The commander makes a vague forward motion with his hand. There’s the hill, the position they’ve got to defend. The men’s faces, haggard from sickness and hunger, stare into the distant blackness, which is lit only by the muzzle-flare of the Russian artillery. But there are no trenches or pillboxes up there! The white expanse stretches out endlessly all around them, with clouds of powdery snow gusting across it. There’s no retreating that way. Anyone who isn’t struck by an enemy bullet will simply die of the bitter cold this icy January night. The unit fans out and disperses across the open ground. One by one, the men take up a prone position and are slowly enveloped by the white death shroud, as tracer bullets from Russian machine gun positions whistle overhead. No one calls out or asks a question, there’s not a sound. Only those who have given up all hope can be that dreadfully still. But this appalling silence ascends to heaven like one great painfully pressing question to which there is no answer from any quarter: What is this sacrifice for, in God’s name, for what?
At Kurella’s suggestion, though, Gerlach cut something from the excerpt. Originally, we learn that even the commanding general cannot contain himself when he receives the senseless order to hold the hill. At first, in the face of objections from his officers, he angrily implements the order while at the same time imploring them with tears in his eyes to appreciate his position. That was too much for Kurella. One of Hitler’s generals crying, he told Gerlach, struck him as too much of a cliché and as something that readers would find implausible. Even so, the author retained the emotional depiction in the novel itself. The full passage read: ‘He [i.e. the general] comes up to the silent captain and takes both of his hands in his. There are tears in his eyes again. He whispers, “It’s dreadful, I know. But there’s nothing I can do to help you!”’ The episode is also significant for the later plot progression and for Gerlach’s work on the manuscript in so far as it is at this point that the officers begin to realize how hopeless the Sixth Army’s predicament is:
In a blinding insight born of all that he has experienced over the past few days, the truth now dawns on Captain Gedig: the High Command… Army Group Manstein… No, these two hundred sacrificial lambs won’t save the Sixth Army. No one can save it now. It too is going to be put to the sword, pointlessly, senselessly… It’s all over!
Gerlach has the figure of Colonel von Hermann express what Breuer and Gerlach are feeling about the loss of the two hundred men:
‘It’s nothing short of criminal!’
The two officers sitting at the back of the bunker give a start. What was that? Did someone speak? Or are some thoughts so distressing and urgent that they can miraculously express themselves? The colonel up front there can’t possibly have said anything so outrageous. It’s just not possible! But then the two of them hear quite clearly what Colonel von Hermann says next:
‘And the worst thing is, there’s no way out… and woe betide anyone who tries to save his own skin after he’s had to demand this of his men!’
‘So, there’s no escape from here?’ thinks Breuer desperately. ‘Is there such a thing as a “must”? Is there really and truly no way out?’
Three months later, by Easter 1944, Gerlach had made significant progress on the manuscript. Conditions in the camp allowed him to write late into the night. Alfred Kurella supplied him with more paper and enquired every so often how the novel was proceeding. Gerlach, though, remained tight-lipped and read the pages he produced to just a small group of trusted officers, whom he encouraged to offer criticism. An authentic portrayal of what had occurred at Stalingrad was his top priority, and for that he needed feedback from other veterans of the battle.
While he was writing the novel, certain events took place that impinged particularly on Gerlach. A conspiracy against the National Committee in April 1944 unfairly made him the target of suspicion on the part of Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht took Gerlach to task for waiting too long before informing General Lattmann about the plot. His criticism culminated in the accusation: ‘You’re not a good anti-fascist yet.’ A few weeks later, Ulbricht analysed what had happened in front of the executive council of the committee and summed up the situation thus, as Gerlach recalled:
The question this raises is whether some comrades still aren’t proper anti-fascists, right? I submit that they’ll have plenty of opportunity to become real anti-fascists back in the camps!
Walter Ulbricht, who became the foremost politician in the Soviet Occupation Zone after 1945 and thereafter in the GDR until the early 1970s, comes across in Heinrich Gerlach’s memoirs as almost a stereotypical figure: ‘Walter Ulbricht. With his small, strangely unfinished and yet at other times somehow ancient-looking head. Those floating, restless eyes and that lilting, mollifying, garbled way he has of speaking that mangles everything he utters…’ This was Gerlach’s unflattering description of the man who pulled the strings at Institute 99 in Moscow and who played a key role in setting the agenda for the National Committee for a Free Germany.
It is a well-known fact that memoirs cannot create a faithful representation of the past. All that can ever be achieved is a partial, incomplete and even sometimes distorted piecing together of past occurrences. For the time lapse between the ‘real past’ and the contemporary moment in which it is recalled necessarily means that the earlier events are seen and evaluated from the perspective of the present. This therefore entails a kind of reconstruction right from the start. When Gerlach wrote his memoirs, Ulbricht had already been General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party since 1950, and was the most powerful man in the GDR. At the same time, he was the most hated politician, and not just in West Germany. During the Workers’ Uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany, demonstrating construction workers marched along the Stalinallee in Berlin chanting ‘Goatee Beard Must Go!’ In 1956, Ulbricht was responsible for bringing trumped-up charges of ‘conspiratorial counter-revolutionary activity’ against the writers Wolfgang Harich, Walter Janka and Erich Loest, and in 1961 he ordered the building of the Berlin Wall. So, did Heinrich Gerlach perhaps superimpose the image of Ulbricht from the postwar period on the situation back at the camp in Lunyovo? Did ‘external elements’ retrospectively creep into his recollections and combine with his own experiences to produce a distorted picture of Ulbricht as a person?
Documents from the Russian special archive, which I have been able to locate and study over the past few years, help to throw light on this and other questions concerning Heinrich Gerlach. These files show that he had a remarkable memory for even the tiniest details and gave a very precise assessment of all the people in Lunyovo. There was also another document about Gerlach in the archive, containing a brief character sketch, which confirms the feeling of dread that assailed him after his dressing-down by Ulbricht. The appraisal of First Lieutenant Gerlach was signed by Walter Ulbricht and Rudolf Herrnstadt.