NOVOFEDOROVKA, Ukraine - Across a 500-kilometer sweep of land stretching from the Don to the Dniestr, one of the largest peacetime resettlements of population in postwar Europe may be starting.


A trickle of ethnic Germans, exiled from Ukraine by Stalin during World War II, is now returning here and could turn into a flood of immigrants settling on this rich southern Ukrainian farmland after five decades of banishment in Siberia and Central Asia.


The collapse of the Soviet Union,


and with it Russia's control over Central Asia, has precipitated the exodus of Germans who fear the rise of ethnic tensions. All of those who have arrived, several thousand in all, have paid for the arduous journey themselves.


"We did not know how long we could stay where we were, perhaps another year, perhaps another two", said Sergei Banderenko. Banderenko, whose German mother was exiled to Central Asia during the World War II, arrived from Kazakhstan to join 23 ethnic Germans at the makeshift site at Novofedorovka, a kilometer off the Odessa-to-Rostov highway.


Their temporary "homes" are Russian-made containers painted in red, yellow and white. Spaced at regular intervals across a sloping, wind-swept field, the site resembles more a surreal three-dimensional work of late-20th century art than the basis for one of many compact villages planned to house 250 German families each.


The resettlement is the brainchild of the republic's Ukraine-German Fund. Its director, Ivan Hoffman, who spent his youth in exile after his parent's banishment to Central Asia, is preparing plans for up to 300, 000 ethnic Germans to return to Ukraine from across the Commonwealth of Independent States.


If initial estimates are accurate, a total of 1 million may eventually seek a new life in the country.


Hoffman said that, given the choice, most Soviet Germans would prefer to emigrate to Germany, although their lack of cultural identity, language and religion means that many would find it difficult to be accepted.


Ukraine was the preferred alternative within the former Soviet Union, a view reinforced after Boris Yeltsin's derisory offer of poisoned resettlement land for ethnic Germans on a former rocket site.


"The Germans no longer trust Boris Yeltsin", said Hoffman.


Worried about the flood of would be immigrants that is already lining up to leave for Germany, the German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, said during a visit to Moscow this week that the issues of aid to Russia and Yeltsin's approval of an autonomous German republic in Russia, on the Volga river, were linked.


More than 2 million ethnic Germans live in the Commonwealth and Bonn is anxious that the majority resettle in Ukraine or Russia, rather than in Germany.


Many, although not all, the names of the settlers in Novofedorovka are pure German with only the Russian patronymic separating Christian names such as Hans and Albert from surnames like Schwartz and Kessler.


Names apart, there is little German about these people. Russian is their mother tongue and their attitudes and impressions are not those of Germans but of confused Soviet citizens. They are indistinguishable from Russians except in the ethnic identification in their passports, which has given them a lifeline out of an increasingly fragile Central Asia.


The settlers prospects are good, although their present conditions are awful. They live in insect-infested containers without running water and electricity and are dependent on local Ukrainian villagers for food.


Supper - and every other meal on the site - consists of tea, bread and a traditional remedy for strength in peasant villages: garlic. The borscht is laden with noodles, buckwheat and fatty meat. Milk, which comes straight from a collective farm cow, is drunk warm.


Over a cup of sugar-laden tea sipped around a campfire, the settlers air their opinions of their ethnic kin. Opinions of Germany are formed from hearsay, hope and history books. They have different answers about what it means to be German.


"Heil Hitler", the ignorant joke in bad taste, while others talk of Beethoven and Bach, proud to belong to such a culture. Ukraine's government seems proud too. By attracting immigrants to the republic, Kiev hopes to cement closer links with Bonn, import several hundred thousand people whose ethnic kin in Germany have a reputation for hard work, and populate with young families the potentially wealthy chernozem, the rich, black-earth belts of Ukraine that traditionally supplied much of the former Soviet Union's grain.


German settlers have a long history in Russia after being invited by the czars to farm land in western and southern Russia. The Soviet regime, soon after its inception, granted the 400, 000-strong German population within the Russian Federation their own Volga-German Autonomous republic, which became the cultural center for Germans.


Another 500, 000 Germans lived in Ukraine, along a belt stretching from the Donbass basin to Odessa and the Romanian border. Village names such as Bloomafeld and Alexanderfeld, lost to history in the 1940s, bore witness to the strength of German influence in the region.


Ironically, the war enabled Soviet Germans to become model Soviet citizens. Flung over a wide area of Central Asia and Siberia as internal exiles, they lost their cultural and linguistic heritage and assimilated with Russian and Ukrainian populations.


The Germans were rootless, languageless and homeless, a perfect mix for imbibing Soviet identity through a debased Russian culture. But however Russified they became, they could not avoid the hate heaped on Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union's ubiquitous propaganda and official history.


"As a child at school, you learned what you were: a fascist", said one settler.


Out of the 23 men at the Novofedorovka camp, only one could speak German. Franz Kessler, a German brought up in Odessa who lost his parents in 1941. Caught in German-controlled territory during the war, by 1944 he found himself "liberated" by Soviet forces. As a German, and one who had been exposed to the enemy, Kessler said he was sent to prison camp, after which he moved to Uzbekistan.


All spoke fondly of the former Soviet Union. "Our homeland is the U. S. S. R". , said 34-year-old Edvard Brakovsky, another half-German, half-Ukrainian from Uzbekistan. "We don't make a difference between Russia and the Ukraine. We were part of the 76 percent who voted in the referendum for the union", he said, referring to the March 1991 national vote on the fate of the Soviet Union.


Brakovsky talks enthusiastically about a future here and says he will refuse to take the financially easy route by applying for German citizenship. "I won't go to Germany because I, don't want to be seen as a Russian pig", Brakovsky said stubbornly.