Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Just a few days after arriving there, however, Gerlach was singled out and transferred to the notorious ‘Lefortovskaya’ military prison in Moscow. The undoubted reason for this was that, as part of his designated role as a Third General Staff Intelligence Officer, Gerlach would have been responsible for gathering information on the enemy and for counter-intelligence. The authorization to this effect, which was also included in the documents on Gerlach, confirmed his transfer from Camp 27 of the NKVD to the military prison.

Gerlach spent four months in solitary confinement and was interrogated repeatedly by NKVD officers. He was released from the military prison in June 1943 and taken to POW camp 160 at Susdal, 200 kilometres from Moscow. The camp was reserved for officers and was administered by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. This stage in his captivity is precisely attested too, by another interrogation or questionnaire form on Heinrich Gerlach with the code number 1050.

Fellow inmates at Camp 160 included Field Marshal Paulus and other generals of the defeated Sixth Army. On 22 July 1943, Gerlach was again ordered to decamp and put on a Ford V3000S lorry heading towards Moscow. Once again, his destination was Camp 27 in Krasnogorsk. Attached to this facility was the Lunyovo special camp, which was under the control of the Soviet Military Secret Service, the GRU. A working party in Lunyovo was already planning the formation of the League of German Officers (BDO), which would work against the Hitler regime from captivity; Gerlach was assigned to this group. At its head was Lieutenant Colonel Bredt, the former chief of the logistics division supplying the Sixth Army. At this stage, Gerlach still did not know that officers had been brought from several different camps to Lunyovo. Colonels Luitpold Steidle and Hans-Günther van Hooven also joined the group. Against their will, the Soviet secret service had also transported the renowned Stalingrad generals Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Dr Otto Korfes and Martin Lattmann to Lunyovo in ZIS limousines. Major General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, the most well-known of them, had fought his way out of encirclement by Soviet forces in the Demyansk Pocket in the spring of 1942, saving six divisions. Thereafter, Hitler took to calling him ‘the toughest man in an encirclement’.

Seydlitz had gone into captivity with the rest of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, after having tried in vain to persuade the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Paulus, to defy Hitler’s orders and break out of the Cauldron. Major General Martin Lattmann headed the 389th infantry division, while prior to his capture Dr Otto Korfes had been in command of the 295th infantry division. Colonel Steidle, who was a regimental commander when he was taken prisoner at Stalingrad, tried to convince the generals that they should collaborate with the BDO by pointing to a historical parallel, the Convention of Tauroggen, which Prussian general Ludwig von Yorck signed with the Russians on 30 December 1812, without prior authorization by his king, Frederick William III. For Steidle, the Sixth Army, which had been written off, needed to make its voice heard in order to bring about a swift end to the war and prevent the total destruction of Germany. Yet the generals initially turned down any collaboration, because they felt bound by their oath of allegiance and believed that any activities conducted from captivity amounted to an act of treason against the troops who were still fighting. The group of officers around Steidle were deeply disappointed. Ultimately, though, General Melnikov of the NKVD managed to win round the generals by conveying to them assurances from Stalin: if anti-fascist forces managed to bring about the fall of the Hitler regime and an end to the war against the Soviet Union, Germany would remain intact with her borders as at 1937. The three generals grasped at this straw of hope. After a further night of mulling over the situation, they agreed to join the League of German Officers. Some decades later, Walther von Seydlitz described the decisive moment in his memoirs:

The thing that finally tipped the scales for me was the thought that if we managed through our involvement to make even a small part of the Russian assurances a reality, we should not hold back from collaborating. Hitler’s madness was leading Germany so surely to destruction that unconventional action on our part was required to salvage what we could. My two comrades, Dr Korfes and Lattmann, came to the same conclusion and decision quite independently, without any urging from me.

This account outlining the dilemma faced by the three generals and the outcome they arrived at was attested by the memoirs of other officers such as Dr Korfes, Steidle and von Einsiedel.

The decision taken by the generals around von Seydlitz at the founding of the BDO to stake everything on Hitler’s downfall and to work for a prompt peace settlement met with a hostile rejection from a section of the officers. Then again, as early as 1977, Bodo Scheurig, who edited Walther von Seydlitz’s memoirs posthumously, correctly pointed out: ‘We now know, however, that the situation at the time fully vindicated Seydlitz’s decision.’

Following the generals’ agreement, it still took some time for the BDO finally to be established. A preparatory conference took place at the end of August, at which the agenda for the inaugural meeting was sketched out, the next steps were planned, and the BDO’s relationship with the National Committee for a Free Germany was discussed. An agreement was also reached on the composition of the future executive committee, with Major General von Seydlitz as its president. As a member of the working party, Heinrich Gerlach was part of the inner circle of the BDO’s leadership.

The summer of 1943 came and went in the Lunyovo special camp without any firm deadline being set for the founding of the organization. Then everything happened very suddenly. On 10 September, news came that the founding of the League of German Officers would take place the very next day. Frantically, the necessary arrangements were made. On 11 September, at around 10.00 a.m., the attendees at the inaugural meeting of the organization finally filed into the festively decorated dining room of the special camp. Heinrich Gerlach was impressed. But what surprised him even more were the ‘bundles of cables, the enormous spotlights, the microphones and the huge film camera’. The Soviet Interior Ministry had given instructions for the event to be filmed. Great store was set by this initiative by German officers, who were convinced that their involvement in trying to oust Hitler would help avert the worst outcome for Germany.

Heinrich Gerlach’s comment set me wondering what had become of the documentary footage recorded by the Soviet film crew in Lunyovo in 1943. It was widely thought to have been lost. But after a painstaking search, we managed not only to find the film stock in one of the Soviet archives but also – no easy task – to make a copy of it. The footage confirmed the account of proceedings written by Gerlach, who is clearly identifiable in various sequences.

Gerlach took his place in the middle of a row on the right-hand side at the front, from where he had a view of the entire hall. In the far-right corner, he spotted the lectern, draped with the black, white and red flag. The future members of the committee of the BDO had seated themselves up front on a separate table. As chairman by seniority, sixty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Bredt opened proceedings. Spotlights and the camera were trained in turn on the committee and the prominent speakers, including Erich Weinert, who, as president of the National Committee for a Free Germany, welcomed the foundation of the officers’ association.