Translated into English, the original Russian typescript reads:
Gerlach, Helmut [sic!], First Lieutenant.
A typical representative [illegible] of Hitler’s army, talented but not honest. Attempts to hide his real opinions by providing information to Soviet organizations. He can be employed for manufacturing work in the Soviet Union.
This assessment, which must have been written sometime in 1944, was totally at variance with the one written by Professor Arnold on 14 July 1943, who described Gerlach as ‘one of the most active, clever and able officers in Camp No. 160’. This new appraisal by Ulbricht and Herrnstadt would have disastrous consequences for Gerlach! But in April 1944 he still had no inkling of this. Rather, he was shocked by a piece of news that Erich Weinert brought from Moscow when he visited Lunyovo. According to this, on 26 April 1944 the Supreme Military Court in Germany had sentenced the president of the League of German Officers, General Walther von Seydlitz, and the other members of the executive committee to death for alleged high treason. Heinrich Gerlach was now in no doubt what fate awaited him in Germany, and he was deeply worried about his family.
The claim that Heinrich Gerlach was condemned to death in absentia alongside other officers of the BDO is still made even today. I researched this in various archives including the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, but found no trace of any files on Gerlach. Nor were there any trial papers on General von Seydlitz, though I did come across appraisals from March and May 1940, as well as from July 1942, noting that Walther von Seydlitz was a natural leader and stressing his ‘first-rate qualities both as a soldier and as a person’. A dispatch of 18 January 1944 from the ‘Sixth Army Processing Unit’ concerning ‘notification of officers missing in action’ disclosed that Artillery General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach had been missing since 23 January 1943 while serving at Stalingrad. The hint at a possible court martial is contained in a telegram from the Supreme Imperial War Attorney’s office (Torgau division) ordering the ‘immediate transfer’ of General Seydlitz’s personnel file.
My search for the trial papers likewise drew a blank at the Federal Archives in Berlin. However, certain files relating to Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel in the military archive did corroborate the fact that proceedings had been instituted against members of the BDO, including Heinrich Gerlach. As early as 23 September 1942, the Air Force personnel department raised suspicions of treason. The basis for proceedings against Lieutenant von Einsiedel was a report on Russian radio claiming that the lieutenant, now a prisoner of war, had made the following statement: ‘My great-grandfather was right when he told me that Germany should never attack Russia. Our invasion has cost us dear!’ The files on Von Einsiedel testify to the intensity of proceedings against the League of German Officers. The bundle of documents on him contained a letter dated 15 December 1944, in which the State Military Attorney informed the High Command of the Air Force that ‘legal proceedings on the grounds of treason’ were being initiated against the officers Major Lewerenz, First Lieutenant Charisius and Lieutenant Graf von Einsiedel. According to this letter, the case against Charisius and von Einsiedel had already, following preliminary investigation, been referred to the People’s Court. Since August 1943, First Lieutenant Charisius had been the official representative of the National Committee for a Free Germany on the Third Ukrainian front. This allows us to conclude that members of the BDO had evidently not been condemned to death before December 1944.
But what had become of the documents concerning the case against General von Seydlitz, and had he really been handed a death sentence? I did finally get an answer to this question, albeit not the one I had imagined. In the State Archive at Stade, I came across papers relating to a trial of 1955–6, again involving Walther von Seydlitz. A month after his release from Russian captivity on 6 October 1955 and his return to Verden, he had instructed a lawyer named Von Hugo to represent his interests by challenging the verdict of the Supreme Military Court against him, of which his family was unaware, in a court of law. This test case examining the soundness of his conviction for treason was a matter of life and death for Von Seydlitz, as he had received neither his military pension since his release nor any payment of the state allowance to which POWs were entitled. And so, in November 1955, the Verden state public prosecutor’s office, represented by Attorney-General Bollmann, instituted preliminary proceedings ‘against the former General von Seydlitz’ with the intention of ‘testing the legality of the death sentence handed down to Seydlitz by the Supreme Military Court in 1944, on the basis of the directive of 2.6.1947’. Bollmann noted: ‘Since the records of the military court have been destroyed, the bases for this judgement need to be reconstructed.’
The documents of which I had sight, which also allow us to draw inferences concerning the official attitude towards the BDO and Seydlitz in the Federal Republic from the mid-1950s on, confirm the following: on 26 April 1944, the Supreme German Military Court, with its senate chairman General Staff Judge Schmauser presiding, sentenced General von Seydlitz alone to death in absentia, declaring him ‘ineligible for military service’ and ordering that his property be seized. As the highest military tribunal of the Third Reich, the Supreme Military Court cited as grounds for its verdict General von Seydlitz’s activities as president of the BDO and vice-president of the National Committee for a Free Germany. Evidence of the cited offence came in the form of several copies of the newspaper Free Germany, pamphlets signed by Seydlitz and personal letters. The Supreme Military Court had instituted proceedings against the BDO and the National Committee as early as the end of 1943 on Hitler’s orders. Generals Korfes, Edler von Daniels, Lattmann, Hofmeister and Vincenz Müller were also targeted in this indictment. Other officers who were identified as being especially active within the BDO were Captain Hadermann and Major Bechler, but also First Lieutenant Heinrich Gerlach. However, at that time the incriminating evidence available was only sufficient to put General von Seydlitz on trial. The instruction to proceed with the prosecution came directly from Hitler via the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. The legal basis for the charge against General von Seydlitz was the amendment made during the war to Paragraph 59 Section 2 of the Wartime Penal Code (Kriegsstrafverfahrensordnung; KstVO), which stipulated that it was still possible to proceed against a defendant whose whereabouts were unknown if the gravity of the charge warranted it. The prosecution in the case against General von Seydlitz was conducted by Alexander Kraell, who as president of the Second Senate of the Supreme Military Court had already been the presiding judge in the trial of the ‘Red Orchestra’ resistance group. In November 1955 Kraell appeared as a witness in the preliminary proceedings against Seydlitz, where he gave evidence concerning the circumstances surrounding the death sentence passed in April 1944. Under cross-examination on 30 November 1955, Kraell described the original trial, and emphasized that the most damning evidence had been four to six letters that General von Seydlitz had sent to front-line commanders whom he knew. Kraell made the following statement for the record:
In these letters, after referring to his former acquaintance with the addressees, Seydlitz launched into a long disquisition promoting his ideas and concluded, as I recall, by demanding that the Sixth Army should retreat and surrender. The letters were examined by both handwriting experts and psychiatrists – the latter because we had to entertain the possibility that his handwriting might reveal that he had been under the influence of drugs, or duress or something of the sort when he wrote it. The experts’ reports vindicated the original charge.