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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2012
The article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.
L'articlé décèle les origines enfouies d'un célèbre mémoire allemand de la bataille de Stalingrad, publié en 1957. L'auteur, Heinrich Gerlach, vétéran de la bataille et ensuite prisonnier de guerre en Union Soviétique, affirmait avoir retrouvé la mémoire de ses expériences à Stalingrad grâce à l'hypnose, puisque son premier manuscrit, écrit durant sa captivité, avait été confisqué par les autorités soviétiques. Or, ce manuscrit fut retrouvé dans une archive russe, et il révèle que Gerlach, contraint par les soviétiques à subir une rééducation politique, composa une autobiographie dans laquelle il sonda son rôle personnel – sa complicité et sa culpabilité – dans les crimes de guerre des allemands. Gerlach a par la suite retiré du mémoire publié ces enquêtes intimes, ainsi que toute référence aux origines soviétiques du récit, qu'il a présenté comme étant son exploration indépendante de la tragédie des soldats allemands abandonnés par Hitler.
Dieser Aufsatz befasst sich mit der Entstehungsgeschichte des 1957 veröffentlichten berühmten Erlebnisberichts von Heinrich Gerlach über die Schlacht von Stalingrad. Der Autor, ein Teilnehmer der Schlacht und einstiger sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener, behauptete die Erinnerung an seine Kriegserlebnisse durch Hypnose wiedererlangt zu haben, nachdem sein ursprünglich in Gefangenschaft verfasstes Manuskript von den sowjetischen Behörden beschlagnahmt worden war. Aus dem inzwischen in einem russischen Archiv gefundenen Originalmanuskript geht jedoch hervor, dass Gerlach durch politische Umerziehungbemühungen der Sowjets veranlasst wurde, eine Autobiografie zu verfassen, in der er sich mit Fragen der persönlichen Schuld und Mittäterschaft an deutschen Kriegsverbrechen auseinandersetzte. Später entfernte Gerlach diese durch Gewissenserforschung geprägten Passagen und sämtliche Hinweise auf die sowjetisch beeinflussten Ursprünge seiner Arbeit aus dem zur Veröffentlichung bestimmten Erlebnisbericht, den er als aus eigener Initiative entstandene Untersuchung der Tragödie der von Hitler im Stich gelassenen Soldaten darstellte.
1 ‘Ich weiß wieder, was war . . . Rußlandheimkehrer erhält durch Hypnosebehandlung sein Gedächtnis zurück’, Quick, 26 Aug. 1951, 1109–11, 1131.
2 ‘Der unbewusste Auftrag’, Quick, 13 Oct. 1950, 1429–32.
3 ‘Zurück nach Stalingrad’, Der Spiegel, 5 (29 Jan. 1958), 42.
4 ‘Ich weiß wieder, was war . . .’, 1109; ‘Zurück nach Stalingrad’, 42. At the time Gerlach contacted him, Dr Schmitz had just completed work on a popular introduction to the subject of hypnosis: Was ist – was kann – was nützt Hypnose? Der Weg zur inneren Freiheit aus Experimenten, Erfahrungen und menschlichen Dokumenten (Munich: Lehamnn, 1951). Schmitz's subsequent publication used some of his sessions with Gerlach (anonymised as ‘Herr G.’) to illustrate the workings of verbal suggestion: Schmitz, Karl, Heilung durch Hypnose (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1957), 37–41Google Scholar.
5 Gerlach, Heinrich, Die verratene Armee (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1957)Google Scholar, available in English as The Forsaken Army (London: Cassell, 2002). The English version is a heavily condensed adaptation of the German original; it focuses on events and lacks many of the personal details that are central to my own analysis. For reviews of the novel when it first appeared, see ‘Der Tod in Stalingrad’, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 8 Feb. 1958; ‘Die Männer von Stalingrad’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 Feb. 1958. The book was also reviewed in the New York Times (13 April 1958, Book review section, 8) and the Washington Post (8 Feb. 1959, p. E7). My discussion of Gerlach's book is based on a 1957 reprint published by Deutscher Bücherbund, Stuttgart.
6 Biess, Frank, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. Jens Ebert shows how importantly Stalingrad figured in the culture of memory promoted by the East German regime: Ebert, Jens, ‘“Erziehung vor Stalingrad”: Die Schlacht in der ostdeutschen Mentalitätsgeschichte’, in Jahn, Peter, ed., Stalingrad erinnern: Stalingrad im deutschen und russischen Gedächtnis (Berlin: Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 2003), 16–23Google Scholar.
7 For other attempts to rethink the war and post-war as an extended laboratory in the production of narratives of memory, guilt and redemption, see the contributions in Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1961), 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
8 Hellbeck, Jochen, Die Stalingrad-Protokolle: Sowjetische Augenzeugen berichten aus der Schlacht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2012)Google Scholar.
9 These words are taken from the dedication in Burtsev's memoirs: Burtsev, M. I., Prozrenie (Moscow: Voen. izd-vo Ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1981), 5Google Scholar.
10 The British and Americans in World War II, too, underwent considerable efforts to record the political moods, and indeed the psychology, of captured Nazi German soldiers, but a comparison of these various efforts also shows how much farther the Soviets went with their re-educational designs and hopes: Neitzel, Sönke, Abgehört: Deutsche Generäle in britischer Kriegsgefangenschaft 1942–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2005)Google Scholar; Neitzel, Sönke and Welzer, Harald, Soldaten: Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011)Google Scholar.
11 These materials are part of the holdings of the Soviet Main Administration for Prisoners of War and Interns (GUPVI), stored at Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), f. 4 p, opis 22-n. Gerlach's novel is ed. 132. In citing the two versions, I will be referring to the manuscript by its original title, ‘Breakthrough at Stalingrad’ (‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’), as opposed to the book title, The Betrayed Army (Die verratene Armee).
12 There seems to be no awareness of this Soviet strand in early post-war (West) German discussions of guilt: the Soviet strand is missing in Jaspers, Karl, Die Schuldfrage (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1946)Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, ‘Organisierte Schuld’, Die Wandlung, 4 (1946), 333–44Google Scholar; Eberan, Barbro, Luther? Friedrich ‘der Grosse’? Wagner? Nietzsche?-?-?: Wer war an Hitler schuld? Die Debatte um die Schuldfrage 1945–1949 (Munich: Minerva, 1985)Google Scholar; Frei, Norbert, ‘Von deutscher Erfindungskraft oder: die Kollektivschuldthese in der Nachkriegszeit’, Rechtshistorisches Journal, 16 (1997), 621–34Google Scholar; Vollnhals, Clemens, Evangelische Kirche und Entnazifizierung: Die Last der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 In a letter to Ronald McArthur Hirst, a military historian researching the Battle of Stalingrad, Heinrich Gerlach provides some of the real names (several of which correspond to the names of his novelistic protagonists) of the members of the 14th Panzer Division in which he served in autumn/winter 1942–3 (Hoover Archives, RMA Hirst Collection, Box 11, letter of 26 Nov. 1979).
14 There are other similarities between the two characters: like Gerlach, Breuer hails from Königsberg, and he also worked as a gymnasium school teacher before he was drafted into the army in 1939. Both Gerlach and Breuer took part in the campaigns in Poland, France and Yugoslavia, and they were in the 6th Army from the first day of the invasion of the Soviet Union. Gerlach (born in 1908) was appointed ‘I-c’ staff officer in charge of intelligence in the 14th Panzer Division in Oct. 1942. Munzinger-Archiv/Internationales Biographisches Archiv 32/88 (1 Aug. 1988); see also Gerlach's letter to Ronald McArthur Hirst, cited in the preceding note.
15 Was Gerlach a Christian believer, and if so, couldn't some of the introspective elements of his original manuscript be due to Christian, rather than Soviet Marxist, tropes? One might think so, based on several biblical passages that appear in the memoir and show Gerlach to be well versed in the Bible. But the more important point is that Gerlach projects Christian thinking, and Christian solutions, squarely onto two side characters, Lieutenant Wiese and divisional chaplain Peters. Wiese finds salvation in death, and Peters at one point marches towards Russian enemy soldiers, chanting (in Russian) ‘Christ has arisen’. He is left unharmed. Breuer by contrast adheres to a religiously unmarked humanist philosophy – he has to face up to his responsibilities in order to regain himself. His position is akin to those of self-professed ‘socialist humanists’. Gerlach opens the sequel to his autobiographical novel with an epigraph by the communist poet Johannes R. Becher. Gerlach, Heinrich, Odyssee in Rot: Bericht einer Irrfahrt (Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg Frankfurt, 1968; 1st edn Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966)Google Scholar.
16 Heinrich Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’ (RGVA, f. 4 p, op. 22-n, ed. 132, ll. 182–8).
17 Ibid., 545–6.
18 On Hartmann, see Bundesarchiv-Militärchiv (BA MA), Freiburg, MSg 2, 5452, pp. 9–10; Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (New York: Viking, 1998), 377Google Scholar.
19 Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 515–19.
20 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 343.
21 During the division's hasty retreat to the East on 24 Nov. in reaction to the Soviet counteroffensive, Breuer is seized by ‘debilitating fear’: ‘Was this the end? . . . There was still something to do. . .. His life had not yet been fulfilled. From dark depths there emerged in him a feeling of guilt, an intangible guilt that had not been redeemed’ (Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 101). These lines are missing in the book which describes the retreat on p. 95.
22 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 482.
23 Ibid., 484. None of the references to guilt appear in the published book (for the scene there, see Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 485). What actions or crimes this sense of guilt might be rooted in is not made fully clear in the manuscript. Both the manuscript and the published book allude to the murder of Jews and captured Red Army commissars. But these references are rather nebulous and never identify any other concrete individual soldier or officer as a possible criminal. Significantly, it is not Breuer, but Lakosch, who has a flashback memory of frenzied German soldiers (not field police or SS troops) in summer 1941, about to shoot a group of Jews in a Western Ukrainian town, before being stopped by an officer. Gerlach may have aligned this scene, which he probably witnessed himself, with another character in the novel in order to exculpate his alter ego Breuer and avoid questions about his own possible criminal responsibility at the scene. I return to these questions further below (see also note 50).
24 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 517–18.
25 Ibid., 542. The novel's published version contains this passage as well, but it is moved to a later place in the book and it pales in expressive power because the book makes no mention of the death of the ‘old Breuer’ (Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 544).
26 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 546–7. The juxtaposition between Hermann and Breuer is erased from the book.
27 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 553. Breuer's self-accusatory statement is missing from the book.
28 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 611–12; Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 618.
29 Gerlach, ‘Durchbruch bei Stalingrad’, 614; Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 621.
30 The published book contains a long indictment of General Paulus. It provides biographical details that were most probably not available to Gerlach in the 1940s when he wrote the original manuscript (Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 457–61).
31 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot.
32 Ibid., 78–9.
33 Ibid., 83–5. On the atrocities, see Boll, Bernd and Safrian, Hans, ‘On the Way to Stalingrad: the 6th Army in 1941–42’, in Heer, Hannes and Naumann, Klaus, eds, War of Extermination: the German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 237–71Google Scholar.
34 Robel, Gert, Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges (ed. Maschke, Erich), vol. 8: Die Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in der Sowjetunion: Antifa (Bielefeld and Munich: E. und W. Gieseking, 1974), 32Google Scholar.
35 Cited in V. A. Vsevolodov, Lager’ UPV I NKVD No. 27 (kratkaia istoriia), ili: Srok khraneniia – postoianno (Krasnogorsk: Memorial'nyi Muzei Nemetskikh Antifashistov, 2003), 112.
36 Ueberschär, Gerd R., ed., Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’ und der Bund Deutscher Offiziere (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1995)Google Scholar; Bodo Scheurig, Free Germany: the National Committee and the League of German Officers (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969).
37 Cited in Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 157–9. The founding appeal of the National Committee (NKFD) was drafted by two German Communists, Alfred Kurella and Rudolf Herrnstadt. Gerd R. Ueberschär, ‘Das NKFD und der BDO im Kampf gegen Hitler 1943–1945’, in Ueberschar, Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’, 32.
38 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 162.
39 An estimated 45% of German officers and 75% of German soldiers in Soviet captivity were members of the NKFD in autumn 1944: Heider, Paul, ‘Zum Russlandbild im Nationalkomittee “Freies Deutschland” und Bund Deutscher Offiziere’, in Volkmann, Hans-Erich, ed., Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 195Google Scholar.
40 Wette, Wolfram, ‘Das Massensterben als “Heldenepos”’, in Wette, Wolfram and Ueberschär, Gerd R., eds, Stalingrad: Mythos und Wirklichkeit einer Schlacht (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992)Google Scholar.
41 Morré, Jörg, Hinter den Kulissen des Nationalkomitees: Das Institut 99 in Moskau und die Deutschlandpolitik der UdSSR 1943–1946 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Major General Otto Korfes, one of the first captured Germans to join the NKFD, wrote the following lines on the first postcard he was allowed to send from captivity to his wife in Germany: ‘Terrible Stalingrad has startled us and made us see again’ (‘Das fürchterliche Stalingrad hat uns aufgerüttelt und sehend gemacht’). Amazingly, his wife received the postcard, in circumvention of Nazi authorities’ systematic efforts to seize any communication between surviving Stalingrad veterans and their families: Wegner-Korfes, Sigrid, ‘Weimar – Stalingrad – Berlin’: Das Leben des deutschen Generals Otto Korfes (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1994)Google Scholar and Ebert, ‘Erziehung vor Stalingrad’, 16. Another former Nazi officer and member of the NKFD, Gerhard Dengler, recalled in a 2001 interview that his ‘bourgeois consciousness died in Stalingrad . . . That is why later at the Central Antifascist School, I want to say, I absorbed Marxism the same way a dry sponge absorbs water’. Dengler later joined the East German Communist Party and became the chief editor of the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland (‘New Germany’) (Stalingrad erinnern, 113); see also: Dengler, Gerhard, Zwei Leben in einem (Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1989)Google Scholar. On communist autobiography and the conversion scenarios charted in it, see Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2000), 283–336CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 43–95.
42 Breuer did not join the NKFD from the start, however. Instead he became a member of the ‘Union of German Officers’ (BDO) that was founded in Sept. 1943 and catered exclusively to German officers. Soviet officials pressed for the creation of a second organisation after realising that the NKFD enjoyed practically no appeal among higher German officers. They evidently could not reconcile their anti-bolshevism with the presence of communists on the board of the committee (Heider, ‘Zum Russlandbild im Nationalkomitee’). At the founding of the BDO, its leaders spontaneously decided to join the NKFD.
43 The implied readers were German POWs in Soviet captivity as well as Wehrmacht soldiers at the front to whom compressed issues of the paper were distributed in leaflet form. Beyond that, the paper appealed to a world audience, especially the Soviet Union's Western Allies who were to know that a nucleus government for a new Germany was ready to be installed as soon as Hitler was defeated: Bungert, Heike, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen: Die Reaktion der Westallierten auf das NKFD und die Freien Deutschen Bewegungen 1943–1948 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997)Google Scholar; Kirchner, Klaus, Flugblätter aus der UdSSR: Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland 1943–1945. Bibliographie. Katalog (Erlangen: Verlag D+C, 1996)Google Scholar.
44 Einsiedel was a celebrity of sorts: only 22 years old, he was Bismarck's great grandson, something that impressed the Soviets a great deal.
45 Leutnant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel, ‘Zurück in die menschliche Gemeinschaft’, Freies Deutschland, 17, 7 Nov. 1943. For other citations from and analyses of German letters and diaries, see Leutnant Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel, ‘Lasst Deutschland nicht zugrunde gehen!’, Freies Deutschland, 22, 12 Dec. 1943, 3; ‘“Armes Vaterland, wer soll dich noch retten?” Aus dem Kriegstagebuch des Leutnants Dr K. F. Brandes’ Freies Deutschland, 7, 12 Feb. 1944, 3.
46 Ilya Ehrenburg, , Russia at War (London: H. Hamilton, 1943), 44Google Scholar.
47 For a more extensive discussion, see Hellbeck, Jochen, ‘“The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers’, Kritika, 10, 3 (2009), 571–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 283. Published in 1945, Plivier's novel (Plivier, Theodor, Stalingrad, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1945Google Scholar; English translation New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948) assumed broad popularity at the time. In ways similar to Gerlach, Plivier casts Stalingrad as a turning point of sorts; he endows the catastrophe with cathartic power. Yet Plivier's characters lack the interiority that they are given in Gerlach's account. This could be because Plivier did not go through the battle, or through the Soviet-controlled court of conscience in its aftermath. On Plivier's novel, see Michael Rohrwasser, ‘Theodor Plieviers Kriegsbilder’, in Schuld und Sühne?, 140–53.
49 While under hypnosis in the Munich clinic, however, Gerlach related that he began writing his novel in July 1944 (Schmitz, Heilung durch Hypnose, 37); Gerlach confirms this in the preface to his published novel (‘This book was composed in Soviet captivity in 1944/45, while still under the fresh impression of what its author experienced’. Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 5). Gerlach was far from alone in casting Stalingrad as a conversion moment.
50 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 284–5.
51 On this shift, see Epifanov, Aleksandr E. and Mayer, Hein, Die Tragödie der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Stalingrad: Von 1942 bis 1956 nach russischen Archivunterlagen (Osnabrück: Biblio, 1996)Google Scholar; Epifanov, А. Е., Schet za Stalingrad (Volgograd: n.p., 1993)Google Scholar. The Moscow ‘Declaration of German Atrocities’ defined war crimes expansively; it also accused those soldiers or officers who were endorsing witnesses to the criminal actions of others (Ueberschär, Gerd R., ‘Sowjetische Prozesse gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene’, in Blasius, Rainer A., Ueberschär, Gerd R, et al., eds, Der Nationalsozialismus vor Gericht. Die alliierten Prozesse gegen Kriegsverbrecher und Soldaten 1943–1952, Frankfurt, 1999, 242)Google Scholar.
52 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 302–5; the full report is reprinted in von Kügelgen, Else and von Kügelgen, Bernt, Die Front war überall: Erlebnisse und Berichte vom Kampf des Nationalkomitees ‘Freies Deutschland’ (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1978), 170–4Google Scholar. Significantly, von Kügelgen wrote his report on 15 Nov. 1943, just days after the Moscow Conference and its joint resolution on the persecution of Nazi war criminals. As they entered Germany and liberated concentration camps, British and American troops, too, forced Germans to confront Nazi acts of atrocities with their own eyes. However, observers also noted how defensively or evasively many Germans reacted to these promptings by the Western Allied powers. Barnouw, Dagmar, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
53 Zagorul'ko, M. M., Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939–1956, vol. 4: Glavnoe upravlenie po delam voennoplennykh i internirovannykh NKVD-MVD SSSR, 1941–1952 (Volgograd: Volgogradskoe Nauchnoe Izdat., 2004), 700Google Scholar. For a comprehensive overview of the political enlightenment programme in Soviet POW camps, see Hilger, Andreas, Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1956 (Essen: Klartext, 2000), 220–54Google Scholar; for a comparative assessment of the re-education of German POWs in Soviet, British and American captivity, see Smith, Arthur L. Jr., The War for the German Mind: Re-educating Hitler's Soldiers (Providence: Berghahn, 1996)Google Scholar.
54 Zagorul'ko, Voennoplennye v SSSR, vol. 4, 715.
55 Ibid., 714.
56 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 305.
57 ‘In December 1949 the manuscript, which had been closely guarded, was forfeited to the MVD’. (Gerlach, Die verratene Armee, 5); see also idem, Odyssee in Rot, 404, with details about how Gerlach stored the manuscript. In 1958 Der Spiegel wrote that ‘in 1949 the MVD discovered and confiscated the novel. As a precautionary measure, Gerlach had copied its content in miniature handwriting onto twenty pages of a school notebook’. When Gerlach was discharged from the camp the pages, which he had hidden in the false bottom of his suitcase, were discovered and taken away. ‘Zurück nach Stalingrad’, Der Spiegel 5 (29 Jan. 1958), 42.
58 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 443, 547.
59 Zagorul'ko, Voennoplennye v SSSR, vol. 4, 698–9.
60 Gerlach, Heinrich, ‘Der neue Weg’, Freies Deutschland, 6, 4 Feb. 1945, 3Google Scholar.
61 Vsevolodov, citing an archival source, provides 1947 as the date of origin of the novel (Vsevolodov, Lager’ UPV I NKVD No. 27, 169–70).
62 Ibid.; Zagorul'ko, M. M., Voennoplennye v SSSR, vol. 3: Tvorchestvo nemetskikh voennoplennykh o Stalingrade i o sebe 1946–1949 (Volgograd: Izdatel’, 2006), 13Google Scholar.
63 Gerlach, Odyssee in Rot, 464.
64 See the ‘Chronicle of the First Political Training Course of the Political Department of the Stalingrad Region’ (Dec. 1947), reproduced in Zagorul'ko, Voennoplennye v SSSR, vol. 3, 505–37. It consists of a series of one-page autobiographical statements that contain the same distinction between the false consciousness of the past and the correct teachings of the present, between a past passive existence under National Socialism and a present active disposition: ‘I learned to think and act politically. Because of my youth I had not been politically active [in Nazi Germany]. Only in captivity did I have the opportunity, thanks to older anti-fascists, to discern the fascist teachings that had been inculcated in us during our youth . . . We also learned to discern the mistakes of the past and to use the realisation of the socialist social order in the Soviet Union as an example and model for . . . our homeland’. See also the Stalingrad novel (‘Stalingrad must be held’) written by Walter Naumann in 1947 (reprinted in Zagorul'ko, Voennoplennye v SSSR, vol. 3, 189–415), which lacks the interiority and sustained depth of Gerlach's piece.
65 Gerlach's NKVD file, were it accessible, might shed light on what the NKVD found out about his role at the eastern front. I also hope that the file contains information about the NKVD's possible role as reader or editor of his Stalingrad manuscript. The full run of prosecution materials (built on partly spurious charges) relating to Hans-Georg Müller, another German POW accused of war crimes in the Soviet Union, is available in Epifanov and Mayer, Die Tragödie der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen, 181–97. See also Ute Schmidt and Günther Wagenlehner, eds, Sowjetische Militärtribunale, vol. 1: Hilger, Andreas, ed., Die Verurteilung deutscher Kriegsgefangener, 1941–1953 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ueberschär, ‘Sowjetische Prozesse gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene’.
66 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 137 (‘Vneshnepoliticheskaia komissiia TsK VKP/b. 1949–1952), d. 337, ll. 2–4.
67 Schissler, Hanna, The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 68–70; Biess, Homecomings, 154–67Google Scholar.
68 von Einsiedel, Heinrich, Tagebuch der Versuchung (Berlin: Pontes-Verlag, 1950)Google Scholar. And yet, while public opinion read Einsiedel's book as a firm anti-Soviet statement, the author seemed to enjoy charting a course between the polar blocks that came to define the political landscape in Germany. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1957 but left it after German unification in 1992. He was elected to the German Parliament as a candidate of the PDS, the former East German Communist Party, in 1994. As the oldest deputy in the chamber, he served as its honorary president. He died in 2007.
69 These are the words of Moeller, Robert, War Stories: the Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 13Google Scholar; see also Frei, Norbert, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
70 Lehmann, Albrecht, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr: Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion (Munich: Beck, 1986)Google Scholar. See also the multivolume history of German POWs of WWII, a veritable monument to German suffering, heavily centred on accounts of Soviet captivity: Maschke, Erich, ed., Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, 15 vols (Bielefeld and Munich: E. und W. Gieseking, 1962–1974)Google Scholar.
71 Biess, Homecomings, 7. Biess provides excellent comparative insights on the returnees and their reintegration into post-war West and East Germany.
72 Schissler, The Miracle Years, 67.
73 On the staunch anti-communism and the evasive position towards the Nazi past that characterised Quick (the magazine that first drew attention to Gerlach's Stalingrad memoir), see Schornstheimer, Michael, Bombenstimmung und Katzenjammer: Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Quick und Stern in den 50er Jahren (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1989)Google Scholar. My attempts to find out more about the conditions of writing and publication of Gerlach's novel in West Germany remained unsuccessful. Did he present a draft that was too sympathetic towards Soviet authorities in his eyes and thus unsuitable for publication in West Germany? Or was the published novel entirely the product of Gerlach's own pen? The Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt publishing house is no longer in operation, and the publisher who has succeeded it (LangenMüller-Herbig-Nymphenburger) knows nothing about the whereabouts of the Nymphenburger archive. Gerlach's sole surviving daughter recalls the existence of a correspondence between her father and editor Berthold Spangenberg, but whether it has survived remains unclear.
74 Doctor Schmitz's cure was but one of many parapsychological treatments offered to dislocated post-war Germans in search of clarity or hope. For other cases, see Black, Monica, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 198–200Google Scholar.
75 ‘Der hypnotisierte Bestseller-Autor’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 Jan. 1958; ‘Zurück nach Stalingrad’, Der Spiegel, 29 Jan. 1958, 42.
76 ‘Ein Roman aus dem Unterbewußtsein’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30 Jan. 1961; ‘Psychotherapeut bekommt Tantiemen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 Jan. 1961.
77 Hilger, Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion, 34–40; Lehmann, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr.