Like most of his fellow captured officers, Heinrich Gerlach hoped that their founding of the BDO might allow them to intervene in the course of history. The traumatic after-effects of his experiences in the Cauldron at Stalingrad were still a vivid memory that gave him the impetus to do something. He could not rid his mind of terrible images of the battle. He remembered how divisional commanders had begged the commander-in-chief to ‘put an end to the senseless slaughter’. He knew that ‘twenty-two of the best German divisions and parts of other units’ had been wiped out. He’d learned that ‘the bodies of 147,200 dead German soldiers and officers were collected by the Russians and buried in mass graves on the battlefield’. And he’d heard about the judgement that Hitler would pass on the survivors of Stalingrad over the dining table: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’ In his memoirs, written more than twenty years later, Gerlach would recall his feelings after General von Seydlitz’s closing address and the League’s rousing appeal to German officers (‘Calling all German generals and officers! Calling the people and the army!’):
Once again, images welled up of the sombre events on the Volga, in all their monstrous gravity and enormity. The appalling sacrifice ordered by a madman, unparalleled in its savagery. This was the answer. One by one, the delegates filed forward and added their signatures to the document.
VIII. Heinrich Gerlach in Lunyovo special camp and the German communist exiles –
A ‘Who’s Who’ of the future GDR
The founding charter of the League of German Officers was also signed by captured soldiers and German exiles from the ‘National Committee for a Free Germany’. Even in the course of the inaugural meeting, there had been spontaneous fraternization between the BDO and the National Committee. Looking back, Count von Einsiedel took a very different view from Heinrich Gerlach, believing that with its incorporation into the National Committee the BDO had ‘fulfilled its task, so rendering its continued existence pointless’. Of course, this was not a view that the captive officers could take in 1943. The National Committee and the BDO, both of which were based in Lunyovo, were responsible for producing the paper Free Germany and running the radio station of the same name, which was headed by the communist Anton Ackermann. Alongside Heinrich Gerlach, the POWs from Lunyovo who made up the newspaper’s editorial staff were Major Homann, Major General von Lenski, First Lieutenant von Kügelgen and Corporal Kertzscher.
Gerlach already had experience of editorial work; prior to the founding of the BDO, as a member of the working party he was obligated to work on the Free Word, the forerunner of Free Germany. Unlike the Free Word, the aim of the newspaper of the National Committee was to win round officers and men to the anti-fascist cause through articles combining analysis with political argument. The large-format paper appeared weekly and was produced by the planographic process, which in this case meant that every single copy was printed by hand. The first edition of Free Germany had already appeared on 19 July 1943, containing the manifesto of the National Committee, which Rudolf Herrnstadt had played a principal part in drafting. Heinrich Gerlach was still in Susdal at that time. During his spell on the paper’s editorial staff, he was one of its most active contributors. Between 19 July 1943 and 3 November 1945, he would write twenty-one articles for the weekly paper, which ran for a total of 120 issues. This made the teacher from Elbing, as he styled himself several times in his pieces, one of the key shaping voices of the newspaper. From the executive committee of the BDO, only General von Seydlitz (with forty-two articles), Dr Korfes (twenty-seven) and Lattmann (twenty-five) were more frequent contributors. The involvement of Colonel Luitpold Steidle (twenty-one articles), Major Hetz (ditto) and First Lieutenant Bernt von Kügelgen (twenty-eight) was also decisive in giving the paper its particular character. Ultimately, however, final editorial control over the paper was wielded by another branch based in ‘Institute 99’ in Moscow.
Following the dissolution by Stalin of the Third Communist International (Comintern) in 1943, Institute 99 took over responsibility for the political education of POWs. To fill the most important posts in this organization, the Soviet leadership turned primarily to ‘tried and tested’ KPD (Communist Party of Germany) functionaries, all of whom Heinrich Gerlach got to know in Lunyovo. Walter Ulbricht played a key role, and it was he who would determine Gerlach’s fate. After 1945, Ulbricht came to occupy decisive positions of power, first in the Soviet Occupation Zone and then (after its inception in 1949) in the German Democratic Republic, as first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) from 1950 to 1973 and later as head of state (1960–73). All the other communist exiles whom Gerlach had dealings with were also appointed to senior posts in the Occupation Zone and the GDR post-1945.
Rudolf Herrnstadt, Anton Ackermann and Karl Maron were responsible for print media and radio broadcasting. The Free Germany radio station transmitted between fifteen and ninety minutes of programmes each day on various wavelengths. A typical day’s broadcasting comprised fifteen minutes of news, fifteen minutes reading out the names of those taken prisoner, and thirty minutes of original programming. Somewhat surprisingly for a communist broadcaster, the intermission signal followed the melody of an old patriotic student fraternity song from 1812 known as the Vaterlandslied (‘Song of the Fatherland’).
The editorial staff of the identically named newspaper, with Rudolf Herrnstadt as editor-in-chief, had much more work to do. Herrnstadt, an experienced journalist, had excellent contacts with the Soviet leadership. Before 1933, he had been a correspondent in Warsaw and Moscow for the Berliner Tageblatt, and in 1941 he emigrated to the Soviet Union, where from 1943 onwards, like so many other communist exiles, he lived at the Hotel Lux in Moscow. Karl Maron, Lothar Bolz and Alfred Kurella were also on the editorial staff of Free Germany. Gerlach subsequently worked with these communist exiles, clearly finding some of them more sympathetic than others. After his first meeting with Herrnstadt, he wrote that he exhibited ‘the aloof chilliness of a block of ice’. This was probably an accurate summation of the editor-in-chief’s emotional state at this time.
It must have been hard for someone like Herrnstadt, who had been involved in the resistance against Hitler from the outset, to now have to work alongside captured Wehrmacht officers. In her biography of her father, Herrnstadt’s daughter, Irina Liebmann, speculates how he must have felt: ‘If you look at photos from this period and see the German officers standing there in their jackboots and their military insignia – well, Herrnstadt knew full well what the outcome would have been if they’d encountered him on the other side of the front.’ In addition, like many other communist émigrés, Herrnstadt had undergone experiences in Soviet exile that he couldn’t talk about. Irina Liebmann quotes the photographer Eva Kemlein, who tells of her disappointment at meeting the German ‘émigrés from Moscow, whose arrival I’d keenly anticipated’: ‘When they arrived, they were like blocks of ice.’ But there was something else about Herrnstadt: in the Soviet Union, he couldn’t say anything about the ‘murder of his own group, the worst of all possible outcomes’: when they met, Gerlach had no idea that Herrnstadt had been the handler of the Berlin anti-Nazi resistance group known as the ‘Red Orchestra’ (Rote Kapelle), whose members were sentenced to death and hanged, along with the spy Ilse Stöbe, by a German war tribunal in December 1942. Gerlach took a very different view of Alfred Kurella, who proved to be ‘an educated and open-minded individual, who was prepared to discuss all aspects of life without the slightest prejudice’. Kurella could speak seventeen languages, translated Central Asian poetry into Russian and German, and was a great admirer of the writings of Romain Rolland, whose secretary he had once been.