Mission at Nuremberg (11 page)

Morale among the medical staff was especially low. “I have had to use a personal brand of psychotherapy on some highly trained professional personnel ordered into the unit recently in order to obtain useful service from them,” Sullivan wrote.

For doctors, nurses, and chaplains alike, the setup of Schwabing made for time-consuming rounds. The 1,684 patients who checked into the hospital in August were spread out over twenty-one wards in seven different buildings. For Gerecke, who celebrated his fifty-second birthday that month, the pressure on his knees, from visiting up to fifteen hundred beds each month, was mitigated by the hospital's high number of ambulatory patients, which kept pastoral meetings in his office at “a high pitch.”

With Geist's help, the chaplain baptized two men—a technician with the 489th Automatic Weapons Battalion and a private with the Fifty-Fifth Fighter Group—at the hospital in August. With the fighting over and the opportunity for baptisms more prevalent, Gerecke made a request of his chaplain superiors. Referencing his
Moments of Comfort
broadcasts in St. Louis, he wrote them in September with an idea to reach many more troops over the American Forces Network.

“There may be opportunity for daily devotions over AFN,” he wrote. “It was my hobby during civilian ministry. May this venture have your blessings?”

In early August, Hank Gerecke took a jeep from where he was stationed in Nancy and picked up his younger brother Corky, then stationed near Frankfurt. The brothers drove down to Munich and, without telling his father, Hank made contact with one of the Ninety-Eighth's doctors he'd met in England. The doctor and some nurses sneaked the brothers into the hospital and hid them on two gurneys under sheets. A doctor called Gerecke to the emergency room on the pretense that someone was near death. When the chaplain arrived, he approached the bodies under the sheets, at which point, his sons popped up yelling, “Happy Birthday!” Without missing a beat, Gerecke yelled back, “You boys get down from there right now!” It's possible the chaplain had never been happier in his life. His sons had survived the war and had traveled to Munich to surprise him on his birthday anniversary.

“We had a righteous time that night,” Hank said later. “We surely did.”

Also in August, Gerecke had asked a Captain Wesley to lead Friday evening Jewish services in the chapel, and Gerecke began a Seventh-Day Adventist service on Saturday mornings from ten to noon. Gerecke and a Jewish chaplain began organizing for High Holy Day services for troops stationed in Munich, and Gerecke convinced the hospital's department heads and chiefs of services to relieve Jewish personnel from normal duties. From September 7 to 9, 153 people attended Rosh Hashanah services at Munich's Prince Regent Theater, an opera house built by Bavarian officials to stage the works of the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic composer—and Hitler favorite—Richard Wagner. When it opened in 1901, the Prince Regent's first performance had been Act III of Wagner's
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
. More than one hundred attended Yom Kippur services at the opera house on September 16 and 17, 1945.

The Ninety-Eighth's senior officers bunked in a large, well-furnished house called the “Villa” at one end of the administrative building, while junior officers lived in apartments at another end of the same building. Nurses lived mostly (and snugly) on the second and third floors of the administrative building. Enlisted men were housed in two former hospital buildings and slept in bunk beds. Feeding thousands in one institution in postwar Munich was a challenge. Fresh meat, fresh eggs, and fresh vegetables were scarce. The hospital's kitchen had steam vats and gas ranges, but workers had to rely on field ranges because of the lack of gas. Glass was also hard to come by, so the hospital's windows that had been broken during the bombing couldn't be replaced. The absence of screens, poor sanitation, and an unofficial dump a quarter mile away from the hospital grounds meant flies were a problem in the summer and early fall. Mess halls, kitchens, latrines, operating rooms, and dressing rooms were regularly sprayed with DDT, which “remarkably reduced this nuisance,” Sullivan wrote. The DDT also took care of the cockroach issue.

Sullivan's interest in morale-building distractions continued in Munich, where he screened five movies a week in the physiotherapy gym. Playing fields for baseball and football games were a five-minute walk from the hospital, and the Ninety-Eighth's football team provided “a good spectacle even though they were out-matched in most games,” he wrote. The basketball team was “uniformly victorious” and well supported. There were regular Liberty Runs into popular spots in the city, and Sunday tours to Garmisch, Starnberg, and Berchtesgaden always took the maximum number allowed on leave.

Gerecke took Geist and a group of his favorite nurses into the Alps for a week in the fall. Amid the snowball fights on the slopes of the Zugspitze, Germany's tallest mountain, one nurse spotted a beautiful little church in one of the mountain villages, and the group asked Gerecke if he could lead them in a service there the next day—a Sunday. He walked into the church and found two ministers, one old and one young, inside. The younger man, sensing an American in the room, greeted Gerecke in English. Gerecke smiled, told the men who he was, and asked if his group could worship there the next morning. He promised they'd be in and out quickly without disturbing anything in the church.

The two men conferred in German, with the older minister becoming animated, telling the young minister that the bumbling Americans, despite their promises to the contrary, would surely damage the church as they had damaged Germany, and he directed the young man to tell the American to go back home and worship in his own country. The young minister turned to Gerecke and told him in English that he was welcome to come back the next day with his group and hold a service in the church.

Gerecke thanked him, smiled at the older minister, and said in German, “Thank you, Pastor, for allowing us to use your church. We promise to leave it as beautiful as when we found it.” And he walked triumphantly back out into the snow. It was always one of Gerecke's favorite stories. “The look on their faces was worth printing,” he'd say.

In October, the army required all officers and enlisted personnel to take two hours of training a week in such subjects as “Aims of the Nazi Party Before 1933,” “The Nazi Party in Power, 1933–39,” “The Guilt of the German People,” “The Nazi Strike,” and “Nazi Atrocities.” The last was probably the easiest to illustrate because of the hospital's proximity to Dachau, about eleven miles to the northwest.

Geist had been with Gerecke the first time each of them visited Dachau. They saw the execution mounds, the barbed wire, the SS barracks. The camp had been liberated only ten weeks before the Ninety-Eighth arrived in Munich. The evidence of mass murder was fresh. Geist took a picture of Gerecke standing next to a sign in English, below a white cross. “This area is being retained as a shrine to the 238,000 individuals who were cremated here. Please do not destroy.”

Gerecke returned several times to Dachau. He never said what compelled him, nor whether his description of touching its walls as blood smeared his hands was literal or metaphorical. Whatever happened in his mind as he walked through the camp remained there for good.

As he and Geist stood next to the ovens on that first visit, Gerecke said in a soft voice, “How could they do something like this?”

He said it over and over again.

CHAPTER 5

The Sun's Light Failed

If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads, and the Lord will reward you.

—PROVERBS 25:21–22

I
N EARLY NOVEMBER 1945,
Colonel Sullivan summoned Gerecke to his office at the Munich hospital to tell him that the army had requested his transfer. Major Nazi war criminals were awaiting trial at Nuremberg, and Colonel Burton Andrus, the commandant of the Nuremberg prison a hundred miles north, had asked for Gerecke as his Protestant chaplain.

Andrus needed to protect his prisoners' spiritual welfare, but he was also thinking pragmatically. The services of a good chaplain could prevent what Andrus called “prison psychosis.” Such a “mental condition,” he wrote, “could only be protected by steps like this. . . . It was not so much that my prisoners were likely to become psychotic, but that it might give them the chance to feign this type of illness.”

He had known that he needed chaplains since mid-August. It wasn't just a matter of regulations. Religious ministry to the prisoners was important if, Andrus wrote later, “we were going to do what, as well meaning people, we should for their possible spiritual benefit.”

Andrus's situation was “urgent,” and he wanted Gerecke for a number of reasons. For one, Gerecke—like so many of the Nazis at Nuremberg—was a Lutheran. He also spoke German and had worked in U.S. prisons and jails before the war.

Sullivan had told Andrus that Gerecke had served long enough. He knew Gerecke had not seen Alma in two years and that he wanted to go home, but the Nuremberg commandant had pushed to get the chaplain into his prison. “I had to go through the chaplain general to get approval for Gerecke,” Andrus wrote. “But I finally got it.”

Andrus had entered the army as a cavalry officer in the First World War. For reasons that were never clear to him, the army put him in charge of a military prison at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, for three months during the war.

The stockade held the U.S. Army's worst criminals—men who had been found guilty of murder, armed robbery, and drug violations. On Andrus's first night in charge of the stockade, the prisoners rioted. The next morning, as Andrus surveyed the damage, the prisoners informed him that they had no intention of recognizing his authority, or of doing any work. For the rest of the day, he had each prisoner brought before him. He gauged by “the defiance in their eyes” which were the ringleaders, and he assigned those men to clean the prison and repair the damages from the riot. He brought in sheet-metal workers to construct three solitary confinement cells and had the work done in full view of the prisoners. Then he instituted a new rule that sentinels would no longer have to give three warning calls to escaping prisoners before they could shoot them. One warning would now be enough.

Andrus stood a rigid five feet, ten inches and considered himself in great shape. He was furious when a reporter for
Time
described him at Nuremberg as “plump.” His small brown eyes were magnified by thick, round, steel-rimmed glasses, and a pencil-thin mustache drew a line between a fleshy nose and two narrow lips. Andrus's signature feature was his green shellacked helmet, always buffed so that the golden eagle on its front shined. Those who eventually worked for him, with him, and around him at Nuremberg—lawyers, soldiers, journalists, and Nazis—called Andrus “pompous,” “officious,” “strict,” “petty,” “naive,” “ridiculous,” “a spit-and-polish stickler,” “an insecure peacock of a man,” and “not the brightest.” The writer John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that it was “hard to imagine the Army could have found a better man for the job.” Galbraith also said Andrus was “somewhat allergic to all of his charges.”

During the Second World War, Andrus had been a combat observer with the army's G-3 Combat Lessons Branch. As his unit moved through Germany at the end of the war, he observed that the Germans were hypocrites. “They have religious statues and pictures around their houses, and try to pose as Christians, yet they are still launching rabot [
sic
] bombs on the women and children in England,” Andrus wrote in a letter to the San Diego Commandery of the Masonic Order of the Knights Templar. “Many of their infernal devices have slaughtered innocent maidens, helpless widows, and defenseless orphans. They are making war on the Christian religion and all it stands for.”

A week after VE Day, Andrus was ordered to Mondorf-les-Bains, a spa town with tree-lined streets, grand nineteenth-century villas, and luxury hotels in southeastern Luxembourg, where he would be the commandant of a secret interrogation center for newly captured Nazi officials. The facility, previously the Palace Hotel, was now code-named Ashcan, and it was temporarily housing some of the most important Nazis who were still alive. In the twenty-seven years since Fort Oglethorpe, Andrus had not had a single assignment dealing with a prison or prisoners. His orders to Mondorf were as surprising to him as those that took him to the Georgia stockade in the previous world war. When Andrus arrived at Ashcan three days later, the Palace was being transformed into a prison fortress. “To get in here,” one guard told a reporter, “you have to have a pass from God and someone has to verify the signature.”

Between May and August 1945, the Allies brought fifty-two captured Nazis to Mondorf. The town was strategically chosen for its unique positioning. Ten miles south of the city of Luxembourg, Mondorf sat on a bluff near the borders of both France and Germany. The Mosel River protected the town on one side, and observers had a clear view from nearly any vantage point high in the town.

The Palace had a veranda where the Nazis not on suicide watch could walk back and forth and take in the view over the twenty-foot-high, double-stockade coils of barbed wire. Over the fence, they could see a few square yards of green grass and a dried-out fountain that also was enclosed with barbed wire. Green slopes on three sides of the Palace's gray stucco façade meant guards could easily watch the goings-on in and around the hotel.

The war may have been over, but Andrus feared residual forces might try to free the Nazi leaders from Allied control, and he wasn't satisfied with Ashcan's defenses when he arrived. He requested floodlights, an airstrip, an electric alarm system for the outer fence, camouflaged netting to protect Ashcan from the air, more machine guns, and more guards, doctors, clerks, and typewriters. GIs carried out fine carpets and elegant furniture, replacing them with folding camp-beds and straw mattresses. Others removed chandeliers and replaced sixteen hundred of the hotel's glass windowpanes with Plexiglas and iron bars.

“I was concerned about guards being bribed, snipers shooting at prisoners or gaining information, and suicide attempts,” Andrus later wrote. “I even feared murder within the enclosure; for deadly enemies were already, in some cases, being confined together. Mondorf, no one had to tell me, was a powder-keg.”

Andrus wrote to a friend, “I hate these Krauts and they know it and respect me for it. I guess that's why I got this job. It's too bad we could not have exterminated them and given that beautiful country to someone who was worthy.”

In April, before he was assigned to Mondorf, Andrus wrote to his wife and included some stationery lifted from an abandoned Nazi headquarters. “Here is some paper we captured in one of the places we used as a Hq. after the Natzi [
sic
] Hq. left,” Andrus wrote. “More & more they rush out without having a chance to move or destroy everything. The more one sees of them the more one comes to detest them—they're terrible people, civillians [
sic
] and all.”

As Andrus tried to put together a secure enclosure in Mondorf, the Nazi leaders kept arriving under the cover of darkness. Ashcan's prisoners would be the central characters in whatever production of justice the Allies decided to stage, and the prisoners knew it. Many of the Nazis were despondent that their captors were not treating them as traditional victorious warrior-gentlemen would.

Wilhelm Keitel demanded a pencil and paper to write a letter of complaint to General Eisenhower. “I am treated here in Mondorf Camp as if I were in a camp for ordinary criminals, in a jail without windows,” he wrote. “In addition, it is made clear to me in every respect that I am to be expressly denied the treatment generally accorded an officer POW. . . . Recently the most extreme measures have been applied. Clothing was taken away, except for a certain limited amount, and almost all toilet articles were withdrawn. Not even military decorations of this war and the past one were left in my possession. Even spectacles were taken away.”

The Germans realized, as they took in the conditions of their imprisonment at Ashcan, that the days were gone when generals on both sides came together over cognac and cigars to discuss the winning and losing strategies of particular battles after the fighting was over. The last, awful months of war—as bad as they were—may have been preferable to what lay ahead.

The Nazis were depressed and ragged. Most still wore the clothes they'd been captured in. The generals had had their ribbons torn from their chests (mostly by a giddy Andrus). The politicians wore grubby suits without ties, which had been taken away to prevent suicides, as had their belts and suspenders, so that their pants drooped. They could not shave themselves, and the staffing at Mondorf was low, so they didn't receive a shave often. The four dozen men looked more like the tenants of a bowery house than the recent leaders of a mighty nation.

One American second lieutenant, after observing the men in the Palace, said, “Who'd have thought we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?”

In the middle of the summer, Andrus gathered all his prisoners and dimmed the lights. “You are about to see a certain motion picture showing specific instances of maltreatment of prisoners by the Germans,” Andrus told them. “You know about these things, and I have no doubt many of you participated actively in them. We are showing them to you, not to inform you of what you already know, but to impress on you the fact that we know of it, too. Be informed that the considerate treatment you receive here is not because you merit it, but because anything less would be unbecoming to us.”

As the prisoners watched the film taken by American GIs who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, they reacted in a variety of ways. The scene would be repeated in dramatic fashion months later in the Nuremberg courtroom during the trials. Hans Frank, Hitler's lawyer and the former governor general of Poland, “held a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged on it for fifteen minutes,” Andrus wrote. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, walked out. Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic
Der Stürmer,
rocked back and forth in his chair, clasping and unclasping his hands. Hermann Goering ignored the film altogether. Karl Doenitz grumbled, “If this is American justice, why don't they just shoot me now?”

Ashcan was partially about collecting Nazi leaders, but it also was critical for interrogating Nazis in preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trial. Soon Andrus and his superiors began to worry that prisoners were comparing notes on their interrogations late in the summer in order to give up less information. Andrus decided to use the Nazis' own deception and mistrust of their American captors against them. If they were comparing notes, he figured, why not eavesdrop on those conversations in order to obtain valuable evidence against them?

Andrus informed some of the prisoners that they were leaving Mondorf and being handed off to the British. He then secured a house, with a high wall around it, in Dalheim, three miles north of Ashcan. British intelligence officers helped add a room to the house that could only be accessed from the outside, and a signals and electronics expert wired the house with small microphones and a recording device. The team filled the house with German furniture and staffed the house with “courteous” British guards. Andrus worked out a circuitous, fifty-mile route around the Luxembourg countryside that would give the Nazis in the back of a windowless army ambulance the feeling that they were driving into northern Germany. Finally, he “leaked” a rumor that a small group would be moved to Germany first, followed by others.

The driver on the two-hour trip took wide left turns to avoid detection and made sharp rights to give the feeling of a southeastern trip. The rough roads Andrus chose enhanced the effect of moving through a scarred German landscape. When they arrived in Dalheim, Goering yelled, “We are at a house I know!” That night, the four Nazis slept on real mattresses and were allowed pillows for the first time all summer. The next day, the prisoners were suspicious of bugs inside the house and moved outside under a willow to talk. But the electronics expert had anticipated that move and had bugged the willow, too.

The next day, a storm kept the Nazis inside the house and quiet—a disappointment for the team. Worse yet, Andrus got word from London that Ashcan had outlived its suitability as a prison facility. Word had leaked to the press that former Nazi leaders were being collected in Mondorf. The Nuremberg prison was far from ready, but Allied officials believed it more secure than the Palace Hotel. They ordered Andrus to move his charges there within twenty-four hours. The entire Dalheim enterprise had been a bust.

The timing of the order “shocked and annoyed” Andrus. He thought he was just about to get valuable information from Goering when they pulled the plug. He told the four Nazis at the house to pack and drove them back to Ashcan in ten minutes.

The next morning, August 12, Andrus and fifteen of the Nazis boarded two GI ambulances and drove quietly through Mondorf without motorcycle escorts and without sirens. The group boarded two dull gray C-47s whose crews had been told nothing about their cargo. Goering got out of the ambulance, carrying a red hat box in one hand and holding up his pants by his belt loop with the other. The rest of the Nazis followed him on board the two planes.