Mission at Nuremberg (13 page)

During the destruction, Nuremberg's residents burned Jewish homes and shops to the ground. They then constructed a large square—the Hauptmarkt—currently the site of Germany's oldest and most famous Christmas market. It is also the site of the Frauenkirche—the Church of Our Lady—which went up between 1350 and 1358 right where Nuremberg's synagogue had once stood. The emperor dedicated the church with the words: “For the glory of the empire, the honor of the Mother of God and salvation of the dead.”

The scapegoating of the Jews didn't end in the medieval ages, however. In the wake of the First World War, some Germans blamed the Jewish population for the nation's defeat. In 1922, Nuremberg's Jewish population of nearly ten thousand was the second largest in Bavaria.

When Hitler walked for the first time into the hall in Frankfurt's government center where the coronation banquets were held for the Holy Roman emperors, he saw the paintings of the emperors hanging on the walls. The three Reichs, wrote Nazi historian Otto Westphal, “appeared to [Hitler's] eye as one grand, sacred, necessary connection.” And just as the popes and kings of the Holy Roman Empire saw themselves as the direct descendants of the Caesars of Rome, Hitler saw himself as the historical successor to Charlemagne.

Hitler was unconcerned with the Old Testament's religious symbolism that connected the Third Reich with the Babylonians. Instead, he was interested in his nation's exalted history when the Holy Roman Empire ruled much of Europe absolutely. And he was interested in Nuremberg for its own history as one of the most important cities in the empire.

Hitler believed Nuremberg was Germany's connection to its grand past as well as to the Nazi Party's anti-Semitic rhetoric. In 1927, the year of the Nazis' first Nuremberg Rally, the ministers of St. Lawrence Church on the south bank of the Pegnitz held a ceremony blessing the Nazi swastika. The following year, the Franconia region of Germany, which includes Nuremberg, sent four times more Nazi Party members to the Reichstag than the average from other regions of the country. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power as Germany's chancellor, Nazi paramilitary brownshirts stormed hundreds of Jewish homes, confiscating cash and beating up the homeowners.

In 1933, Willy Liebel, Nuremberg's mayor, presented Hitler with
Knight, Death and the Devil,
one of Dürer's most important engravings, which portrayed a knight riding through a dark Nordic gorge, pursued by a swine-snouted devil. In the drawing, the knight ignores both the devil and death and serves as an embodiment of pious integrity, guided by Christ. The present was a gift from the city's residents, a reminder of Nuremberg's importance to the Third Reich.

The following year, Leni Riefenstahl filmed the sixth Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. The rallies themselves were massive propaganda events—in 1934, more than half a million German citizens and soldiers descended on the city.

Riefenstahl's film,
Triumph of the Will,
released in 1935, was propaganda about propaganda. The film begins with words against a black background: “Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers.” Riefenstahl carefully orchestrated her presentation of Hitler as a god. The first shot is of puffy white clouds, shot from inside an airplane. With Wagner's
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
playing in the background, Hitler glides above the city, past the soaring, swastika-bannered spires of St. Sebald and St. Lawrence, before descending down to the adoring German citizens below.

The Nazis had worked hard to crush the Christian churches but found it too difficult, so Hitler attempted instead to co-opt its power through the use of architecture, liturgy, and propaganda. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazis built more than three hundred churches in Bavaria. A popular Nazi poster featured Hitler marching with a Nazi flag and a dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovering above his head, as rays of light from heaven stream down.

In 1935, Hitler decided Nuremberg was the right stage to announce a new law that would make official the state's anti-Semitic policies. The Nuremberg Laws, as they were known, denied German citizenship for German Jews and prohibited them from marrying or having sex with anyone “of German or related blood.” Historians have called the Nuremberg Laws “the worst in the history of human beings.”

Hitler had a place for the Jews in his grand vision of a new German empire. And as he stood before the Frauenkirche in the 1930s, on the other side of the Hauptmarkt, reviewing his SA stormtroopers as they marched past him during the Nazi Party rallies, he must have been awed at how well his vision was coming together.

 

AFTER THE MEN AND
women of the Ninety-Eighth threw a farewell party for their chaplain and said their good-byes, Gerecke asked his assistant, Tommy Geist, to come to Nuremberg with him, to be his partner in the most frightening experience of his life. But Geist had learned that he, like Gerecke, was eligible to go home to his wife, and Gerecke didn't press the issue. Geist, however, did want a final road trip with his boss, so on November 11, 1945, they packed Gerecke's gear into a jeep for the hundred-mile trip north.

What Gerecke and Geist found when they arrived in Germany's medieval crown jewel was a city-sized debris field. According to a report by the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS)—the U.S. military's occupation authority in Germany—the city had become “among the dead cities of the European continent,” and it had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombers until it was “beyond description.”

On the night of January 2, 1945, under a full moon, the British had sent more than five hundred Lancaster heavy bombers over Nuremberg. Within an hour eighteen hundred people were killed and 90 percent of the city was destroyed. The castle, the walls, the churches, the city hall, thousands of medieval houses—almost all of it was gone. Another four thousand were killed in subsequent Allied air raids in the following weeks. By the spring of 1945, nothing remained of Nuremberg's one thousand years but rubble and the stench of death.

Yet by November, six months after the Third and Forty-Fifth Infantry Divisions of the U.S. Army had taken the city on Hitler's birthday—April 20, 1945—its population had increased 60 percent. There were now 280,000 people in Nuremberg. Thousands of German soldiers were working in Russian labor camps, and so the majority of the city's residents were women and children.

Nuremberg's remaining citizens peeked out from the lean-tos they'd built from salvaged lumber and bits of sheet metal. Some huddled in air-raid shelters, or house cellars, which were now just holes dug into the earth. Bathtubs hung halfway out from the upper floors of buildings whose front walls had been shorn completely away. Candles flickered from the darkness under the piles where people slept. The sound of the old city was the quiet of a graveyard.

Single rooms, left somehow untouched when the rest of the building had been destroyed, seemed to hover in midair. At night families cooked potatoes or cabbage, foraged from nearby farms, over open fires in the streets. Protein was hard to come by, and Allied rations consisted mostly of bread and potatoes. Some younger mothers resorted to prostitution to feed their children. The journalist Rebecca West wrote, “there was no money” in Nuremberg. “There was only cigarettes.” And it was with cigarettes—or soap, or nylons—that American GIs paid the young women, and the women in turn used these to barter for food.

Outside the remains of the Museum of Gothic Art a huge stone head from a statue of God lay on the pavement. “Instead of scrutinizing the faces of men,” West wrote, “He stared up at the clouds, as if to ask what He himself could be about.” A British fighter plane, lodged in the broken roof of a church, was too high for anyone to remove it, or the body of its pilot. The rubble of Nuremberg, West wrote, “exhaled the stench of disinfectant and that which was irredeemably infected, for it concealed thirty thousand dead.” When it rained, death flowed from the wreckage and into the city's drains.

While more than 90 percent of the city was flattened, a few structures—fountains, bridges, parts of the old castle—were miraculously untouched. The Allies chose Nuremberg over Berlin as a trial site because its courthouse—the Palace of Justice—and prison were left intact after the bombing and were connected to each other. However symbolically appropriate it was that the surviving high Nazi criminals would be put on trial in the city that represented so much to Hitler, the choice of Nuremberg was purely pragmatic.

And pragmatism prevailed in the months leading up to the trial. Resurrecting a city that had been declared dead “seemed hopeless,” according to OMGUS officials. For one, Nuremberg's police force had been decimated and crime was rampant. Bandit gangs uncovered caches of machine guns and small arms across the region, and over the summer attacked farmhouses outside town, raping women and stealing whatever they could find.

To get the city running again, OMGUS first began de-Nazifying it by firing twenty-two hundred city employees. The agency then installed city government managers at the end of July 1945 and hired one thousand new workers. By November, five hundred police considered “politically clear” had been trained and were walking the beat. Prison buildings were cleaned and repaired, and OMGUS devoted one wing of a prison to housing war criminals and trial witnesses.

OMGUS officials reconstituted local courts and used thirty-four bags and two chests of gold from the Reichsbank vaults to reopen Nuremberg's banks. They turned over control of the trains to a new transport agency and allowed thirty-eight insurance companies to resume business. Scores of horses that had belonged to the German military were handed over to local farmers. Soon enough, four political parties organized, the presses of a German-edited and published newspaper began running, and a tax agency opened its doors to begin collecting public revenues.

Seventy-five percent of Nuremberg's school buildings had been destroyed. Most teachers had been Nazi Party members, and so new teachers were trained, which helped the city bring back twenty-five thousand children to class by November 1945. Because of the “acute housing problem,” OMGUS officials attempted to put a roof over everyone in Nuremberg. But the scarcity of materials and labor presented a major hurdle. OMGUS considered gas, wood, coal, and food “critical items” to provide to Nuremberg's residents.

Six months after its capture, the city began to hum again, and most of Nuremberg had electricity, a water supply, and a partial sewage system. Streets and tracks had generally been cleared of rubble, and three hundred streetcars carried a million passengers across the city each week. In addition to military phone lines, OMGUS installed about a thousand civilian phone lines by November. Post office and parcel post service had resumed. Hospitals were repaired and reopened and individual health clinics established. By November, an immunization program was up and running for city residents, and Nuremberg had more hospital beds available than it had since 1939. Two cinemas started showing films again, and two more would open by the end of the year. Theatrical performances were staged for German civilians in nearby Furth and Erlangen.

The one major gripe for Nurembergers was about food and drink—beer in particular. Food had been rationed at 1,365 calories a day per person in the summer. Officials set a goal of 2,000 for the winter. The city lacked meat, partly due to a daily export of meat to Berlin, but worse was the ban on beer drinking. “The prohibition of beer for civilians deprives the population of a daily beverage to which they have become accustomed over many years and will undoubtedly be difficult to enforce,” an OMGUS report stated.

“It is true that there is a long way to go and much to be accomplished,” OMGUS officials wrote in their November report. “But for a city termed ‘91% dead' it is felt that definite progress has been made and that Military Government has done a significant job in showing the German people the way.”

 

GERECKE WAS NERVOUS WHEN
he arrived at Andrus's office at the Palace of Justice. He'd only had one commanding officer since his time in the army began, and Gerecke could hear the colonel chewing out one of his underlings from outside the door. A corporal walked out, head hung low. “It's about time you got here,” Andrus said to Gerecke. “I sure need a chaplain.”

You sure do,
Gerecke thought.

Andrus waved everyone else out of his office and waved Gerecke in, pointing to a chair. He told Gerecke he'd been born on an army post and raised as an army brat. Andrus may not have served in combat during the First World War, but he liked to say that he'd experienced hostile fire at age two months, when his own West Point–trained father was serving in the American west, battling Indians.

The commandant told Gerecke that a Sunday school teacher had once used ice cream to entice him to attend class. “But I've never forgotten the story she [told].” It was, he said, “the story of a lost sheep, and how the master went out looking for it and brought it back rejoicing. Chaplain, you're going to find lost sheep in our prison and if God is gracious to you, you might bring back a few of them.”

Andrus asked Gerecke if he planned to hold services outside the prison, and they discussed an ancient, and badly damaged, church in nearby Mögeldorf that Gerecke could take over. “I'll be out there sometime to surprise you,” Andrus said.

But then he issued a warning of sorts: “Chaplain, just remember, you are here to fulfill the requirements of the Geneva Convention.”

CHAPTER 6

Judas Window

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God.

—ROMANS 12:19

T
HE NAZIS BARELY RECOGNIZED
Nuremberg when they arrived. Albert Speer, an architect who had designed many of Nuremberg's Nazi edifices, could only guess at where the streets had been. “As we moved farther into the center of the city, I grew increasingly confused, for I could no longer get my bearings in this gigantic rubble heap,” Speer wrote later. “There, in the midst of all this destruction, as though spared by a miracle, stood the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. How often I had driven past it in Hitler's car. Trite though the idea may be, I cannot help thinking there was a deeper meaning to the fact that this building remained undamaged.”

When Andrus arrived, he had his hands full just trying to make sure the new prison was safe and manned with competent staff. The prison was in bad shape from Allied bombing, and German POWs were at work making hasty repairs. The work was being done under the watchful eyes of American GIs, but there weren't enough of them. A trickle of occupation forces were making their way to Nuremberg, but not fast enough for Andrus, who was furious that the army had allotted only one guard for every fifty German POWs working on the repairs. At one point, Andrus's force had gone from about three hundred men to fifty, and he wasn't happy with the quality of soldier the army was providing him.

There was, at least, a show of force outside the Palace of Justice, with five M24 tanks armed with 75 mm guns surrounding the courthouse. Anyone coming into the court required documentation, and even the tribunal's judges often needed to flash their papers multiple times as they moved around the grounds. Andrus was the only person in the building allowed to carry a weapon. His guards were allowed only billy clubs, which they made from mop handles and painted white.

The Palace of Justice contained 530 offices and 80 courtrooms, all mostly spared by the bombing. The U.S. Army spent $6 million—about $75 million today—renovating Courtroom 600, where the major Nazi defendants would be tried, in a building set back several hundred yards from Fürtherstrasse, the main street Speer and Hitler had once driven down.

Before the trial, GIs removed courtroom walls, creating an additional visitors' gallery, as well as room for the world's press. To accommodate filming, they removed chandeliers and substituted floodlights, blacked out windows, and cut holes in the wooden walls to get the best camera angles.

The prison that adjoined the courthouse was designed in a four-spoked, half-wagon-wheel structure. The army built a long, wooden covered walkway that led to an elevator that deposited the prisoners directly into the defendants' dock in Courtroom 600.

The prison's four wings were divided into three tiers that each held ninety-nine cells. The wings radiated out from a central rotunda where a guard, sitting in a wooden central protective nest high above the main floor of the prison, could control entry and exit in each wing. Two of the prison's wings held civilian prisoners. The other two held Andrus's charges—the defendants and the witnesses called to testify in the trial. Altogether, Andrus oversaw about 250 people housed in the prison cells at any one time, with a total of about 450 moving through during the year of the trial. The major Nazi defendants were held on the ground floor of Wing Four, the spoke closest to Courtroom 600.

When the prison opened in 1868, it was the most modern in Europe; it represented a new concept in resocialization that gave each prisoner his own cell, rather than placing prisoners together in community cells. The prison could be run by five guards, one in each of the four wings and one in the central hub. Its structure mimicked Philadelphia's Cherry Hill Prison (now known as Eastern State Penitentiary), which was based on a correctional theory known as the Pennsylvania system. The theory held that criminals were products of their environments, and that solitude would make a prisoner regretful and penitent.

Each cell measured thirteen feet by six and a half feet. Opposite the wooden door, a window of unbreakable opaque glass opened only halfway to the outside world. The ceiling was slightly concave, giving it a vaulted look, and the floor was made of flagstone. The only thing in the cell not visible from the thick wooden door's one-foot-square peephole—which Gerecke called a “Judas window”—was a seatless toilet and tin washbasin.

Opposite the guard's large peephole in the cell door was a steel cot, fastened to the wall, with a thin straw mattress and two gray army blankets, as well as a table, and a chair. The chair was removed at night and the table was ordered specifically by Andrus to be so rickety that it would collapse under any strain. The commandant didn't want any Nazi suicides under his watch. For the same reason, Andrus ordered ties, shoelaces, belts, and nail files to be taken away from the prisoners.

Yet despite Andrus's careful efforts, two men managed to commit suicide before the trials even began. Leonardo Conti, Hitler's health minister, who took part in the Nazis' eugenics euthanasia program called Aktion T4, hanged himself with a towel fastened to the bars on his cell window on October 6, 1945. Three weeks later, Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, hid from his cell's guard by sitting on the toilet. He then looped his jacket zipper to the water-tank lever and created a noose with his towel. With a pair of underwear stuffed into his own mouth to quiet the death rattle, Ley leaned forward until he strangled to death. In one of the notes he left, Ley wrote, “We have forsaken God and therefore we were forsaken by God.”

Until the suicides, there had been one guard for every four cells, which meant a check on each cell every thirty seconds. After Ley's death, Andrus required a guard for every prisoner, meaning constant observation for each prisoner for the rest of their time at Nuremberg.

The flagstone corridor outside the Nazis' cells stretched about 25 feet between the two walls of cells. Chicken wire, strung between the two iron catwalks on the second tier, was installed to prevent a prisoner from jumping to his death. At each end of the 175-foot-long corridor, an iron spiral staircase—also laced with chicken wire—led to the upper tiers.

The inmates on these upper tiers had more freedom and less supervision. Some were German POWs who also worked in the prison, preparing meals or doing laundry. Their cells, with larger bunks and thicker mattresses, were a major contrast to the barren cells of the major Nazi inmates' downstairs. The second tier featured a dental clinic, a physiotherapy room, and a chapel with pews for seating fifty men.

But that chapel was off-limits for the twenty-one men on trial for war crimes. Hitler's top lieutenants on the ground floor would have to make do with a smaller chapel, created by knocking down a wall in between two cells. Two candlesticks and some hymnbooks rested on an improvised altar covered by a white cloth. Above the altar, a small crucifix hung on the wall. A couple of wooden benches served as pews, and a U.S. Army chaplain's kit organ sat in the corner. The little chapel was, Andrus wrote, “a sanctified place where, we are told, at least some of these men, accused of such enormous crimes against humanity, are asking forgiveness.”

Outside each cell door on the ground floor, Andrus had installed a flood lamp that the cell's guard could shine in on the prisoner at any time. At night, each guard was instructed to point the bright light at his prisoner through the door's peephole. A sympathetic guard might point it at the prisoner's body. A less sympathetic guard trained it on the prisoner's face throughout his watch.

The defendants were not allowed to turn and face the cell wall when they slept. Guards were ordered to yell at any prisoner who turned in his sleep, and even used long poles, stuck through the square hole, to prod the sleeping Nazis awake.

Andrus housed the major defendants in the middle cells along the corridor, leaving the empty cells on each side for storage. One held the defendants' own property. Another was stacked with freshly laundered underwear.

Guards woke up the prisoners shortly before breakfast each day as they changed shifts outside the cells. Twice a week the prisoners could take a hot shower or bath. Otherwise, each man was brought fresh water to wash with at 7:00
A.M.
Then, a German POW would hand the prisoner a spoon and breakfast in a U.S. Army “meat can” through the square portal in the cell door. Breakfast usually consisted of “sweet soup,” “biscuit soup,” or “oats soup”—sometimes with noodles. Occasionally, the prisoners would get bread and sausage, oatmeal, bread with jam, or cereal. Coffee came in a standard army-issue canteen cup without a handle.

Each prisoner was responsible for keeping his own cell clean, and after breakfast, he was handed a broom to tidy up. The prisoners then received cold water to drink, or—in the winter—another cup of coffee. A POW barber, accompanied by an American guard, then visited the cells to shave each prisoner. No conversation was allowed during this process, and the barber was responsible for ensuring that every piece of equipment he brought into each cell also came out with him.

Andrus used a German POW doctor and an American doctor to check the prisoners' health in the midmorning or in the afternoon each day. The prisoners also had frequent visits by the U.S. Army psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley (and later Dr. Leon Goldensohn) or the U.S. Army psychologist, Gerecke's roommate, Dr. Gustave Gilbert. After a shave, the prisoners were allowed their twenty-minute walks in a small 140-by-100-foot exercise yard, where they were supposed to remain in a single file, but usually fell into groups to talk. A guard wielding a billy club followed eight paces behind while others with machine guns stood sentinel on the walls and in the towers.

Much of the prisoners' time early on was taken up by U.S. Army interrogations, visits with their attorneys in room 57, where they prepared legal defenses, or in discussions with the chaplains. A typical dinner might have featured a simple soup followed by hash, bread or noodles, then scrambled eggs, fish, or sausage, with a dessert of chocolate or cheese and tea. Lights went out at 9:30, and the flood lamps came on.

 

TRYING INDIVIDUAL GERMAN LEADERS
in an international court for their crimes during the war was not an obvious enterprise. In fact, the process of figuring out who to prosecute, and over what events, was arduous and took the Allies years. The creation of the Nuremberg Laws and the destruction of Jewish property and synagogues during Kristallnacht in 1938 were early examples of Germany's wrongdoing. Then, Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 had violated provisions of the 1929 Hague and Geneva conventions.

Beyond that, there was the persecution, including mass killings, of Jews and others. Roosevelt and Churchill both publicly condemned the reports of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps, promising “retribution,” but saying nothing about how justice would be administered. In 1942, soon after their pronouncement, representatives from nine governments-in-exile—Poland, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece—met in London. This body of representatives, known as the Inter-Allied Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes, rejected the idea of vengeance. Instead, they wrote the Declaration of St. James, which stated that “the sense of justice in the civilized world” required them to “place among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or participated in them.”

By the end of the year, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Australia, and India had joined the nine governments-in-exile to form the United Nations War Crimes Commission. The commission's purpose was to investigate war crimes, identify suspected perpetrators, and collect and organize evidence against those perpetrators. In a statement, Roosevelt condemned “atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith.”

Despite the international commission's early promise, its importance waned after Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and their staffs became more involved in the war crimes issue in 1943. Eventually, the commission's principal function became debating the legal aspects of prosecuting war crimes: How, exactly, would the Allies deal with the Nazis once the war was won?

A year before Germany's surrender, Herbert Pell, the U.S. representative on the commission and a New York friend of Roosevelt's, wrote to Sir Cecil Hurst, the British commissioner and chairman of the body and the former president of the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague. Pell was growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of legal precedent to support the commission's mandate. “Every nation now at war with either Japan or Germany has expressed the intention of punishing those responsible for outrages. . . . A failure to provide what the people of the world consider to be justice will bring on us obloquy and mockery.” Yet, Pell, wrote, “there is no such thing as international criminal law; there is no penalty settled for the violations of the rules of war; the list of war crimes is not a sacred thing accepted since time immemorial.” He continued:

 

It seems to me silly to try and haul unsuitable precedents in by the ears to debate on how many murders make a massacre, or whether or not the law passed for the peace-time government or respectable nations can be applied in totally unforeseen conditions; kidnapping, for example, is against the law of France, but it seems rather absurd to invoke the provisions of French domestic law against German officers accused of deporting French civilians, as if they were ordinary kidnappers. . . .

Unless we are able to provide the machinery for swift, severe and general justice we will find our work done for us more roughly by the bayonets of invading troops. It is all very well to imagine that British soldiers will pat the heads of innocent yellow-headed children or give soap to German women; this will not be the case of the soldiers of the Continent; a man who has seen his own child starved will not appreciate the beauty of the rosy infants of Germany; a man whose sister has been sent to a German brothel will not fraternize. . . . If we want to avert general massacre, we must satisfy the popular demand for justice.