Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

By March 1951, just before Easter, everything was ready: the Gerlachs boarded the plane and landed in Hamburg. They then took the train on to Brake. Their furniture was due to be brought to them by a removals firm. In the event, though, it never arrived. The Gerlach family was informed that all their worldly possessions had been destroyed in a fire. They suspected that the Soviet secret service was behind this. This assumption cannot be corroborated, although something else can be proved beyond all doubt by classified documents that have recently come to light: there was a long-standing plan to turn Heinrich Gerlach into a Soviet agent. An appraisal by the Soviet secret service of the spying activities of agents who had been successfully recruited from the ranks of captured German officers contains, alongside information on several other members of the BDO, a relatively extensive report on Gerlach. Their attempt to recruit him is noted as having been a mistake, and a failure on the part of the security services.

This report is the sole instance of Gerlach being referred to by the code name of ‘Kurt’. It begins by going into his family background, his army call-up, and ends with an account of his final posting as a supposed military intelligence officer and head of an Ic department. Subsequently, it notes that Gerlach was a member of the action group that founded the BDO and that he worked on the editorial board of Free Germany. The report then goes on to deliver a damning criticism of the agent the Soviets thought they had been grooming: ‘Kurt’. It claimed that, in the National Committee, Kurt had been ‘playing a double game, spreading rumours designed to sow confusion and mocking the German communists’. It went on: ‘Though fully aware of the existence of fascist underground groups within the National Committee, he failed to report them, preferring to make anti-Soviet statements himself.’ This secret report maintained that it had been the National Committee leadership that had instigated Gerlach’s transfer to Camp 190 at Vladimir. It was only after the National Committee had been dissolved that ‘Kurt’ was recruited.

In 1948, when the Council of Ministers of the USSR resolved that most former members of the National Committee should be repatriated, it was decided that Kurt should also be sent back to Germany, where he could work for the Soviet secret service. But Kurt’s refusal to cooperate led to his planned repatriation being rescinded. Nevertheless, the following year the decision was taken to finally release Kurt from prison, since it had been discovered he had been sentenced to death by the Nazis for his involvement with the BDO and the National Committee. The secret service report then noted: ‘In the light of this, negotiations were reopened with “Kurt” to try to get him to engage in clandestine work after his repatriation, and “Kurt” agreed to this once more. Secret passwords and methods of contacting the Soviet authorities were all agreed.’ However, Kurt had then attempted to smuggle a manuscript he had written about the Battle of Stalingrad to Germany with the help of another returnee. At the border, the book had been found and impounded. This secret report, a unique example of an appraisal of the performance of clandestine agents in the field, sums up Heinrich Gerlach’s subsequent activities and the failed attempt to bring pressure to bear on him, as follows:

In the Western zones of occupation, ‘Kurt’ wrote to a German writer, asking for his assistance in trying to retrieve his impounded book on the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’. In this letter, he cast aspersions on the glorious Soviet press organs and claimed that he had been forced to agree to work with our secret services, and that he had no intention of keeping to the agreements he’d made and so would not set foot on the territory of the GDR. It has become evident that ‘Kurt’ is a sworn enemy of our country and an agent provocateur, whom we failed to uncover until it was too late.

We have decided not to return the impounded book, because a careful reading of the contents revealed its anti-Soviet character and the lack of evidence of any anti-fascist attitudes.

It was a major failure on our part to have tried to recruit ‘Kurt’ and to have repatriated him.

This report by the Soviet secret service confirmed all of Heinrich Gerlach’s suspicions and also reveals the reason he was not repatriated until 1950. Furthermore, after reading these documents, his fear of being abducted by the Soviet secret police does not appear to be remotely unfounded.

In Brake, Heinrich Gerlach started out by renting two rooms, with shared use of the bathroom, from a widow living at Huntestraße 6. When the summer holidays of 1951 finished, the family moved into a larger flat at Breite Straße 117. Now, at the beginning of July 1951, Gerlach began trying to interest the press in his reconstruction of his Stalingrad novel. As we have already seen, he had already embarked on his first major attempt to recall his novel at Christmas 1950, after he realized that he was never going to get his original manuscript of the work back from the Soviet Union. His attempt to get to the manuscript by approaching the interior ministry through Professor Janzen had come to nothing. Gerlach could not have known that, as of December 1950, some very high-ranking Soviet officials had begun to take a keen interest in his Stalingrad novel.

Once again, earlier secret documents show how Breakout at Stalingrad became an issue of such burning concern to the confidential intelligence community in the Soviet Union. Gerlach’s request to the Soviet Ministry of the Interior to return his manuscript had been the catalyst for a great deal of discombobulation within the Russian party and state apparatus. On 29 December 1950, the secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, aside from Stalin and jointly with Deputy Premier Georgy Malenkov, the most important man in the political hierarchy of the USSR at the time, received a letter, which reads as follows:

TO COMRADE L.P. BERIA,

Pursuant to the order of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued on 9 December 1950, please find attached information on the content of the book written by the former Lieutenant Colonel [sic!] of the German Army H. Gerlach, ‘Breakout at Stalingrad’.

The letter was signed by Mikhail Suslov and Vagan Grigorian and dated 28 December 1950. According to the distribution list, a copy was also sent to Georgy Maximilianovitch Malenkov. This suggests that in December 1950, the entire governing elite of the USSR was concerned with Heinrich Gerlach and his Stalingrad novel. In 1950, as acting chairman of the Council of Ministers and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Malenkov was second only to Stalin. At that time, Mikhail Andreyevitch Suslov was Secretary of the Central Committee and likewise one of the most powerful politicians in the Soviet Union. Finally, at the time of this matter involving Heinrich Gerlach, Vagan Grigorian was active in foreign affairs. From 1949 to 1953, he was the chairman of the influential Foreign Policy Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Grigorian was also the first person to deal with the issue concerning Gerlach’s novel, and commissioned a report on its contents. He then forwarded this to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Suslov. Then, in January 1951, three other leading party officials became involved in scrutinizing ‘Breakout at Stalingrad’ . On 23 January, the following ‘top secret’ communication was sent to Comrade Kruglov: