by Tim Townsend
The next day was Thanksgiving. The Allies did not take the day off from the trial to celebrate, but they observed the American holiday by giving thanks in the courtroom. Jackson asked hundreds of military and civilian Allied personnel to gather before the morning session. He spoke briefly, explaining the meaning of Thanksgiving to the British, French, and Russians, and invited Father Edmund Walsh, vice president of Georgetown University and Jackson’s consultant at Nuremberg, to speak.
He also asked Gerecke, who had been in Nuremberg for just ten days, to say a prayer. As Gerecke spoke, Jackson and hundreds of others bowed their heads. When he was done, the trial resumed with the court ruling that Julius Streicher, the editor of the anti-Semitic Der Stürmer newspaper, was sane and fit to stand trial.
Lawyers for the U.S. counsel began making the case for Germany’s conspiracy to wage aggressive war. American prosecutor Major Frank Wallis spoke for much of the day and into the next session on Friday. That night, Wallis wrote in his diary that while he was standing in the courtroom in front of the prisoners’ dock, the eight justices, 350 members of the press, and “cameras and more cameras,” he was actually speaking to the world and to future generations.
“This was history being made and recorded,” he wrote. “History that would be in school books, history that would be a source of study for years to come by International lawyers and students.”
Wallis looked at the defendants as he laid out the case against them “with a feeling of scorn and contempt—mixed with a bit of awe when I remembered how close they came to success in their mad undertaking.” His job that day, he wrote, was “to drive a few nails into the coffins of the bastards with words,” and he did so for four hours. “I don’t think that I will ever forget Thanksgiving 1945, and I doubt if I’ll ever spend another Thanksgiving in a strange country, in an International Court Room prosecuting such low-level scoundrels. I certainly hope not.”
Gerecke felt a grave sense of urgency as he became aware that some, if not most, of the major criminals he’d be ministering to in Nuremberg would be executed. A trial like this had never been attempted before, so no one really knew how long it was going to last. Some felt it might be just a few weeks. Others believed it could go through Christmas and possibly into the spring. Few of the participants in the Nuremberg experiment contemplated being in Germany a year after the trial began.
As the prisoners began to accept Gerecke during the trial’s initial weeks, many slowly agreed—some eagerly, others with cool courtesy—to attend his services on Sundays. Gerecke and O’Connor used the larger chapel in the middle of the prison for services for the witnesses confined to the prison. For the defendants, they used the small two-cell chapel. A former lieutenant colonel of the SS, and former Christian, was the organist. By the end of the trial, Gerecke had brought the man back to the faith and served him Communion. “The simple Gospel of the Cross had changed his heart,” Gerecke wrote later.
Gerecke’s services were composed of three hymns, a scripture reading, a sermon, prayers, and then a benediction. Eventually, thirteen of the defendants attended the services. Each of these defendants remembered the Bible verse that was dedicated to him when he was confirmed in the Lutheran Church as a child. Four of the other defendants attended O’Connor’s Catholic Masses, and five others refused all spiritual counsel.
DURING THE FIRST WEEKS, as life in the courtroom ground nearly to a halt over the slow pace of the trial, Gerecke and O’Connor were never busier. In addition to their counseling, the chaplains were also serving as translators and providing religious education lessons for the defendants. They soon developed a grim joke. “At least we Catholics are responsible for only six of these criminals,” O’Connor would say. “You Lutherans have fifteen chalked up against you.” Gerecke found the priest “jolly” and “delightful.”
They were constantly visiting the cells of witnesses, including high-ranking Nazi officials who didn’t make the Allies’ defendants list. While court was in session, Gerecke bounced back and forth between watching the session in the courtroom and ministering to the Nazis.
The chaplains were also communicating with the families of those inside the prison. At one point, Gerecke, at the behest of the family of a witness—an SS chief—went to check in on the man’s wife, who was staying in Nuremberg to be near him. When the chaplain arrived at the address, an American officer casually answered the door. Gerecke apologized and said he must have the wrong address, that he was looking for the wife of a Nazi officer.
“You’ve got the right address, Chappie,” the officer said. “And she’s doing just fine.” Gerecke went back to the prison and told the man his wife was, indeed, doing fine.
Before his Sunday service with the defendants, Gerecke also ministered to GIs at the little church in Mögeldorf, the neighborhood where he was quartered. OMGUS vacated many of the homes around Nuremberg to house the small army of American, British, French, and Russian lawyers, judges, military officers, translators, interpreters, and secretaries employed by the tribunal. The Nuremberg war crimes community was “an island which suddenly emerged from a sea of Germanism and Germans,” wrote Taylor. “Nuremberg and its people created the atmosphere in which, outside the Palace of Justice and a few social enclaves such as the Grand Hotel, we all lived.”
Often a home’s new temporary residents hired—somewhat awkwardly—the home’s owner as a housekeeper. The journalists covering the trial all lived together in a huge mansion with beautiful gardens and greenhouses. Most of the attorneys bunked together in several houses, while each of the justices had his own residence, where he lived together with his aides.
The Germans had a complicated view of their occupiers. Some ingratiated themselves with the war’s victors by smiling sweetly and offering to carry bags. Others were less friendly—for instance, one Nurembergian just stared blankly at an American lawyer who was struggling to ask directions in German. He waited for a few minutes to respond and then answered in perfect English.
For the most part, the war crimes community was always on edge. Rumors of snipers in the rubble were frequent. Many of the less adventurous stuck close to the well-guarded buildings used by the International Military Tribunal and traveled only on streets cleared of rubble and approved by the U.S. Army.
Those working on the trial worked hard and sometimes in dangerous circumstances, but they also played hard, and much of that play took place at the Grand Hotel. The Grand, a fifty-year-old luxury accommodation located directly across from the train station, was just outside the walls of the destroyed old city. During the Reich’s heyday, it had housed VIPs who had come to view the Nazi Party rallies, but now it was one of the only buildings left partially standing.
Though the city was blacked out at night, the Grand Hotel was a light in Nuremberg’s wreckage, attracting those looking for some relief from the often-tedious court proceedings during the day. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Grand wasn’t exactly Claridge’s. Tarpaulins flapped over holes in the stone walls in one wing. Guests staying in some rooms on the upper floors had to cross a frightening, wall-less traverse along a catwalk to their rooms. Bags of water, treated with chemicals for drinking, stood in each of the hotel’s corridors for guests. Yet despite the destruction to the hotel’s façade, its lobbies, dining rooms, and main ballroom were intact.
As the trial progressed, the Grand Hotel became the center of social life, mostly for the American officers and civilians in the war crimes community, and also for anyone with a court pass. It was also home to the various celebrities and VIPs who came to town to visit the Palace of Justice for a day or two to “see the show,” as the journalist Rebecca West put it. The food was cheap and decent, the wine cellars were well stocked, and the entertainment was frequent. One observer said the reception hall, where most conversation took place, looked like “a Hollywood set for an international spy drama. There was a great deal of red plush, and artificial marble and tarnished ormolu.”
Men in uni
form and others in suits were waved through the front door by two armed MPs, and then down a hall to the Marble Room, where they danced the jitterbug with the young American girls who were employed by the court as secretaries, clerks, stenographers, and interpreters. Most nights, a German band played jazz, but there were also cabarets composed of a company of singers, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, and a midget who balanced half a dozen cups and saucers on his head, then threw in lumps of sugar. The young ladies made the rounds at the dinner parties about town, and they often ended up at the Marble Room.
General Eisenhower had implemented a rule to prevent the Americans from draining the small amount of resources from the German population by preventing married occupation forces from bringing their wives or children to Nuremberg. The result was that the American girls were hugely popular—and not just with the American men, but with the British, French, and Russians as well. A related rule said all Allied personnel in Nuremberg had to be there for official purposes. That meant judges with Czech girlfriends had to find them jobs doing translation or other menial tasks around the Palace of Justice.
“Most of the senior personnel, including the lawyers, were married men, while most of the women were single and young and not a few very attractive,” wrote Taylor. “This gave the society a relaxed, tolerant and philanderous ambience which many of us found agreeable.”
“There was hardly a man in the town who had not a wife in the United States, who was not on the vigorous side of middle age and who was not spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile,” West wrote. “To the desire to embrace was also added the desire to be comforted and to comfort.”
Some of the occupiers felt a visceral discomfort, however, as starving Germans pressed their faces to the glass at the Grand Hotel. “Inside, we, the conquerors who had brought their leaders to trial, were disporting ourselves in a manner certainly vulgar and virtually callous,” said one member of the war crimes community.
Enlisted men frequented another building that had survived the bombing—the Opera House—which played movies downstairs and provided a dance hall and club upstairs. Allied rules against fraternization with German women were largely ignored. Those connections, along with the contact Allied personnel had with waiters and other service industry people, were the only real relations the war crimes community had with Nurembergians.
Despite the fun many of the occupiers were having with Nuremberg’s locals, the war’s victors eventually became bored with one another. For the most part, the Americans and British were friendly, the French less so, and the Russians largely kept to themselves. The French and British were mostly housed in a district west of the city called Zirndorf, where the French had set up their own club for drinking and dancing that was less busy and garish than the Grand Hotel.
During certain celebratory occasions, and at dinner parties thrown by the higher-ranking war crimes court officials, members of the four victorious nations mixed together. At a St. Andrew’s Night party, British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe had haggis flown in, entrancing the Russians. The dinner parties “were quite unrefreshing,” West wrote. “For the guests at these parties had either to be co-workers grown deadly familiar with the passing months or VIPs . . . who, as most were allowed to stay only two days, had nothing to bring to the occasion except the first superficial impressions, so apt to be the same in every case. The symbol of Nuremberg was a yawn.”
After several months, life on the war crimes island did become tedious for most. The day began at 8:30 and ended at 5:30. If there was no dinner party invitation, many simply ate at home and worked again until going to sleep. Because of the need to translate every word of the trial into four languages, the court proceedings themselves were slow. Despite the fact that the world was watching, in the fishbowl of Nuremberg, everyone saw the same people each day and each night. Gossip was rife. Nuremberg was “water-torture, boredom falling drop by drop on the same spot on the soul,” West wrote. To live in the city “was, even for the victors, in itself physical captivity.”
There was a lot of drinking, and weekends were highly anticipated events. “Those working on the trial were still mopping up the War, subject to a military atmosphere and far from home,” wrote Nuremberg historians Ann and John Tusa. “If they were to be denied the satisfactions of repatriation, family, and peacetime careers, they would wring what pleasure they could from the situation they were in.”
Weekends provided a chance to get out of Nuremberg, and most of the war crimes community took advantage of the countryside as frequently as possible, including a lot of skiing over the winter—in Czechoslovakia, Berchtesgaden, or Garmisch.
With 170 total staff, the British contingent was the second largest of the war crimes community. The French and Soviet staffs were much smaller, while the American staff—including the military and all the Palace of Justice (court and prison) employees—was more than a thousand.
That was the atmosphere and structure of Nuremberg. The meaning of Nuremberg, West wrote, “was that the people responsible for the concentration camps and the deportations and the attendant evocation of evil must be tried for their offenses.”
GERECKE WANTED ALL THE Nazis in his care to receive Holy Communion before they were executed. But these believers in particular were likely to take more time than most to understand the significance of Communion to Gerecke’s satisfaction, and with the looming prospect of the gallows for so many in his care, the chaplain knew he didn’t have much time.
“I must feel convinced that each candidate not only understands its significance, but that, in penitence and faith, he is ready,” he wrote later.
After several months at Nuremberg, the chaplains often arrived in their offices to find that guards had placed notes from certain prisoners expressing a desire to see the chaplains on their next visit through the cell blocks. Because the court operated from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., and 2:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., the chaplains made calls before the defendants left for court in the morning or after trial in the evening. Weekends were busy for the chaplains—they often made cell calls on Saturdays and on Sundays between services.
During the proceedings, Gerecke felt it was important to visit the sessions nearly every day. It was crucial to his ministry, he thought, to “watch both sides of the story and try to keep [his] balance in speaking with the defendants by hearing a part of the evidence brought out at trial.”
Yet, despite Gerecke’s efforts to fully understand the situation around him, some of the defendants were skeptical. When Karl Doenitz first met Gerecke, the admiral insisted that Gerecke wouldn’t be able to preach the Gospel without bringing Hitler and the war into the conversation.
“I know little about your politics,” Gerecke responded. “And since you wouldn’t be interested in mine, we’ll simply deal with the World of God in relation to the hearts of men.”
Doenitz challenged Gerecke to show him what he was talking about regarding the Gospel. “If you have the courage to come [to our cells], I’ll attend your services. I think you’ll probably help me,” Doenitz said.
Doenitz had joined the German Imperial Navy in 1910 and had become an officer at the age of twenty-three. He was an admiral in 1942 when he engineered the rescue of about two thousand enemy survivors of the Laconia, a British passenger ship that a German U-boat had torpedoed in the shark-infested mid–South Atlantic between West Africa and Brazil. Doenitz had ordered the rescue against a standing rule from Hitler that waging war takes precedence over rescue missions. In ordering the rescue, Doenitz risked Allied attacks on the German submarines and U-boats taking part in the rescue, angering Hitler.
To appease the führer, Doenitz instituted a new rule known as the Laconia Order, which forbade commanders from rescuing lifeboats.
The Nazis believed that American production could replace ships, but it was much more difficult for the enemy to replace and train the men who worked those ships, so killing them would create a bottleneck and slow the U.S. Navy.
U-
boat commanders later testified that Doenitz had given them verbal orders that both ships and their crews should be the target of future attacks, and so the main charge against Doenitz at Nuremberg was that he had ordered his men to fire on survivors of crippled Allied ships.
While Doenitz was on trial in Nuremberg, U-boat commander Lieutenant Heinz Eck was on trial in a British military war crimes court in Hamburg for doing just what Doenitz had ordered. Eck was the commander of U-852, which sank an Allied merchant vessel, the Peleus, in March 1944. The Greek steamship was torpedoed and sank within three minutes. Most of its thirty-five-member crew were able to get to two liferafts or debris floating in the water.
When Eck’s U-boat surfaced, the German sailors brought aboard two men to be interrogated. Then they put the men back in the water. The sub moved about half a mile away to prepare her guns, then returned, flashed her signal light, and her crew began firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades at the Peleus’s crew for five hours. Three men—the Greek first officer, a Greek seaman, and a British seaman—survived the attack and were picked up twenty-five days later by a Portuguese steamship. In Nuremberg, prosecutors pointed to the Peleus case as a clear example of how men following the supreme commander’s orders had committed a war crime.