Heinrich Gerlach: Breakout at Stalingrad

As instructed by Comrade G.M. Malenkov, we are sending herewith for your information the report on the content of the book ‘Breakout at Stalingrad’ by the first lieutenant of the former German army Heinrich Gerlach.

The attached four-page report is to be returned after reading.

This letter was signed by an assistant to the Secretary of the Central Committee. It was also countersigned and dated 25.01.1951 by Ivan Serov and Amayak Kobulov. These three top functionaries – Kruglov, Serov and Kobulov – complete the cast list of Soviet officials dealing with the case of Heinrich Gerlach’s novel. Sergei Kruglov was the USSR’s interior minister, and Ivan Serov a first deputy of the Ministry of the Interior. Amayak Kobulov was, from April 1950 on, the acting head and later head of the operational directorate of GUPVI (the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees). The fact that Ivan Serov was involved in this matter once again prompts us to speculate that Heinrich Gerlach’s fear of being abducted was thoroughly justified. After the war, Serov became second head of state security and in this capacity was civil director of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD). His duties included tracking down spies, saboteurs and other hostile elements, and neutralizing those who were opposed to the institutions that were then being put in place within the Soviet Zone of Occupation. From 1945, Serov also built up an extensive network of agents within the Zone.

The report primarily went into the content of the Stalingrad novel and the author’s standpoint. It stressed that the manuscript ‘has as its subject one of the most significant events of the Great Patriotic War, namely the encirclement and crushing of Hitler’s forces at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43’, and that the writer, a former Wehrmacht officer, pointed out in the afterword that ‘nothing was fabricated’ in his novel but that it was based on ‘personal experiences and conversations with German enlisted men and officers who fought at Stalingrad’. Consequently, the author would doubtless claim that he was giving a ‘true account of events’. But, the appraisal contended, even the most cursory of readings revealed that the book was not only ‘far from being an accurate description of the Battle of Stalingrad’, but also ‘a pack of lies from start to finish’. The reason for this, the report claimed, was that the author ‘was not viewing and portraying the war from the perspective of a progressive anti-fascist mode of writing, but instead from the standpoint of the decadent bourgeois intelligentsia, which sympathizes with fascism’. The report then went on to list reasons why the novel should be dismissed out of hand. Firstly, the author ‘seldom expresses his own opinion of Hitler’s war’. Rather, fully consonant with his own ‘method of bourgeois objectivism’, Gerlach had preferred to ‘let countless figures in the novel speak, and express a variety of different viewpoints’. Some of them ‘timidly criticized the Führer, while others conversely engaged in long and openly fascist diatribes’. Secondly, the report maintained, Gerlach had depicted ‘only one side in the conflict, namely the German army and principally German officers at that’. In doing so, the author had ‘grossly distorted the real state of affairs’, for Gerlach had presented the well-known moral standpoint of the officers of Hitler’s army ‘in a false light’. In Gerlach’s portrayal, then, these officers had ‘high ideals’ and were ‘noble-minded and honourable people’.

Moreover, the author had been at pains to stress the ‘steadfastness and tenacity of German officers in combat’. As a result, the novel was full of ‘German officers waxing lyrical about their sense of duty towards their homeland and about their loyalty and honour as officers’. The author’s intention was clearly to lead his readers to conclude that, if only the kind of steadfastness and tenacity as shown by the officers in his novel had been present throughout the Wehrmacht, Hitler’s army might have triumphed over the Russians. Such a biased perspective, ‘which is very skilfully presented in Gerlach’s novel, can only have one aim, namely to strengthen revanchist sentiment and to promote the planning of a new war against the Soviet Union’. ‘It is especially enlightening,’ the report added, ‘to note the author’s attitude to fascist leaders like Hitler and Göring.’ To be sure, the novel contained a few statements by officers and generals who thought that Hitler was an ‘upstart and adventurer’. But at the same time, there are other passages where the writer ‘openly praises the Führer’. For instance, in describing a meeting between Hitler and his generals, Gerlach allegedly emphasized ‘the Führer’s humanity’, while at the end of the novel, the soldiers shout: ‘We give thanks to our Führer! Heil Hitler!’ The author made every effort to conceal his ‘hostile attitude’ towards the Soviet Union. Craftily, he had ‘put his owns thoughts in the mouths of his characters’. The appraisal ended with the following disparaging conclusion:

In general, we may say of Gerlach’s novel that he grossly falsifies actual events. The author skilfully promotes revanchist tendencies and slanders the Soviet Union. In the present climate, a book like this could prove very useful to the Anglo-American warmongers in shoring up revanchist attitudes within West Germany.

The judgement of the report was clear; in addition, it was confirmed by two further negative assessments. These are simply variations on the principal report, with the addition of a few extra quotations from Gerlach’s text translated into Russian. Even the earlier, shorter appraisal that Grigorian sent Suslov on 20 December 1950 concluded with a wildly inaccurate character sketch of Heinrich Gerlach:

It is abundantly clear from the novel that the writer was a dyed-in-the-wool SS man, and has remained so. Returning this manuscript, which represents a calumny of the Soviet people and a hymn of praise to Hitler, would be highly inadvisable. Even without a thorough edit, the book could be used in West Germany for the propagandistic aims of revanchism and remilitarization.

Studying the report on Heinrich Gerlach, one thing immediately becomes apparent: statements by his characters are equated with the alleged views of the author. In addition, the writers of the report were concerned that the writer should have stood back from the wartime events and considered them from a distance. In other words, the report writers wanted to see a sovereign authority imposed on the literary portrayal – that is, a narrator who would explicitly condemn the National Socialist system, the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler and all the officers involved, and obtrude upon the action at various points to give ideological assessments of the situation. Heinrich Gerlach’s approach was quite different: through his use of immediacy and unsparing realism, he was attempting to show what the war and Stalingrad meant for the individual. The Soviet assessors were also hamstrung by another problem, namely the translation from German to Russian. As a result, a central episode at the end of the novel is not taken in the sense in which it was intended – that is, as a sarcastic and cynical judgement on Hitler and the Nazi regime. The things that Heinrich Gerlach had experienced and suffered and witnessed induced him to create a concluding episode that is meant to be read symbolically and which largely encapsulates the message of his Stalingrad novel:

Breuer stands leaning against the wall. He looks at the faces around him, faces upon which the three-month ordeal of the Stalingrad Cauldron – which has weighed down so much more heavily than the three and a half years of war and the decades of peace before it – has left its indelible scars. These faces are a world away from those of the young, fresh soldiers who would have stood in front of the primped-up Reichsmarschall in Berlin the day before. The soldier here had seen more than other men; they’d stared into the abyss of hell.