Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The question this raises is whether some comrades still aren’t proper anti-fascists, right? I submit that they’ll have plenty of opportunity to become real anti-fascists back in the camps!

Walter Ulbricht, who became the foremost politician in the Soviet Occupation Zone after 1945 and thereafter in the GDR until the early 1970s, comes across in Heinrich Gerlach’s memoirs as almost a stereotypical figure: ‘Walter Ulbricht. With his small, strangely unfinished and yet at other times somehow ancient-looking head. Those floating, restless eyes and that lilting, mollifying, garbled way he has of speaking that mangles everything he utters…’ This was Gerlach’s unflattering description of the man who pulled the strings at Institute 99 in Moscow and who played a key role in setting the agenda for the National Committee for a Free Germany.

It is a well-known fact that memoirs cannot create a faithful representation of the past. All that can ever be achieved is a partial, incomplete and even sometimes distorted piecing together of past occurrences. For the time lapse between the ‘real past’ and the contemporary moment in which it is recalled necessarily means that the earlier events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of the present. This therefore entails a kind of reconstruction right from the start. When Gerlach wrote his memoirs, Ulbricht had already been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party since 1950, and was the most powerful man in the GDR. At the same time, he was the most hated politician, and not just in West Germany. During the Workers’ Uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany, demonstrating construction workers marched along the Stalinallee in Berlin chanting ‘Goatee Beard Must Go!’ In 1956, Ulbricht was responsible for bringing trumped-up charges of ‘conspiratorial counter-revolutionary activity’ against the writers Wolfgang Harich, Walter Janka and Erich Loest, and in 1961 he ordered the building of the Berlin Wall. So, did Heinrich Gerlach perhaps superimpose the image of Ulbricht from the postwar period on the situation back at the camp in Lunyovo? Did ‘external elements’ retrospectively creep into his recollections and combine with his own experiences to produce a distorted picture of Ulbricht as a person?

Documents from the Russian special archive, which I have been able to locate and study over the past few years, help to throw light on this and other questions concerning Heinrich Gerlach. These files show that he had a remarkable memory for even the tiniest details and gave a very precise assessment of all the people in Lunyovo. There was also another document about Gerlach in the archive, containing a brief character sketch, which confirms the feeling of dread that assailed him after his dressing-down by Ulbricht. The appraisal of First Lieutenant Gerlach was signed by Walter Ulbricht and Rudolf Herrnstadt.

Translated into English, the original Russian typescript reads:

Gerlach, Helmut [sic!], First Lieutenant.

A typical representative [illegible] of Hitler’s army, talented but not honest. Attempts to hide his real opinions by providing information to Soviet organizations. He can be employed for manufacturing work in the Soviet Union.

This assessment, which must have been written sometime in 1944, was totally at variance with the one written by Professor Arnold on 14 July 1943, who described Gerlach as ‘one of the most active, clever and able officers in Camp No. 160’. This new appraisal by Ulbricht and Herrnstadt would have disastrous consequences for Gerlach! But in April 1944 he still had no inkling of this. Rather, he was shocked by a piece of news that Erich Weinert brought from Moscow when he visited Lunyovo. According to this, on 26 April 1944 the Supreme Military Court in Germany had sentenced the president of the League of German Officers, General Walther von Seydlitz, and the other members of the executive committee to death for alleged high treason. Heinrich Gerlach was now in no doubt what fate awaited him in Germany, and he was deeply worried about his family.

The claim that Heinrich Gerlach was condemned to death in absentia alongside other officers of the BDO is still made even today. I researched this in various archives including the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, but found no trace of any files on Gerlach. Nor were there any trial papers on General von Seydlitz, though I did come across appraisals from March and May 1940, as well as from July 1942, noting that Walther von Seydlitz was a natural leader and stressing his ‘first-rate qualities both as a soldier and as a person’. A dispatch of 18 January 1944 from the ‘Sixth Army Processing Unit’ concerning ‘notification of officers missing in action’ disclosed that Artillery General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach had been missing since 23 January 1943 while serving at Stalingrad. The hint at a possible court martial is contained in a telegram from the Supreme Imperial War Attorney’s office (Torgau division) ordering the ‘immediate transfer’ of General Seydlitz’s personnel file.

My search for the trial papers likewise drew a blank at the Federal Archives in Berlin. However, certain files relating to Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel in the military archive did corroborate the fact that proceedings had been instituted against members of the BDO, including Heinrich Gerlach. As early as 23 September 1942, the Air Force personnel department raised suspicions of treason. The basis for proceedings against Lieutenant von Einsiedel was a report on Russian radio claiming that the lieutenant, now a prisoner of war, had made the following statement: ‘My great-grandfather was right when he told me that Germany should never attack Russia. Our invasion has cost us dear!’ The files on Von Einsiedel testify to the intensity of proceedings against the League of German Officers. The bundle of documents on him contained a letter dated 15 December 1944, in which the State Military Attorney informed the High Command of the Air Force that ‘legal proceedings on the grounds of treason’ were being initiated against the officers Major Lewerenz, First Lieutenant Charisius and Lieutenant Graf von Einsiedel. According to this letter, the case against Charisius and von Einsiedel had already, following preliminary investigation, been referred to the People’s Court. Since August 1943, First Lieutenant Charisius had been the official representative of the National Committee for a Free Germany on the Third Ukrainian front. This allows us to conclude that members of the BDO had evidently not been condemned to death before December 1944.

But what had become of the documents concerning the case against General von Seydlitz, and had he really been handed a death sentence? I did finally get an answer to this question, albeit not the one I had imagined. In the State Archive at Stade, I came across papers relating to a trial of 1955–6, again involving Walther von Seydlitz. A month after his release from Russian captivity on 6 October 1955 and his return to Verden, he had instructed a lawyer named Von Hugo to represent his interests by challenging the verdict of the Supreme Military Court against him, of which his family was unaware, in a court of law. This test case examining the soundness of his conviction for treason was a matter of life and death for Von Seydlitz, as he had received neither his military pension since his release nor any payment of the state allowance to which POWs were entitled. And so, in November 1955, the Verden state public prosecutor’s office, represented by Attorney-General Bollmann, instituted preliminary proceedings ‘against the former General von Seydlitz’ with the intention of ‘testing the legality of the death sentence handed down to Seydlitz by the Supreme Military Court in 1944, on the basis of the directive of 2.6.1947’. Bollmann noted: ‘Since the records of the military court have been destroyed, the bases for this judgement need to be reconstructed.’