Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Over 91,000 men went into captivity, including 2,500 officers and clerical staff. That figure represented less than a third of the Sixth Army’s original complement of men and around half its officers. Of the thirty-two German generals in the Cauldron, seven had been flown out, one died in battle, one shot himself and one was posted as missing after 2 February 1943; this left twenty-two generals taken prisoner, foremost among them a field marshal.

Four-fifths of the soldiers and half of the officers who went into captivity subsequently died as a result of the trauma they had suffered. Of the twenty-two generals, one succumbed to stomach cancer.

The original manuscript ends with an episode in the headquarters of the Führer:

In the spring of 1943, Field Marshal Freiherr von Weichs, C-in-C of the disbanded Army Group ‘B’ (of which the Sixth Army had been part up to November 1942) and his chief of staff, General von Soderstern, were paying a visit to the Führer’s headquarters. The first letters from the troops captured at Stalingrad had just begun to filter through to Germany. Over lunch, the two officers voiced their opinion that these letters – evidence that many of the men who had fought at Stalingrad were still alive – must have come as a great relief and comfort to their relatives.

Hitler looked up with a glowering expression on his face that dumbfounded the two men. Then he said: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’

However, unlike the new version of the text, in which Hitler has the last word and condemns himself out of his own mouth without any commentary by a narrator, Gerlach ends the original version with an afterword, which, while expressly claiming the foregoing text to be a novel, nevertheless maintains that ‘nothing in this book is “fabricated”’. The manuscript ends with a pointer to the factual basis of the book and an expression of thanks to the ‘surviving Stalingrad veterans’:

[The author] has taken the subject matter of his book both from the experiences he himself underwent in and around Stalingrad and from accounts given to him by survivors of the battle – soldiers, officers and generals – during the three years he spent in captivity. It is incumbent upon him to thank here all his former comrades for their invaluable assistance and cooperation.

On an initial skim-read, it quickly became apparent what a complicated task it would be to compare the original manuscript with the version that Heinrich Gerlach had reconstructed and the new text he had written. But in order to even begin this task, it would be necessary to obtain a copy of the manuscript held in the archive here. We knew that there would be no possibility of copying the 614 pages of the original in the special archive. We still had a few days at our disposal there, however, especially since we were planning to look at some more material on cultural activities in the Soviet POW camps. Furthermore, other documents were available with information on the work of the League of German Officers, whose founder members included Heinrich Gerlach. Over the ensuing days, we discovered numerous wall newspapers, poems, songs and stories that would help us build up a picture of cultural activity in the camps, and which later formed the basis of an exhibition on German POWs in the Soviet Union. But by the time we left Moscow, we also had something else in our luggage, which had been the real reason for our trip there: Heinrich Gerlach’s novel Breakout at Stalingrad . In the form of 614 individually photographed pages.

Back in Germany, we realized that the real work was now about to begin. In any event, we needed to produce a printed version – an unusually complicated, time-consuming and laborious process in view of the many corrections and reworkings made by the author. In addition, the question of copyright had to be resolved. We were greatly aided in our work on the novel by the fact that in 1966 – almost ten years after the publication of The Forsaken Army , which by then had become a huge bestseller – Heinrich Gerlach had picked up where the novel left off and, in his work Odyssey in Red ( Odyssee in Rot ), given an account of the long spell that he and his fellow German soldiers and officers had spent in Soviet captivity. As in his novel, Gerlach once again ‘encoded’ his own fate in this autobiographical work in the figure of First Lieutenant Breuer. In the Lunyovo camp near Moscow, where the founding of the League of German Officers was due to take place in September 1943, Gerlach’s alter ego, Breuer, recalls his home town of Königsberg and his tutor, Ernst Wiechert:

Breuer closed his eyes. How warm the sunshine still was! What a lovely day! Scraps of thoughts floated like clouds across the sky of his drowsy consciousness. […] The words of Ernst Wiechert, his teacher in Königsberg, came back to him: ‘I urge you all never to stay silent when your conscience bids you speak.’ Too many people had kept silent for too long, and wasted too many opportunities. And look at the dreadful price they’d paid. First Stalingrad…

The reference to Ernst Wiechert was no coincidence. In the early 1930s, Wiechert was one of the most popular writers in Germany. His novels and short stories like The Wolf of the Dead (1924), The Silver Coach (1928), The Small Passion (1929) and Jürgen Doskocil’s Maid (1932) were reprinted many times and his place in the German literary canon was ensured by his inclusion on the grammar-school curriculum. On 29 March 1929, Wiechert gave a famous valedictory address to a group of pupils whom he had tutored for four years in preparation for their school-leaving exam, though this was never published. It was a quite different story, however, with his famous ‘Address to German Youth’ of 6 July 1933, which he delivered in the main auditorium at the University of Munich. It was this speech, which invoked values like conscience and civil courage, that Breuer was quoting off the top of his head. Yet Heinrich Gerlach was not actually, as his memoir suggests, a student of Ernst Wiechert. Although Wiechert had indeed worked in Königsberg between 1920 and 1930 as a grammar-school teacher, he had taught at the Hufengymnasium in the city, whereas Gerlach had attended the Wilhelmsgymnasium throughout his time at school. He took his school-leaving exam there in February 1926 aged seventeen, the youngest in his class. In an unpublished memoir entitled ‘All Things Must Pass – Memoirs of a Königsberg Man’, which he wrote for his children and grandchildren at Christmas in 1987, he recalled his childhood and youth and gave a sketch of his family’s life. On beginning his studies at Königsberg University, he noted:

In the meantime, I’d made up my mind to study philology. After a rather tentative first semester at our venerable Albertina [a nickname for the Albertus-Universität Königsberg], at the tender age of eighteen I left the family home for the first extended period of my life. To study abroad! I resolved that if I was going to go at all, then it should be as far away as possible – to Vienna.

Although the subsequent biographical details of Heinrich Gerlach’s life, from his army call-up in August 1939 to Stalingrad, have hitherto been a closed book, they can in part be reconstructed on the basis of this unpublished family memoir. After embarking on his studies in Königsberg followed by two semesters in Vienna, he completed his fourth semester at the University of Freiburg. In fact, after Vienna his family’s finances could not stretch to another semester’s study away from his home town, but like some ‘Deus ex machina’ his mother’s younger brother, Bruno Kördl, who was engaged at the Freiburg Municipal Theatre as a much-vaunted heroic tenor, suddenly stepped in. Gerlach’s uncle offered to provide Heinrich with board, lodging and free theatre tickets if his parents would undertake to pay his university fees and send him 50 Reichsmarks a month as pocket money. So it was that Gerlach came to enrol at the University of Freiburg for the winter semester of 1927–28, where he attended an undergraduate seminar run by the Latinist Wolfgang Aly. Aly, who taught at Freiburg as an associate professor, was a specialist in Greek literature as well as various Latin authors such as Livy. While attending his seminar, Gerlach wrote a paper for Aly on the ‘Civis’, a short epic written in hexameters, whose provenance was unknown at the time. The student Gerlach, too, was unable to solve this mystery, but in the Latin exam at the end of his coursework, he did manage to show that the philologists of humanism had each, at various intervals, arrived at very similar theses and arguments on the work. This essay of Gerlach’s so impressed the then still young Königsberg ancient philologist Harald Fuchs – who at twenty-nine had been appointed to the chair in philology at the Albertina as Wolfgang Schadewaldt’s successor – that he offered to accept the work from Gerlach as a doctoral dissertation. Gerlach refused, because he had promised Josef Nadler that he would join his group of doctoral students, who were preparing a wide-ranging research project on Johan Georg Hamann. Yet Josef Nadler, who was well known at the time for his Literary History of the Germanic Tribes and Landscapes , and who had been a lecturer at Königsberg University since 1925, then suddenly and quite unexpectedly took up an invitation to work at the University of Vienna. This effectively ended Heinrich Gerlach’s ambitions to take a doctorate. He duly finished his undergraduate degree course in Königsberg and in 1931 took the first state examination to become a teacher. From the autumn of that year he did a year’s internship at a grammar school at Tilsit before returning to his former alma mater, the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Königsberg, where in the autumn of 1933 he passed the second state teaching exam. However, as Gerlach recalled, job prospects at that time were fairly bleak: