Heinrich Gerlach - Breakout at Stalingrad

Soon after, he was sitting in a ‘Black Maria’ and being driven out beyond the Moscow city limits. When he stepped out of the van, he found himself in Camp 27 at Krasnogorsk for the fourth time. Here, Gerlach met the last of those who had once belonged to the leadership of the League of German Officers. In the main, these were people who had cooperated with the secret services. Others, like generals Martin Lattmann or Vincenz Müller, Colonel Steidle, majors Homann and Bechler, Military Court Justice Major Schumann or Lieutenant von Kügelgen, had already long since taken up senior positions within the German Democratic Republic. Gerlach suspected that they had all agreed to work for the Soviet secret service during their time at Camp 27 at Krasnogorsk. The confidential files of the MVD and the KGB confirmed this suspicion.

As for Gerlach himself, a new personal dossier was created for him in Camp 27, dated 28 December 1949, which charted the final stages in his odyssey through the camps. Its reference number (PU-No. 01834838) was the one under which all the material on Gerlach was ultimately filed in the Moscow Secret Archive.

Once again, however, Gerlach found himself in a perilous situation at Krasnogorsk. In January 1950, a first lieutenant from Moscow confronted him with the miniature transcript of his Stalingrad novel, which had been discovered in the false bottom of his chest. Gerlach was deeply distressed; fearing that he would be rearrested, his first reaction was to deny everything. But then, suddenly, a great sense of calm overcame him. He had nothing to lose, so he mentioned his fear of losing the original manuscript and pointed to the fact that, despite having been a member of the National Committee, he had been accused of being a war criminal. The Russian officer knew nothing of this and expressed his sympathy. The manuscript was spirited away and Gerlach was free to go. But ultimately the day came when he was summoned by the secret service; by this time, it was April 1950. Gerlach knew what this meant. He signed his name in the knowledge that paper doesn’t blush and that he ultimately had no intention of being made into a Soviet agent. His signature was his ticket from captivity to freedom.

Gerlach’s prison dossier indicates that, in accordance with Protocol 582, he was released from Camp 27 on 21 April 1950 and transferred to Repatriation Camp 69. Together with the last of the Lunyovo prisoners, including Colonel van Hooven, he travelled via Moscow, Brest-Litovsk and Frankfurt an der Oder to Berlin. On 22 April 1950, he changed trains at Westkreuz and travelled one stop to Halensee, in the west of the city. He described his arrival there in Odyssey in Red :

Slowly he climbed the steps up to the ticket barrier. His air-force rucksack hung from his shoulders […] His legs grew heavier and heavier. There was the barrier now, beneath the large station clock. And behind it, huddled in a corner by the ticket booths as if in fear, stood a woman […] [He] went up to her. A boy was standing beside her, as tall as her. A child’s drawing, showing a tree and a house and two yellow suns above. Two suns illuminating a bunker in Stalingrad… ‘He’s going to be confirmed,’ said Irmgard, putting her arm round the boy and squeezing him tight. ‘It’s his confirmation tomorrow!’ And she started to weep. It was 23.04…

Heinrich Gerlach’s prison release papers had actually been issued for travel to East Berlin. But because the train carrying the returnees arrived at Berlin Friedrichstraße station an hour early, no one from the East German authorities was there to meet it. So Gerlach simply got on the local S-Bahn train waiting on the opposite platform and travelled to the western sector of the city. The next few weeks were extremely difficult for him as a late homecomer from Russian captivity. He had joined the Wehrmacht way back in the summer of 1939 and had been separated from his family for eleven years. When his wife, his three children and his mother had been taken into ‘kin custody’ by the Nazis in the summer of 1944, they had been forced to leave Lyck in East Prussia with just a few suitcases. Following their release by the Americans, they made it to Berlin via Thuringia, because Gerlach’s uncle lived in the capital – the opera singer he had lodged with during his semester in Freiburg.

Although his family had been officially designated as ‘people persecuted by the Nazi regime’, Gerlach was at first refused permission to resume teaching in higher education. Only in October 1950 did he manage to secure a badly paid post at a Berlin primary school. Despite knowing nothing about life in postwar Germany, he was immediately thrown into teaching the higher grades. This was problematic for him, as he found initially that he could not get on with the children in his charge, who had not attended school for several years. But even worse were the shadows of the past. It was not long before the comrades from the East came calling. He refused to collaborate with them and made it clear that he had no intention of pursuing the career that had been mapped out for him in East Germany. Thereafter, he came under increasing pressure. Gerlach’s daughter, Dorothee Wagner, who at the time was thirteen years old, recalled decades later how the children would come and tell their father, ‘they’re out in the street again’ – men ‘who really did look like they appeared in the movies, with leather coats and sunglasses’. Gerlach’s younger son, too, who was eleven when he returned, remembered how his father had once come home from school in a distraught state and told them what he’d seen: ‘At first it was just suspicions, but soon it became clear that those shadowy figures in slouch hats really were following Dad. We needed to be on the lookout, because those guys were loitering around every day at the same time but always at different places around the area, watching the family.’ Gerlach warned his wife and children never to leave the house on their own. He was scared because he knew that a number of people had already been abducted. Things came to a head when the secret service men confronted him on the street in broad daylight. Passers-by came to his aid. Gerlach reported the incident to the police, hoping for their help. The eleven-year-old Heinrich Gerlach Jr remembered the response:

The police said they couldn’t do anything. My father had gone to see them on several occasions and told them about these unpleasant types. However, he couldn’t even prove that he was their intended victim, and so the police patrol that had occasionally cruised specially down the otherwise quiet Lützenstraße was withdrawn when it failed to find any culprits. Whenever the police showed up, it seemed the black car with the leather-coated men inside was never there.

Heinrich Gerlach was finding the situation increasingly threatening and so decided ‘to look around for another position in the West’. He spotted a job advertisement in the Deutsches Lehrblatt (German Teachers’ Journal): the humanist grammar school at Friesoythe in the Oldenburg Münsterland region of Lower Saxony was seeking to appoint a teacher of German and Latin. Gerlach applied and sent in a meticulously prepared CV and other material in support of his application. He received an immediate reply inviting him to come for an interview. Having written back to arrange a date, the next communication he received was a job offer from the headmaster of a grammar school in Brake. No one in the family had heard of this small town on the Lower Weser, which was situated about 70 kilometres from Bremen. Gerlach accepted on the spot. In order not to run the risk of travelling by train through the GDR, it was decided that they should fly from West Berlin to Hamburg. This meant that the family could only take absolute necessities with them in a few suitcases.