Mission at Nuremberg (12 page)

Andrus informed the lieutenant in charge about his cargo. “It is realized by everyone that these men are considered terrible people,” Andrus said. “But it is not our job to judge them or to take justice into our own hands.”

The lieutenant grinned at Andrus. “You mean, no leaving the plane without a ‘chute,' sir?”

At the Nuremberg prison, Andrus had first recruited two other chaplains—Father Sixtus O'Connor, a Catholic priest from New York, and a twenty-eight-year-old Lutheran chaplain named Carl Eggers. The two men ministered to the Nazis for several weeks, but the senior Nazis were mostly middle-aged men, and they refused to be counseled by a junior officer of Eggers's age. Andrus had to replace Eggers, and Gerecke's experience working in St. Louis's jail system was a plus. “I absolutely needed his services,” Andrus wrote later. “I knew of no one else qualified for [the situation].”

But Sullivan was loyal to Gerecke, and he resisted Andrus's request for the chaplain. So before trying to go up the chain of command to protect him, Sullivan had given Gerecke the option of taking the assignment. He had laid out the alternatives: minister to Hitler's henchmen, or go home to his wife.

Gerecke was badly shaken and asked Sullivan if he could think it over. He was terrified by the prospect of being close to the men who had tried to take over the world. Would he have to shake their hands? He imagined that simply feeling their breath on his face would be sickening. How could he comfort these Nazis who had caused the world so much heartache? How could he minister to the leaders of a movement that had taken millions of lives? How could he form a spiritual bond with these men without getting in the way of whatever God had planned for them already? He had conducted hundreds of prison services, but there were obvious differences between burglars in St. Louis and the mass murderers in Nuremberg.

Gerecke had recently traveled to Paris on leave to meet Hank, who was also on a leave, to spend a week as happy tourists in the city of light. They visited the Louvre and walked the banks of the Seine. Hank was twenty-four, and after they ate dinner together each night, he would go out on the town while his father turned in. One morning, after a particularly hard night of partying, Gerecke led Hank on a grueling schedule of sightseeing. “He was torturing me,” Hank said later.

Now Gerecke found himself calling Hank for advice. Hank assured his father that he would make the right decision, and that the family would support him and love him no matter what he did. Gerecke walked outside the hospital grounds, found a bench to sit on, and prayed harder than he ever had in his life.

He thought, as any pastor might, of Jesus. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was not alone when he was crucified at Golgotha. On either side of him, the Romans also had crucified two criminals, or “malefactors.”

One of the criminals taunted Christ. “Aren't you the Messiah?” he asked. “Save yourself and us.”

The second criminal admonished the first. “We've been punished justly for the crimes we committed,” he said. “But this man has done nothing to deserve the same fate as ours.” The second criminal turned to Jesus and said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

“Today shall you be with me in paradise,” Jesus told the criminal. For Christians, Jesus's forgiveness of the criminal before his death is crucial because it represents the sacrificial moment when Christians' sins were forgiven. It also represents an atonement—the reunification of God with his creation.

Christ's forgiveness loomed large in Gerecke's thoughts as he prayed for direction on the park bench. He realized that God wanted something incredible from him. The author of the Gospel of Luke writes that after Christ told the second criminal that they'd be together in Paradise, “darkness came over the whole land . . . while the sun's light failed” in the last moments of Christ's life. Gerecke was staring into that darkness, desperately searching for light. If, as never before, he could hate the sin but the love the sinner, he thought, now was the time.

He walked back into Sullivan's office. “I'll go,” he said.

 

TWO DECADES BEFORE GERECKE
arrived, Nuremberg was an ideal place for the young Nazi movement to ground its ideology. For one, the city was the headquarters of
Der Stürmer,
Julius Streicher's newspaper that recycled medieval myths about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children. The newspaper's motto was “The Jews are our misfortune.”

Hitler's vision of a Third Reich, or Third Empire, hinged on a version of the medieval idea of
translatio imperii,
or translation of empire. Under this theory, there were three Reichs. The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from the crowning of the first emperor, Charlemagne, by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in AD 800 until Emperor Francis II abdicated the throne a thousand years later.

The Second Reich took place during the much shorter period after German unification in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm I and lasted until the end of the First World War.

Translatio imperii
came from the second chapter of the Old Testament book of Daniel, in which Daniel interprets the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar. The king had dreamed of a great statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron and clay. In his dream he watched the statue's feet break apart. The rest of its body soon crumbled “and became like the chaff of the summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found.”

Daniel explains to Nebuchadnezzar that he and his kingdom are represented in the dream by the head of gold. The silver had represented another “inferior” kingdom, while the bronze was a kingdom that would “rule over the whole earth,” and the iron was a kingdom that would crush and smash everything, including all the other kingdoms. In the end, Daniel says to Nebuchadnezzar, “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed. . . . It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever.”

Biblical scholars mostly have agreed through the centuries that the head of gold represented Nebuchadnezzar's own Babylonian empire (605–539 BC), the silver represented the Persian Empire (539–331 BC), the bronze represented the Greek-Macedonian Empire (331–146 BC), and the iron represented the Roman Empire (146 BC–AD 476). Since Daniel's prediction failed and the apocalypse didn't arrive as the Roman Empire fell—ushering in, for Christians, Jesus's second coming—medieval scholars employed the idea of
translatio imperii
to extend the fourth and final iron kingdom into their own times. They adopted the Holy Roman Empire name to ensure that it would be their own era that would precede the glory of Christ's return.

The city that Hitler would come to see as a perfect place to institute his own version of
translatio imperii
has its origins—at least in legend—in the eighth century when the parents of a Danish prince named Sebald planned their son's succession to the throne. The prince, chosen by his parents for his intellect and virtue, longed to serve God instead of country, so when he reached adulthood, he fled Denmark.

He joined the three children of Britanny's King Richard—Willibald, Wunibald, and Walpurgis—who had similar yearnings for a life of Christian service. Rather than enter a monastery, the four became
peregrinatia pro Christo
—wanderers for Christ, who undertook dangerous journeys and put themselves in harm's way for the sake of Jesus. The four men moved piously across Europe on a pilgrimage that eventually brought them to Rome and then to Germany, where Wunibald established a monastery.

But Sebald set off on his own, preferring the life of a hermit. In the depths of Germany's forest, Sebald prayed, fasted, held vigils for local peasants, and—as tradition has it—performed miracles. Accounts held that he restored the vision of a blind man, fixed broken glass with prayer, and turned water into wine and icicles into firewood. He served as the peasants' teacher and Christian model.

Sebald's harsh environment and fasting eventually caught up with him, and when a group of his beloved peasants found his body one day lying in the forest, they yoked it to two oxen and followed it in a funeral procession. The procession led out of the woods, and eventually the oxen stopped at the site of a deserted former Roman encampment. The peasants buried Sebald in that spot, which is now the center of Nuremberg.

Eventually, as more Christians made pilgrimages to Sebald's grave, a chapel was built next to it. Sebald was not officially canonized by Rome until 1425, but he was venerated by the town's citizens for three centuries before that as the patron saint of Nuremberg.

In the early thirteenth century, construction began on a more ambitious building atop Sebald's grave, and nearly three centuries later, a huge Romanesque and Gothic parish church with twin towers climbing toward the sky dominated the center of a thriving medieval metropolis. The church was known as St. Sebald's. In 1508, church officials commissioned a grand, fifteen-foot-high brass tomb for Sebald's bones. The artist, Peter Fischer, built the tomb, placing Christ—“the Lord of the Worlds”—at the top.

Outside St. Sebald's, on the wall of the east choir, is a small sculpture typical of some medieval churches. It depicts a number of Jews suckling from the teats of a pig, a creature described in the Hebrew Bible as unclean. The
Judensau,
as the sculpture was called, once pointed in the direction of the city's Jewish quarter, just a few yards to the south. And it is symbolic of Nuremberg's troubled anti-Jewish history.

Nuremberg was built on sandy soil. Not much has ever grown there, and its economic status and critical position in Germany's history were drawn from business and politics, rather than agriculture and trade. The word
Norenberc
appears for the first time in a document from AD 1050 as a reference to a fortress that Emperor Henry II built on the rocks above today's city. The fortress on Norenberc hill became a central, and favorite, stop for emperors and their courts as they traveled from outpost to outpost within the empire. A settlement developed around the castle and the Pegnitz River, and by 1400, a three-mile stone wall, with four circular guard towers at the corners, had been built around the city—a fortress around the fortress. A hundred years later, between forty thousand and fifty thousand people lived within Nuremberg's walls.

Nuremberg developed a powerful city council that made decisions of state and justice, symbolized by a sculpture above the entrance to city hall. Visitors can still see two reclining figures, Justice and Prudence, bookending a pelican piercing her own breast to feed her chicks with her blood—an allusion to the sacrifice of Christ for man.

The city housed all kinds of tradesmen, but it was known for its metalwork in knives, candleholders, and bowls. Platers made suits of armor, bladesmiths made swords, bowyers made crossbows. It was also known for the masterworks of its medieval and early Renaissance artists who specialized in painting, engraving, woodcuts, portraiture, printmaking, and glass decoration. One artist in particular, Albrecht Dürer, was considered a great master of northern Renaissance art and created religious depictions in the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Modern historians have shown that German cities with a history of Jewish massacres in the Middle Ages had much higher proportions of anti-Semitic sentiment during the Nazi era.

At the end of the thirteenth century, Nuremberg's Jews built their section of the town on undeveloped swampy land near the Pegnitz River, which divides the city's northern and southern districts. A century later, church officials in the town of Röttingen, sixty miles west of Nuremberg, accused the Jews there of defiling Holy Communion wafers with blood. It was part of a pattern of charges leveled by Christians against the Jews during the Middle Ages that included stories of Jews stealing Communion hosts, piercing them, and draining them of Christ's blood, and Jews kidnapping Christian children, murdering them, and using their blood for Jewish rituals.

In his 1543 tract, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” Martin Luther—who called Nuremberg “the eyes and ears of Germany”—wrote that if he had “power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have,” he “would deal severely with their lying mouths.” Luther hated Jews for both theological and social reasons. Like many medieval German Christians, his belief that Jews had killed Christ found a modern-day outlet in usury.

“We are at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then,” Luther wrote. “We are at fault in not slaying them.”

Long before Luther cursed the Jews and advocated for their deaths, pogroms had been spreading across Europe. Dozens of Jews were killed in Röttingen in 1298 in what became known as the Rintfleisch pogroms, named after a butcher who led the months-long rampage. Over the summer that year, violence spread to more than 140 surrounding communities where roving bands of Christians killed 3,500 Jews. When the gangs arrived in Nuremberg, the city's Jews sought shelter in its fortress, but they weren't allowed in and 600 were killed by the mob.

In 1348, the Black Death began sweeping through Europe. After several Jews “confessed” under torture to starting the plague by poisoning wells and food, rumors spread from town to town in Germany and soon the Germans began burning Jews. In the German towns with Jewish populations, nearly 75 percent witnessed the massacre of their Jewish populations between 1348 and 1350.

On December 5, 1348, the townspeople of Nuremberg targeted the city's Jewish population under the consent of the Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV. The emperor had signed a document allowing for the destruction of the city's Jewish quarter to build a fruit market and a church dedicated to Mary. The result was the annihilation of six hundred people—more than a third of Nuremberg's surviving Jewish population. Not only had the emperor's signature cleared space in Nuremberg, it also solved a problem for many citizens and businesses that had owed large sums of money to Jewish bankers. Much of the borrowing had occurred a year earlier as a result of a government transition that had brought in both Karl IV and a change of control in the Nuremberg City Council.