Heinrich Gerlach (Author)

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Heinrich Gerlach (born August 18, 1908 in Königsberg , † March 27, 1991 in Brake ) was a German writer. As a first lieutenant in the Wehrmacht , he took part in the battle of Stalingrad . During his captivity in the Soviet Union he became a member of the Association of German Officers and the National Committee for Free Germany . He became known through the Stalingrad novel The Betrayed Army (1957) .

Life

Gerlach did his Abitur at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Königsberg. From 1929 he studied Latin, German and French in Vienna , Geneva , Freiburg im Breisgau and in Königsberg. After a semester in Königsberg, he went to Vienna for two semesters. Then followed a winter semester in 1927/28 in Freiburg. Then he went back to Koenigsberg. In the spring of 1931 he passed the first state examination. From autumn 1931 a year-long legal traineeship at a grammar school in Tilsit followed . Now he went back to the Wilhelms-Gymnasium and took his second state examination in autumn 1933. Since there was no vacancy as a study assessor, he went to teach at the Army College in Osterode am Harz in October 1933 . On April 20, 1934, he married his long-time girlfriend Ilse Kordl. Then he got a substitute position as a teacher in Lyck . He later got a permanent position there. His family stayed in Lyck until 1944.

On August 17, 1939, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a reservist . He was promoted to sergeant and appointed leader of a telephone-construction crews when strung 228. news department . From February to April he was in Halle on the Saale for an officer candidate course . From April to August 1940 he was with the 1st news department in Königsberg. From August to December 1940 there was a renewed assignment to the 228th news department in Westphalia . There he was promoted to lieutenant on September 1, 1940 . From December 1940 to April 1941 he was a platoon leader in the 228th Intelligence Department in France . In April 1941, he and his intelligence department were on duty in Yugoslavia during the Balkan campaign . From June 1941 a service with the 16th Infantry Division (motorized) took place . With this division he took part in the attack on the Soviet Union from June 22, 1941 . From July 24, 1942 he was on the staff of the XXXXVIII. Armored Corps used. With the Panzer Corps he took part in various battles such as the Kessel Battle for Kiev , the double battle at Vyazma and Bryansk and the Blue case . Gerlach was promoted to first lieutenant on July 1, 1942 . From the end of July the corps belonged to the 6th Army and advanced towards Stalingrad . On October 24, 1942, he was transferred to the staff of the 14th Panzer Division , which was part of the Panzer Corps. Here Gerlach was Third General Staff Officer or Ic. As Ic, he was in charge of the enemy intelligence department with responsibility for the enemy situation , operational management of subordinate units of the Abwehr , letter censorship of units subordinate to the secret field police and subordinate units of the propaganda company . By this time the 14th Panzer Division had lost almost all tanks during the heavy fighting in the city center and was fighting in the section between the bread factory and the Volgaufer . Gerlach was seriously wounded in the head and was taken prisoner of war in late January 1943 .

First he was taken to the Stalingrad city prison Beketowka. On February 24, 1943, he was transported to Camp 27 Lunjowo in Krasnogorsk under the control of the Soviet military secret service GRU . Shortly afterwards, on February 28, he was transferred to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow and placed in solitary confinement. Because of his position as third general staff officer and the associated responsibility for the enemy intelligence department, he was interrogated by the NKVD for four months. In June he was taken to the NKVD prison camp 160 in Suzdal . There were only officers there, including the generals captured in Stalingrad. On July 22, 1943 he was returned to Camp 27 near Lunjowo. There he belonged to the 14-member initiative group for the establishment of the Association of German Officers (BDO). On September 11th he was co-founder of the BDO and co-signer of the appeal to the German generals and officers! To the people and the armed forces! from September 12, 1943. From July 1943 to November 1945 he wrote 21 articles for the newspaper of the NFKD , Free Germany .

By order of the OKH of December 23, 1944, Gerlach was "temporarily" released from active military service in absentia, together with 19 other officers who were in Soviet captivity, to conduct proceedings before the People's Court . Shortly afterwards he was sentenced to death by the Reich Court Martial. His family was taken into kin custody in July 1944 .

When Gerlach was no longer politically needed in 1949, he was sent to various Soviet labor camps and prison. In the course of a mass conviction, he faced 25 years of forced labor for alleged war crimes . Against this background, he agreed to a conspiratorial cooperation with the Soviet secret service, which he had previously refused. He was repatriated in April 1950 . By chance he was able to evade the access of the Soviet authorities on arrival in Berlin. He then lived with his wife and three children in West Berlin , where he worked as a primary school teacher. In 1951 Gerlach was forced to leave Berlin after being pressured by Soviet agents. He spent the rest of his life with his family in Brake, where he got a job as a teacher at the grammar school.

Gerlach's Stalingrad novel

A few months after his capture, Gerlach began to process what he had experienced in diary notes. Since this form proved to be unsuitable for capturing the scope of the events literarily, he decided at the end of 1943 to write a novel about the battle of Stalingrad. In addition to personal experiences, Gerlach was able to draw on the reports of his fellow prisoners, which enabled him to describe the battle from numerous perspectives. The manuscript for the novel breakthrough at Stalingrad has Gerlach own account on May 8, 1945 completed. He intended to publish the novel on his return to Germany and smuggled the manuscript through several prison camps. In 1949 it was confiscated by the Soviets.

The Army Betrayed (1957)

Back in Germany, Gerlach tried to have his manuscript returned. Corresponding inquiries went unanswered. It later emerged that the Soviets had issued an expert opinion on the breakthrough at Stalingrad . Accordingly, a hostile attitude towards the Soviet Union was recognizable in the text.

While a reconstruction of the novel seemed hopeless to him at first, Gerlach learned in an edition of the illustrated magazine Quick about the possibility of drawing memories out of the subconscious through hypnosis . He contacted the Munich doctor and psychologist Karl Schmitz. He was about to publish his book What is - what can - what use is hypnosis? and saw in Gerlach an opportunity to distinguish himself as a luminary in the field of hypnosis. However, Gerlach could not afford the treatment. On the advice of Schmitz, he asked Quick to finance the hypnosis experiment and promised the paper a sensational story in return. Quick transferred Schmitz 1750 marks and reported under the title I know again what was ... about the high points and the results of the 23 hypnosis sessions that had taken place in the Munich practice in the summer of 1951. Although it actually succeeded in reconstructing considerable parts of the novel, Gerlach still needed several years to complete the second version, which appeared in 1957 under the title The betrayed army . In 1959 he was awarded the Premio Bancarella for this. In the following years the work became a bestseller and had a total circulation of more than 1 million copies by 1988. It has also been translated into numerous languages. Carsten Gansel describes the betrayed army as "authentic documentation that compares and weighs up so that the language is noticeably broader, more rounded and smooth [than in the breakthrough at Stalingrad ]".

Breakthrough at Stalingrad (2016)

The original manuscript for Breakthrough at Stalingrad was found by Gansel in the State Military Archives in Moscow on February 14, 2012 and published in 2016 with an afterword.

The novel is more authentic compared to The betrayed army , because in its creation no “extra-literary consideration” was required with regard to any public taste. The depiction penetrates here “under the soldier's dirty uniform and reveals his pitiful greed for tinned meat, cigarettes, firewood and imitation Christmas trees as well as his loneliness, the abandonment, despair and impoverishment in the icy bunkers.” The original version is also characterized by a dedicated self-reflection of some characters in the novel, in the context of which conflicts of conscience and the question of one's own responsibility for the crimes under the banner of National Socialism are dealt with. Jochen Hellbeck sees in this the influence of Soviet re-education , with which Gerlach came into contact as a prisoner of war. Corresponding tendencies took a back seat in The betrayed army . Gerlach adapted the novel to the needs of the West German audience. The second version is characterized by a soldierly victim narrative and the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht . The German soldiers are shown here primarily as suffering who were "duped" by Hitler and who are at the mercy of their duty as soldiers without any alternative. In doing so, Gerlach oriented himself on the narrative style that was characteristic of the West German war novel of the 1950s.

Odyssey in Red: Report of an odyssey

In 1966 the novel Odyssey in Red was published , in which Gerlach addresses his long-term imprisonment of war and his commitment to the NKFD and the BDO . In 1970, based on the book, a documentary drama for television entitled Das Haus Lunjowo was filmed. The novel was reissued in 2017. In an afterword, the editor Carsten Gansel explains the results of extensive research on Heinrich Gerlach that had taken place in the run-up to the new publication.

Fonts

  • Breakthrough at Stalingrad. Edited with an afterword and documentary material by Carsten Gansel. Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2016, ISBN 978-3-86971-121-8 .
  • The betrayed army. A Stalingrad novel. Munich: Nymphenburger Verl.-Handl. 1957
  • Odyssey in red. Report of an odyssey. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandl. 1966. Edited, with an afterword and documentary material by Carsten Gansel. Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2017, ISBN 978-3-86971-144-7 .
  • Prussia. Rise, splendor and fall. Augsburg: Weltbild Verlag GmbH 1994, ISBN 3-89350-694-2 .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Breakthrough at Stalingrad. Edited with an afterword and documentary material by Carsten Gansel. Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2016, 585 ff
  2. ↑ Breakthrough at Stalingrad. Edited with an afterword and documentary material by Carsten Gansel. Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2016, 587 ff
  3. ^ Rudolf Absolon: The Wehrmacht in the Third Reich. Volume VI: December 19, 1941 to May 9, 1945. Harald Boldt, Boppard 1995. ISBN 3-7646-1940-6 . P. 547.
  4. ↑ Breakthrough at Stalingrad . Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2016, p. 647 ff.
  5. ↑ Breakthrough at Stalingrad . Galiani, Berlin 2016, p. 537 ff .
  6. ↑ Breakthrough at Stalingrad . Berlin: Galiani Verlag 2016, p. 689.
  7. ↑ Ulrich Baron: Devil, is that cold. Confiscated in the Soviet prison camp, rewritten in 1957. Heinrich Gerlach's war novel “The betrayed army” is now published in the first version: “Breakthrough at Stalingrad” . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 22, 2016, p. 14
  8. ^ Jochen Hellbeck: Breakthrough at Stalingrad: The Repressed Soviet Origins of a Bestselling German War Tale . In: Contemporary European History . No. 1/2013 .
  9. ↑ Norman Ächtler: Generation in Kesseln: The soldier's victim narrative in the West German war novel 1945-1960 . Wallstein, 2013.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gerlach, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Koenigsberg
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 1991
Place of death Brake