Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Gerecke, standing near the door, noticed that O’Connor was beginning to crack. As O’Connor followed Frank up the steps, the war hero who had ministered to troops in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, and who had buried thousands of victims of the Holocaust, nearly fainted from the stress.

  Frank thanked Andrus “for the kindness which [he] received in this incarceration.” On the gallows, O’Connor read a short prayer. Frank looked at him. “May Jesus have mercy on me,” he said, and then he dropped.

  When Streicher entered the gym a few minutes later, he was twitching and anxious. He got his right arm free from the MP and raised it in a party salute, while yelling “Heil Hitler” at the tribunal judges. O’Connor prodded Streicher to state his name, but he refused. Finally, O’Connor lost his temper. In German he screamed, “For God’s sake, Julius, tell them your name!”

  “Heil Hitler,” Streicher screamed instead.

  When he reached the top of the gallows, Streicher spat at Woods and shouted that the Bolsheviks would hang him one day. “I am now by God my father!” he yelled. “Adele my dear wife. I die innocently.”

  Streicher dropped at 2:14 A.M. Tilles said later that Woods had adjusted Streicher’s noose, placing the coils off center so the rope wouldn’t immediately snap his neck, and he would strangle. “Unlike the other men who died soundlessly, Streicher’s gasps and gurgles filled the chamber,” Tilles wrote. “Everyone heard his gasps, and everyone denied hearing them. No one moved to Streicher’s aid, no one objected, no one uttered any type of comment.” The doctors declared Streicher dead at 2:23 A.M.

  When Andrus called for Sauckel, Gerecke’s breath caught. Sauckel had been the most troubled of all the condemned men in the last days. He was having difficulty composing himself, and he seemed disoriented as he walked into the gym. When Gerecke got him to the top of the platform, Sauckel yelled out, “I’m dying an innocent man.” He began to talk about his wife and children, and Gerecke became unsteady. “I felt I could not go on,” he said later. Gerecke shakily said a prayer and Sauckel fell through the trapdoor at 2:26 A.M. Moments later, General Jodl spoke his final words as if addressing his troops: “I salute you, my Germany.”

  O’Connor stood next to the final man, Seyss-Inquart, as he dropped at 2:45 A.M. The process had taken less than two hours.

  As Jodl and Seyss-Inquart were still hanging, guards brought Goering’s body into the gym on a stretcher. They removed a blanket to show the tribunal his body and then deposited it with the others behind the black curtain hiding the coffins. The judges announced the proceedings closed, and at 2:57 A.M., the witnesses left the gym.

  The chaplains returned to the prison in silence and rested. An hour or so later, they were summoned back to the gym to give what Gerecke called “committal prayers.” They wanted the families, especially the children, to know that chaplains had performed final rites for their husbands and fathers.

  Gerecke and O’Connor ducked behind the black curtain where each body was positioned atop its coffin. The Army Signal Corps had been tasked with photographing the bodies, both naked and clothed, and with the nooses still around their necks. No photographs of anyone involved with the executions were allowed, nor were photographs of the chamber itself allowed.

  What the chaplains saw astonished them. The Nazis’ faces were destroyed. Whether on purpose or not, Woods had miscalculated the amount of rope needed for each man. He’d also poorly designed the hinge on the trapdoor and tied the ropes improperly. The result was that the Nazis’ faces smashed into the platform on their way down, breaking their noses and tearing their faces. Some, like Streicher, may have strangled to death rather than died from broken necks. Exactly what the chaplains saw, Gerecke wrote later “could never be told.”

  Both performed a final blessing over the bodies of the dead men, and O’Connor held a special Mass for mourning. Gerecke quickly realized that the army had other plans for the bodies, and he wouldn’t be able to fulfill the favor Keitel asked of him—burial in a cemetery lot near a family chapel in Brunswick.

  After the chaplains left the gym, the coffin lids were nailed shut, and at 4:00 A.M. MPs loaded the eleven coffins into two army six-by-six trucks that had pulled up to the gym.

  The trucks left Nuremberg at 5:30 A.M., escorted by two machine-gun-mounted jeeps carrying armed MPs. Fifty more MPs stood at the gates of the Palace of Justice as the trucks departed. The convoy headed north, then doubled back in an effort to elude journalists who were following. Reporters were eventually dissuaded when the MPs swung the machine guns in their direction. The best guess among members of the press was that the bodies were being taken to an airfield in nearby Erlangen for a flight to Berlin.

  Inside the gym, Woods and his team began the four-hour process of breaking down the gallows, which they then drove back to Landsberg and burned to prevent anyone from collecting souvenirs.

  When the remaining prisoners woke up on the prison’s second tier that morning, the guards escorted them down to the ground floor and instructed them to clean the cells of their dead colleagues. Inside the cells they found the remains of last meals—partially eaten sausage, bits of potato, crumbs of bread—scattered papers, and unfolded blankets. Seyss-Inquart had marked his wall calendar with a large X on October 16, the last day of his life.

  In the afternoon, several guards escorted Schirach, Hess, and Speer to the gym and handed them mops and brooms. Speer tried to keep his composure. Hess stopped at what looked like a large bloodstain on the floor and raised his arm in the Nazi Party salute.

  Gerecke returned to his apartment in Mögeldorf and tried to sleep. He reflected on “the gross hates and cruelties which climaxed in the careers of the Nazi leaders” that had begun with “petty hates, prejudices and compromises.” He was convinced that the eleven who died “to pay a debt to the world” were “men of intelligence and ability” who, in different circumstances, could have been “a blessing to the world instead of a curse.”

  In his monthly report, Gerecke said he believed that Frick, Sauckel, Ribbentrop, and Keitel “died as penitent sinners trusting God’s mercy for forgiveness. They believed in Jesus who shed his blood for their sins.”

  As he lay in bed that night, Gerecke thought about the Lutheran Church and all the good it did in the world. He thought about the work of Lutheran youth societies, the Lutheran Layman’s League, the missionary program of the Lutheran Women’s League, and of “all that we have,” he said later. “Oh, it’s a glorious thing.”

  In the days that followed, Emmy Goering told Edda that her father was dead. Then, Emmy later wrote, “something marvelous happened.”

  Gerecke came to visit them in their tiny house north of Nuremberg. “Frau Goering,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that the act your husband committed is not a suicide in the eyes of God.”

  When he left, Edda looked at her mother. “Mummy, how happy I am!” she said. “Now I’m not worried. We shall see Papa again.’ ”

  O’Connor also tended the families of his flock. Hans Frank’s sixteen-year-old son Norman had written O’Connor on the day of the executions, and five days later, O’Connor wrote back, expressing his sympathy and telling Norman about his father’s final moments.

  “His last thoughts were with you,” he wrote. “But he did not fear for you. He was convinced that you would understand, and that you had the courage and faith to master your future.”

  O’Connor told Norman that his task now was to look after his mother and siblings “with love and a man’s courage,” and “to represent the name of your father in this world, and to defend his honor.”

  He told Norman that his father had gone “straight to heaven” and that “he found a fair verdict in front of God’s judgment chair. Now he surely found quiet and peace and love—those things that this world doesn’t give.”

  He signed off, “Please be always true to God and to yourself. —O’Connor.”

  FORGIVENESS IS CENTRAL TO the story of Jesus of Nazareth, who, nailed to the
cross, prayed to God, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And it is, therefore, the core theological and ethical concept of Christianity. Forgiveness is simply what is expected of Christ’s followers. When Christ taught his disciples to pray, he told them to ask God: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

  The Nazis killed eleven million noncombatants, but more than half of those were Jews killed because they were Jewish. Judaism’s theology is ancient and broad, and there is no one settled-upon concept of forgiveness. Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, said one of the thirteen fundamental truths of Judaism was divine reward and retribution: God rewards those who keep his commandments and punishes the wicked. In Judaism, forgiveness requires that the original violation actually be removed. The Hebrew word for forgiveness is mehillah, the wiping away of a transgression. True forgiveness means the victim must be prepared to reestablish a relationship with the perpetrator. If God is forgiving, according to Jewish theology, in imitation of God, Jews must forgive.

  But those who commit acts of violence against God’s creation must also ask forgiveness of the creator. Perpetrators must do more than pray for God to pardon them. They must take an active role in the process of asking God’s forgiveness: admitting the wrong they’ve committed, humbling themselves before God and promising not to sin again. As the author of Psalm 32 puts it: “Then I acknowledged my sin to You; I did not cover up my guilt; I resolved, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”

  God, however, sees through false penitence. “Because that people has approached Me with its mouth and honored Me with its lips, but has kept its heart far from Me, and its worship of me has been a commandment of men, learned by rote,” God says through the prophet Isaiah, “I shall further baffle that people with bafflement upon bafflement; and the wisdom of its wise shall fail, and the prudence of its prudent shall vanish.”

  Broadly, forgiveness in Judaism has two working parts, at extreme opposite ends of the good-evil spectrum: desisting from the evil act, and then doing good. That shift, according to Rabbi David Rosen, is summed up in a word that “dominates the penitential literature of the Bible”—shuv, which means “to turn.” It is the central idea in the Jewish concept of teshuva, which literally means “return.” Teshuva has come to mean repentance and is itself central to the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. On that day, the Day of Atonement, the victims of wrong are obligated to forgive the wrongdoer, but only after the wrongdoer has done teshuva: recognized the wrong he’s done, stopped doing that wrong, confessed the wrong and asked forgiveness of the victim, and resolved not to repeat it. If the wrongdoer fails to go through the process, the victim can still forgive as an act of charity. But tradition generally insists that the wrongdoer earn his forgiveness through teshuva, rather than having it gifted to him for “free” by the victim.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis, disparaged the idea of free forgiveness, which he called “cheap grace,” and which he described as “forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins.” In that framework “grace alone does everything,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “and so everything can remain as it was before.”

  When teshuva is accomplished, the wrongdoer has returned to his former state of good, and all that is left to complete the process is for his victim to accept the wrongdoer’s confession and recognize it by forgiving it. Teshuva implies “that man has been endowed by God with the power of ‘turning,’ ” says Rosen. “He can turn from evil to the good, and the very act of turning will activate God’s response and lead to forgiveness.” If the wrongdoer has asked for forgiveness three times in the presence of others, and the injured party refuses to forgive him, the tables are turned and the original victim becomes the sinner.

  Even when teshuva is completed, and a path is opened up for the resumption of a relationship between the former wrongdoer and the former victim, it isn’t incumbent on the former victim to reestablish the relationship. Memory of an evil act can linger, and in Jewish tradition, reconciliation isn’t required the way forgiveness is after the completion of teshuva. Conversely, forgiveness isn’t a necessary prerequisite to reconciliation. The theologian Rabbi Elliott Dorff has said that the modern relationship between Jews and Germans illustrates such a circumstance.

  Contemporary Germans who were not alive during the Holocaust don’t have the moral standing to ask for forgiveness, despite the guilt some may feel for the evil acts of their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Similarly, most contemporary Jews, despite the pain many may feel for the atrocities perpetrated on their families during the Holocaust, don’t have the moral standing to forgive the evil acts done to their parents’ or grandparents’ generations. “While forgiveness between contemporary Germans and Jews is therefore not logically possible,” Dorff says, “reconciliation is both possible and necessary.”

  Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, wrote about the moral impossibility of survivors of the Holocaust to forgive what was done to those who did not survive. In 1941, Wiesenthal—then thirty-one—was captured in Poland and sent to the Janowska work camp near Lvov. One day, Wiesenthal was included in a group that was taken out of the camp to work at a nearby hospital for the day. Wiesenthal was given the job of emptying cartons filled with rubbish from the operating rooms. At one point, he was approached by a nurse.

  “Are you a Jew?” she asked.

  He followed the nurse, who walked quickly into the Red Cross building, up a flight of stairs, and into a room with only a white bed and night table beside it. The nurse left the room, and a figure on the bed, wrapped in white, asked in a broken voice, “Please come nearer. I can’t speak loudly.”

  As Wiesenthal approached the bed, he could see the man’s white, bloodless hands and a head completely bandaged with openings for his mouth, nose, and ears. Wiesenthal sat down on the edge of the man’s bed. “I have not much longer to live,” the man whispered. “I know the end is near.” Wiesenthal could tell the man was German.

  “I am resigned to dying soon, but before that I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me,” the man said. “Otherwise I cannot die in peace.” The man explained to Wiesenthal that he’d been in the hospital for three months, and that he’d heard there were Jews working as laborers there. He’d asked a nurse to find a Jew and bring him to his bed, and the nurse had complied, acting on the last wish of a dying man.

  The man said his name was Karl and that he was a member of the SS.

  “I must tell you something dreadful, something inhuman,” Karl said, grabbing Wiesenthal’s hand. “I must tell you of this horrible deed . . . because you are a Jew.”

  Karl told Wiesenthal that he was twenty-one years old, and from Stuttgart where his father managed a factory. An only child, Karl was brought up Catholic—an altar boy whom their priest hoped would grow up to study theology. Instead, Karl had joined the Hitler Youth, and faith receded from his life. Out of fear, his parents stopped speaking much about their lives in front of him, so he found friendship in his Hitler Youth comrades. Like most of his friends, when war came Karl volunteered for the SS.

  “I was not born a murderer,” Karl said.

  When Karl’s SS platoon joined a unit of SA stormtroopers in Dnepropetrovsk on the Russian front, they found the town deserted. Cars had been abandoned. Homes were burning. Streets were blocked by hastily erected barricades. Karl’s unit received an order to report to another part of the town. When they arrived at a large square, he saw a large group of civilians huddled together and under guard.

  “And then the word ran through our group like wildfire: ‘They’re Jews,’ ” Karl told Wiesenthal. “In my young life I had never seen many Jews. . . . all I knew abou
t the Jews was what came out of the loudspeaker or what was given us to read. We were told they were the cause of all our misfortunes. They were trying to get on top of us, they were the cause of war, poverty, hunger, unemployment.”

  The order was given and Karl, along with the rest of his unit, marched toward the huddled mass of families—150 people, maybe 200. The children stared at the approaching men with anxious eyes. Some were crying. Women held their infant children. A truck arrived with cans of gasoline, which were taken to the upper stories of one of the small houses on the square. Karl and his unit drove the Jews into the house with whips and kicks. Another truck arrived, and those Jews, too, were crammed into the small house before the door was locked.

  Wiesenthal had heard the story before. Many times. He didn’t need to hear the ending. He knew the ending. He got up to leave. “Please stay,” Karl pleaded. “I must tell you the rest.” Something in the tone of Karl’s voice—or maybe the need to hear a confession from the mouth of a Nazi—convinced Wiesenthal to sit back down.

  The order was given, and the SS unit pulled the safety pins from their grenades and tossed them into the upper windows of the house. Explosions, then screams, then flames and more screams. The men readied their rifles, prepared to shoot any of the Jews who tried to flee the fire. Karl saw a man on the second floor of the house, holding a child. His clothes were on fire. A woman stood next to him. The man covered the child’s eyes with one hand and jumped. The woman followed. Burning bodies fell from other windows. The shooting began.

  “My God,” Karl whispered. “My God.”

  For Karl and his comrades “there could be no God,” Wiesenthal wrote. “The Führer had taken His place. And the fact that their atrocities remained unpunished merely strengthened their belief that God was a fiction, a hateful Jewish invention.” Weeks later, a shell exploded near Karl and he lost his eyesight. His face and upper body were torn to ribbons.