Yet for all the distance between himself and his editor-in-chief, Gerlach found the atmosphere at Free Germany intensely stimulating. He wrote prodigiously, edited, and mapped out ideas for broadcasts. His first article, published in the 5 September 1943 edition of Free Germany, carried the title ‘War without People’ and examined the ‘campaign’ against the Soviet Union. The topics for articles in Free Germany were set by the editorial board and the contributions were discussed once they had been written. Gerlach gained great satisfaction from writing. After studying her father’s papers on the enforced collaboration between officers and communist exiles, Irina Liebmann wrote very appositely: ‘Under laboratory conditions, a rapprochement took place that was deeply absurd, but a rapprochement for all that. Herrnstadt’s memoirs contain remarkable vignettes of German officers in these exceptional circumstances. What bound them all together was a shared concern for Germany.’ If one examines the contributions to Free Germany in their entirety, which were the work of 274 authors in all, inmates of Lunyovo and of the officers’ camps at Krasnogorsk, Yelabuga, Oranki, Voikovo and Susdal, one finds oneself agreeing with Irina Liebmann’s impression: ‘How sad they are […] This comes across in the absence of rhetoric in all the articles, and in the welter of surprising details – a descriptive style that vanishes once the war is over.’
The staff of the newspaper were shocked when they were confronted with evidence of war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht. As early as 1943 – before the founding of the BDO – the Red Army, as it advanced west, was known to have found in Krasnodar vans that had been converted into mobile gas chambers. This was very disturbing news to the officers, who had not wanted to acknowledge systematic atrocities hitherto, preferring to regard them as exceptions. This conviction was seriously undermined when Major Karl Hetz, vice-president of the National Committee, told a group of officers at Lunyovo how such gas vans worked. Rudolf Herrnstadt was shocked to learn of this. After the BDO was formed, the editorial board decided that Hetz should be called upon to explain how he came to know about the gas vans. Accordingly, on 15 September 1943, just a few days after the formation of the League, an article by Major Hetz appeared in the paper under the headline ‘The Gas Van’. As Irina Liebmann noted: ‘This was the very first German newspaper article anywhere in the world on this form of crime.’ A few months later, the newspaper received a report by Lieutenant Bernt von Kügelgen about mass murders perpetrated against the civilian populace of Kiev. Cracks also began to appear in Heinrich Gerlach’s conviction that the German forces were ‘clean’. He recalled the winter of 1939–40 in Warsaw, when he saw SS officers mistreating a young girl who was selling stockings on the street. His driver had also once related to him an incident at a transit camp in Dubno, when five hundred Soviet officers were gunned down one night under floodlights. Gerlach was aware of how he had tried to assuage his conscience at the time by telling himself such things were exceptions, excesses committed in the heat of the moment. But after reading Kügelgen’s report he was forced to admit to himself: ‘It was organized from above, it was systematic.’ Finally, fifty years and more after the end of the Second World War, two travelling exhibitions organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (in 1995–99 and 2001–4) brought public acknowledgement at last of the war crimes carried out by the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The twenty-one articles that Heinrich Gerlach wrote while working on the editorial staff of Free Germany analyse the catastrophe at Stalingrad and the current military situation; he also reported on meetings of the National Committee and tried to put across a more objective image of the Soviet Union to counter the clichéd view of Bolshevism that was peddled in Germany. He also gave authentic accounts of life in the Cauldron, culled from the novel he was working on. His article of 26 March 1944, recalling the German capitulation at Stalingrad a little more than a year after the actual event, begins thus:
Fourteen months ago, the Sixth Army was wiped out at Stalingrad. Hundreds of thousands died, not for their homeland – since that could hardly be defended there on the Volga – nor for oil, metal ores or wheat – they couldn’t be obtained by seizing others’ territory – nor even to save the endangered Eastern Front – the mass killing at Stalingrad couldn’t achieve that; no, the sole reason for their cold and brutal sacrifice was Adolf Hitler’s dogmatism and self-regard. And because the men knew that they had to die for nothing, they didn’t go to their deaths with a victorious smile on their faces, with flashing eyes and singing the national anthem, but instead, dressed in rags, emaciated by hunger, filled with all the pain of tormented animals, they died a miserable death in frost and snow, and with a curse on their lips against the man whom they’d once trusted. That was Stalingrad.
The rest of the piece is an unsparing reckoning with Hitler and with German propaganda, which made ‘out of the senseless, criminal sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men a new heroic epic to rival the Nibelungenlied’. Gerlach’s acute and bitter account climaxed in a call that he believed would presently grow ever more insistent on the home front too: ‘Hitler must be toppled if Germany is to survive!’
In July 1944 – with the front moving inexorably closer to Germany – he invoked a nightmarish vision of the death and destruction that was about to be visited upon the country. Harking back to his last home leave at the end of April 1942, he conjured up a picture of Lyck in East Prussia, which was situated around 150 kilometres from Gerlach’s birthplace of Königsberg and was still untouched by the war – ‘My home town – what a charming little place!’ He described the island on the lake, the marketplace, the church, the water tower and the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt School, for many years his residence and place of work. ‘What’s about to happen?’ Gerlach asked, before delivering a sobering and positively chilling answer: ‘It’s not about to happen, it’s happening right now! Today, Hitler ordered the alarm bells rung throughout Lyck! Evacuation! Assemble on the market square, women, children and pensioners with hand luggage, handcarts are permitted.’ Gerlach foresaw destruction: total destruction. ‘Hitler is setting out his killing zone in Germany! Blowing up buildings! Setting light to houses! No stone is to be left standing!’ And he saw what would be left after a fight to the death: ‘All that remains is a heap of stones, a pile of smoking, smouldering rubble. A smell of burning wafts far and wide across the countryside. That was Lyck!’ Confronting any illusions people might have, he noted: ‘It’s impossible to imagine – but this is how it will turn out, this is the only possible outcome if we let Hitler continue with his war. For wherever Hitler wages war, he recognizes no mothers, no children, no home towns and no schools. All he sees is “defensive terrain” that is to be left as scorched earth when German forces withdraw.’ In the desperate hope that such a dreadful scene might still be averted, Gerlach positively implores his countrymen not to submit to this fate but to rise up against the dictator: