Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

The days of Hitler’s rule are numbered. The nearer we come to the moment of final collapse, the more loudly and desperately Goebbels and his henchmen bang the propaganda drum to try to rouse German people to make one last frantic and pointless stand. And a key element in this latest propaganda hysteria are the so-called ‘terrors’ that the ‘Bolshevist domination that will ensue at war’s end’ will visit upon Europe and upon Germany in particular.

Gerlach recounted his experiences as a prisoner of war, and was at pains to stress that he was neither a communist nor a Marxist. He told his readers that he did not applaud everything that was done in Lunyovo, but that he had recognized while in captivity how the Soviet Union had, within just a few decades, ‘achieved centuries’ worth of development’. The Soviet people would ‘[harbour] no hatred towards other people, nor any desire for conquest. Having paid such a heavy price for their own freedom, they would not dream of enslaving other peoples or imposing on them a political system they did not want.’ Accordingly, it would not be the Soviet occupation of Germany that plunged the country into an abyss ‘but every day that Hitler’s war, which is already lost, is allowed to continue’. Gerlach went on: ‘The country’s real enemy isn’t outside its borders, but within Germany itself!’ Gerlach’s next article, which appeared on 22 October 1944 under the headline ‘Oppose Hitler’s Thugs’, inveighed against the Third Reich’s ‘scorched earth’ policy: ‘Goebbels exhorts the German people to make every home into a fortress and to raze everything else to the ground. That miserable armchair general Dittmar [General Kurt Dittmar, the German general staff radio spokesman] has given official notice of the bestialization of warfare under the National Socialists. In doing so, the regime has now finally revealed to its own people the criminal face it was careful to keep hidden for so long.’

Alongside his continuing role on the editorial staff of Free Germany , in the autumn of 1944 Heinrich Gerlach was already busy writing the third part of his Stalingrad novel. It was around this time that he got to know Georg Lukács, who came to Lunyovo to deliver a series of lectures on German philosophy and literature. Lukács was one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in exile, and had become embroiled in the Stalinist ‘purges’ and ‘Moscow show trials’ of 1936. Though Gerlach found himself deeply irritated by his external appearance – Lukács initially struck him as being something of a caricature of an intellectual – he was nevertheless won over by his outstanding breadth of knowledge. Lukács was a great connoisseur and admirer of German literature and his pronouncements on Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig and Ernst Wiechert chimed in with Gerlach’s preferences. Lukács also referred to a novel that he claimed was the best anti-war book ever, Arnold Zweig’s Erziehung vor Verdun ( Outside Verdun ), which had been released in 1935 by Querido Verlag, the leading publisher of exile writers; all the leading names in German literature who were forced to leave the country after 1933 were published by this house. Gerlach read Zweig’s novel over a single night and took inspiration from its title for his own work. He also came across the oft-quoted saying by the German knight and humanist scholar Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523): ‘Ich träume nicht von alter Zeiten Glück, Ich breche durch und schaue nie zurück’ (‘I don’t waste time dreaming of the good old days, I break through and never look back.’). This novel, which he spent every free moment working on, would be called Durchbruch bei Stalingrad (Breakout at Stalingrad).

Because newly captured officers were constantly arriving at Lunyovo, before being transported on to other POW camps, Gerlach was able to glean vital information about the final weeks of the Battle of Stalingrad. He also got to hear of some of the conversations that took place among the general staff of the Sixth Army, to which he of course had not been party. He heard reports, for instance, from Colonel Adam, Field Marshal Paulus’s adjutant, about the final hours before they were taken prisoner, while General Vincenz Müller supplied Hitler’s notorious statement on the defeat: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’ His novel about Stalingrad, like the war itself, was now nearing its end. On 21 October 1944, Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany, surrendered to the Allies, and 12,000 men of the Wehrmacht were taken into American captivity. On 31 January 1945, Gerlach’s birthplace, Königsberg in East Prussia, which had earlier been largely destroyed by RAF bombing, was surrounded by the Red Army. Gerlach published an article on 4 February 1945, the second anniversary of the capitulation at Stalingrad, which spoke of the endless suffering of the exhausted, starving and wounded men at the front who were still hoping for a miracle, and of Hitler’s betrayal of the encircled troops. ‘You can rely on me with rock-like confidence!’ ran the telegraph message that the Führer had sent to the Cauldron. ‘And then,’ wrote Gerlach, ‘by the beginning of February it was all over. No miracle had happened. We were alone in the ruins of Stalingrad, beneath which tens of thousands of comrades lay buried, along with our faith and our false hopes and wishes. And then the Russians were standing outside our bunkers. Many of our comrades still flung themselves headlong in desperation into the hail of enemy bullets, and many committed suicide. Dying was hard, but it seemed an even harder prospect to go on living.’ For Gerlach, the decision to stay alive was his first small and modest act of rebellion against Hitler and for Germany. The hard road to enlightenment after Stalingrad made him realize the absolute necessity of a ‘pitiless struggle against Hitler and his entire system’.

On 2 May 1945, the Red Army completed its conquest of Berlin. The Russian troops had advanced on the heart of the city from all directions and the German commander charged with the defence of the capital, General Weidling, surrendered with the rest of the garrison. Seventy thousand German soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. A few hours later, another 64,000 were added to this figure. And with the surrender of the encircled Ninth Army southeast of the city, 60,000 of whose troops had already died in a week of fighting, a further 120,000 officers and men entered captivity. Two days later, on 4 May, Free Germany printed something akin to a leader by Heinrich Gerlach, which gave an unsparing account of current circumstances in Germany and called for immediate action in response: ‘The situation we now find ourselves in – in a country largely destroyed by war and occupied by the victors – is of necessity our starting point. No one is able or willing to change or alleviate this situation – we alone can bring this about.’ Alluding to the monologue delivered by the title character of Goethe’s Faust in his study, Gerlach noted: ‘Nothing will happen unless we set it in motion ourselves! We are at a beginning. And in the beginning was the deed. We will only go on living if we act . And we have it in our power to act straight away . With everyone fulfilling his or her own particular role, however modest it may be.’

Admittedly, Gerlach omitted to mention what impelled him to deliver this impassioned plea, namely his awareness of how limited was his own scope for action, incarcerated as he still was in a POW camp, albeit a rather more comfortable one than previously. What was really oppressing him was the fact that Lunyovo was steadily emptying. Several members of the BDO and the national committee – principally the leadership of the German Communist Party in exile – had returned to Germany; the first to leave, on 30 April 1945, had been the ‘Ulbricht Group’. In the camp, no one was sorry to see Ulbricht go. But others who had left for Berlin at the same time included Fritz Erpenbeck, who had lent constant support to Gerlach’s plan to write a novel, as well as Karl Maron and Wolfgang Leonhard. Soon after, Maron was appointed First Deputy Mayor of Berlin. Rudolf Herrnstadt, who was also to have been part of the Ulbricht Group, was vetoed by the Soviets for fear he would become the target of anti-Semitic violence in Germany. Even so, before long he was editor-in-chief of the Tägliche Rundschau ( Daily Review ) in Berlin, which from 15 May 1945 on was distributed by the Red Army as a ‘front newspaper for the German people’. He would presently be instrumental in the founding of the Berlin Verlag publishing house and the newspaper Free Germany . He eventually became editor-in-chief of the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), and from 1950 to 1953 served as an alternate member of both the Politburo and the Central Committee of the SED.