by Tim Townsend
Vetlesen, Arne, 218
Vienna, and Schirach, 176, 181
Volf, Miroslav, 249–51
volksdeutsche, 196
Volstead Act, 14
Wagner, Richard, 92, 112
Waller, James, 218–19
Wallis, Frank, 157–58
Walsh, Edmund, 157
Walsh, Father, 75, 87, 89
Walther League Messenger, 294–95
Wannsee Conference, 192–93
war, relationship between the divine and, 52, 60
war crimes, defining, 128, 132
war crimes planning, 125–36
War of 1812, 54
Warsaw Ghetto, 157, 191–92
Washington, George, 53–54
Wehrenberg, Fred, 14–15
Wehrenberg, Gertrude, 14
Wehrenberg’s Tavern (St. Louis), 14–15, 16
Werfel, Franz, 193
Wesley, Captain, 92
Wessel, Henry, 23
West, Rebecca, 1, 114–15, 161, 164, 194
Westphal, Otto, 111
“What Men Live By” (Tolstoy), 304
Whelp, H. C., 297
Wichita Natural Gas Co., 28–29
Wickham, Louis, 46
Wiener Graben quarry, 198–99
Wiesenthal, Simon, 281–86
Wild, Johannes, 179
William, Peter, III, 310–12
William I, German Emperor, 106
Williams, Dorothy “Dot,” 33, 66, 73
Willig, Mark, 311–12
Winfield, Kansas, 26
Wireless News Service, 178
Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 62
Wittmer, George, 45–46
Woods, John, 256–57, 272, 273, 275, 276–77
World Series (1946), 4, 259, 266
World’s Fair (1904), 14–15
World War I, 30–31, 49, 56–57, 106
Wray, T. J., 220–21
Wright, Robert, Baron Wright, 133, 135
Yale, Wesley, 200–201
Yalta Conference, 126–27
Yom Kippur, 63, 80, 279–80
Ziereis, Franz, 194–96, 200, 207, 210–11
Zion Lutheran Church (Gordonville), 20–24
Zirndorf, Nuremberg, 163
Zugspitze, Germany, 93–94
Zwingli, Ulrich, 222
Zyklon B, 197–98, 212–13
Photographic Inserts
Henry Gerecke in the 1918 yearbook of St. John’s Academy and College in Winfield, Kansas, which prepared high-school- and college-aged would-be Lutheran pastors for graduate-level seminary.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Gerecke entered Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in 1918, and married Alma Bender, the daughter of a city brewer, the following year.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Part of Gerecke’s ministry was a radio show called Moments of Comfort—a combination of scripture recitation and soothing sermonizing. Here he is in an undated photograph doing a live broadcast in the KFUO-AM studios.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Gerecke (left) training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he arrived in September 1943 at the age of fifty. He’d been assigned as a chaplain to the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital, which deployed to Hermitage, England—sixty miles west of London—five months later.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Richard O’Connor, the son of a New York schoolteacher and a construction worker, was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1934 at the age of twenty-five and took the name Sixtus. Pictured here in 1943, he volunteered to be a chaplain with the Eleventh Armored Division.
Permission of Holy Name Province.
Prisoners carried large stones up the “Stairway of Death” (Todesstiege) from the Wiener Graben quarry (left), part of Mauthausen Concentration Camp near Linz, Austria, in 1942. In May 1945, after O’Connor and the Eleventh Armored Division helped liberate Mauthausen, an American soldier poses (right) near the edge of the “parachute jump” at the top of the quarry. Often the SS guards simply pushed Mauthausen’s inmates over the quarry wall to their deaths, calling such victims “parachutists.”
Left: Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstaette Mauthausen Federation Nationale des Deportes et Internes Resistants et Patriotes Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, courtesy of SPB.
Right: Permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Janet Peters.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner—pictured here on the right during an inspection of Mauthausen on April 27, 1941—oversaw the Nazis’ concentration camp system. Kaltenbrunner was Catholic, and O’Connor was his chaplain during the trial.
Z-Gedenkstaette Mauthausen Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes Yad Vashem Photo Archives, courtesy of Amicale, France.
As a chaplain with the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital, Gerecke ministered to wounded GIs and to hospital staff. The Ninety-Eighth was fifteen miles east of the Ramsbury and Membury airfields, and after the D-Day landings began in June 1943, the army used the Ninety-Eighth as a transit hospital for air evacuations from the Continent.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Gerecke’s two eldest sons served in Europe during the war. Hank (left) and Corky (middle) both visited their father (right) when they could get leave.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
During the Second World War, Colonel Burton C. Andrus (center, pictured here with Gerecke) had been a combat observer with the Army’s G-3 Combat Lessons Branch. He was variously described at Nuremberg as “pompous,” “officious,” “strict,” and “an insecure peacock of a man.” Andrus fought hard to get Gerecke to the Palace of Justice. “I knew of no one else qualified for [the situation],” he wrote later.
U.S. Army and Heritage Education Center, Burton C. Andrus Collection.
Along with one of the army psychologists, Gerecke and O’Connor (pictured here in an undated photo) were the only members of the prison staff who spoke German. The two men became good friends, eventually developing 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.”
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Heraldic design of 6850th Internal Security Detachment, the unit—including Gerecke and O’Connor—that staffed the prison. Andrus, who was a member of the Masonic Order of the Knights Templar, designed the emblem, writing in a memo that the azure field stood for truth, the sable border for solemnity, and the gules (or red) flames for “the pit of wrath.” The key at the top of the herald stood for security, the scales for justice, and the crushed eagle within the flames symbolized “Germany, Fallen, destroyed.”
U.S. Army and Heritage Education Center, Burton C. Andrus Collection.
On the night of January 2, 1945, the British sent more than five hundred Lancaster heavy bombers over Nuremberg. Within an hour 1,800 people were killed and 90 percent of the city was smashed. Another 4,000 were killed in subsequent Allied air raids in the following weeks. At top, a young boy stands in Nuremberg’s former Adolf Hitler Platz, in front of the ruins of St. Sebald Church. On the bottom, a boater travels through the destroyed city along the Pegnitz River.
Photos by Ray D’Addario, ca. 1945–1946, courtesy of the Robert H. Jackson Center, Jamestown, New York.
The Grand Hotel, shown here during the trials, a fifty-year-old luxury accommodation just outside the walls of the destroyed old city, was the hub of after-court activity in the American war crimes community in Nuremberg. A German band played jazz most nights in the hotel’s Marble Room.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Senior courtroom staff could take in more sophisticated culture at the Nuremberg Opera House. Pictured is the program from a January 1946 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s The Masked Ball.
U.S. Army and Heritage Education Center, Burton C. Andrus Collection.
; When he arrived at the Palace of Justice (shown here in aerial view), Gerecke shook the defendants’ hands, a gesture for which he was later severely criticized by the American public. Shaking hands with these men didn’t mean that he was unconcerned with their alleged crimes, but, he wrote later, “I knew I could never win any of them to my way of thinking unless they liked me first.”
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Thanksgiving fell on the third day of the trial. American prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson spoke briefly, explaining the meaning of Thanksgiving to the court. He then asked Gerecke, who had been in Nuremberg for just ten days, to say a prayer as hundreds of military and civilian Allied personnel bowed their heads.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke, from the collection of the Concordia Historical Institute, St. Louis, Missouri.
The U.S. Army spent about $75 million (in today’s dollars) renovating Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice—removing walls and creating an additional visitor’s gallery and a room for the world’s press. A long wooden covered walkway led to an elevator that deposited the prisoners directly into the Courtroom 600 defendants’ dock, shown here.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Each cell in the prison where the war crimes defendants were held measured thirteen feet by six and a half feet and was accessed through a thick wooden door with a one-foot-square peephole, which Gerecke called a “Judas window.”
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Hermann Goering, the highest-ranking Nazi leader at Nuremberg (pictured here sitting in the courtroom) was exactly the same age as Gerecke, whom he called “pastor.” Goering was head of the German Air Force and Hitler’s designated successor.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Defendants General Alfred Jodl (left), Hans Frank (center), and Alfred Rosenberg (right) in court, circa 1946. Jodl and Rosenberg largely rejected Gerecke’s offer of spiritual counsel. Frank was Hitler’s personal lawyer, and eventually governor general of Poland, where an estimated three million Jews were killed during the war. O’Connor baptized Frank during the trial, bringing him back into the church.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Baldur von Schirach (pictured in the Palace of Justice speaking to his attorney) led the Hitler Youth movement and was later a Nazi leader in Vienna.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Albert Speer (shown here in Courtroom 600) was Hitler’s architect and designed many of the Nazi Party’s grand edifices in Nuremberg. Speer and Schirach both asked Gerecke to work with them toward receiving Holy Communion while they were on trial.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
Gerecke was close to General Wilhelm Keitel, seated here in the Courtroom 600 dock. The former chief of staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, he was one of Hitler’s preeminent yes-men. Fritz Sauckel, shown here consulting with Keitel, was Hitler’s labor chief and Gerecke’s first convert back to the Lutheran faith at Nuremberg.
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel, courtesy of the Harry S. Truman Library.
As the prisoners began to accept Gerecke during the trial’s initial weeks, many slowly agreed to attend his services on Sundays. Gerecke and O’Connor used a small chapel fashioned by knocking down a wall between two cells. A former lieutenant colonel of the SS was the organist. In this photo, Gerecke poses for an army promotional shot.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
In June 1946, a rumor circulated among the defendants that Alma Gerecke had called her husband home to St. Louis. All twenty-one defendants signed a letter to Alma asking her to let Gerecke stay until the end of the trial.
From the collection of Concordia Historical Institute.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
Gerecke and O’Connor also ministered to the defendants’ families throughout the trial. Gerecke was especially close to Goering’s wife, Emmy, and daughter, Edda, whom he visited in the countryside and sent care packages to after the war. Goering signed the back of this photo of his family for Gerecke.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
When the trial ended, Gerecke returned to St. Louis. He hadn’t seen Alma—pictured here with Gerecke at a welcome-home party in his honor—or his youngest son, Roy, in three years. He was soon assigned to the Fifth Army’s disciplinary barracks in Milwaukee, where he ministered to the U.S. Army’s troubled souls.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
In 1950, Gerecke, pictured here celebrating with a beer, was discharged and moved with Alma to Chester, Illinois, to be the assistant pastor of St. John Lutheran Church. But for Gerecke, Chester’s real draw was the Menard penitentiary, a maximum-security facility housing 2,500 murderers and rapists, the state’s worst criminals. He became the chaplain at Menard and at a hospital for the criminally insane.
Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.
After the trial, O’Connor returned to Siena College, where he taught philosophy, gardened, and played the horses at the nearby Saratoga Race Course. He never wrote about his year in Nuremberg, and rarely spoke of it, even to friends. Here he is in front of a blackboard in a Siena classroom.
Permission of Siena College Archives, Loudonville, New York.
In 1961, Gerecke had a heart attack in the Menard prison parking lot on his way into the prison. He drove himself home, but died later that day in Chester’s hospital. He was sixty-eight years old. The cross on top of St. John Lutheran School in Chester is named in his honor.
From the collection of Concordia Historical Institute.
About the Author
TIM TOWNSEND, formerly the religion reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, holds master’s degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Divinity School. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. In 2005, 2011, and 2013, he was named Religion Reporter of the Year by the Religion Newswriters Association, the highest honor on the “God beat” at American newspapers. He recently joined the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project as a senior writer and editor in Washington, D.C.
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Credits
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover photographs: eagle © by SuperStock; trial © by akg-images/Alamy
Copyright
MISSION AT NUREMBERG. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Townsend. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
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EPub Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062300195
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