Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Though Stalin had given an assurance that the last prisoners of war would be released from the Soviet Union by 1949, and indeed had formally honoured this pledge, POWs who had committed war crimes, or were suspected of having done so, were exempted from repatriation. A directive to this effect was issued by the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky, Molotov’s successor and the man responsible for drawing up the scenario for the show trials of the 1930s in the Soviet Union. The 30,000 or so POWs who were accused of war crimes were dealt with in swift trials beginning at the end of 1949. They included members of the Waffen-SS, police battalions, or security units. Yet a large proportion of those condemned had nothing to do with the crimes of which they were accused. The trials were conducted according to a principle that was valid for all totalitarian systems, which the historian Lev Besymenski has summarized as follows: ‘Ultimately, the system at that time had an automatism about it, and if an order went out to find war criminals, then war criminals were duly found.’ POWs who had been members of the BDO and interned at Lunyovo, including Heinrich Gerlach, also found themselves caught up in the process of mass sentencing. The reason for this, apart from the negative character assessment by Ulbricht and Herrnstadt in his prisoner dossier, was very simple: his refusal to cooperate with the Soviet security services. Gerlach was released from captivity as a POW and immediately charged, in his role as an Ic, with having deployed agents and saboteurs within the Soviet Union and mistreated and murdered Soviet prisoners. These were trumped-up charges.

A document that for decades was locked away and marked ‘top secret’ gives us an insight into Heinrich Gerlach’s situation in December 1949. The file in question is a two-page detention order dating from 6 December 1948. The order was signed by the military prosecutor Colonel Gasin and by the acting head of department at the Interior Ministry in Moscow, Colonel Gerashenko, on 10 December 1948. This directive furnishes us with proof that at this juncture Gerlach’s interrogation by an investigating officer and preliminary proceedings against him had been concluded. Following his arrest, Gerlach himself added his signature on 17 December 1948, acknowledging this order. In line with this, a handwritten note appears on the document stating that ‘this order has been read out in German to the accused Gerlach with the assistance of the interpreter First Lieutenant Judaison’. This order truly sealed Gerlach’s fate, since the mandatory sentence for the crimes of which he was accused was twenty-five years’ hard labour.

The detention order proves that the legal proceedings against Gerlach and his co-accused followed the pattern of the Great Terror of the 1930s. There was no possibility of raising objections, and the twenty-five-year sentence was set in advance. The accused individual’s lack of rights was not some exceptional ruling reserved for German POWs; it was common practice in Stalin’s Russia to deny even Soviet citizens any right to defend themselves against accusations and to have access to legal representation for their defence at trial. In the Interior Ministry’s gaol, Heinrich Gerlach realized that even the former inmates of Lunyovo, whom the Soviet authorities had courted, were not immune from despotism and terror. The fate of Konrad Freiherr von Wangenheim, a cousin of the author Gustav von Wangenheim, who provided him with material for his Stalingrad novel, shocked him to the core. Konrad von Wangenheim, who had taken part in the eventing competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics as part of the German equestrian team, was sentenced to twenty-five years. When Gerlach realized that the same fate awaited him, he knew what he had to do: simply say ‘yes!’ to the GRU’s requests and survive.

Up to this point, Gerlach had not crossed the boundary he had set for himself, and had remained true to himself. His experiences at Stalingrad had turned him into an opponent of the Hitler regime, but in the interim he had also come to appreciate what mechanisms were used in the Soviet Union in order to transform the ideal of the ‘new man’ into social reality. Where collectivism was invoked at any price, there was no place for the personality of the individual; indeed, it was a positive hindrance and had, where necessary, to be broken through the sanctions of the state. In the late 1920s, Johannes R. Becher, whose lectures Gerlach remembered well, outlined a set of principles that intellectuals needed to adopt if they were to throw in their lot with the communist movement: ‘The intellectual who wants to make common cause with the proletariat must make a bonfire of almost everything he owes to his bourgeois upbringing before he can join the ranks of proletarian freedom fighters.’ And with regard not just to the artistic personality, he wrote: ‘The much-vaunted, the sacred and hallowed “personality” must die. Likewise the artistic conceit of the internal and external life, the habit of exaggeration and paradox and all the emphasis on individual mood and temperament that the “personality” uses to flaunt its own self-importance. And we also need to put an end to idleness, however brilliant, and irresponsibility, however highbrow. Only if we do away with all this will the true “personality” emerge.’ At this stage, Gerlach was not familiar with Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Soviet system in her work Origins of Totalitarianism , which does not confine itself to the so-called Stalinist ‘purges’ to which those German communist exiles that Gerlach had had dealings with were also forced to submit, people such as Johannes R. Becher, Friedrich Wolf, Alfred Kurella, Gustav von Wangenheim, Willi Bredel, Erich Weinert, and Georg Lukács. Hannah Arendt describes how denunciation came to play such a major role in the system of the ‘Red Terror’:

No sooner was a person accused than his friends were transformed into his bitterest enemies overnight, since it was only through denouncing him and helping to build the police’s and public prosecutor’s case against him that they could save their own skin. Because, generally speaking, the crimes for which the accused was standing trial were non-existent, the state was reliant precisely on these people to provide circumstantial evidence against him. During the great waves of purges, there was only one way of proving one’s own reliability. And that was by denouncing one’s friends. And in turn, where totalitarian rule and membership of a totalitarian movement were concerned, this acted as a completely logical yardstick: in such a situation, truly the only reliable person is the one who is prepared to betray his friends. Conversely, friendship and any other form of attachment were highly suspect.

Within the exceptional circumstances that prevailed in the ‘totalitarian institution’ (Albrecht Lehmann) of a POW camp, friendship and integrity were precisely what provided a moral yardstick for Heinrich Gerlach. He admitted to himself that although he had made certain compromises during his years in captivity and executed some tactical manoeuvres, he had thus far been incapable of signing up to cooperate with the Soviet secret services. Now it dawned on him that twenty-five years of hard labour would be the price for him continuing to say ‘No’. And so Gerlach wrote a letter to the MVD general who in July 1948 had advised him to take up the secret service’s suggestion that he collaborate with them. He announced that he had changed his position and was now ready to cooperate. Things moved quickly over the next few days. On Christmas Eve 1949, Gerlach was taken from his cell and brought with other inmates before a state prosecutor. At first, he did not understand what was required of him, but then signed a log of his detention, which was dated to the day he was sent to gaol, 16 December 1949. With this, his eight days of incarceration in the special prison were effectively struck from the record! All the charges against him were dropped. And indeed, in Gerlach’s ‘normal’ prison record there is no indication whatsoever that he was transferred to an MVD gaol on 16 December 1949. Yet a handwritten entry marking the first lieutenant’s transition through various institutions of the Soviet penal system confirms that he really was there. This reads: ‘Arrived at Camp 27 on 24 December 1949 from the transit prison of the Interior Ministry, Moscow District.’