Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Few who had been part of the Nuremberg experiment over the previous ten months were in a celebratory mood. Whether translators or prosecutors or reporters, they had become familiar with the faces in the dock, some of whom had just been sentenced to die for their crimes. Many simply went home and prepared to leave Nuremberg. “It is a terrible thing to see a man condemned to death,” wrote Ann and John Tusa, “even when you are certain that he has been responsible for the death of millions.”

  THOUGH THE DEFENDANTS GIVEN a death sentence had four days to appeal, Keitel refused to allow his attorney to do so. His role in the Third Reich had been too great for his frank admission of weakness to move the tribunal past a guilty verdict and death sentence. The deliberations about his fate had been the shortest of those for any defendant, requiring virtually no discussion. All four judges voted him guilty on all four counts.

  Instead of appealing his sentence, Keitel appealed the form of execution. He felt that death by hanging did not become an officer. “The death sentence has come as no surprise to me, but I am very deeply upset about the way it is to be executed,” he wrote his lawyer on the same day he learned his sentence. “Help me make a plea for my execution to be changed to a soldier’s death by firing squad. I consider it pointless to ask more than that.”

  The same day, Keitel’s wife, Lisa, also wrote to her husband’s attorney. “We heard the judgment, but it was only as we expected,” she wrote. “I hope that my husband’s plea for a military execution will be granted him and Jodl. Otherwise, please, no plea for clemency.”

  On October 5, 1946, Keitel wrote to the Allied Control Council, the military government then running occupied Germany.

  I will willingly give up my life in the expiation demanded by my sentence, if my sacrifice will speed the prosperity of the German people and serve to exonerate the German armed forces from blame. I have only one plea: to be granted a death by firing squad . . . the mode of execution that is the right of the soldier in every other army in the world upon whom sentence of death is pronounced as a soldier.

  Keitel was not the only one to request that his execution be conducted by firing squad. Goering also asked that if his sentence could not be commuted to life, he be shot rather than hanged. His lawyer pointed to Goering’s bravery during the First World War as a reason. Jodl also asked that his death sentence be set aside, or that he be shot. Raeder, who had been sentenced to life in prison, asked that his sentence be commuted to death by shooting, “by way of mercy.”

  The Allied Control Council only seriously considered the requests from those Nazis who wanted to be shot rather than hanged. In the end, though, as one of the members later wrote, these men were being tried “for their responsibility in abominable crimes, and not for being soldiers.” On October 11, the attorneys for the condemned men were notified that their petitions had been denied.

  When Keitel discussed his German honor with the prison psychiatrists, he became emotional and the doctors were sure that he would have committed suicide if he’d been able to. “How often I have found myself seriously confronted with this as a possible way out, only to reject it because—as suicides have always demonstrated—nothing is changed and nothing bettered by such action,” Keitel wrote in a note to his lawyer just after the trial began. “Quite the contrary, the armed forces, whose counselor and mediator I had so often been, would have labeled me a deserter and branded me a coward.”

  Hitler had chosen suicide, Keitel wrote, “shunning his own personal responsibility” and leaving it “to a subordinate to account for his autocratic and arbitrary actions, these two shortcomings will remain forever incomprehensible to me. They are my final disillusion.”

  Despite his depression, Keitel kept his uniform pressed, his hair immaculately brushed, and his cell in perfect order as much as he could. “One has only a bunk and a small table, with no desk or shelf, and even the wooden chair is taken out,” Keitel wrote of his cell in his memoirs. “There is nothing to hang or lay one’s clothes and underwear on: one is obliged to lay it on the stone floor, so it is impossible to keep one’s clothes clean.”

  Two days after his sentence, Keitel wrote his son Karl-Heinz to say that he predicted that he would be executed two weeks later. “It has been a great help to me in facing up to the Tribunal as I did, that I have for a long time been aware of what my fate would be,” he wrote. “I regret nothing that I said at my Trial, and I would never take back a word I said; I spoke the pure truth, the whole time, to every question and on every occasion. That is something I can still be proud of, and for all time in history.”

  Keitel wrote Karl-Heinz once more, three days before his death, noting that since his incarceration, only the women in the family had written him. “Enough said,” he wrote. “What cowards we men are.”

  The tribunal’s sentence against Keitel had been pronounced “in the name of humanity,” Fritzsche later wrote. “Humanity, however, will not benefit by this sacrifice if it fails to realize that at no time in his career did Keitel bear the brand of Cain.”

  FRITZSCHE’S UNDERSTANDING OF THE biblical term “the brand of Cain” was as a mark that signified to the world that Cain was a murderer. Gerecke would have thought about the phrase differently. To the chaplain, the brand of Cain meant protection—even for murderers—from harm, through the grace of God.

  The first five books of the Bible—called the Torah by Jews, and the Pentateuch by Christians—were first passed around orally before they were written down and finally stitched together by a later editor. The story of Cain and Abel comes in the fourth chapter of Genesis and was written by an author that modern biblical scholars refer to as “J,” the Jahwist (or Yahwist), for his recurring use of the term YHWH, a transliteration of the Hebrew for “Lord,” when referring to God.

  As opposed to some of his fellow Genesis scribes who were concerned with the law, genealogies (commonly known as the “begats”), or the rules and regulations for Israelite priesthood, the Yahwist is the Torah’s storyteller. He portrays what scholars call the “primeval history”—the first ten or so chapters of Genesis—as a gradual distancing between God and his creation. Throughout these chapters, the Yahwist takes his reader on a tour of this growing alienation, starting with Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise. He then describes Noah’s predicament as the rains fell and the world began to flood before moving on to report on the confusion at Babel’s Tower when human language began to fragment into different dialects. Later, in the Torah, the Yahwist is responsible for the story of the plagues, the Exodus from Egypt, and the wandering in the wilderness.

  In the Yahwist’s hands, God is all-powerful and anthropomorphized, which makes God’s humanity both reassuringly familiar and terrifying. The Yahwist is a fan of character flaws and he is an expert at exploiting them in the service of a narrative, especially when exploring the basic theological concerns about the divide between the human and the divine. The first story to illustrate this is the tale of Adam and Eve’s encounter with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

  The Yahwist brings murder into the primeval history pretty quickly, and things go badly for people from there onward. Cain is a farmer who is jealous of God’s preference for his brother Abel because Abel can afford to offer “the fat portions” of his first-born sheep in sacrifice to God. Cain, on the other hand, can only offer the “fruits of the ground.” Though God warns Cain not to give in to his anger over this slight, Cain can’t help himself, and so he takes Abel into the field and kills him. In return, God banishes Cain from his own land to wander the earth, but he marks Cain to protect him from those who might avenge Abel’s murder. Anyone who takes Cain’s life, God says, “will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.”

  In Hebrew folk etymology, Cain means “acquisition” and Abel means “emptiness.” Brothers are constantly pitted against one another in the Hebrew Bible and here the Yawhist uses the historical opposition of shepherds and farmers to illustrate that divide. Cain’s story is most likely a reference to the Ken
ites, who were a tribe of metalworkers living in southern Palestine around 1200 BC, an era known as the “period of the Judges.” Just as the Israelites favored the Kenites in the period of the Judges, God in the Old Testament must favor Cain after he kills his shepherd brother.

  Cain stands for much more than one tribe, however. When the Yahwist wrote his primeval history, or “the beginning of things” as scholars call it, he wanted to connect the history to the lives of his audience. In the Yahwist’s eyes, every human being is Cain and Abel, and committing sin is a universal human flaw. Cain was capable of overcoming sin, and yet he didn’t just choose, of his own free will, to sin.

  “The logic of sin proves stronger than the injunction to do good,” writes theologian Miroslav Volf. “This is exactly what we should expect, for the logic of sin was originally designed for the very purpose of overcoming the obligation to do good.” Committing a sin is not just making a wrong choice, but rather it is succumbing “to an evil power.” Before he killed Abel, Cain had the ability to conquer sin or be conquered by it. He murdered his brother, according to Volf “because he fell prey to what he refused to master.”

  Volf, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers on the Christian theology of reconciliation and forgiveness, has pointed out that traditional mythology often tells stories of sin from the perspective of the perpetrator so as to legitimize the sinner’s actions and render sympathy toward him. The story of Cain and Abel condemns Cain, and though the Yahwist engenders sympathy for Abel, he twists tradition by making the story really about Cain, and by pointing the finger at his audience in doing so.

  “The story about a murderous ‘them’ is a story about a murderous ‘us,’ ” Volf writes. “Cain is ‘them’ and Cain is ‘us.’ ” The story’s great feat is that it combines “a clear judgment against the perpetrator with the commitment to protect him from the rage of the ‘innocent’ victim.” In the story, God questions Cain again and again, asking him, why are you angry? Why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? Where is your brother Abel? What have you done?

  God’s constant questioning of Cain suggests a parental presence—God is someone who cares deeply about Cain’s actions and their consequences. God and Cain’s relationship makes God’s decision to banish Cain from his presence all the more poignant. And this is not an unfamiliar trope in the Bible. For instance, Jesus’s suffering on the cross didn’t tear his heart, Volf suggests, but rather it was the abandonment of everyone around him, including his father: “ ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ ”

  From God’s perspective, the story of Cain and Abel could not have gone worse—God loses both brothers to death and banishment. Yet, according to Volf, God’s mark of protection on Cain represents both armor to protect him from victimization as well as God’s grace. “The same God who did not regard Cain’s scanty offering, bestowed kindness upon the murderer whose life was in danger,” Volf writes. God did not abandon Cain. He claimed Cain as his own by marking and protecting him, even as he sent Cain “away from the presence of the Lord.”

  Thousands of years later, the U.S. military assigned two chaplains to pastor the men responsible for mass slaughter. Whether the decision to make this offer came from the Geneva Conventions or from U.S. Army regulations based on them, at its heart, the decision came from ancient principles of compassion.

  Those chaplains believed that God loves all human beings, including perpetrators, and so their decision was more about how to minister to the Nazis, not whether they should. The process of ministering to those who have committed evil involves returning the wrongdoer to goodness, a difficult challenge when faced with a leader of the Third Reich. For Gerecke and O’Connor that challenge meant using what they learned about each defendant to spiritually lead him back from the place where he’d fallen to a place of restoration.

  The decisions Gerecke made in Nuremberg’s prison were not God’s decisions. They were a series of individual pastoral choices made by a middle-aged American preacher who was attempting to bring what he believed was God’s light into a dark heart. The Nuremberg chaplains were not judging the members of their flocks, nor were they forgiving their crimes against humanity. They were trying to lead those Nazis who were willing to follow toward a deeper insight into what they had done. They were attempting to give Hitler’s henchmen new standing as human beings before their impending executions.

  CHAPTER 10

  Wine and Blood

  Good is opposed to evil in such a way that a good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.

  —J. L. MACKIE

  FROM THE DAY OF the sentencing until the executions, Gerecke and O’Connor were with the eleven condemned men almost day and night. The prisoners’ movements were considerably restricted. Daily exercise now consisted of a walk up and down the cell block, handcuffed to a guard. There would be no more walks in the courtyard and no more chapel services, and any activities outside a prisoner’s cell were done in handcuffs. Some of the men asked Gerecke to stop in and visit with them four or five times a day.

  The seven other convicted men, now housed in cells on the prison’s second tier, were also only allowed to walk back and forth on the prison’s ground floor. Yet the men consistently refused. “What an effect it would have on those condemned to death if they saw us strolling there,” Speer wrote. “They are no longer taken for walks. Now and then one of their cell doors opens, perhaps for the chaplain or the doctor.”

  But finally, after nearly two weeks in what amounted to solitary confinement, Speer relented and took Andrus up on his offer to walk on the ground floor. A guard shackled his wrist to Speer’s and led him down the narrow winding staircase.

  “In the silence,” Speer wrote, “every step on the iron stairs sound[ed] like a thunderclap.”

  Once on the floor of the prison, where he’d spent so much of the last year, Speer saw eleven guards staring directly into the condemned men’s cells. And as Speer passed each cell, he saw his colleagues lying on their backs, hands outside the blanket, heads turned toward the inside of the cell—just as Andrus demanded. “A ghostly sight,” Speer wrote. “It looks as though they have already been laid on their biers . . . I cannot stand it for long. Back in my cell, I decide not to go back down again.”

  The men continued to turn inward toward themselves, and some toward God. According to Gerecke, Ribbentrop read his Bible most of the day. Hitler’s foreign minister had, Speer thought, “abandoned his arrogance for a faith in Christ that sometimes strikes a grotesque note.” Gerecke noticed that Keitel “was especially interested in certain Bible portions and certain hymns which spoke of the love of God in the redeeming Blood of Christ.” Sauckel, on the other hand, was “much disturbed,” Gerecke noted. He was “so unstrung that I feared he would not hold up under the pressure. He would pray aloud and always end our devotional sessions with, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’ ”

  Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Sauckel all took Communion with Gerecke in their cells. “God had changed these hearts along the way and now in the face of losing all material things, even their life, they could hear the promises of God to penitent sinners through the lips of Jesus who receives sin-burdened souls,” Gerecke later wrote.

  When they were not praying, the men spent their remaining time seeking small pleasures. Some of the condemned men were stamp collectors, and they spent the time removing stamps from the letters they received. Seyss-Inquart asked Andrus if they could take cold showers, telling the commandant that as chief Nazi in the occupation of the Netherlands, he had allowed those condemned to death to take cold showers, and it often helped them. Jodl wrote to his wife that he felt like a monk in his cell—it was no longer a prison, but a refuge.

  On October 12, the condemned men met with their wives for the final time. As Emmy Goering waited in her attorney’s apartment for her scheduled time to proceed to the Palace of Justice, she prayed. “My God, give me the strength to bear this last visit. Afterwards, let whatev
er you want happen to me. But give me the courage this last time.”

  When they saw each other, Emmy said she had told Edda about Hermann’s impending death. Hermann was crying.

  “Is Papa really going to die?” Edda had asked her mother. “If Papa must die, will he find all the people he once loved in heaven?”

  Yes, Emmy had assured her, most certainly.

  Emmy told her husband what Edda had asked her.

  “She says she wants to meet you in heaven,” Emmy said. And if it weren’t for Edda, “I would like to die with you.”

  A ray of sunlight seemed, to Emmy, to light up Hermann’s face. “All signs of suffering vanished from it,” Emmy later wrote. “Suddenly, he looked very young.”

  “Don’t be afraid that they will hang me,” Hermann said. “They’ll keep a bullet for me.”

  “Do you really think they will shoot you?” Emmy asked.

  “You may be sure of one thing,” he said. “They won’t hang me.”

  They spoke some more of their marriage, of Edda, and of happier days. And then it was time for Emmy to go.

  “I bless you, you and our daughter,” Hermann told his wife, making a sign of blessing with his left hand. “I bless our dear Fatherland, and I bless all those who will be good to you.” And then a guard led him out of the room and back to his cell.

  Emmy stayed in her seat for a few minutes, with Gerecke next to her. Only after a moment did she realize she was speaking through her tears, “I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . . ”

  Emmy completely lost her composure as Gerecke led her out of the room. “When I had seen a particularly dramatic scene in the theater or cinema in the past, I had often thought: ‘it’s exaggerated! Reality can’t be so cruel!’ ” she later wrote. “Everything became hazy in front of my eyes, my body broke in a sweat and I felt that I was going to faint.”