Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

This general review was conducted by First Lieutenant [illegible] on 11 April 1948.

After this entry comes another handwritten observation, again signed by a secret service operative and giving notice of a momentous decision:

Unsuitable for repatriation. Employee of Department Ic. 14. Captain [signature illegible] 25.x.48.

No comments are attached, but the Cheka appear to justify their decision by highlighting Gerlach’s role as the head of Department Ic on the staff of the 14th German tank division. The security agents assumed that, in this capacity, Gerlach had been responsible for monitoring the enemy’s position, and that in consequence he was the head of a department dedicated to gathering intelligence on the enemy, which had specialized in interrogating captured Russian soldiers to try to gauge the military situation. At the same time, the Russian military secret service understood ‘Ic’ to mean that they were dealing with a counter-espionage officer who may have commanded a detachment of secret field police. As far as the Russian secret service was concerned, therefore, Gerlach was in military intelligence, in other words a ‘colleague’. The MVD officers had no idea that Gerlach had only been deputized to fill the ‘Ic’ post in the Stalingrad Cauldron, and that counter-espionage had played no further part at that stage. All the same, the order was confirmed on 24 December 1948, by which time Gerlach had been moved to another camp. An official stamp in the corner of the document reads: ‘This personnel matter has been correctly dealt with. 24 December 1948.’

Heinrich Gerlach, though, knew nothing of this decision. His signature in the dossier dates from 5 May 1948. This means that Gerlach must have signed it in either Vladimir or Kameshkovo, one day before his transfer to the Lunyovo camp. In Lunyovo, the Cheka decided that the time had now come to recruit Gerlach for the NKVD. He had been under surveillance for years, and the GRU took the view that he was well worth cultivating in view of his role as a former Ic. Gerlach was offered the chance of becoming editor-in-chief of a magazine on art and literature in the Soviet Occupation Zone. In this role, he would be expected to forge links with intellectuals throughout Germany and to compile reports on these connections. Gerlach asked to be given time to consider. Around four weeks later, at the end of July 1948, the time came for him to put his cards on the table. To the astonishment of the secret service men, he turned the offer down, maintaining that he could not and would not cross this line.

His decision had consequences: not long after, on 14 August 1948, he was transported from Lunyovo, together with a number of others who had also refused to sign their personal dossiers. He was taken to Camp No. 435/14, a labour camp located on one of Moscow’s main roads, Tverskaya Street. The camp was housed in an unfinished high-rise building whose office space was used by the Interior Ministry (MVD). The POWs were penned in behind a wooden fence topped with barbed wire in various parts of the building. Heinrich Gerlach was first put to work on a nearby building site, and later became a machine operator in a foundry. On 12 September 1948, an extraordinary event took place. At this stage, hundreds of thousands of POWs were still being held in the Soviet Union. It was announced that a delegation from the German Democratic Women’s League, based in the Eastern Zone, would be visiting Central Camp 435. With this in mind, ‘Potemkin villages’, a ploy typical of the Soviet Union, were put in place to try to disguise the miserable conditions: in this case, the barracks were given a fresh coat of whitewash and the assembled prisoners kitted out in new suits. The idea was that the women’s delegation should see well-scrubbed, happy prisoners. Gerlach himself wasn’t present at this spectacle, but two other former Lunyovo inmates gave him a detailed account of proceedings:

The camp gates were opened, buses drove up and disgorged Russian officers in a seemingly endless flow. The orchestra played ‘Entry of the Guests’ from Wagner’s Tannhäuser . And suddenly we caught sight of a small group of women, surrounded by Russian uniforms. One of our comrades, a nicely turned-out lad, stepped forward with an enormous bunch of flowers and – no word of a lie – recited a poem. The eight women sat on a podium, looking a bit lost amid all the uniforms. Someone from the anti-fascist education programme said a few political words in greeting. Then a Soviet officer introduced the SPD delegate Käthe Kern, who stepped up to the microphone.

Working in archives – especially in secret and special archives – isn’t easy to plan. But my researches unearthed another discovery, in the form of a photograph album documenting the visit of the women’s delegation to Camp 435, which corroborates Gerlach’s recollection down to the smallest detail. The delegation did indeed visit the camp on 12 September 1948, while the ‘nicely turned-out lad’ was identified on a picture caption as being the ‘Labour Champion Hoppe’.

The man from the anti-fascist programme, who like the rest is sporting a new suit, was a POW by the name of Caspari; it was he who also presented the women’s delegation with an album documenting the achievements in re-educating the prisoners.

A few months later, at the beginning of January 1949, Gerlach and his fellow prisoners learned of a report by the Soviet news agency TASS, claiming that over the course of 1949 all the remaining prisoners of war would be released from Soviet captivity. This gave Gerlach new hope and prompted him to make another attempt to safeguard his manuscript. For several weeks, he sat awake on his plank bed, copying out his Stalingrad novel, using an ordinary arithmetic book and a pencil. Gerlach developed a method like that used by Hans Fallada in the diary that he kept during 1944, when he was being held by the Nazis. Falllada wrote on both sides of every sheet and also used ‘Sütterlin’ script, a historical form of German handwriting that was hard for others to decipher. When he had filled all the pages, he would invert them and use the gaps between the individual lines to continue his diary. In addition, Fallada devised a sophisticated system of abbreviations.

Gerlach didn’t make things quite so complicated, though he, too, developed a minuscule form of handwriting and his own system of abbreviations. In the end, he managed to condense a manuscript of at least 614 pages into ten double sheets of the arithmetic book. He then hid this mini-transcript of his novel in a specially prepared false bottom of a wooden chest. At the same time, he approached Professor Janzen, who visited the camp around 1 May 1949, and whom he knew in his capacity as the head of the anti-fascist school in Krasnogorsk. Gerlach asked Janzen which Soviet agency might be responsible for scrutinizing his Stalingrad manuscript and in a position to issue an endorsement testifying to its harmlessness. Professor Janzen told Gerlach that the decision lay with him, and took the manuscript with him when he left the camp. After a few months had elapsed – by this time it was October 1949 – Gerlach enquired after the manuscript and received a note back from Janzen saying that, although he personally had had no concerns, the manuscript had nevertheless been confiscated. He advised Gerlach, once he had been repatriated (which was imminent), to submit a request to the Interior Ministry in Moscow to have the papers returned to him.

This reply shocked Gerlach, but he told himself that the miniature copy of the novel was safely concealed in the false bottom of his chest. Besides, his hopes of being repatriated had been raised. Camp 435 had been placed on the list of facilities that were to be closed down by the end of the year. But when the time came, Heinrich Gerlach once again found that his name was not on the list of those to be repatriated. Worse was to follow: on 16 December 1949, Gerlach was arrested; just before this happened, he was able to shuffle off his chest with the hidden manuscript onto a young fellow prisoner. Soon after, he found himself under arrest and packed off to the MVD’s transit gaol. At this point, Gerlach had no idea what he was accused of, but soon found out why he had been detained.