BEKETOVKA. Lots of people out on the streets, largely women and children. Odd to find so much life in a place not far from the City of Death! Taciturn expressions with a searching look. Very occasionally an open threat, either verbally or in a person’s demeanour. Adolescents jump out and make as if to land a punch. The guards shoo them away, calmly but firmly. All without any fuss, and almost without a sound. Breuer can feel their gaze on his skin, scanning his face, and sometimes he’s amazed to see a hint of pity in their eyes. Of course, it was the head bandage he was wearing! That filthy, blood-encrusted dressing must look frightful. On the plus side, the wound to his left eye seemed to have healed well, and he could hardly feel any pain there any more. Head bandages have an extraordinary effect on people. They embody picture-book notions of heroism. A hero with a stomach wound or frostbitten feet, say, would be unthinkable!
In the camp at Beretovka alone, more than 27,000 prisoners died between 3 February and 10 June 1943, putting the mortality rate of the survivors of Stalingrad at over 90 per cent. As the war progressed, around three thousand POW camps would be set up in the Soviet Union, split between main and subsidiary camps. These facilities each housed anything between a hundred and several thousand inmates. The camp administration was situated in each main camp. But in the subsidiary camps, too, there was an independent array of amenities, comprising a hospital, kitchen, laundry, barber’s shop and shoe-repair workshop. In sum, from the first day of captivity to the last, the camps were ‘total institutions’ that radically restricted the individual’s freedom of movement and subordinated him to an inflexible system. This began with early-morning sports or PT and continued with work assignments and increasing possibilities of regulated leisure-time activities. In this respect, for every soldier who underwent the experience, being a prisoner of war was a highly unusual situation. It was particularly difficult for those soldiers who were taken into captivity individually rather than in groups. Mass capitulations, such as happened at Stalingrad, were a different matter. Initially, Heinrich Gerlach also found that being taken prisoner was almost an ‘anonymous act’; he was just one among thousands. He was extremely fortunate, since he was among a group of hand-picked officers who were driven to the camp in lorries. Gerlach noted the exact date in his memoirs: 24 February 1943, barely three weeks after his capture. Although the situation in the camps was chaotic at first, care was taken to register the details of all POWs when they first arrived. During interrogation, they were required to fill out a questionnaire, which gave them a registration number and was filed in their personal dossier. The questionnaire contained other information such as surname, Christian name, date of birth, home address, nationality, education history and occupation in civilian life, together with the date and place of capture or of transfer from another camp. Precisely this first Soviet record of Heinrich Gerlach came to light in the material from the special archive, thus enabling us to document the first important stage in his odyssey through the camps. His first destination was the famous Camp 27 at Krasnogorsk, near Moscow.
Just a few days after arriving there, however, Gerlach was singled out and transferred to the notorious ‘Lefortovskaya’ military prison in Moscow. The undoubted reason for this was that, as part of his designated role as a Third General Staff Intelligence Officer, Gerlach would have been responsible for gathering information on the enemy and for counter-intelligence. The authorization to this effect, which was also included in the documents on Gerlach, confirmed his transfer from Camp 27 of the NKVD to the military prison.
Gerlach spent four months in solitary confinement and was interrogated repeatedly by NKVD officers. He was released from the military prison in June 1943 and taken to POW camp 160 at Susdal, 200 kilometres from Moscow. The camp was reserved for officers and was administered by the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. This stage in his captivity is precisely attested too, by another interrogation or questionnaire form on Heinrich Gerlach with the code number 1050.
Fellow inmates at Camp 160 included Field Marshal Paulus and other generals of the defeated Sixth Army. On 22 July 1943, Gerlach was again ordered to decamp and put on a Ford V3000S lorry heading towards Moscow. Once again, his destination was Camp 27 in Krasnogorsk. Attached to this facility was the Lunyovo special camp, which was under the control of the Soviet Military Secret Service, the GRU. A working party in Lunyovo was already planning the formation of the League of German Officers (BDO), which would work against the Hitler regime from captivity; Gerlach was assigned to this group. At its head was Lieutenant Colonel Bredt, the former chief of the logistics division supplying the Sixth Army. At this stage, Gerlach still did not know that officers had been brought from several different camps to Lunyovo. Colonels Luitpold Steidle and Hans-Günther van Hooven also joined the group. Against their will, the Soviet secret service had also transported the renowned Stalingrad generals Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Dr Otto Korfes and Martin Lattmann to Lunyovo in ZIS limousines. Major General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, the most well-known of them, had fought his way out of encirclement by Soviet forces in the Demyansk Pocket in the spring of 1942, saving six divisions. Thereafter, Hitler took to calling him ‘the toughest man in an encirclement’.
Seydlitz had gone into captivity with the rest of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, after having tried in vain to persuade the commander-in-chief of the Sixth Army, Field Marshal Paulus, to defy Hitler’s orders and break out of the Cauldron. Major General Martin Lattmann headed the 389th infantry division, while prior to his capture Dr Otto Korfes had been in command of the 295th infantry division. Colonel Steidle, who was a regimental commander when he was taken prisoner at Stalingrad, tried to convince the generals that they should collaborate with the BDO by pointing to a historical parallel, the Convention of Tauroggen, which Prussian general Ludwig von Yorck signed with the Russians on 30 December 1812, without prior authorization by his king, Frederick William III. For Steidle, the Sixth Army, which had been written off, needed to make its voice heard in order to bring about a swift end to the war and prevent the total destruction of Germany. Yet the generals initially turned down any collaboration, because they felt bound by their oath of allegiance and believed that any activities conducted from captivity amounted to an act of treason against the troops who were still fighting. The group of officers around Steidle were deeply disappointed. Ultimately, though, General Melnikov of the NKVD managed to win round the generals by conveying to them assurances from Stalin: if anti-fascist forces managed to bring about the fall of the Hitler regime and an end to the war against the Soviet Union, Germany would remain intact with her borders as at 1937. The three generals grasped at this straw of hope. After a further night of mulling over the situation, they agreed to join the League of German Officers. Some decades later, Walther von Seydlitz described the decisive moment in his memoirs: