Heinrich Alexander Stoll

Heinrich Alexander Stoll was the pen name used by the German writer Heinrich Joachim Friedrich Karl Hans Stoll (8 December 1910 - 4 March 1977). During the 1950s and 1960s he emerged in East Germany as a prolific author of adventure novels, historical novels and reworkings of ancient legends, along with short stories and science fiction works. There are nevertheless suggestions that the reality of his own experiences as a young man, during twelve years under Hitler followed by six years under Soviet military administration and the early years of the Ulbricht dictatorship, were a match for almost any novel.

Life Stoll was born in Parchim, a garrison town and market town a short distance inland from Schwerin and Rostock in the marshy flatlands of northern Germany. Heinrich Christian Stoll, his father, was a career soldier and, at the time he was born, a sergeant in the Second Great Ducal Mecklenburg Dragoon Regiment No. 18. (Heinrich Christian Stoll later became a railway official. and grew up, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the Grand Duchy of his birth. It was also in Parchim that he attended the local "Friedrich-Franz Gymnasium" (secondary school). He then enrolled in 1929 and 1932 successively at the Universities of Erlangen and of Rostock, studying both Protestant Theology and Art history, and graduating in 1933.

Between 1937 and 1943 Heinrich Alexander Stoll lived abroad, undertaking what one source identifies as "longer stays" in Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Most sources are silent as to what he did during most of this period, but once he settled in Rome he supported himself through "small journalistic assignments [for] Swiss newspapers". Most Germans in Rome during this period were soldiers involved in fighting. Stoll was not one of these, but family papers that became available after 2017 indicate that he was in contact with the German embassy, evidently undertaking assignments that could be construed as "intelligence related". By this time he was living in Rome, where he made a study of Classical archaeology and worked as a correspondent for foreign newspapers.

After the war he returned home to Parchim which was now being administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone. It was, in some ways, an unfortunate decision, since according to at least one source Parchim was the scene of "extreme Stalinist persecution" during the immediate post-war years. The same commentator asserts that, measured by the number of death sentences carried out as a proportion of the overall population, Parchim suffered more than anywhere else in the Soviet occupation zone, presumably reflecting decisions taken by local military commanders. Stoll was not executed; but nor was he unaffected. During 1945 he joined the Liberal Democratic Party, at this stage not yet subsumed into "bloc party" structure of what would become, within five years, a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. He also headed up the local branch of the rapidly evolving National Cultural Association. It was a position of some privilege and of some influence in the local community. After his release Stoll was again engaged prominently in the activities of the local branch of the National Cultural Association at nearby Schwerin. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone was rebranded and relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany): it was an eventful year, also, for Stoll personally. In November of that year he was lured to West Berlin where he was arrested and taken into investigative custody on suspicion of espionage. Details are hazy. The incident seems to have originated with suspicions that Stoll had denounced the teacher (and later an author) Alexandra Wiese (1923–1995) to the security services, leading to Wiese's arrest. After being released he returned once more to Parchim, where former comrades from the LDPD and the Cultural Association now kept their distance. On 6 January 1950 Heinrich Alexander Stoll disappeared without a trace.

There was no trial, but it turned out that Stoll had been sentenced to ten years of hard labour in Siberia. Following the availability of hitherto undisclosed family papers, there recent hints have appeared that he could have become a focus of suspicion among the townsfolk on account of his homo-sexuality. "He always bought me something when he came [to visit his friend and cousin and the speaker's father], and often surprised me .... and I remember, soon after I got my driver's licence, I drove with him to Poland in my parents' car .... I learned a whole lot, not just about art history, but also about how to handle difficult people .... when the car got stuck we spent the night in a field without problems. The next morning the farmer helped us again [apparently thanks to Stoll skills at negotiating away their presence in the field, in Polish, with a potentially indignant farmer]". Heinrich Alexander Stoll himself was a private man, who lived alone and spoke little of himself. Burkhard Unterdörfer, who probably knew him better than anyone else still alive half a century after Stoll's death, is unhesitating in identifying what he saw as the high point of his life: in 1966 Stoll enjoyed the privilege of a private audience with the pope (who had, like him, spent most of the war years living mostly out of sight in Rome).

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