by Tim Townsend
Between May and August 1945, the Allies brought fifty-two captured Nazis to Mondorf. The town was strategically chosen for its unique positioning. Ten miles south of the city of Luxembourg, Mondorf sat on a bluff near the borders of both France and Germany. The Mosel River protected the town on one side, and observers had a clear view from nearly any vantage point high in the town.
The Palace had a veranda where the Nazis not on suicide watch could walk back and forth and take in the view over the twenty-foot-high, double-stockade coils of barbed wire. Over the fence, they could see a few square yards of green grass and a dried-out fountain that also was enclosed with barbed wire. Green slopes on three sides of the Palace’s gray stucco façade meant guards could easily watch the goings-on in and around the hotel.
The war may have been over, but Andrus feared residual forces might try to free the Nazi leaders from Allied control, and he wasn’t satisfied with Ashcan’s defenses when he arrived. He requested floodlights, an airstrip, an electric alarm system for the outer fence, camouflaged netting to protect Ashcan from the air, more machine guns, and more guards, doctors, clerks, and typewriters. GIs carried out fine carpets and elegant furniture, replacing them with folding camp-beds and straw mattresses. Others removed chandeliers and replaced sixteen hundred of the hotel’s glass windowpanes with Plexiglas and iron bars.
“I was concerned about guards being bribed, snipers shooting at prisoners or gaining information, and suicide attempts,” Andrus later wrote. “I even feared murder within the enclosure; for deadly enemies were already, in some cases, being confined together. Mondorf, no one had to tell me, was a powder-keg.”
Andrus wrote to a friend, “I hate these Krauts and they know it and respect me for it. I guess that’s why I got this job. It’s too bad we could not have exterminated them and given that beautiful country to someone who was worthy.”
In April, before he was assigned to Mondorf, Andrus wrote to his wife and included some stationery lifted from an abandoned Nazi headquarters. “Here is some paper we captured in one of the places we used as a Hq. after the Natzi [sic] Hq. left,” Andrus wrote. “More & more they rush out without having a chance to move or destroy everything. The more one sees of them the more one comes to detest them—they’re terrible people, civillians [sic] and all.”
As Andrus tried to put together a secure enclosure in Mondorf, the Nazi leaders kept arriving under the cover of darkness. Ashcan’s prisoners would be the central characters in whatever production of justice the Allies decided to stage, and the prisoners knew it. Many of the Nazis were despondent that their captors were not treating them as traditional victorious warrior-gentlemen would.
Wilhelm Keitel demanded a pencil and paper to write a letter of complaint to General Eisenhower. “I am treated here in Mondorf Camp as if I were in a camp for ordinary criminals, in a jail without windows,” he wrote. “In addition, it is made clear to me in every respect that I am to be expressly denied the treatment generally accorded an officer POW. . . . Recently the most extreme measures have been applied. Clothing was taken away, except for a certain limited amount, and almost all toilet articles were withdrawn. Not even military decorations of this war and the past one were left in my possession. Even spectacles were taken away.”
The Germans realized, as they took in the conditions of their imprisonment at Ashcan, that the days were gone when generals on both sides came together over cognac and cigars to discuss the winning and losing strategies of particular battles after the fighting was over. The last, awful months of war—as bad as they were—may have been preferable to what lay ahead.
The Nazis were depressed and ragged. Most still wore the clothes they’d been captured in. The generals had had their ribbons torn from their chests (mostly by a giddy Andrus). The politicians wore grubby suits without ties, which had been taken away to prevent suicides, as had their belts and suspenders, so that their pants drooped. They could not shave themselves, and the staffing at Mondorf was low, so they didn’t receive a shave often. The four dozen men looked more like the tenants of a bowery house than the recent leaders of a mighty nation.
One American second lieutenant, after observing the men in the Palace, said, “Who’d have thought we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?”
In the middle of the summer, Andrus gathered all his prisoners and dimmed the lights. “You are about to see a certain motion picture showing specific instances of maltreatment of prisoners by the Germans,” Andrus told them. “You know about these things, and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you, not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too. Be informed that the considerate treatment you receive here is not because you merit it, but because anything less would be unbecoming to us.”
As the prisoners watched the film taken by American GIs who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, they reacted in a variety of ways. The scene would be repeated in dramatic fashion months later in the Nuremberg courtroom during the trials. Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and the former governor general of Poland, “held a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged on it for fifteen minutes,” Andrus wrote. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, walked out. Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, rocked back and forth in his chair, clasping and unclasping his hands. Hermann Goering ignored the film altogether. Karl Doenitz grumbled, “If this is American justice, why don’t they just shoot me now?”
Ashcan was partially about collecting Nazi leaders, but it also was critical for interrogating Nazis in preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trial. Soon Andrus and his superiors began to worry that prisoners were comparing notes on their interrogations late in the summer in order to give up less information. Andrus decided to use the Nazis’ own deception and mistrust of their American captors against them. If they were comparing notes, he figured, why not eavesdrop on those conversations in order to obtain valuable evidence against them?
Andrus informed some of the prisoners that they were leaving Mondorf and being handed off to the British. He then secured a house, with a high wall around it, in Dalheim, three miles north of Ashcan. British intelligence officers helped add a room to the house that could only be accessed from the outside, and a signals and electronics expert wired the house with small microphones and a recording device. The team filled the house with German furniture and staffed the house with “courteous” British guards. Andrus worked out a circuitous, fifty-mile route around the Luxembourg countryside that would give the Nazis in the back of a windowless army ambulance the feeling that they were driving into northern Germany. Finally, he “leaked” a rumor that a small group would be moved to Germany first, followed by others.
The driver on the two-hour trip took wide left turns to avoid detection and made sharp rights to give the feeling of a southeastern trip. The rough roads Andrus chose enhanced the effect of moving through a scarred German landscape. When they arrived in Dalheim, Goering yelled, “We are at a house I know!” That night, the four Nazis slept on real mattresses and were allowed pillows for the first time all summer. The next day, the prisoners were suspicious of bugs inside the house and moved outside under a willow to talk. But the electronics expert had anticipated that move and had bugged the willow, too.
The next day, a storm kept the Nazis inside the house and quiet—a disappointment for the team. Worse yet, Andrus got word from London that Ashcan had outlived its suitability as a prison facility. Word had leaked to the press that former Nazi leaders were being collected in Mondorf. The Nuremberg prison was far from ready, but Allied officials believed it more secure than the Palace Hotel. They ordered Andrus to move his charges there within twenty-four hours. The entire Dalheim enterprise had been a bust.
The timing of the order “shocked and annoyed” Andrus. He thought he was just about to get valuable information from Goering when they pulled the plug. He told the four Nazis at the house to pack and
drove them back to Ashcan in ten minutes.
The next morning, August 12, Andrus and fifteen of the Nazis boarded two GI ambulances and drove quietly through Mondorf without motorcycle escorts and without sirens. The group boarded two dull gray C-47s whose crews had been told nothing about their cargo. Goering got out of the ambulance, carrying a red hat box in one hand and holding up his pants by his belt loop with the other. The rest of the Nazis followed him on board the two planes.
Andrus informed the lieutenant in charge about his cargo. “It is realized by everyone that these men are considered terrible people,” Andrus said. “But it is not our job to judge them or to take justice into our own hands.”
The lieutenant grinned at Andrus. “You mean, no leaving the plane without a ‘chute,’ sir?”
At the Nuremberg prison, Andrus had first recruited two other chaplains—Father Sixtus O’Connor, a Catholic priest from New York, and a twenty-eight-year-old Lutheran chaplain named Carl Eggers. The two men ministered to the Nazis for several weeks, but the senior Nazis were mostly middle-aged men, and they refused to be counseled by a junior officer of Eggers’s age. Andrus had to replace Eggers, and Gerecke’s experience working in St. Louis’s jail system was a plus. “I absolutely needed his services,” Andrus wrote later. “I knew of no one else qualified for [the situation].”
But Sullivan was loyal to Gerecke, and he resisted Andrus’s request for the chaplain. So before trying to go up the chain of command to protect him, Sullivan had given Gerecke the option of taking the assignment. He had laid out the alternatives: minister to Hitler’s henchmen, or go home to his wife.
Gerecke was badly shaken and asked Sullivan if he could think it over. He was terrified by the prospect of being close to the men who had tried to take over the world. Would he have to shake their hands? He imagined that simply feeling their breath on his face would be sickening. How could he comfort these Nazis who had caused the world so much heartache? How could he minister to the leaders of a movement that had taken millions of lives? How could he form a spiritual bond with these men without getting in the way of whatever God had planned for them already? He had conducted hundreds of prison services, but there were obvious differences between burglars in St. Louis and the mass murderers in Nuremberg.
Gerecke had recently traveled to Paris on leave to meet Hank, who was also on a leave, to spend a week as happy tourists in the city of light. They visited the Louvre and walked the banks of the Seine. Hank was twenty-four, and after they ate dinner together each night, he would go out on the town while his father turned in. One morning, after a particularly hard night of partying, Gerecke led Hank on a grueling schedule of sightseeing. “He was torturing me,” Hank said later.
Now Gerecke found himself calling Hank for advice. Hank assured his father that he would make the right decision, and that the family would support him and love him no matter what he did. Gerecke walked outside the hospital grounds, found a bench to sit on, and prayed harder than he ever had in his life.
He thought, as any pastor might, of Jesus. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was not alone when he was crucified at Golgotha. On either side of him, the Romans also had crucified two criminals, or “malefactors.”
One of the criminals taunted Christ. “Aren’t you the Messiah?” he asked. “Save yourself and us.”
The second criminal admonished the first. “We’ve been punished justly for the crimes we committed,” he said. “But this man has done nothing to deserve the same fate as ours.” The second criminal turned to Jesus and said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
“Today shall you be with me in paradise,” Jesus told the criminal. For Christians, Jesus’s forgiveness of the criminal before his death is crucial because it represents the sacrificial moment when Christians’ sins were forgiven. It also represents an atonement—the reunification of God with his creation.
Christ’s forgiveness loomed large in Gerecke’s thoughts as he prayed for direction on the park bench. He realized that God wanted something incredible from him. The author of the Gospel of Luke writes that after Christ told the second criminal that they’d be together in Paradise, “darkness came over the whole land . . . while the sun’s light failed” in the last moments of Christ’s life. Gerecke was staring into that darkness, desperately searching for light. If, as never before, he could hate the sin but the love the sinner, he thought, now was the time.
He walked back into Sullivan’s office. “I’ll go,” he said.
TWO DECADES BEFORE GERECKE arrived, Nuremberg was an ideal place for the young Nazi movement to ground its ideology. For one, the city was the headquarters of Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s newspaper that recycled medieval myths about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children. The newspaper’s motto was “The Jews are our misfortune.”
Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich, or Third Empire, hinged on a version of the medieval idea of translatio imperii, or translation of empire. Under this theory, there were three Reichs. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from the crowning of the first emperor, Charlemagne, by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in AD 800 until Emperor Francis II abdicated the throne a thousand years later.
The Second Reich took place during the much shorter period after German unification in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I and lasted until the end of the First World War.
Translatio imperii came from the second chapter of the Old Testament book of Daniel, in which Daniel interprets the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar. The king had dreamed of a great statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. In his dream he watched the statue’s feet break apart. The rest of its body soon crumbled “and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found.”
Daniel explains to Nebuchadnezzar that he and his kingdom are represented in the dream by the head of gold. The silver had represented another “inferior” kingdom, while the bronze was a kingdom that would “rule over the whole earth,” and the iron was a kingdom that would crush and smash everything, including all the other kingdoms. In the end, Daniel says to Nebuchadnezzar, “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed. . . . It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever.”
Biblical scholars mostly have agreed through the centuries that the head of gold represented Nebuchadnezzar’s own Babylonian empire (605–539 BC), the silver represented the Persian Empire (539–331 BC), the bronze represented the Greek-Macedonian Empire (331–146 BC), and the iron represented the Roman Empire (146 BC–AD 476). Since Daniel’s prediction failed and the apocalypse didn’t arrive as the Roman Empire fell—ushering in, for Christians, Jesus’s second coming—medieval scholars employed the idea of translatio imperii to extend the fourth and final iron kingdom into their own times. They adopted the Holy Roman Empire name to ensure that it would be their own era that would precede the glory of Christ’s return.
The city that Hitler would come to see as a perfect place to institute his own version of translatio imperii has its origins—at least in legend—in the eighth century when the parents of a Danish prince named Sebald planned their son’s succession to the throne. The prince, chosen by his parents for his intellect and virtue, longed to serve God instead of country, so when he reached adulthood, he fled Denmark.
He joined the three children of Britanny’s King Richard—Willibald, Wunibald, and Walpurgis—who had similar yearnings for a life of Christian service. Rather than enter a monastery, the four became peregrinatia pro Christo—wanderers for Christ, who undertook dangerous journeys and put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of Jesus. The four men moved piously across Europe on a pilgrimage that eventually brought them to Rome and then to Germany, where Wunibald established a monastery.
But Sebald set off on his own, preferring the life of a hermit. I
n the depths of Germany’s forest, Sebald prayed, fasted, held vigils for local peasants, and—as tradition has it—performed miracles. Accounts held that he restored the vision of a blind man, fixed broken glass with prayer, and turned water into wine and icicles into firewood. He served as the peasants’ teacher and Christian model.
Sebald’s harsh environment and fasting eventually caught up with him, and when a group of his beloved peasants found his body one day lying in the forest, they yoked it to two oxen and followed it in a funeral procession. The procession led out of the woods, and eventually the oxen stopped at the site of a deserted former Roman encampment. The peasants buried Sebald in that spot, which is now the center of Nuremberg.
Eventually, as more Christians made pilgrimages to Sebald’s grave, a chapel was built next to it. Sebald was not officially canonized by Rome until 1425, but he was venerated by the town’s citizens for three centuries before that as the patron saint of Nuremberg.
In the early thirteenth century, construction began on a more ambitious building atop Sebald’s grave, and nearly three centuries later, a huge Romanesque and Gothic parish church with twin towers climbing toward the sky dominated the center of a thriving medieval metropolis. The church was known as St. Sebald’s. In 1508, church officials commissioned a grand, fifteen-foot-high brass tomb for Sebald’s bones. The artist, Peter Fischer, built the tomb, placing Christ—“the Lord of the Worlds”—at the top.