Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  A large incinerator hadn’t been used for months, and it took two hundred German POWs from the beginning of August until the end of September to clean up the papers and garbage that the hospital’s former staff had simply thrown into the basements. The heating system was decrepit and didn’t work in some buildings. The mess hall was large but unusable. The kitchen had excellent gas range ovens, but there was no gas to be found in Germany and even coal was difficult to come by. The water was not chlorinated. A garage for ambulances and other vehicles had been destroyed.

  Despite the conditions, eight hundred patients, most suffering from typhus fever, were being cared for by German doctors and nurses. As the Ninety-Eighth took over, Schwabing was “literally bulging with Germans,” Sullivan wrote, “some working on the premises and others just living there.” The mayor of Munich was living in one ward. The mass influx of Americans meant members of the Ninety-Eighth had to join them, sleeping in wards for the first weeks while other quarters were decontaminated from the typhus patients. In August, the Ninety-Eighth confronted a “full blown typhoid epidemic,” necessitating the vaccination of staff and the emergency treatment of those who’d contracted the fever. In the mess, Germans had been eating spoiled food, and the condition of the latrines was “deplorable.”

  Sullivan also found an attitude toward illness that was symptomatic of life under Hitler. “It was found that under the Nazi period any individual who was sick was told he was sabotaging the institution,” he wrote. “Apparently this fact was so ingrained into the minds of the employees that they would only report sick when ready to collapse physically. For example, a cleaning woman worked in my office for two weeks wearing a coat in summer, finally reported that she was sick, and promptly died.” Six patients died from typhus, but the unit eventually got the spread of the disease under control. It helped that two parts of the campus left standing were a huge laundry facility that employed seventy-five people and a well-equipped laboratory that the Americans eventually organized into bacteriology, serology, histopathology, hematology, urinalysis, chemistry, photography, and blood bank departments.

  The only members of the Ninety-Eighth who were thrilled with the facilities they found at Schwabing were the chaplains. The hospital’s Catholic and Protestant chapels had both survived the bombing. “Beautiful chapel designated for Protestant Services,” Gerecke wrote. The chapel seated 125 people in pews and had a two-manual pipe organ in working condition and a piano. The altar and pulpit were built into the architecture of the chapel, which meant Gerecke’s army-issue chaplain outfit could largely remain packed. Each chaplain even had his own office attached to the worship spaces. Having two chapels meant each chaplain could offer more services, so Gerecke began leading worship at 9:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M., and 7:30 P.M. on Sundays.

  Chaplain Walsh was greeted by fellow Catholics at the hospital—a group of one hundred nuns who worked and lived in an attached cloister. Each day, seventy-five of them worked in the laundry facility, in the kitchen, or as ward attendants. The language barrier was a problem for the Americans with all the German hospital workers, including the nuns. But in time, the sisters worked with the Ninety-Eighth’s nurses and soon took over the routine menial functions, becoming the most dependable civilian employees of the hospital. Nuns were also given part of the kitchen and mess to provide food for the German hospital workers from the sisters’ own stores.

  Despite the typhoid epidemic, the mess, and the communication difficulties, the Ninety-Eighth began accepting patients on July 22. The initial patient load of 896 grew to 1,073 by mid-September, and the surreal experience of operating a destroyed hospital continued. The Germans introduced the Americans to a woman bathing in a tub in one corner of the hospital. She wouldn’t leave the tub and told the staff she’d been immersed in it since the end of the First World War, as a treatment for a venereal disease she’d contracted from an American soldier.

  In addition to doctors and nurses, 350 Germans worked for the Ninety-Eighth as cooks, housemaids, and secretaries. Nearly all of them lived “in undesirable quarters at the top of several of the ward buildings,” Sullivan wrote. Polish and Hungarian workers joined the Germans as hospital employees. Aside from the work of the nuns, which he considered invaluable, Sullivan was unimpressed with the work ethic of the unit’s civilian employees. “The average German worker, despite all claims to the contrary, has been found to be a somewhat slow-moving individual, who usually does a good job, but takes his time about it,” he wrote. “One German bricklayer, for example, has been found to lay only 1/3 of the bricks of his American prototype.”

  Motivation and morale problems were not limited to Germans. After July, the Ninety-Eighth slowly began coming apart. “The juggernaut of redeployment struck in August,” as the army transferred 57 officers out of the unit in the next few months, and 116 new officers in. By December, most were replacements and not happy ones. The war was over, and nobody wanted to be living in a bombed-out hospital in Munich. The possibility of a transfer to the Pacific still loomed for many, and the army’s point system, which determined when individuals could go home, kept changing and was thought by most to be unfair.

  The staff of the hospital remained “competent if unenthusiastic,” Sullivan wrote.

  Since arrival in Germany, redeployment remains uppermost in the minds of practically all officers, nurses and enlisted personnel, especially those that have been in the theater for any length of time. The point score’s constant changing, the uncertainty of when they will return, premature information often released in the ‘Stars and Stripes,’ false rumors such as the fact that ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] graduates will not be sent overseas, and a general feeling that injustice has been done in having such a discrepancy in points between those eligible to go overseas and those eligible to return in the theater, has created a feeling of unrest in the command which at this stage of operation is extremely difficult for a unit Commander to combat.

  Morale among the medical staff was especially low. “I have had to use a personal brand of psychotherapy on some highly trained professional personnel ordered into the unit recently in order to obtain useful service from them,” Sullivan wrote.

  For doctors, nurses, and chaplains alike, the setup of Schwabing made for time-consuming rounds. The 1,684 patients who checked into the hospital in August were spread out over twenty-one wards in seven different buildings. For Gerecke, who celebrated his fifty-second birthday that month, the pressure on his knees, from visiting up to fifteen hundred beds each month, was mitigated by the hospital’s high number of ambulatory patients, which kept pastoral meetings in his office at “a high pitch.”

  With Geist’s help, the chaplain baptized two men—a technician with the 489th Automatic Weapons Battalion and a private with the Fifty-Fifth Fighter Group—at the hospital in August. With the fighting over and the opportunity for baptisms more prevalent, Gerecke made a request of his chaplain superiors. Referencing his Moments of Comfort broadcasts in St. Louis, he wrote them in September with an idea to reach many more troops over the American Forces Network.

  “There may be opportunity for daily devotions over AFN,” he wrote. “It was my hobby during civilian ministry. May this venture have your blessings?”

  In early August, Hank Gerecke took a jeep from where he was stationed in Nancy and picked up his younger brother Corky, then stationed near Frankfurt. The brothers drove down to Munich and, without telling his father, Hank made contact with one of the Ninety-Eighth’s doctors he’d met in England. The doctor and some nurses sneaked the brothers into the hospital and hid them on two gurneys under sheets. A doctor called Gerecke to the emergency room on the pretense that someone was near death. When the chaplain arrived, he approached the bodies under the sheets, at which point, his sons popped up yelling, “Happy Birthday!” Without missing a beat, Gerecke yelled back, “You boys get down from there right now!” It’s possible the chaplain had never been happier in his life. His sons had survived the war and
had traveled to Munich to surprise him on his birthday anniversary.

  “We had a righteous time that night,” Hank said later. “We surely did.”

  Also in August, Gerecke had asked a Captain Wesley to lead Friday evening Jewish services in the chapel, and Gerecke began a Seventh-Day Adventist service on Saturday mornings from ten to noon. Gerecke and a Jewish chaplain began organizing for High Holy Day services for troops stationed in Munich, and Gerecke convinced the hospital’s department heads and chiefs of services to relieve Jewish personnel from normal duties. From September 7 to 9, 153 people attended Rosh Hashanah services at Munich’s Prince Regent Theater, an opera house built by Bavarian officials to stage the works of the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic composer—and Hitler favorite—Richard Wagner. When it opened in 1901, the Prince Regent’s first performance had been Act III of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. More than one hundred attended Yom Kippur services at the opera house on September 16 and 17, 1945.

  The Ninety-Eighth’s senior officers bunked in a large, well-furnished house called the “Villa” at one end of the administrative building, while junior officers lived in apartments at another end of the same building. Nurses lived mostly (and snugly) on the second and third floors of the administrative building. Enlisted men were housed in two former hospital buildings and slept in bunk beds. Feeding thousands in one institution in postwar Munich was a challenge. Fresh meat, fresh eggs, and fresh vegetables were scarce. The hospital’s kitchen had steam vats and gas ranges, but workers had to rely on field ranges because of the lack of gas. Glass was also hard to come by, so the hospital’s windows that had been broken during the bombing couldn’t be replaced. The absence of screens, poor sanitation, and an unofficial dump a quarter mile away from the hospital grounds meant flies were a problem in the summer and early fall. Mess halls, kitchens, latrines, operating rooms, and dressing rooms were regularly sprayed with DDT, which “remarkably reduced this nuisance,” Sullivan wrote. The DDT also took care of the cockroach issue.

  Sullivan’s interest in morale-building distractions continued in Munich, where he screened five movies a week in the physiotherapy gym. Playing fields for baseball and football games were a five-minute walk from the hospital, and the Ninety-Eighth’s football team provided “a good spectacle even though they were out-matched in most games,” he wrote. The basketball team was “uniformly victorious” and well supported. There were regular Liberty Runs into popular spots in the city, and Sunday tours to Garmisch, Starnberg, and Berchtesgaden always took the maximum number allowed on leave.

  Gerecke took Geist and a group of his favorite nurses into the Alps for a week in the fall. Amid the snowball fights on the slopes of the Zugspitze, Germany’s tallest mountain, one nurse spotted a beautiful little church in one of the mountain villages, and the group asked Gerecke if he could lead them in a service there the next day—a Sunday. He walked into the church and found two ministers, one old and one young, inside. The younger man, sensing an American in the room, greeted Gerecke in English. Gerecke smiled, told the men who he was, and asked if his group could worship there the next morning. He promised they’d be in and out quickly without disturbing anything in the church.

  The two men conferred in German, with the older minister becoming animated, telling the young minister that the bumbling Americans, despite their promises to the contrary, would surely damage the church as they had damaged Germany, and he directed the young man to tell the American to go back home and worship in his own country. The young minister turned to Gerecke and told him in English that he was welcome to come back the next day with his group and hold a service in the church.

  Gerecke thanked him, smiled at the older minister, and said in German, “Thank you, Pastor, for allowing us to use your church. We promise to leave it as beautiful as when we found it.” And he walked triumphantly back out into the snow. It was always one of Gerecke’s favorite stories. “The look on their faces was worth printing,” he’d say.

  In October, the army required all officers and enlisted personnel to take two hours of training a week in such subjects as “Aims of the Nazi Party Before 1933,” “The Nazi Party in Power, 1933–39,” “The Guilt of the German People,” “The Nazi Strike,” and “Nazi Atrocities.” The last was probably the easiest to illustrate because of the hospital’s proximity to Dachau, about eleven miles to the northwest.

  Geist had been with Gerecke the first time each of them visited Dachau. They saw the execution mounds, the barbed wire, the SS barracks. The camp had been liberated only ten weeks before the Ninety-Eighth arrived in Munich. The evidence of mass murder was fresh. Geist took a picture of Gerecke standing next to a sign in English, below a white cross. “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please do not destroy.”

  Gerecke returned several times to Dachau. He never said what compelled him, nor whether his description of touching its walls as blood smeared his hands was literal or metaphorical. Whatever happened in his mind as he walked through the camp remained there for good.

  As he and Geist stood next to the ovens on that first visit, Gerecke said in a soft voice, “How could they do something like this?”

  He said it over and over again.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Sun’s Light Failed

  If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads, and the Lord will reward you.

  —PROVERBS 25:21–22

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1945, Colonel Sullivan summoned Gerecke to his office at the Munich hospital to tell him that the army had requested his transfer. Major Nazi war criminals were awaiting trial at Nuremberg, and Colonel Burton Andrus, the commandant of the Nuremberg prison a hundred miles north, had asked for Gerecke as his Protestant chaplain.

  Andrus needed to protect his prisoners’ spiritual welfare, but he was also thinking pragmatically. The services of a good chaplain could prevent what Andrus called “prison psychosis.” Such a “mental condition,” he wrote, “could only be protected by steps like this. . . . It was not so much that my prisoners were likely to become psychotic, but that it might give them the chance to feign this type of illness.”

  He had known that he needed chaplains since mid-August. It wasn’t just a matter of regulations. Religious ministry to the prisoners was important if, Andrus wrote later, “we were going to do what, as well meaning people, we should for their possible spiritual benefit.”

  Andrus’s situation was “urgent,” and he wanted Gerecke for a number of reasons. For one, Gerecke—like so many of the Nazis at Nuremberg—was a Lutheran. He also spoke German and had worked in U.S. prisons and jails before the war.

  Sullivan had told Andrus that Gerecke had served long enough. He knew Gerecke had not seen Alma in two years and that he wanted to go home, but the Nuremberg commandant had pushed to get the chaplain into his prison. “I had to go through the chaplain general to get approval for Gerecke,” Andrus wrote. “But I finally got it.”

  Andrus had entered the army as a cavalry officer in the First World War. For reasons that were never clear to him, the army put him in charge of a military prison at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, for three months during the war.

  The stockade held the U.S. Army’s worst criminals—men who had been found guilty of murder, armed robbery, and drug violations. On Andrus’s first night in charge of the stockade, the prisoners rioted. The next morning, as Andrus surveyed the damage, the prisoners informed him that they had no intention of recognizing his authority, or of doing any work. For the rest of the day, he had each prisoner brought before him. He gauged by “the defiance in their eyes” which were the ringleaders, and he assigned those men to clean the prison and repair the damages from the riot. He brought in sheet-metal workers to construct three solitary confinement cells and had the work done in full view of the prisoners. Then he instituted a new rule that sentinels would no longer have to
give three warning calls to escaping prisoners before they could shoot them. One warning would now be enough.

  Andrus stood a rigid five feet, ten inches and considered himself in great shape. He was furious when a reporter for Time described him at Nuremberg as “plump.” His small brown eyes were magnified by thick, round, steel-rimmed glasses, and a pencil-thin mustache drew a line between a fleshy nose and two narrow lips. Andrus’s signature feature was his green shellacked helmet, always buffed so that the golden eagle on its front shined. Those who eventually worked for him, with him, and around him at Nuremberg—lawyers, soldiers, journalists, and Nazis—called Andrus “pompous,” “officious,” “strict,” “petty,” “naive,” “ridiculous,” “a spit-and-polish stickler,” “an insecure peacock of a man,” and “not the brightest.” The writer John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that it was “hard to imagine the Army could have found a better man for the job.” Galbraith also said Andrus was “somewhat allergic to all of his charges.”

  During the Second World War, Andrus had been a combat observer with the army’s G-3 Combat Lessons Branch. As his unit moved through Germany at the end of the war, he observed that the Germans were hypocrites. “They have religious statues and pictures around their houses, and try to pose as Christians, yet they are still launching rabot [sic] bombs on the women and children in England,” Andrus wrote in a letter to the San Diego Commandery of the Masonic Order of the Knights Templar. “Many of their infernal devices have slaughtered innocent maidens, helpless widows, and defenseless orphans. They are making war on the Christian religion and all it stands for.”

  A week after VE Day, Andrus was ordered to Mondorf-les-Bains, a spa town with tree-lined streets, grand nineteenth-century villas, and luxury hotels in southeastern Luxembourg, where he would be the commandant of a secret interrogation center for newly captured Nazi officials. The facility, previously the Palace Hotel, was now code-named Ashcan, and it was temporarily housing some of the most important Nazis who were still alive. In the twenty-seven years since Fort Oglethorpe, Andrus had not had a single assignment dealing with a prison or prisoners. His orders to Mondorf were as surprising to him as those that took him to the Georgia stockade in the previous world war. When Andrus arrived at Ashcan three days later, the Palace was being transformed into a prison fortress. “To get in here,” one guard told a reporter, “you have to have a pass from God and someone has to verify the signature.”