Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

In complete contrast to his jovial appearance, in evaluating the various meetings with the officers in Susdal – the delegation was in the camp for a total of ten days, from 18 to 28 July – Wilhelm Pieck gave a sharply astute summary of the situation that corroborated Becher’s assessment. The officers, in Pieck’s view, ‘see it as tactless of us to try to force them into a decision with such haste’. All in all, he continued, in the short time available it had not been possible to impress on the prisoners that the National Committee ‘was meant to help the German people bring the war to an end’. Becher and Pieck also believed that the anti-fascist newspaper for prisoners of war, The Free Word (Das freie Wort), had largely failed because its editors, lieutenants Bernt von Kügelgen and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel (the great-grandson of the first Imperial German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck), were regarded as too young and inexperienced and that the tone of the paper was too stridently polemical and ‘un-German’. Heinrich Gerlach ran into Bismarck’s great-grandson just a few weeks after first getting to know the exiled German communists. But what made the greatest impression on Gerlach during his time in Susdal was a lecture by a German captain whom Arnold had managed to recruit early on to the anti-fascist cause, Dr Ernst Hadermann. ‘He was one of them, and he was using their language. And the ideas he was expressing were theirs, but they’d been given order and structure by a superior intellect,’ as Gerlach later recalled. At Hadermann’s urging, Gerlach started using the camp library, which, in addition to light fiction, contained the works of some of the great storytellers of the nineteenth century, as well as German writers like Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, Leonhard Frank, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Hesse and Ernst Wiechert, Rudolf Georg Binding, and even Hans Carossa. Another book that he found in the library was Johannes R. Becher’s semi-autobiographical novel Farewell ( Abschied ), published in Moscow in 1940, which he read with great interest. His commitment did not go unnoticed; Professor Arnold invited him for a chat and intimated that he could see Gerlach being called to higher things during his captivity: ‘You’ll go to another camp. There, you’ll learn and study and talk to proper people.’ What Gerlach refers to here was not a case of his memory playing tricks. Seventy years later – something I’ll discuss presently – I was to discover notes of this conversation in a Russian archive. Professor Arnold really had submitted a very positive assessment of Heinrich Gerlach, which laid the foundations of the subsequent stations in his captivity. In this report, dated 14 July, we read:

Character sketch of the prisoner-of-war First Lieutenant in the German Army Gerlach, Heinrich. Gerlach, Heinrich, Lt. is one of the most active, clever and able officers in Camp No. 160. He assists us in our work, and has undertaken a series of tasks involving communicating with and processing fellow officers. Appears to be an opponent of the Hitler regime. He presumably had something to do with military intelligence in the Wehrmacht and was responsible for carrying out particular political duties. Where the political aspirations and objectives of the USSR are concerned, Gerlach still harbours many prejudices. Aspires to learn (further education). Could be useful, and enjoys a good deal of authority among senior officers. Professor Arnold. 14 July 1943.

Just before this appraisal, on 12–13 July 1943, the NKFD was founded at Krasnogorsk camp near Moscow, despite a flat refusal on the part of the Stalingrad generals to extend it any cooperation. Gerlach learned of its inception from a newspaper called Free Germany ( Freies Deutschland ) that was left on tables in the camp. This provoked a great deal of outrage among the inmates, especially as the banner at the foot of the front page was printed in black, white and red, namely the colours of the flag of the Second German Empire from 1871, and again from 1933 onwards. The founding manifesto of the National Committee, Gerlach read in Free Germany , had been signed by twelve communist exiles and twenty-one prisoners of war, whose membership was authenticated in each case by a facsimile signature. The most senior of the eleven officers on the committee – Karl Hetz, Herbert Stößlein and Heinrich Homann – only had the rank of major. Gerlach did not know these officers, though he had spoken with Captain Cramer and Captain Dr Hadermann, two of the other founder members, in the camp just a few days before. Gerlach recalled the name of another signatory solely because of his prominence: ‘There was a count among them as well. Breuer pondered for a moment. Yes, that’s right, it was that bald great-grandson of Bismarck, who was a flight lieutenant with three confirmed kills and a Knight’s Cross. Back in Stalingrad, in the Cauldron [the encircled pocket where German forces were trapped], they’d seen a Soviet propaganda pamphlet with a picture of him and thought it was a fake.’ Just two months later, Gerlach would get to meet Bismarck’s descendant in person – who actually had a tally of thirty-five downed enemy planes and was highly decorated and who’d been shot down on 30 August 1942 near Stalingrad – at the founding of the League of German Officers.

Almost fifty years later, at the beginning of the 1990s and shortly after publication of my two volumes on Johannes R. Becher for Aufbau, I, too, would get to know this Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel. In May 1991, at the inaugural congress of the German Writers’ Association for the whole of the reunified country, a history commission was established and charged with the task of researching the history of the two parallel associations that had existed when Germany was divided. I was elected to the commission and Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel joined a little later. As the count had known Johannes R. Becher from his time in the NKFD, we compared notes on several occasions. For him, Becher was an ambiguous person who was no longer of interest to him. Stalingrad and the period he spent in captivity in the Soviet Union, however, remained his abiding theme. He referred me to his Diary of a Temptation: 1942–1950 , which had been published back in 1950 by Pontes Verlag. In our discussions, which also touched on literature about the siege of Stalingrad, Von Einsiedel drew my attention to a documentary novel entitled Die verratene Armee . He told me it had been written by a first lieutenant whom he’d got to know in Krasnogorsk camp at the inauguration of the League of German Officers; the man’s name was Heinrich Gerlach. Einsiedel only ever referred to him as ‘the teacher’, and recounted how the book had been very successful in the Federal Republic. According to him, it had none of the sort of macabre scenes of death and destruction that appeared in, say, Theodor Plievier’s bestseller Stalingrad , which Aufbau had published in 1946. Recently, in the new edition of their co-edited book entitled Stalingrad and the Individual Soldier’s Culpability (1993), he and Joachim Wieder had reiterated their high opinion of Gerlach’s work. He recommended both books to me unreservedly. At that stage, I had a good knowledge of all the novels about the war that had been published in the GDR, beginning with Erich Loest’s Jungen, die übrig blieben ( The Boys Who Survived , 1950) and running through those novels that came in for harsh criticism from the GDR Writers’ Association for their allegedly ‘hard-bitten writing style’, written by authors who were then still young, like Harry Thürk’s Stunde der toten Augen ( Hour of the Dead Eyes , 1957) and Egon Günther’s Dem Erdboden gleich ( Razed to the Ground , 1957). While the novels of the ‘hard-bitten’ school had meanwhile been erased from the collective consciousness of the GDR, the epic novels of character development that appeared in the 1960s were still much in evidence. Principal among these was Dieter Noll’s Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt ( The Adventures of Werner Holt , 1960), which for many years was on the GDR’s school curriculum. Likewise, the appeal of the novels Wir sind nicht Staub in Wind ( We Are Not Dust in the Wind , 1962) by Max Walter Schulz and Der Hohlweg ( The Defile , 1963) by Günter de Bruyn went far beyond just literary specialists. By contrast, the Second World War novels that had come out in the Federal Republic were largely unknown to me, nor was I sufficiently well versed in the secondary literature on Stalingrad. The events that Von Einsiedel had witnessed at first hand and reported to me were, by and large, uncharted territory for me. All I knew about the NKFD were the familiar accounts in GDR literary histories, and I’d never heard of the League of German Officers, which had been founded in Soviet captivity. Ultimately, I took Von Einsiedel’s advice and read his diary and – albeit rather cursorily – Heinrich Gerlach’s Die verratene Armee . I had to agree with him: Gerlach’s novel really was, as he and Wieder had claimed, ‘a book with no prejudice or resentment, which avoids painting things in black and white and shuns ideological distortion’. It was also a novel that presented an unsparing picture of the horrors of war – an example of a ‘hard-bitten writing style’, if ever there was one. This tone was sustained throughout, but was most in evidence in the episode when Gerlach described the ‘Bone Road’: