Viktor Herdt was born 25 September 1949 in the Siberian village of Friedental. He is a Russian-German historian and genealogist. His parents came to Siberia from the Volga German colony of Mariental and had been relocated to Friedental during the 1941 Deportation.
Herdt studied from 1967 to 1969 at the State University of Omsk and at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig (Germany) from 1969-1973. From 1974 to 1977, Herdt taught the German language at the Minsk State Linguistic University. From 1980 to 1988 he worked as an editor of the German-Soviet newspaper Neues Leben . From 1988 to 1991, Herdt was employed in the publishing industry in Moscow.
He emigrated to Germany in 1991. From 1992 to 2001, Viktor Herdt was a research associate at the Institute for German and Eastern European Studies in Göttingen, and has held the same position since 2002 at the Northeast Institute (History and Culture of Germans in Northeastern Europe).
- Viktor Herdt (German Wikipedia)