Comrades Ulbricht and Herrnstadt report that Gerlach is a typical representative of the German Army, who is trying to cover up his past.
After some notes about Gerlach’s closest relatives and his wife, under the heading ‘Grounds for refusal’, reference is made to the attached documents, which are identified as follows: ‘A copy of the personal dossier plus the character witness statement by Ulbricht and Herrnstadt.’
At this stage, this top-secret information still had no impact on Gerlach’s fate. While he was not repatriated or sent to work in the Soviet Occupation Zone, he did remain on the staff of Free Germany. His last article appeared on 6 September 1945 under the headline ‘The People’s Court’. In it, the editor provided a commentary on the start of the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg, where the first twenty-four defendants appeared in November of that year. In addition to a final reckoning with the leading figures of the Nazi Third Reich, Gerlach also exhorted every individual German to ‘put yourself on trial, honestly and openly!’ For ‘only through this kind of serious and honest self-examination do we earn the right to judge others!’ Two days later, on 8 September 1945, the Free Germany radio station ceased broadcasting. This deprived the National Committee and the BDO of an important channel of influence, since the newspaper only had a very small circulation within the POW camps. It was hardly surprising, then, when two months later the National Committee and the BDO also applied to wind themselves up.
Eventually, permission to do so was granted by the NKVD, the Soviet Interior Ministry, with the personal blessing of Stalin and the secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria. In the final edition of Free Germany, which appeared the following day, 3 November 1945, a statement was printed, explaining that ‘after the complete annihilation of the Hitler state and now that a democratic bloc of anti-fascist parties has begun operating in Germany’, there was no longer any reason for them to continue their work in the Soviet Union. Henceforth the planning of political activity would be solely the responsibility of Soviet agencies, namely the ‘Department for POW and Internees’ Affairs’ (UPVI) of the NKVD.
Towards the end of the war, then, the emphasis in the POW camps was on enacting an educational concept that was designed to turn the prisoners of war into ‘friends of the Soviet Union’ and provide an ideological spur for a ‘duty to make reparations’. Ultimately, this amounted to nothing more than putting prisoners to work on reconstruction projects in the Soviet Union. According to regulations drawn up by the State Defence Committee of the Soviet Union as early as December 1944 and February 1945, an increasing number of POWs were to be formed into work battalions numbering 750, 1,000 or even 1,500 men apiece. The prisoners were employed primarily in the construction industry, in coal mining and forestry, and in the rebuilding of ruined Soviet cities. And so, until the great wave of repatriation in 1949, POWs and internees found themselves employed as labourers on all the major building projects in the USSR. These ranged from the construction of collective farms in the Ukraine, coal mining in the Donbass region and the building of the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, through repairing and enlarging the Moscow underground system, to the erection of the building that housed the Moscow Special Archive. However, at this early stage, the camp at Lunyovo remained unaffected by these developments. Even so, the situation grew tenser following the dissolution of the National Committee and the BDO. The NKVD conducted repeated interrogations of German officers. Not just the files we found on Heinrich Gerlach, but others too, verify that the Soviet security services had been conducting surveillance on a group of officers from the two organizations with an eye to recruiting them to work for the Soviet Union. To this end, information was gathered on the relevant candidates. In a top-secret communication dated 20 February 1945, the UPVI departmental head and major in the state security service, Klaussen, sent a strictly confidential list to the head of the Operational Department 15-B, Captain Shulchenko. The list, which took the form of a confidential personalized data collection file, contained the names of those members of the National Committee for a Free Germany who were of interest to the security services. Heinrich Gerlach appears right at the top, under the code name ‘Teacher’. Major Karl Hetz, Major Heinrich Homann and Colonel Adam were also included.
Christmas 1945 passed without incident. Nor did the following months, up to May, bring any changes. Gerlach took a wryly amused view of the preparations for 1 May 1946, which included decking out the meeting hall with banners printed with typical Soviet slogans like ‘Long Live the First of May, the Day of Struggle for All Workers’. Five days later, on 6 May, he was no longer in Lunyovo, but en route to Labor Camp 190 in Vladimir, some 190 kilometres east of Moscow and 25 kilometres away from Camp 160 at Susdal, where he had spent part of 1943. A personal data file for Gerlach, with the registration number 1848 and dated 25 July 1946, confirms his arrival in Vladimir. Before his surprise relocation, Gerlach had passed a rough plan of his Stalingrad novel, outlining its basic structure and chronology, to General von Seydlitz. Gerlach was convinced that Von Seydlitz was about to be released. He could not have known at this point that the general would only return to Germany as one of the last war captives in October 1955, more than five years after his own homecoming.
After his move, Heinrich Gerlach was initially put to work doing heavy labour on a road-building project, during which he stayed at the camp in Susdal. A labour camp was a new experience for him. Up to now, he had lived a privileged life in captivity. He knew that regular prison camps discriminated according to service rank, with the enlisted men receiving the worst treatment where both accommodation and food were concerned. The situation in camps for officers was different, where in observance of the Geneva Convention the inmates were not obliged to work, at least at first. The ‘generals’ camps’, such as that at Voikovo, were the exception, not the rule. In Vladimir, it became abundantly clear to Heinrich Gerlach that most POWs’ lives were not played out in the sort of facilities he’d known hitherto, but in these hard labour camps. And he registered with alarm that, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, there was a widespread conviction that ‘where the organization of these labour camps was concerned, they had created something quite special and progressive. A visiting card from a new world that was rewriting the history of mankind afresh.’ A chill ran down Gerlach’s spine when he realized that ‘these labour camps reflected Soviet reality. That was the thing. That was the worst aspect.’