In the course of the 1944 trial of General von Seydlitz, Kraell continued, alongside the many newspaper articles and pamphlets, the Supreme Military Court also adduced as evidence a number of photographs showing Seydlitz ‘in the company of Weinert, Pieck and others’. Ultimately, he said, the total body of evidence ‘was easily sufficient to ensure the conviction of General von Seydlitz’. In his capacity as a witness ten years after the end of the war, Kraell summed up the outcome of the 1944 prosecution thus: ‘In response to my application, on the charge of military treason in conjunction with that of high treason Seydlitz was sentenced to death, pronounced unfit for military service and stripped of all his human rights.’ According to Kraell’s statement, ‘on Hitler’s orders’ proceedings continued ‘against the rest of those accused, yet with no satisfactory outcome in the shape of formal charges being brought’. As a result of the assassination attempt against Hitler on 20 July 1944, the case was transferred (again by order of the Führer) from the Supreme Military Court to the Reich Attorney General at the People’s Court. In the end, despite more evidential material being gathered, no prosecution was ever brought against other members of the BDO and the National Committee.
Admittedly, going on what Erich Weinert told him in April 1944, Heinrich Gerlach could only assume that he, too, had been sentenced to death. His fears on this score appeared to be borne out a couple of months later, after it transpired that the families of prominent figures in the BDO had been taken into custody under Hitler’s orders. Yet at that stage, Gerlach had no idea that his own family was among them. The Gerlach family’s ordeal began in July 1944 and only ended on 30 April 1945, when American troops entered Neuschwanstein near the town on Füssen in Bavaria, where they had been interned, and the war came to an end.
Instead, some months later another report prompted an outbreak of positive euphoria in Lunyovo. Four days after publication of Gerlach’s dystopian vision of his home town of Lyck, Erich Weinert was once again the bearer of momentous tidings, bursting into the camp on 20 July 1944 with news of the attempt on Hitler’s life. The officers and other members of the National Committee thought their moment had come at last; finally, they hoped, senior Wehrmacht officers had seized the reins of power in Germany. The euphoria only lasted for a few hours. Later that day, Greater German Radio announced that Hitler had survived. Over the weeks that followed, the members of the BDO, Gerlach included, felt paralysed, as reports came in of the arrests and executions of the group of conspirators around Claus von Stauffenberg, scotching all hope of Hitler being toppled from power. Not even the declaration on 8 August by Field Marshal Paulus and other Stalingrad generals that they were joining the BDO could alter this mood of despondency. Heinrich Gerlach summed up the hopelessness many members of the BDO now felt regarding their own chances of ever being able to take effective action:
They [i.e. Paulus and the other officers] joined our ranks after realizing that everything had turned out the way the National Committee and the League of German Officers predicted it would. But this realization came too late. They themselves have come too late. A year too late. Now there’s no hope of changing or saving anything, and fate has taken its course. The fate of Stalingrad has been visited upon Germany itself.
Even the brief celebration on 22 August 1944 to mark General von Seydlitz’s 56th birthday could not halt the creeping demise of the BDO, as Gerlach saw it. While the speeches praising Von Seydlitz and the sight of prominent Wehrmacht generals strolling around in the company of communists like Wilhelm Pieck and Erich Weinert still conveyed the impression of a self-confident group of opponents of Hitler, ultimately the BDO’s scope for action continued to dwindle in the light of the ongoing military situation. I found a photograph album in the special archive containing important images of the work of the BDO and its representatives.
As the front crept ever closer to the borders of the German Empire, Heinrich Gerlach felt himself to be in an almost schizophrenic situation. During the day, he would find himself caught up in the infectious optimism generated in Lunyovo by the prospect that the war might soon end. But at the same time, he knew what that meant. Setting aside his personal fears about the way in which the Red Army might conduct itself as it advanced, he wrote several articles attacking the prevailing ‘bogey man’ image of Bolshevism. For instance, his piece ‘Dance of Death Around a Lie’, which was published in the 24 September 1944 edition of Free Germany, began as follows:
The days of Hitler’s rule are numbered. The nearer we come to the moment of final collapse, the more loudly and desperately Goebbels and his henchmen bang the propaganda drum to try to rouse German people to make one last frantic and pointless stand. And a key element in this latest propaganda hysteria are the so-called ‘terrors’ that the ‘Bolshevist domination that will ensue at war’s end’ will visit upon Europe and upon Germany in particular.
Gerlach recounted his experiences as a prisoner of war, and was at pains to stress that he was neither a communist nor a Marxist. He told his readers that he did not applaud everything that was done in Lunyovo, but that he had recognized while in captivity how the Soviet Union had, within just a few decades, ‘achieved centuries’ worth of development’. The Soviet people would ‘[harbour] no hatred towards other people, nor any desire for conquest. Having paid such a heavy price for their own freedom, they would not dream of enslaving other peoples or imposing on them a political system they did not want.’ Accordingly, it would not be the Soviet occupation of Germany that plunged the country into an abyss ‘but every day that Hitler’s war, which is already lost, is allowed to continue’. Gerlach went on: ‘The country’s real enemy isn’t outside its borders, but within Germany itself!’ Gerlach’s next article, which appeared on 22 October 1944 under the headline ‘Oppose Hitler’s Thugs’, inveighed against the Third Reich’s ‘scorched earth’ policy: ‘Goebbels exhorts the German people to make every home into a fortress and to raze everything else to the ground. That miserable armchair general Dittmar [General Kurt Dittmar, the German general staff radio spokesman] has given official notice of the bestialization of warfare under the National Socialists. In doing so, the regime has now finally revealed to its own people the criminal face it was careful to keep hidden for so long.’
Alongside his continuing role on the editorial staff of Free Germany, in the autumn of 1944 Heinrich Gerlach was already busy writing the third part of his Stalingrad novel. It was around this time that he got to know Georg Lukács, who came to Lunyovo to deliver a series of lectures on German philosophy and literature. Lukács was one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in exile, and had become embroiled in the Stalinist ‘purges’ and ‘Moscow show trials’ of 1936. Though Gerlach found himself deeply irritated by his external appearance – Lukács initially struck him as being something of a caricature of an intellectual – he was nevertheless won over by his outstanding breadth of knowledge. Lukács was a great connoisseur and admirer of German literature and his pronouncements on Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig and Ernst Wiechert chimed in with Gerlach’s preferences. Lukács also referred to a novel that he claimed was the best anti-war book ever, Arnold Zweig’s Erziehung vor Verdun (Outside Verdun), which had been released in 1935 by Querido Verlag, the leading publisher of exile writers; all the leading names in German literature who were forced to leave the country after 1933 were published by this house. Gerlach read Zweig’s novel over a single night and took inspiration from its title for his own work. He also came across the oft-quoted saying by the German knight and humanist scholar Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523): ‘Ich träume nicht von alter Zeiten Glück, Ich breche durch und schaue nie zurück’ (‘I don’t waste time dreaming of the good old days, I break through and never look back.’). This novel, which he spent every free moment working on, would be called Durchbruch bei Stalingrad (Breakout at Stalingrad).