Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The education authorities sent out hectographed notes en bloc to all of us fresh-faced and newly qualified teachers, informing us that permanent or even temporary posts were out of the question for the foreseeable future. So, what were we to do now? In the end, I got very lucky and secured a temporary position at the military academy in Osterode, which was really hard work and involved lots of burning the midnight oil. I survived on a diet of bread rolls spread with liver-sausage and maté tea, and diligently saved my money.

On 20 April 1934 Gerlach married his girlfriend of many years, Ilse Kordl, in Königsberg. Shortly after the wedding the young couple moved to Lyck, in Masuria, where Gerlach had obtained a position ‘for a maximum of six weeks’ at the High School for Boys. As things turned out, the family’s six-week sojourn in the picturesque little town on Lake Lyck was to turn into a ten-year residence. Five years in, however, Heinrich Gerlach was called up as an army reservist on 17 August 1939:

It was one of the last days of August in that fateful year of 1939. Thirty degrees in the shade. The sun was blazing down on the sports field of the little town of Freystadt, not far from the Polish border. We had been encamped here for two days, eating pea soup from the field kitchen wagon. When I say ‘we’, I mean the horse-drawn 228th Intelligence Division, a Territorial Army outfit that had been newly re-formed in the middle of the month, mainly with reservists from the Elbing region. It was clear bad things were about to happen; the previous day live rounds had been handed out to us. As a junior officer and commander of a telephone line construction unit, I applied myself strenuously in this period to learning about horses and picking up at least a few riding skills. Dressed in fatigue bottoms, our bare torsos burned red by the sun, we loafed about in intense boredom on the treeless sports field, cooling the horses every few minutes by hosing them down with water.

No further precise locations in Heinrich Gerlach’s ‘war biography’ are given in his personal memoir. All we learn is that he came to be stationed in Paris in the winter of 1940–41, a place he had already visited as a student. Yet in his recollection, he found the atmosphere in occupied Paris oppressive:

The city centre was off-limits to German soldiers and could only be accessed with a special pass. Our division was issued with three such passes, which the officers used in rotation. In this way, I got to see the city once more, and everything was totally different. There were no visible signs of war damage, but the buildings were dreary and grey, and the streets were covered in slush and shrouded in mist in this dank winter. The people were glum, hungry and freezing, and still evidently in a state of shock after their country’s terrible lightning defeat […] There was no mention of de Gaulle or the Resistance at this stage. There was tentative talk of collaboration, of Marcel Déat and a new form of socialism, and the populace looked hopefully to Marshal Pétain, the grand old man in Vichy, who had prevented the very worst from happening. People dealt politely with the equally polite and correct occupation force. No one lifted the veil on what the SS and the Gestapo might be getting up to somewhere in the dark recesses—.

Gerlach then fast-forwarded to describe what transpired after the occupation of Paris:

Then, one day in March, we suddenly received orders to pack up and ship out. And so we plunged head over heels into the escapade in Yugoslavia and shortly thereafter into the crazy war against the Soviet Union, in which well-meaning Frenchmen, who were more far-sighted than us, had already cautiously warned us not to become embroiled.

But how had Heinrich Gerlach subsequently risen through the ranks to become a first lieutenant? However paradoxical it may sound, information on this aspect of his life only came to light through the Soviet POW records, in which Gerlach meticulously listed where he saw action and on what date he was elevated to what rank. From February to April 1940, he attended the officer cadet school in Halle, passing out successfully with the rank of sergeant. In April Gerlach was transferred to Königsberg to join the 1st Intelligence Battalion. From August 1940, we find him attached once more to the 228th Intelligence Battalion in Westphalia. On 1 September he was promoted to a lieutenant in the reserves and from December 1940 to April 1941 he served as a platoon leader in the occupation of France. He then spent a month (April 1941) in Yugoslavia, and in June was attached as an officer to the 16th Motorized Rifle Division. On 22 June, the so-called Russian campaign began for Gerlach. On 24 July 1941 he was appointed as a staff officer to the 48th Armoured Corps, and on 1 July 1942 promoted to first lieutenant. From 24 October 1942 onwards, Heinrich Gerlach was a General Staff Intelligence Officer Third Class (Ic) for the 14th Armoured Division.

Gerlach was engaged in the Stalingrad campaign right from the outset, right up to the murderous battle when German forces were encircled in the Cauldron and the final capitulation at the end of January 1943. With other survivors of the defeated Sixth Army, he spent days huddled in foxholes, cellars and abandoned bunkers. For Gerlach there now began a seven-year-long odyssey through prisoner-of-war camps. His first place of incarceration was the town gaol in Beketovka, 15 kilometres south of Stalingrad. Just a day after the cessation of hostilities on 3 February 1943, the acting People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Ivan Serov – who many years later, in 1950, would be the person dealing with Gerlach’s impounded manuscript – ordered that the required number of POW camps should immediately be set up in the area around Stalingrad. However, the Soviets had underestimated the numbers of captured German troops by tens of thousands. Beketovka was chosen as an assembly point because here the level of destruction was less than in other places, though even in this town 90 per cent of the housing stock had been destroyed. According to an NKVD report of the time, the ‘assembly points and distribution camps at which the prisoners arrived, either in a state of total apathy or in constant fear of being summarily “finished off”, after gruelling marches around the outskirts of Stalingrad, in severe subzero temperatures and without any food or overnight accommodation, […] had only “rudimentary facilities” at best’. Unlike many of his compatriots, who were utterly exhausted and frozen half to death, Gerlach was in good enough shape to take stock of his surroundings on his arrival at Beketovka:

BEKETOVKA. Lots of people out on the streets, largely women and children. Odd to find so much life in a place not far from the City of Death! Taciturn expressions with a searching look. Very occasionally an open threat, either verbally or in a person’s demeanour. Adolescents jump out and make as if to land a punch. The guards shoo them away, calmly but firmly. All without any fuss, and almost without a sound. Breuer can feel their gaze on his skin, scanning his face, and sometimes he’s amazed to see a hint of pity in their eyes. Of course, it was the head bandage he was wearing! That filthy, blood-encrusted dressing must look frightful. On the plus side, the wound to his left eye seemed to have healed well, and he could hardly feel any pain there any more. Head bandages have an extraordinary effect on people. They embody picture-book notions of heroism. A hero with a stomach wound or frostbitten feet, say, would be unthinkable!

In the camp at Beretovka alone, more than 27,000 prisoners died between 3 February and 10 June 1943, putting the mortality rate of the survivors of Stalingrad at over 90 per cent. As the war progressed, around three thousand POW camps would be set up in the Soviet Union, split between main and subsidiary camps. These facilities each housed anything between a hundred and several thousand inmates. The camp administration was situated in each main camp. But in the subsidiary camps, too, there was an independent array of amenities, comprising a hospital, kitchen, laundry, barber’s shop and shoe-repair workshop. In sum, from the first day of captivity to the last, the camps were ‘total institutions’ that radically restricted the individual’s freedom of movement and subordinated him to an inflexible system. This began with early-morning sports or PT and continued with work assignments and increasing possibilities of regulated leisure-time activities. In this respect, for every soldier who underwent the experience, being a prisoner of war was a highly unusual situation. It was particularly difficult for those soldiers who were taken into captivity individually rather than in groups. Mass capitulations, such as happened at Stalingrad, were a different matter. Initially, Heinrich Gerlach also found that being taken prisoner was almost an ‘anonymous act’; he was just one among thousands. He was extremely fortunate, since he was among a group of hand-picked officers who were driven to the camp in lorries. Gerlach noted the exact date in his memoirs: 24 February 1943, barely three weeks after his capture. Although the situation in the camps was chaotic at first, care was taken to register the details of all POWs when they first arrived. During interrogation, they were required to fill out a questionnaire, which gave them a registration number and was filed in their personal dossier. The questionnaire contained other information such as surname, Christian name, date of birth, home address, nationality, education history and occupation in civilian life, together with the date and place of capture or of transfer from another camp. Precisely this first Soviet record of Heinrich Gerlach came to light in the material from the special archive, thus enabling us to document the first important stage in his odyssey through the camps. His first destination was the famous Camp 27 at Krasnogorsk, near Moscow.