But once again fate dealt kindly with Gerlach the war captive. When the subsidiary camp was dissolved in the summer of 1946, Gerlach was transferred to the main camp 190/1 at Vladimir. After a few weeks there, he was offered the post of editor of the wall newspaper by the camp’s political instructress. She was familiar with several of his contributions to Free Germany. And it was a fortunate coincidence that this political instructress at Camp 190/1 in Vladimir just happened to be one Mishket Liebermann, a relative of the renowned German Impressionist painter Max Liebermann. She had been living in the Soviet Union since the late 1920s. After a brief engagement at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, she had travelled to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1927, where she got to know Sergei Eisenstein, director of the (even then) famous film Battleship Potemkin (1925).
In April 1929, Mishket Liebermann made her way to Russia once more, journeying to Minsk in Belorussia via Moscow. She obtained a position at the Jewish Theatre in the city and made her debut in Ernst Toller’s drama Hoppla, Wir leben! (Hoppla, We’re Alive!), the play that had marked the opening of the famous German director Erwin Piscator’s agitprop theatre on Nollendorfplatz in Berlin two years earlier. Following a brief spell back in Berlin just before the Nazis seized power, she promptly returned to the Soviet Union. Around that time, Erwin Piscator was establishing a collective theatre in Dnepropetrovsk, a kind of itinerant company involving several exiled German actors, among them Erwin Geschonneck and Mishket Liebermann. When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, she began visiting German POW camps, and became responsible for political education.
At first Gerlach gave her a wide berth and shunned any involvement with the camp’s wall newspaper; he simply had no desire to trot out political slogans any more. However, Mishket Liebermann reassured him that the anti-fascist bloc politics being enacted in the Soviet Occupation Zone were not about communist agitation. And when, in October 1946, Gerlach received the first indications that his wife Irmgard was alive and well, his whole outlook changed. Now, all he wanted was to get by as best he could and return home to Germany and his family. Accordingly, from November 1946 he produced the wall newspaper for Camp 190/1 and could build on the support of his German political instructress. And it was she, too, who retrieved the manuscript of Gerlach’s Stalingrad novel, which had meanwhile found its way on to the desk of the camp commandant.
Gerlach was thus exempted from having to work outside the camp, which could well have meant hard labour. The major role the wall newspaper played in camp life was due in large measure to the importance that was accorded to the written word, and indeed to art and literature as a whole in the Soviet Union; this was very much in line with the attitude of Stalin, who in 1932 famously called writers ‘engineers of the human soul’. Gerlach treated recurrent themes of captivity in his contributions: daily life in the camp, restitution, promotion of high productivity, cultural work, news from the Soviet Occupation Zone, information on the policies of the Socialist Unity Party and its newly established youth wing, the Free German Youth (FDJ), developments in global politics, and experiences within the Soviet Union. While Mishket Liebermann returned to East Berlin in 1947, Heinrich Gerlach still remained behind at the POW camp, despite the fact that a large number of German prisoners and other interned Germans had been repatriated over the course of the year. According to the latest Russian sources, a total of around 221,329 German soldiers and 33,182 internees had been released by that stage. Camp Number 69 in Frankfurt an der Oder acted as a central transit camp.
Despite his privileged position, Gerlach found the situation increasingly unbearable. Secret service men from the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered him to compile reports on his comrades. In response, Gerlach took the only honourable course of action, divulging everything to those he was required to write about, and submitting innocuous reports in which he praised their efforts for peace and restitution and emphasizing their anti-fascist disposition. It ultimately dawned on him how the rules of the NKVD worked: ideally, everybody was expected to report on everyone else. But the security officers weren’t remotely interested in gathering information; rather, they were after something else: ultimately, this was all a grand exercise in betrayal! But Gerlach had established some clear boundaries for himself; in his view, there was a line that one should not cross and where a refusal to cooperate was the only possible answer.
It is hardly surprising that we initially found nothing in Gerlach’s personal dossier to indicate that the Soviet secret service agencies made any attempt to influence him. Instead, I came across a postcard from Germany, sent by the regional authority for Berlin Wilmersdorf, whose offices were located in the city’s Charlottenburg district, postmarked 3 April 1948 and addressed to Heinrich Gerlach in Camp No. 2989. Why, I asked myself, should a postcard have been sent to Camp 2989? In April of that year, Gerlach was in Camp 190 in Vladimir. The solution to this supposed confusion was simpler than I thought: the number 2989 actually referred to the hospital at Kameshkovo in the Vladimir region, where Gerlach had been admitted after breaking his foot. The postcard contained an important piece of information:
For the purpose of presenting prima facie evidence to the Russian authorities, this is to certify that Frau Ilse Gerlach and her three children: Jürgen, Maria-Dorothea [sic!] and Heinrich are all recognized victims of fascism (freedom fighters).
The document was verified by the social security office (district office ‘Victims of Fascism’).
The secret services in Vladimir took no notice of this corroboration of Gerlach’s integrity. But because the doctor who treated him – another captured German officer – ordered that his foot should stay in a plaster cast for several weeks, Gerlach was granted some peace and quiet for a while. But then he found himself assailed from another direction, without knowing how this had come about. All of a sudden, after almost two years in the labour camp at Vladimir, on 6 May 1948 Gerlach was ordered to leave the hospital and travel by train to Moscow, with an army sergeant specially detailed to guard him. The Russian military authorities in the capital were already informed about his arrival; two officers flanked him and marched him straight to a waiting ZIM limousine, which drove out of the city. Its destination was Camp 27 (Lunyovo) at Krasnogorsk, a place where Gerlach now found himself for the third time.
XI. ‘Unsuitable for repatriation’ –
Heinrich Gerlach in the clutches of the NKVD secret service
In Camp 27, Heinrich Gerlach encountered a number of officers with whom he had worked in the BDO and the National Committee, and whom he had assumed had long since gone back to Germany. These included: generals Lattmann, Korfes, Von Lenski and Vincenz Müller, colonels Van Hooven and Adam, and majors Lewerenz, Hetz and Homann. Gerlach was one of this group of former inmates of Lunyovo who now found themselves thrown together once more in Krasnogorsk, where they were accorded a special status. He was very uneasy about the privileged treatment he received in comparison with the other prisoners in the camp. But in any event he was happy to see the back of the camp at Vladimir, believing that he’d seen the last of the security services from Camp 190. Yet at the same time, he suspected that his sudden transfer to Krasnogorsk had not come about by chance, especially as no one at the hospital in Kameshkovo had any idea why he was being moved. All he’d been told was that ‘we’re not authorized here to give you orders’. In other words, the fate of the former member of the editorial board of Free Germany was being decided elsewhere, a thought that made Gerlach nervous. ‘We can’t give you orders … we’re not authorized. So who was? You feel the presence of an unseen eye gazing at you, boring into your temples, the back of your neck, all over. Who’s looking at you? What do they want? And why now, all these years after the war?’