by Tim Townsend
In an evangelical tract, The Cross and the Swastika, British writer F. T. Grossmith “tried to continue Gerecke’s ministry” by corresponding with the Nuremberg defendants who were still alive in the late 1970s. For instance, he sent Karl Doenitz “some Christian literature,” which he hoped “he read and applied to his life.” He also wrote that he visited Speer’s home in Heidelberg many years after the trials to ask about Gerecke. Speer told Grossmith that Gerecke was “a man with a warm heart . . . he cared,” and that without him, he “could never have got through those days at Nuremberg.”
The foreword of The Cross and the Swastika is attributed to Speer: “Henry Gerecke made a lasting impression on me. . . . He was sincere and forthright. His outspokenness was not upsetting to us because everyone knew that he meant well. He was liked and appreciated by all the defendants.” Yet Speer never mentioned Gerecke in the famous books he wrote in Spandau, where he was imprisoned in the years following the trial.
The other two “big men” that Gerecke brought back to a belief in Christ were Hans Fritzsche, head of radio broadcasting in the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, and Baldur von Schirach, the Reich’s Hitler Youth leader and governor of Vienna. Fritzsche, one historian has said, “fitted least snugly into the category of major war criminal.”
For a radio propagandist, Fritzsche was a soft-spoken man. When Gerecke entered his cell, Fritzsche gave him a genuine welcome, saying he was “deeply ashamed of having turned against the church” and that he “hoped to come all the way back to Christ.”
Gerecke asked Fritzsche if he would come to chapel services and he replied, “Of course I’m coming to chapel.” He wanted to discuss with the chaplain “some of those important doctrines of the Scriptures,” he said.
At one point during the trial, Fritzsche was walking in a public area of the Palace of Justice when a woman he recognized from court approached him. She began speaking to him in English, and before he could grasp what she was saying, the woman took Fritzsche’s hand and bowed dramatically to him. He removed his hand and walked hastily away. That night, Fritzsche told Gerecke about the incident, and the chaplain promised to investigate.
The woman, Gerecke found, was an American of Russian descent who had carefully watched the entire trial. Fritzsche later recounted how the woman told Gerecke that she had been shocked by the evidence presented in court but was also ashamed that the Allies were holding all twenty-one Nazis responsible “for the misdeeds of a number of individuals.” The woman “had felt the urge to demonstrate this on behalf of all the Americans who shared her opinion to at least one of the accused Germans.”
Fritzsche was most likely not a man used to receiving the bows of strangers. He had come from a long line of blacksmiths and armorers in the Leipzig area in eastern Germany. His mother’s family had been tulip growers from Münster, and his mother had doted on him because he was the youngest. She wore simple clothing but spoke French and played the piano and had what he called “a shining personality.” Hans was close to his mother and, even as an adult, would rest his head in her lap when he needed comfort. She died of heart disease when Hans was thirty-eight.
Hans was educated in public schools, and from the ages of twelve to fourteen he was diagnosed with a “weak heart,” which kept him out of school for a year and unable to play sports until he was nearly twenty. When he finally could engage in outdoor activities, he favored mountain climbing and skiing. In a nod to the maternal side of his family, Hans grew cacti and orchid collections when he was fourteen.
“My mother could be very sad about little things, but in a time of any great difficulty or crises she was always brave,” Fritzsche told one of the American psychiatrists at Nuremberg. His mother had a religious phrase she would use in difficult times: “The soul is saved,” she would say.
Soon after leaving university for financial reasons, Fritzsche began writing for a living. He was an editor at the Telegraphen Union, a wire service, and then, in the late 1920s, editor in chief of the Wireless News Service, part of the Hugenberg media empire whose press had a nationalistic tone similar to that of the Nazis.
Fritzsche’s writing attracted Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, who hired him in 1933 to head the News Service in the ministry’s Press Section, which relayed instructions on what to print to the country’s daily newspaper editors. Fritzsche’s delivery was calm, learned, rational, and clear—the opposite of so many Nazis. Fritzsche could deliver precisely what Goebbels needed in order to reach a particular part of the German populace that was turned off by the rantings of other Nazi leaders.
But Fritzsche’s calm demeanor belied the underlying message in his writings and his radio commentaries. For instance, he regularly attacked Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill and justified Hitler’s incursions into other sovereign lands. Fritzsche rose up the Nazi ranks, eventually heading the Ministry of Propaganda’s Radio Division.
His views lined up well with the party’s anti-Semitism. After quoting Roosevelt’s line, “There never was a race and never will be a race which can serve the rest of mankind as master,” Fritzsche said in a 1941 broadcast, “Here, too, we can only applaud Mr. Roosevelt. Precisely because there is no race which can be the master of the rest of mankind, we Germans have taken the liberty of breaking the domination of Jewry and of its capital in Germany, or Jewry which believed itself to have inherited the crown of secret world domination.”
Later that same year, Fritzsche told his listeners, “The fate of Jewry in Europe had turned out to be as unpleasant as the Führer predicted it would be in the event of a European war. After the extension of the war instigated by the Jews this unpleasant fact may also spread to the New World, for you can hardly assume that the nations of the New World will pardon the Jews for the misery of which the nations of the Old World did not absolve them.” Jews, Fritzsche said, were prepared to murder anyone in the way of their goal.
Fritzsche’s outward calm also disguised his ruthlessness. At the height of his popularity, a man named Johannes Wild wrote him anonymous letters, protesting his broadcasts. Enclosed in the letter were drawings of Hitler’s great-grandfather as an orangutan wearing a helmet, and calling the führer a “bloodthirsty crook.” Fritzsche turned the papers over to the Gestapo, which tracked Wild down, arrested him, and executed him.
Even when the war was lost, Fritzsche trumpeted the Nazi cause, telling Germans to “hold out to the last.” After Nuremberg, Germany’s own court tried Fritzsche and concluded that his propaganda helped prolong the war because it led to the drafting of German children to fight in order to sustain it.
Despite Fritzsche’s early enthusiasm over discussing the scriptures, he was wary of buying into the Christian doctrines. “Don’t expect me to drink it all down,” he said. “I’m not going to accept it as I find it. But I want to talk to you about it.” For Gerecke, that was an opening, and he took it.
Gerecke also took the openings that Baldur von Schirach gave him. When Gerecke arrived at Schirach’s cell for the first time, Schirach greeted him with a boyish smile and perfect English, urging Gerecke to visit often. The energy he’d expended on Nazi youth activities “should have been used to develop loyalty to really Christian principles,” Schirach told Gerecke.
Schirach had American roots. His paternal grandfather was German, but lived in the United States and fought in the Civil War. He married an American girl in Philadelphia in 1869, then moved back to Germany. The couple’s son, Schirach’s father, also married an American girl on a visit to the United States.
Baldur was born in Berlin to the by-now aristocratic Schirach family and joined several youth organizations as a teenager after the First World War. In 1925, at age eighteen, he read Mein Kampf, and he met Hitler the following year. Hitler sent Schirach to Munich, where the party was strongest, and where Schirach attended university, becoming a student leader. For the next decade, Hitler groomed Schirach, giving him more responsibility over the Nazi Party’s youth programs. By 1936, Sch
irach—at age twenty-nine—was one of the Reich’s leaders, reporting directly to Hitler.
Schirach was responsible for the six million Hitler Youth members, whom he recruited by using a combination of militarism, nationalism, and a devotion to pagan romanticism. He was creating, in essence, the future of the SS—young people trained to believe in the supremacy of Teutonic culture. Schirach repaid Hitler’s trust in him with blind devotion. And poetry:
That is the greatest thing about him,
That he is not only our leader and a great hero,
But himself, upright, firm and simple,
. . . in him rest the roots of our world.
And his soul touches the stars
And yet he remains a man like you and me.
The young people under Schirach’s authority said prayers before their evening meal:
Fuehrer, my Fuehrer given me by God,
Protect and preserve my life for long.
You secured Germany from its deepest need.
I thank you for my daily bread.
Stay for a long time with me, leave me not.
Fuehrer, my Fuehrer, my faith, my light
Heil my Fuehrer.
In 1940, Schirach enlisted in the German army and fought in France. When he returned, Hitler made him the governor of Vienna, a city Hitler had always considered “Jew-ridden.” In a speech in 1942, Schirach said the “removal” of Jews to the east would “contribute to European culture,” and he deported 185,000 Viennese Jews to Poland during his tenure. Schirach admitted at Nuremberg that he had been an anti-Semite ever since reading the English author Houston Stewart Chamberlain—whose writings helped form the foundation of Nazi policy—and Henry Ford. But he also told a U.S. Army psychiatrist that those influences had been wrong.
“I have rethought all the ideas which directed me during the last fifteen or twenty years of my life,” Schirach said. “Having come to the conclusion that racial policy as a whole is one of the greatest menaces to mankind.”
Some weeks after Gerecke had first asked the prisoners to attend chapel services, the three “big men” asked to see him alone.
Gerecke stopped to talk to Speer first, who asked him, “If I can tell you that the blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed me of all my sins and I believe that, will you commune me?” He also heard the same request in Schirach’s and Fritzsche’s cells. Schirach said “that he had led people to follow blindly a kind of program, that he didn’t understand himself, but now knew how wrong he was.”
Gerecke arranged a service in the tiny chapel. “I shall never forget the sight of those three big men kneeling before the crucifix, asking that their sins be forgiven,” Gerecke wrote. The three moved up to the altar—a white sheet covering a table—and took Communion. They looked so focused on the holiness of the moment, Gerecke thought, that the guards walked out and left the chaplain to his business.
After the war, some people who heard his story asked Gerecke whether the men in his spiritual care at Nuremberg had not actually found Christianity but rather were simply frightened by the probability that they would soon meet their deaths at the end of a rope.
“My only answer is that I have been a preacher for a long time and have decided that [finding God] is the only way a good many folk find themselves,” Gerecke said later. One of “many proofs” that the prisoners had not “put on an act” at Nuremberg, he said, was a news story from the mid-1950s that said all the Nazi prisoners at Spandau—except Hess—were attending chapel regularly.
CHAPTER 8
Book of Numbers
To be able to do harm, to inflict evil, is a power excessively hateful, it is common to cowardice, along with flies and scorpions, and the devil himself.
—ERASMUS
AT THE END OF the court’s session on Thursday, December 20, 1945, tribunal president Lord Lawrence adjourned the court until January 2, making for a much-welcomed twelve-day Christmas break for the trial staff. Robert Jackson threw a Christmas party at his house that night, primarily for the judges and attorneys.
At one point, Elsie Douglas, Jackson’s secretary, sat down at the piano and began playing “Silent Night.” A Russian officer sang, “Stille Nacht, helige Nacht. Alles shläft, einsam wacht . . .” The next day, the trial’s lawyers, judges, and secretaries dispersed for the Christmas break. Some went home to see family. Some, like Jackson, went sightseeing in Rome, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Others went skiing in the Austrian Alps.
Nuremberg’s defendants and witnesses didn’t go anywhere, and neither did their jailers or chaplains. The prisoners were all worried about their families’ safety, and Christmas made their ignorance more profound. “Most of us had no idea whether our nearest and dearest were still alive and our thoughts of them were clouded by anxiety and fear, by incessant futile imaginings and misgivings,” Hans Fritzsche wrote. “We longed for news of them.”
Despite how it seemed to the prisoners, Colonel Andrus and his chaplains were working hard behind the scenes to get the defendants’ families access to the prison through petitions to the trial judges and the military government. When the answer was no—which it always was—they checked every information channel for news on the whereabouts of the defendants’ families.
Colonel Andrus knew his prisoners were going through what he called “a particularly harrowing time.” And rumors were only making things worse—the defense attorneys for Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher, Wilhelm Keitel, Baldur von Schirach, and Hjalmar Schacht all passed on word that their wives had been captured by American forces. “Worse,” wrote Andrus, “they had been told that there was no certainty that their children had been taken with them.”
In some cases, the rumors were not far from truth. On Christmas Eve, while Allied prosecutors like Jackson were singing Christmas carols in the courtyard of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Henriette von Schirach, Baldur’s wife, was taken by American soldiers from a house she was living in with their children near Dresden. Henriette was put in a jeep, leaving her four young children behind with a Christmas tree, some rice, and several pounds of sugar—a gift from Gerecke. She was friendly with the chaplain throughout the trial, and in its later stages she often attended his services in Mögeldorf.
An hour after the Americans picked her up, she arrived at an Allied POW camp in Bad Tölz. She was ordered to remove her clothes and told that she’d be scrubbing toilets. It was Christmas Eve, so Henriette was given the night off, but she was told that in the morning she would be doing her cleaning with torn red, black, and white Hitler Youth rags.
Henriette was thrown into a cell made for six people but that was holding nine. The woman next to her, a pretty, dainty wife of a former Gestapo chief, had tried to kill herself and her two children while her husband shot himself in the woods. The Allies had begun to round up Nazis and their families, and the woman had slit her children’s wrists. But the children had started to scream and woke the neighbors. One of the boys survived, but the other died. Her husband had also failed in his suicide attempt in the woods. He’d been brought to the same prison in Bad Tölz and had managed to hang himself earlier that night. “He had to die,” the woman told Schirach. “He saw and did terrible things.”
A Swiss woman who had recently been released from the camp sent back a bottle of burgundy and a damask cloth. There was just enough burgundy for each of them to have a gulp. One woman took a red candle, a few pine tree branches, and some cakes from her suitcase and placed them on the tablecloth.
They passed around the burgundy and the prison food—sausages and white rolls. Suddenly, the cell door opened, and a guard brought in a bowl of hot punch. The scent of cloves and cinnamon filled the cell. “From Captain Lutz,” the guard said. “Merry Christmas.” The women drank from battered tumblers and began singing Christmas carols hesitantly. Then male voices joined in from the SS cells down the corridor.
“It sounded strong and beautiful like Christmas Mass,” Henriette wrote later. “Soldiers, peasant boys and workers sang t
he old carols in the darkness of prison until midnight. The light of the candle fell across the faces of the V.D.-infected street girls, but as they sang their faces looked bright and clear.”
For the Nuremberg prisoners back in their cells, Christmas Eve was about memories. Albert Speer was twenty on Christmas Eve in 1925 when he visited his future wife at her parents’ apartment overlooking the Neckar River in southwestern Germany. He’d used his student allowance to buy her a bedside lamp with a silk shade. After celebrating with her parents, Speer went up into the mountains above the Neckar Valley to his own parents’ house where the Christmas tree was always set up in the big living room. A fire snapped in a fireplace of old Delft tiles, and two buckets filled with water stood near the tree, just in case.
Speer cherished his family’s Christmas rituals. His father would always try to sing a carol in a disjointed, horrible voice, before fading out after a stanza. Then, the family would head to the dining room, where Speer’s mother brought out boiled Westphalian ham with potato salad served on the Speer family tableware. Speer’s father sat on the board of the largest local brewery, and the family always washed down Christmas dinner with Dortmund beer. Now, in 1945, Speer sat alone with only fish, bread, and tea.
Other prisoners were less sentimental that night. Gerecke had left Julius Streicher some devotional literature in the hope that the Christmas spirit would extend even to those who rejected his faith. But Streicher told Gustave Gilbert that the Christ story didn’t inspire or move him. The newspaper editor and propagandist said he was his own philosopher. “I’ve often thought about this business about God creating the universe,” Streicher told Gilbert. “I always ask myself, if God made everything, who made God? You see, you can go crazy thinking about that. And all that stuff about Christ—the Jew who was the Son of God. I don’t know. It sounds like propaganda.”