Because newly captured officers were constantly arriving at Lunyovo, before being transported on to other POW camps, Gerlach was able to glean vital information about the final weeks of the Battle of Stalingrad. He also got to hear of some of the conversations that took place among the general staff of the Sixth Army, to which he of course had not been party. He heard reports, for instance, from Colonel Adam, Field Marshal Paulus’s adjutant, about the final hours before they were taken prisoner, while General Vincenz Müller supplied Hitler’s notorious statement on the defeat: ‘The duty of those who fought at Stalingrad is to be dead!’ His novel about Stalingrad, like the war itself, was now nearing its end. On 21 October 1944, Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany, surrendered to the Allies, and 12,000 men of the Wehrmacht were taken into American captivity. On 31 January 1945, Gerlach’s birthplace, Königsberg in East Prussia, which had earlier been largely destroyed by RAF bombing, was surrounded by the Red Army. Gerlach published an article on 4 February 1945, the second anniversary of the capitulation at Stalingrad, which spoke of the endless suffering of the exhausted, starving and wounded men at the front who were still hoping for a miracle, and of Hitler’s betrayal of the encircled troops. ‘You can rely on me with rock-like confidence!’ ran the telegraph message that the Führer had sent to the Cauldron. ‘And then,’ wrote Gerlach, ‘by the beginning of February it was all over. No miracle had happened. We were alone in the ruins of Stalingrad, beneath which tens of thousands of comrades lay buried, along with our faith and our false hopes and wishes. And then the Russians were standing outside our bunkers. Many of our comrades still flung themselves headlong in desperation into the hail of enemy bullets, and many committed suicide. Dying was hard, but it seemed an even harder prospect to go on living.’ For Gerlach, the decision to stay alive was his first small and modest act of rebellion against Hitler and for Germany. The hard road to enlightenment after Stalingrad made him realize the absolute necessity of a ‘pitiless struggle against Hitler and his entire system’.
On 2 May 1945, the Red Army completed its conquest of Berlin. The Russian troops had advanced on the heart of the city from all directions and the German commander charged with the defence of the capital, General Weidling, surrendered with the rest of the garrison. Seventy thousand German soldiers and officers were taken prisoner. A few hours later, another 64,000 were added to this figure. And with the surrender of the encircled Ninth Army southeast of the city, 60,000 of whose troops had already died in a week of fighting, a further 120,000 officers and men entered captivity. Two days later, on 4 May, Free Germany printed something akin to a leader by Heinrich Gerlach, which gave an unsparing account of current circumstances in Germany and called for immediate action in response: ‘The situation we now find ourselves in – in a country largely destroyed by war and occupied by the victors – is of necessity our starting point. No one is able or willing to change or alleviate this situation – we alone can bring this about.’ Alluding to the monologue delivered by the title character of Goethe’s Faust in his study, Gerlach noted: ‘Nothing will happen unless we set it in motion ourselves! We are at a beginning. And in the beginning was the deed. We will only go on living if we act. And we have it in our power to act straight away. With everyone fulfilling his or her own particular role, however modest it may be.’
Admittedly, Gerlach omitted to mention what impelled him to deliver this impassioned plea, namely his awareness of how limited was his own scope for action, incarcerated as he still was in a POW camp, albeit a rather more comfortable one than previously. What was really oppressing him was the fact that Lunyovo was steadily emptying. Several members of the BDO and the national committee – principally the leadership of the German Communist Party in exile – had returned to Germany; the first to leave, on 30 April 1945, had been the ‘Ulbricht Group’. In the camp, no one was sorry to see Ulbricht go. But others who had left for Berlin at the same time included Fritz Erpenbeck, who had lent constant support to Gerlach’s plan to write a novel, as well as Karl Maron and Wolfgang Leonhard. Soon after, Maron was appointed First Deputy Mayor of Berlin. Rudolf Herrnstadt, who was also to have been part of the Ulbricht Group, was vetoed by the Soviets for fear he would become the target of anti-Semitic violence in Germany. Even so, before long he was editor-in-chief of the Tägliche Rundschau (Daily Review) in Berlin, which from 15 May 1945 on was distributed by the Red Army as a ‘front newspaper for the German people’. He would presently be instrumental in the founding of the Berlin Verlag publishing house and the newspaper Free Germany. He eventually became editor-in-chief of the central organ of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), and from 1950 to 1953 served as an alternate member of both the Politburo and the Central Committee of the SED.
Heinrich Gerlach’s involvement in the editorial department of the newspaper became ever more intensive during this period of upheavaclass="underline" he wrote, edited, and chaired discussions. And with good reason: after more than two years, his ultimate goal was within sight: his Stalingrad novel was finished, a weighty tome of 616 pages! With the end of the war coinciding with the completion of his novel, a great weight was lifted from his shoulders. But he couldn’t tell anyone about it or show his manuscript to anyone. Instead, he hid it under his pillow.
X. ‘He’s trying to cover up his past’ –
Heinrich Gerlach’s odyssey through POW camps
Following Rudolf Herrnstadt’s return to Berlin, Alfred Kurella took over as chief editor of Free Germany. Yet among the editorial staff, it was not only Heinrich Gerlach who began to question the purpose of the paper now that Hitler’s dictatorship had collapsed. It had lost its whole raison d’être: the struggle against Hitler. Who was their target readership? Who were they to write for now? The editorial staff tried to counter this by harking back to the past, to the war and to German guilt and emphasizing the need for change. After completion of the course on anti-fascism, Colonel Adam and generals Vincenz Müller, Lattmann and Lenski all wrote articles in which, in their newly enlightened state, they examined their own guilty involvement with Nazism. Despite its best efforts to remain up to date, the Free Germany newspaper increasingly became a ‘black box’, a closed system with no connections to the outside world.
The editors had no idea what was actually going on in Germany at the time. And as prisoners of war, they had no way of forming an impression of conditions in the Soviet Union, either. They tried to counter this isolation by introducing a new regular feature on the last page of the paper: headed ‘News from the Soviet Union’, it reprinted reports on what life was like in the Soviet Union. This attempt to find new subject matter was doomed to failure, as Gerlach was well aware. Even so, he made every effort to do what was asked of him. In his piece of 23 August 1945, entitled ‘The old school year draws to a close’, he tried to cast a spotlight on the day-to-day life of a school in the Soviet Union, an everyday existence of which he knew nothing from personal experience. This article was little short of political kitsch, but Gerlach was still mindful of Walter Ulbricht’s warning: those comrades who had not yet gained enough political insight ‘would be given ample opportunity in the camps to become proper anti-fascists, you mark my words!’ The fact that Gerlach went about his task with conviction, and that he was consequently viewed as a progressive spirit, is evident from a letter that Erich Weinert wrote to Wilhelm Pieck and the head of Institute 99, Mikhail W. Kozlov, in July 1945. In it, Weinert proposed that twenty members of the National Committee, including Heinrich Gerlach, should be dispatched immediately to Germany. However, as it turned out, unlike Captain Hadermann, Gerlach was not among the group sent back to Germany. Understandably, having had no knowledge of Weinert’s deliberations, Gerlach himself did not question why this should have been so. With hindsight, though, it is tempting to ask why Gerlach remained behind at the camp. Once again, the documents we found in the Special Archive in Moscow provide an answer, in the form of a one-page report on the person of Heinrich Gerlach, marked ‘top secret’. This sheet, which dates from before Weinert’s letter of July 1945, bears the signature of Mikhail W. Kozlov. After a quick resumé of Gerlach’s biographical details, including his service record in the Wehrmacht until his capture, his membership of the National Committee and the editorial board of the newspaper Free Germany is noted. Then, however, comes the following observation: