a larger act of documentation: a testimony about violence that the colony’s women are gathering to deliberate over, even as the consequences of that testimony remain controlled by male religious and civic authority.