by Tim Townsend
Outside St. Sebald’s, on the wall of the east choir, is a small sculpture typical of some medieval churches. It depicts a number of Jews suckling from the teats of a pig, a creature described in the Hebrew Bible as unclean. The Judensau, as the sculpture was called, once pointed in the direction of the city’s Jewish quarter, just a few yards to the south. And it is symbolic of Nuremberg’s troubled anti-Jewish history.
Nuremberg was built on sandy soil. Not much has ever grown there, and its economic status and critical position in Germany’s history were drawn from business and politics, rather than agriculture and trade. The word Norenberc appears for the first time in a document from AD 1050 as a reference to a fortress that Emperor Henry II built on the rocks above today’s city. The fortress on Norenberc hill became a central, and favorite, stop for emperors and their courts as they traveled from outpost to outpost within the empire. A settlement developed around the castle and the Pegnitz River, and by 1400, a three-mile stone wall, with four circular guard towers at the corners, had been built around the city—a fortress around the fortress. A hundred years later, between forty thousand and fifty thousand people lived within Nuremberg’s walls.
Nuremberg developed a powerful city council that made decisions of state and justice, symbolized by a sculpture above the entrance to city hall. Visitors can still see two reclining figures, Justice and Prudence, bookending a pelican piercing her own breast to feed her chicks with her blood—an allusion to the sacrifice of Christ for man.
The city housed all kinds of tradesmen, but it was known for its metalwork in knives, candleholders, and bowls. Platers made suits of armor, bladesmiths made swords, bowyers made crossbows. It was also known for the masterworks of its medieval and early Renaissance artists who specialized in painting, engraving, woodcuts, portraiture, printmaking, and glass decoration. One artist in particular, Albrecht Dürer, was considered a great master of northern Renaissance art and created religious depictions in the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries.
Modern historians have shown that German cities with a history of Jewish massacres in the Middle Ages had much higher proportions of anti-Semitic sentiment during the Nazi era.
At the end of the thirteenth century, Nuremberg’s Jews built their section of the town on undeveloped swampy land near the Pegnitz River, which divides the city’s northern and southern districts. A century later, church officials in the town of Röttingen, sixty miles west of Nuremberg, accused the Jews there of defiling Holy Communion wafers with blood. It was part of a pattern of charges leveled by Christians against the Jews during the Middle Ages that included stories of Jews stealing Communion hosts, piercing them, and draining them of Christ’s blood, and Jews kidnapping Christian children, murdering them, and using their blood for Jewish rituals.
In his 1543 tract, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” Martin Luther—who called Nuremberg “the eyes and ears of Germany”—wrote that if he had “power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have,” he “would deal severely with their lying mouths.” Luther hated Jews for both theological and social reasons. Like many medieval German Christians, his belief that Jews had killed Christ found a modern-day outlet in usury.
“We are at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then,” Luther wrote. “We are at fault in not slaying them.”
Long before Luther cursed the Jews and advocated for their deaths, pogroms had been spreading across Europe. Dozens of Jews were killed in Röttingen in 1298 in what became known as the Rintfleisch pogroms, named after a butcher who led the months-long rampage. Over the summer that year, violence spread to more than 140 surrounding communities where roving bands of Christians killed 3,500 Jews. When the gangs arrived in Nuremberg, the city’s Jews sought shelter in its fortress, but they weren’t allowed in and 600 were killed by the mob.
In 1348, the Black Death began sweeping through Europe. After several Jews “confessed” under torture to starting the plague by poisoning wells and food, rumors spread from town to town in Germany and soon the Germans began burning Jews. In the German towns with Jewish populations, nearly 75 percent witnessed the massacre of their Jewish populations between 1348 and 1350.
On December 5, 1348, the townspeople of Nuremberg targeted the city’s Jewish population under the consent of the Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV. The emperor had signed a document allowing for the destruction of the city’s Jewish quarter to build a fruit market and a church dedicated to Mary. The result was the annihilation of six hundred people—more than a third of Nuremberg’s surviving Jewish population. Not only had the emperor’s signature cleared space in Nuremberg, it also solved a problem for many citizens and businesses that had owed large sums of money to Jewish bankers. Much of the borrowing had occurred a year earlier as a result of a government transition that had brought in both Karl IV and a change of control in the Nuremberg City Council.
During the destruction, Nuremberg’s residents burned Jewish homes and shops to the ground. They then constructed a large square—the Hauptmarkt—currently the site of Germany’s oldest and most famous Christmas market. It is also the site of the Frauenkirche—the Church of Our Lady—which went up between 1350 and 1358 right where Nuremberg’s synagogue had once stood. The emperor dedicated the church with the words: “For the glory of the empire, the honor of the Mother of God and salvation of the dead.”
The scapegoating of the Jews didn’t end in the medieval ages, however. In the wake of the First World War, some Germans blamed the Jewish population for the nation’s defeat. In 1922, Nuremberg’s Jewish population of nearly ten thousand was the second largest in Bavaria.
When Hitler walked for the first time into the hall in Frankfurt’s government center where the coronation banquets were held for the Holy Roman emperors, he saw the paintings of the emperors hanging on the walls. The three Reichs, wrote Nazi historian Otto Westphal, “appeared to [Hitler’s] eye as one grand, sacred, necessary connection.” And just as the popes and kings of the Holy Roman Empire saw themselves as the direct descendants of the Caesars of Rome, Hitler saw himself as the historical successor to Charlemagne.
Hitler was unconcerned with the Old Testament’s religious symbolism that connected the Third Reich with the Babylonians. Instead, he was interested in his nation’s exalted history when the Holy Roman Empire ruled much of Europe absolutely. And he was interested in Nuremberg for its own history as one of the most important cities in the empire.
Hitler believed Nuremberg was Germany’s connection to its grand past as well as to the Nazi Party’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. In 1927, the year of the Nazis’ first Nuremberg Rally, the ministers of St. Lawrence Church on the south bank of the Pegnitz held a ceremony blessing the Nazi swastika. The following year, the Franconia region of Germany, which includes Nuremberg, sent four times more Nazi Party members to the Reichstag than the average from other regions of the country. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power as Germany’s chancellor, Nazi paramilitary brownshirts stormed hundreds of Jewish homes, confiscating cash and beating up the homeowners.
In 1933, Willy Liebel, Nuremberg’s mayor, presented Hitler with Knight, Death and the Devil, one of Dürer’s most important engravings, which portrayed a knight riding through a dark Nordic gorge, pursued by a swine-snouted devil. In the drawing, the knight ignores both the devil and death and serves as an embodiment of pious integrity, guided by Christ. The present was a gift from the city’s residents, a reminder of Nuremberg’s importance to the Third Reich.
The following year, Leni Riefenstahl filmed the sixth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The rallies themselves were massive propaganda events—in 1934, more than half a million German citizens and soldiers descended on the city.
Riefenstahl’s film, Triumph of the Will, released in 1935, was propaganda about propaganda. The film begins with words against a black background: “Adolf Hit
ler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers.” Riefenstahl carefully orchestrated her presentation of Hitler as a god. The first shot is of puffy white clouds, shot from inside an airplane. With Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg playing in the background, Hitler glides above the city, past the soaring, swastika-bannered spires of St. Sebald and St. Lawrence, before descending down to the adoring German citizens below.
The Nazis had worked hard to crush the Christian churches but found it too difficult, so Hitler attempted instead to co-opt its power through the use of architecture, liturgy, and propaganda. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazis built more than three hundred churches in Bavaria. A popular Nazi poster featured Hitler marching with a Nazi flag and a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovering above his head, as rays of light from heaven stream down.
In 1935, Hitler decided Nuremberg was the right stage to announce a new law that would make official the state’s anti-Semitic policies. The Nuremberg Laws, as they were known, denied German citizenship for German Jews and prohibited them from marrying or having sex with anyone “of German or related blood.” Historians have called the Nuremberg Laws “the worst in the history of human beings.”
Hitler had a place for the Jews in his grand vision of a new German empire. And as he stood before the Frauenkirche in the 1930s, on the other side of the Hauptmarkt, reviewing his SA stormtroopers as they marched past him during the Nazi Party rallies, he must have been awed at how well his vision was coming together.
AFTER THE MEN AND women of the Ninety-Eighth threw a farewell party for their chaplain and said their good-byes, Gerecke asked his assistant, Tommy Geist, to come to Nuremberg with him, to be his partner in the most frightening experience of his life. But Geist had learned that he, like Gerecke, was eligible to go home to his wife, and Gerecke didn’t press the issue. Geist, however, did want a final road trip with his boss, so on November 11, 1945, they packed Gerecke’s gear into a jeep for the hundred-mile trip north.
What Gerecke and Geist found when they arrived in Germany’s medieval crown jewel was a city-sized debris field. According to a report by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS)—the U.S. military’s occupation authority in Germany—the city had become “among the dead cities of the European continent,” and it had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers until it was “beyond description.”
On the night of January 2, 1945, under a full moon, the British had sent more than five hundred Lancaster heavy bombers over Nuremberg. Within an hour eighteen hundred people were killed and 90 percent of the city was destroyed. The castle, the walls, the churches, the city hall, thousands of medieval houses—almost all of it was gone. Another four thousand were killed in subsequent Allied air raids in the following weeks. By the spring of 1945, nothing remained of Nuremberg’s one thousand years but rubble and the stench of death.
Yet by November, six months after the Third and Forty-Fifth Infantry Divisions of the U.S. Army had taken the city on Hitler’s birthday—April 20, 1945—its population had increased 60 percent. There were now 280,000 people in Nuremberg. Thousands of German soldiers were working in Russian labor camps, and so the majority of the city’s residents were women and children.
Nuremberg’s remaining citizens peeked out from the lean-tos they’d built from salvaged lumber and bits of sheet metal. Some huddled in air-raid shelters, or house cellars, which were now just holes dug into the earth. Bathtubs hung halfway out from the upper floors of buildings whose front walls had been shorn completely away. Candles flickered from the darkness under the piles where people slept. The sound of the old city was the quiet of a graveyard.
Single rooms, left somehow untouched when the rest of the building had been destroyed, seemed to hover in midair. At night families cooked potatoes or cabbage, foraged from nearby farms, over open fires in the streets. Protein was hard to come by, and Allied rations consisted mostly of bread and potatoes. Some younger mothers resorted to prostitution to feed their children. The journalist Rebecca West wrote, “there was no money” in Nuremberg. “There was only cigarettes.” And it was with cigarettes—or soap, or nylons—that American GIs paid the young women, and the women in turn used these to barter for food.
Outside the remains of the Museum of Gothic Art a huge stone head from a statue of God lay on the pavement. “Instead of scrutinizing the faces of men,” West wrote, “He stared up at the clouds, as if to ask what He himself could be about.” A British fighter plane, lodged in the broken roof of a church, was too high for anyone to remove it, or the body of its pilot. The rubble of Nuremberg, West wrote, “exhaled the stench of disinfectant and that which was irredeemably infected, for it concealed thirty thousand dead.” When it rained, death flowed from the wreckage and into the city’s drains.
While more than 90 percent of the city was flattened, a few structures—fountains, bridges, parts of the old castle—were miraculously untouched. The Allies chose Nuremberg over Berlin as a trial site because its courthouse—the Palace of Justice—and prison were left intact after the bombing and were connected to each other. However symbolically appropriate it was that the surviving high Nazi criminals would be put on trial in the city that represented so much to Hitler, the choice of Nuremberg was purely pragmatic.
And pragmatism prevailed in the months leading up to the trial. Resurrecting a city that had been declared dead “seemed hopeless,” according to OMGUS officials. For one, Nuremberg’s police force had been decimated and crime was rampant. Bandit gangs uncovered caches of machine guns and small arms across the region, and over the summer attacked farmhouses outside town, raping women and stealing whatever they could find.
To get the city running again, OMGUS first began de-Nazifying it by firing twenty-two hundred city employees. The agency then installed city government managers at the end of July 1945 and hired one thousand new workers. By November, five hundred police considered “politically clear” had been trained and were walking the beat. Prison buildings were cleaned and repaired, and OMGUS devoted one wing of a prison to housing war criminals and trial witnesses.
OMGUS officials reconstituted local courts and used thirty-four bags and two chests of gold from the Reichsbank vaults to reopen Nuremberg’s banks. They turned over control of the trains to a new transport agency and allowed thirty-eight insurance companies to resume business. Scores of horses that had belonged to the German military were handed over to local farmers. Soon enough, four political parties organized, the presses of a German-edited and published newspaper began running, and a tax agency opened its doors to begin collecting public revenues.
Seventy-five percent of Nuremberg’s school buildings had been destroyed. Most teachers had been Nazi Party members, and so new teachers were trained, which helped the city bring back twenty-five thousand children to class by November 1945. Because of the “acute housing problem,” OMGUS officials attempted to put a roof over everyone in Nuremberg. But the scarcity of materials and labor presented a major hurdle. OMGUS considered gas, wood, coal, and food “critical items” to provide to Nuremberg’s residents.
Six months after its capture, the city began to hum again, and most of Nuremberg had electricity, a water supply, and a partial sewage system. Streets and tracks had generally been cleared of rubble, and three hundred streetcars carried a million passengers across the city each week. In addition to military phone lines, OMGUS installed about a thousand civilian phone lines by November. Post office and parcel post service had resumed. Hospitals were repaired and reopened and individual health clinics established. By November, an immunization program was up and running for city residents, and Nuremberg had more hospital beds available than it had since 1939. Two cinemas started showing films again, and two more would open by the end of the year. Theatrical performances were staged for German civilians in nearby Furth and Erlangen.
The one major gripe for Nurembergers was about food and drink—beer in particular. Food had been rationed at 1,365 calories a day per
person in the summer. Officials set a goal of 2,000 for the winter. The city lacked meat, partly due to a daily export of meat to Berlin, but worse was the ban on beer drinking. “The prohibition of beer for civilians deprives the population of a daily beverage to which they have become accustomed over many years and will undoubtedly be difficult to enforce,” an OMGUS report stated.
“It is true that there is a long way to go and much to be accomplished,” OMGUS officials wrote in their November report. “But for a city termed ‘91% dead’ it is felt that definite progress has been made and that Military Government has done a significant job in showing the German people the way.”
GERECKE WAS NERVOUS WHEN he arrived at Andrus’s office at the Palace of Justice. He’d only had one commanding officer since his time in the army began, and Gerecke could hear the colonel chewing out one of his underlings from outside the door. A corporal walked out, head hung low. “It’s about time you got here,” Andrus said to Gerecke. “I sure need a chaplain.”
You sure do, Gerecke thought.
Andrus waved everyone else out of his office and waved Gerecke in, pointing to a chair. He told Gerecke he’d been born on an army post and raised as an army brat. Andrus may not have served in combat during the First World War, but he liked to say that he’d experienced hostile fire at age two months, when his own West Point–trained father was serving in the American west, battling Indians.
The commandant told Gerecke that a Sunday school teacher had once used ice cream to entice him to attend class. “But I’ve never forgotten the story she [told].” It was, he said, “the story of a lost sheep, and how the master went out looking for it and brought it back rejoicing. Chaplain, you’re going to find lost sheep in our prison and if God is gracious to you, you might bring back a few of them.”