Of the over three million soldiers of the Wehrmacht who were taken into Soviet captivity between 1941 and 1945, more than a million died. Heinrich Gerlach survived. He processed the horrors of the battle of Stalingrad by writing Breakthrough at Stalingrad; to describe his endless journey through Soviet work and prison camps, he penned the autobiographical account Odyssee in Rot. In the camp at Lunyovo, Gerlach was also one of the founding members of the Bund deutscher Offiziere (BDO), a league of German officers who were POWs and who, beginning in 1943, from within prison, called for German soldiers to desert and fight against Hitler – in forced collaboration with exiled communists such as Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbrich and Erich Weinert. In 1944, in Nazi Germany, in Gerlach’s absence, proceedings were initiated against him for high treason, and his family was punished under Sippenhaft, the principle of “kin liability.”
In his richly sourced afterword, publisher Carsten Gansel provides background material to Gerlach’s stirring account from the Russian archives – about the plans the Soviet leadership had for the members of the BDO in postwar Germany; Gansel sketches the attempts by the secret service to turn Heinrich Gerlach and other leading members into agents – and, for the first time, analyzes the journals Gerlach wrote after the war, from 1952 to 1991. In this way, he reconstructs how Odyssee in Rot came about and, through the leading figure of Gerlach, recounts how the members of the BDO who went to the West after the war were anything but celebrated as heroes of the resistance, but instead had to defend themselves against being stigmatized as communist supporters and traitors.
