On August 12, 1941, the Central Committee of the  Communist Party decreed the expulsion of the Volga Germans, allegedly for treasonous activity,  from their autonomous republic on the lower Volga. On September 7, 1941, the Volga German  Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was abolished and about 438,000 Volga Germans were  deported. In subsequent months, an additional 400,000 ethnic Germans were deported to Siberia from their other traditional settlements such as Ukraine and the Crimea. The Soviets were not successful in expelling all German settlers living in the Western and  Southern Ukraine, however, due to the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht (German Army). The  secret police, the NKVD, was able to deport only 35% of the ethnic Germans from Ukraine. Thus in 1943, the Nazi German census registered 313,000 ethnic Germans living in the occupied  territories of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet re-conquest, the Wehrmacht evacuated about  300,000 German Russians and brought them back to the Reich. Because of the provisions of the  Yalta Agreement, all former Soviet citizens living in Germany at war's end had to be repatriated,  most by force. More than 200,000 German Russians were deported, against their will, by the  Allies and sent to the Gulag . Thus, shortly after the end of the war, more than one million ethnic Germans from Russia were in special settlements and labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. It  is estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 died of starvation, lack of shelter, over-work, and disease  during the 1940s. On November 26, 1948, Stalin made the banishment permanent, declaring that Russia's Germans were permanently forbidden from returning to Europe, but this was rescinded after his death in 1953. Many Russian Germans returned to European Russia, but quite a few remained in Soviet Asia. Although the post-Stalin Soviet state no longer persecuted ethnic Germans as a group, their Soviet republic was not re-founded. Many Germans in Russia largely assimilated and integrated into Russian society. There were some 2 million ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union in 1989. Soviet Union census revealed in 1989 that 49% of the German minority named German their mother tongue. According to the 1989 Soviet census, 957,518 citizens of German origin, or 6% of total population, lived in Kazakhstan, and 841,295 Germans lived in Russia including Siberia. Perestroika opened the Soviet borders and witnessed the beginnings of a massive emigration of Germans from the Soviet Union.