What Gerlach could not have appreciated in Vladimir began to become clearer in Krasnogorsk. But the first thing that was laid on for the former Lunyovo prisoners was a regular sightseeing programme – the group was taken on a city tour of Moscow, dressed in civvies, given a guided tour of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Lenin Mausoleum, and attended lectures on such subjects as the history of the Russian Communist Party, socialism in the Soviet Union and recent developments in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. It soon became apparent what was afoot in Lunyovo: the former BDO members were being prepared for repatriation and deployment within the Eastern Zone! In the process, it gradually emerged which particular area the Russian military authorities had earmarked the former German officers for. The chief intention was for them to play an active role in the NDPD, the National Democratic Party of Germany, which had been founded in the Soviet Occupation Zone on 25 May 1948.
Heinrich Gerlach couldn’t believe his ears when he heard that someone whom he had dismissed out of hand – Dr Lothar Bolz, the last chief editor of Free Germany and a friend of Rudolf Herrnstadt – had been appointed as the NDPD’s first leader. He found it astonishing that the communist Bolz should be made chairman of a party that was a repository for lower-ranking fellow travellers and members of the Nazi Party, plus former Wehrmacht officers. However, these developments in the Soviet Occupation Zone were fully in line with Stalin’s policies on Germany and Europe. Stalin, who was actually aiming for Russian hegemony over Europe and the whole of Germany, was seeking initially to manipulate the part of Germany that came under his direct influence. Accordingly, he was fully prepared to go along with the SED in bringing the denazification process to an end in 1948. But of course, in the incipient Cold War, Stalin and the Soviet authorities wanted to have some kind of safeguard and so, as well as ensuring that their informants were installed in all the political and state institutions, also began gradually to build up a network of agents in Germany.
As early as March 1944 a report was presented to the head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret service chief Lavrenti Beria, which had been prepared by the acting head of the Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees (UPVI) at the NKVD, Major General Petrov. The twenty-five-page-long report concerned the ‘secret service operational work of the Soviet NKVD administration regarding the affairs of prisoners of war and other detainees’. It began by pointing out that the UPVI conducted no security operations prior to March 1942, because another NKVD department was responsible for such matters at the time. Then, as the number of POWs increased, NKVD order number 002707 authorized the formation of an operational department within the UPVI. But because a number of different agencies within the UPVI were already responsible for the supervision and monitoring of prisoners of war and for processing any intelligence gathered, there was no systematic collating of this data. In addition, the proliferation of authorities entrusted with this task violated the very principle of secrecy. The report noted that secret service operations had only been reorganized in August 1943 at Beria’s instigation. Consequently, an operational Cheka department was created within the framework of the UPVI, comprising eleven subsections. The principal task of the new department was to organize intelligence gathering and to recruit agents for the postwar period. Suitable stations were set up, mainly in the suburbs of Moscow, for the purpose of conducting surveillance operations among POWs. Lunyovo was seen as especially important in this regard and was given the designation No.15-B by the secret services. Its significance was due to the presence there of the League of German Officers and the National Committee. Because the secret service agents had their eye on influential, well-connected and well-educated personalities and on their potential careers in postwar Germany, they set their sights especially on members of the BDO. As of 1 March 1944, the report records that 3,239 agents had been successfully recruited, 956 of whom were Germans.
Heinrich Gerlach had no way of objectively gauging the extent of the Soviet secret service’s activities, and so had no inkling of how this agency was directing his odyssey through the POW camps. The documents we found in the Special Archive indicate that the Cheka took a marked interest in Gerlach. Alongside the negative character assessment by Ulbricht and Herrnstadt, this was the reason he was not repatriated and fetched up in Lunyovo once more. The central Cheka department in Moscow had plans for Gerlach: the secret service agents in the camps were only required to exert the necessary pressure. Gerlach’s personal dossier indicates that, even while he was still recuperating in the hospital at Kameshkovo, his case had been re-examined once more. A handwritten note appears in one of the documents:
This general review was conducted by First Lieutenant [illegible] on 11 April 1948.
After this entry comes another handwritten observation, again signed by a secret service operative and giving notice of a momentous decision:
Unsuitable for repatriation. Employee of Department Ic. 14. Captain [signature illegible] 25.x.48.
No comments are attached, but the Cheka appear to justify their decision by highlighting Gerlach’s role as the head of Department Ic on the staff of the 14th German tank division. The security agents assumed that, in this capacity, Gerlach had been responsible for monitoring the enemy’s position, and that in consequence he was the head of a department dedicated to gathering intelligence on the enemy, which had specialized in interrogating captured Russian soldiers to try to gauge the military situation. At the same time, the Russian military secret service understood ‘Ic’ to mean that they were dealing with a counter-espionage officer who may have commanded a detachment of secret field police. As far as the Russian secret service was concerned, therefore, Gerlach was in military intelligence, in other words a ‘colleague’. The MVD officers had no idea that Gerlach had only been deputized to fill the ‘Ic’ post in the Stalingrad Cauldron, and that counter-espionage had played no further part at that stage. All the same, the order was confirmed on 24 December 1948, by which time Gerlach had been moved to another camp. An official stamp in the corner of the document reads: ‘This personnel matter has been correctly dealt with. 24 December 1948.’