Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

At the time when he was writing his memoir, Walter Janka could surely never have imagined that this would actually come to pass, but things moved at a breakneck pace in the autumn of 1989; the state and party archives were indeed opened, and files long kept secret suddenly became accessible! Among the documents on Johannes R. Becher that I had now unearthed I found secret character appraisals by Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht from the time when they were all living in exile in Moscow, along with confidential letters that Becher wrote to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party (KPD) after attempting suicide at the ‘Hotel Lux’, the haunt of exiles in Moscow. Suddenly, I also found myself in possession of the secret ‘Medical Dossier on Comrade Becher’, containing information that I thought would be out of place in any edition of his writings. But I also came across written reports by Becher of fifty-one interviews that he had conducted in June 1943 with German officers of the Sixth Army who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets after the Battle of Stalingrad in January and February of that year and who were being held at POW Camp 160 in Susdal. Like the camps at Krasnogorsk, Yelabuga, Oranki and Voikovo, Susdal was reserved for German officers. In the course of his conversations in June 1943, Becher was forced to conclude that only a handful of the officers were prepared ‘to work for the cause of peace’. Most were unwilling to commit themselves, describing themselves as apolitical and bound by their oath of military allegiance, and fearing that any anti-fascist activity on their part might count against them at the war’s end. From his comments, one got a sense of how disappointed Becher was that no real change of heart had set in, even after Stalingrad. For instance, he noted on one of his conversations:

Lieutenant Colonel von Sass, whom I’d met at Krasnogorsk, was again sporting the Knight’s Cross that he’d taken off there, along with all his other medals. Friendly and polite. Very content with the camp food, etc. No grounds for complaint. Waxes lyrical about how pleasant life is in the camp, and that they were kept busy from dawn to dusk with all kinds of tasks.

Becher summed up his attempt to recruit Von Sass for the planned National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD), an action group formed by officers and other exiles to fight against the Nazi regime, in the following terms: ‘He avoids taking any kind of political stance, just like that time in Krasnogorsk, but now he also appears to have “composed” himself again. He plans to go down with Hitler. That will be his fate, he says, if it comes to it. He swore his oath to the Führer and that was that.’ But Becher’s conversations with Colonel Luitpold Steidle, a fellow Bavarian who some years later ended up in the same swimming club as the writer, took a quite different turn. ‘Cuts a very impressive figure,’ noted Becher. ‘Insists that he’s proud to have belonged to the division (Daniels) that surrendered at Stalingrad in time to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Like Major Seffke, he’s keen to point out that he’s being treated well as a POW.’ Becher had a second talk with Colonel Steidle, in which he tried to sound out his political views. ‘Quizzed on his attitudes as a Catholic to National Socialism, he sidesteps the question by saying that its ideological contradictions made little impression on him as an individual,’ the author reported. And to Becher’s question ‘What did the men of the officers’ corps think about anti-Semitism?’, Steidle was at pains to stress that the officers ‘never subscribed to many of the more extreme National Socialist views’ and that ‘anti-Semitism had never been rife in the officers’ corps or in the Army of the Reich’. The two conversations with Steidle were, according to Becher, so promising that they were joined for a third by the Soviet academic Professor Arnold. Arnold, whose real name was Abraham Guralski, and who had a chair at a Soviet university, was appointed as a political instructor for German prisoners of war, and had been engaged in discussions primarily with officers since the autumn of 1941. In the process, he had managed to persuade one officer to work with him: Dr Ernst Hadermann, whom Gerlach later got to know. Between 1943 and the end of the war, Arnold became one of the most important figures liaising with the captured officers, who rated his intellect and breadth of knowledge very highly. Like Becher, Professor Arnold came to the view that Colonel Steidle was an ‘easy-going and sincere officer’ who was ‘civilized and measured’ and ‘intellectually a cut above the general run of German colonels’. In conversation, Steidle gave the impression of being fully prepared to ‘fight for the cause of freedom’, but also of being ‘unwilling to make a commitment in his present circumstances, where he did not have access to the full facts’. Following this assessment by Johannes R. Becher and Professor Arnold, it comes as no surprise to learn that, a few weeks later, Colonel Steidle was among those who formed an action group that led to the formation of the League of German Officers (BDO).

The importance that the Soviet leadership attached to convincing German officers, and especially the generals who had fought at Stalingrad under Field Marshal Paulus, the commander in chief of the defeated Sixth Army, to join the struggle against Hitler may be gauged from an incident just three weeks later. High-ranking Soviet military personnel accompanied the leadership of the exiled KPD in a delegation to Susdal to try to persuade officers to work with them in setting up the National Committee for a Free Germany. At this juncture, the generals refused to engage in any discussions, meaning that the delegation was forced to focus its efforts once more on the lower ranks up to colonel.

Reading through Becher’s extensive notes on these conversations in the archive in the spring of 1990, I had no inkling that over the following years I would repeatedly encounter several of the personalities mentioned there – and not just in the archive files but also, in one instance, even face-to-face. I experienced something of a feeling of déjà vu when I discovered that Heinrich Gerlach, whose trail I began to follow only several years later, had been in Susdal at exactly the same time as Becher and the German communist exiles had been recruiting there for the NKFD. Gerlach arrived at the Susdal camp on 23 June 1943 after four months in solitary confinement. Soon after his arrival he became acquainted with prominent German communist exiles like Wilhelm Pieck and Johannes R. Becher, and also Professor Arnold, with whom Colonel Steidle had already had dealings. Twenty years later, in his autobiographical work Odyssey in Red , he – or, more precisely, his fictional alter ego, First Lieutenant Breuer – recalls how he met German émigrés in the camp and was introduced to Johannes R. Becher. The picture that he paints here of Becher is less than flattering:

Breuer grasped the soft, childlike hand that was extended limply to him. He gazed into a weary face that was lent an expression of ill-temper by a permanently drooping lower lip. He noticed the thin hair that had turned grey at the temples and was already very wispy on the crown, and searched in vain for the man’s eyes, which were hidden behind the heavily reflective lenses of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. So this was Becher, the communist poet with the poncy Christian name; the man whom homesickness had inspired to create artworks, and hatred driven to pen angry pamphlets. The dark-grey single-breasted suit, the carefully knotted tie… A proletarian? A communist? Breuer was taken aback. The man just didn’t fit any of his preconceptions.

The following day Breuer attended a meeting at which Becher reported on the situation in Germany after Stalingrad. Yet he delivered it in a language ‘that bandied about terms like “the Hitler cabal” and “the Nazi clique” so liberally’ that the officers ‘[felt] forced back into a sense of fellow feeling with the person being abused, an allegiance they’d only just begun to detach themselves from’. Their response was correspondingly lukewarm. Only the man sitting next to Breuer, ‘a plumpish man in a light-grey suit’, seemed to be really enthused by the speaker. ‘White hair, badly cut on the sides, with a squat neck and a broad face in the middle of which a bulbous nose glowed red as a strawberry’ is Gerlach’s vivid description. It turned out later that the man with the bulbous nose was Wilhelm Pieck, formerly a Communist Party representative in the Reichstag. Pieck, who returned from exile to Berlin along with other leading KPD members on 1 July 1945 and served as the GDR’s first and only president from 1949 to 1960 (after which the office was replaced by a collective head of state, the State Council), was sixty-seven years old in 1943 and chairman of the illegal KPD. The captured officers in Susdal only realized later who they were dealing with. ‘My goodness, so he’s the top dog! It’d be really good to bend his ear, then…’ was one reaction.