Mission at Nuremberg (19 page)

Hitler was, for the most part, his own foreign minister, and Ribbentrop—who was almost universally disliked by higher Nazi leadership—was his gofer. The trappings of wealth and power, which Ribbentrop both craved and aggrandized, fit him badly. He was contemptuous, incompetent, vain, and combative. Goering once called him that “dirty little champagne peddler.”

As Gerecke sat in his cell, Ribbentrop began asking more questions and pointing out contradictions from the Bible. “Can a man be patriotic and Christian at the same time?” he asked.

Gerecke responded, “Of course you can be patriotic and Christian at the same time provided you do so according to Romans 13 until you come into conflict with Acts 5:29. The former will tell you what you owe your government and how to be loyal to it as a Christian. The latter will emphasize its application to Christian patriotism and tell you that you must obey God rather than man.”

After several months, Ribbentrop began reading the Bible and the catechism. Gerecke said Ribbentrop “became more and more penitent, eager to turn from the past.” Yet, it wasn't until the Nuremberg judges were in closed session at the end of the trial that Ribbentrop expressed any interest in taking Communion, which he eventually did.

Many of the Nazis were unresponsive at first to Gerecke's overtures to join his services in the chapel. Constantin von Neurath, the former German foreign minister and Reich protector of Bohemia, said his entire family had been Catholic, and that he'd never been a churchgoer. Eventually, Gerecke wrote, Neurath showed “genuine interest,” and he agreed to try it out. Neurath's family was thankful, and they sent Gerecke letters that thanked him for helping Neurath “get right with God.”

As with Rosenberg and Ribbentrop, Gerecke found that Hjalmar Schacht, the former president of the Reichsbank, responded to his requests “a little on the sharp side.”

“I'll be there,” Schacht said about attending chapel, “but don't ever ask me to come to Communion.” That was fine with Gerecke. His only intention at first was to get each of the defendants to Sunday service. But he asked Schacht why he was so averse to Communion.

Schacht's bitterness at being accused of war crimes alongside men like Goering and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had overseen the concentration camp system, made him spiritually unprepared for Communion, he told the chaplain. “But if there's any degree of fairness in this trial, then I'm going to be a free man when it's over with. . . . And then I should like to go to church with my wife and take of the Lord's Supper.”

Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's labor chief, became the first of the thirteen to work seriously with Gerecke. Sauckel was a short, stocky man with a bald head shaped like a bulldog's and a cramped mustache fashioned after Hitler's. He wasn't smart, but he'd been efficient enough at his job to became the most notorious slaver in history.

At Nuremberg, the fifty-one-year-old's groveling friendliness—always smiling nervously, hands constantly fluttering as he spoke—made most cringe. Sauckel had a habit of pausing between each word as he gave his testimony during the trial, which irked the judges, and the learned Germans in the room loathed his “vile” blue-collar accent. Goebbels had famously called Sauckel “one of the dullest of the dull,” though one Berlin journalist said he was “one of the toughest of the Old Guard Nazis.”

When Sauckel spoke to someone directly, his words seemed automatic, as if he'd prepared phrases and sentences for precise situations, shining and buffing them until a particular question demanded that exact, practiced reply. After Gerecke greeted him in his cell that first afternoon, Sauckel put his hands on Gerecke's arms and said, with great feeling, “As a clergyman, you are one person to whom I can open my heart.”

Gerecke wrote later that Sauckel told him that he'd done his job as a Nazi without “any idea of committing wrong against God or man.” He said he'd simply been working toward an ideal social community that he'd dreamed of since his days as a seaman and laborer.

As he'd done with the others, Gerecke tried to remember that Sauckel was once a child. Fritz had been brought up poor and considered himself a working-class success story who retained his workingman's point of view. His father had come from a long line of farmers and had been a postman, and his mother had come from a seafaring family.

At age fifteen, Fritz left home to become a merchant marine and sailed around the world, including to North America. In 1912, he was shipwrecked off the Scottish coast.

In 1914, just as the First World War was beginning, Fritz's ship, en route to Australia, was sunk by a French battleship. He spent the rest of the war in a French POW camp. When Sauckel returned to Germany in 1919, he found his savings worthless because of inflation. He took a job as a lathe operator in a ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt and began studying engineering.

In 1923, Sauckel married a girl he'd known for ten years. Though Elisabeth was Catholic, Sauckel's parents were eventually won over by her charm. It was a happy marriage that produced ten children—eight boys and two girls—over the next fifteen years. Two of the boys were eventually killed during the Second World War.

After two years, Sauckel became a labor leader at his factory, and as early as 1921, he was making speeches and organizing for the Nazi Party. In 1923, Sauckel heard Hitler speak and was enthralled by his message of national unity. He came to feel Hitler was “the man chosen by fate to unite Germany,” and eventually he began to write letters to Hitler that had a worshipful tone. Like Rudolf Hess, Sauckel “had for Hitler the loyal fidelity of a dog to its master,” said one Nuremberg psychologist.

In 1933, Sauckel was elected into the Reichstag to represent Thuringia, the region north of Bavaria, and he served as an energetic leader of the Nazi Party in the region. Eventually Hitler brought him closer into his inner circle.

Hitler saw in Sauckel what historian Eugene Davidson called a man of “tireless efficiency” who was “a good choice for the greatest slave roundup in history.”

Hitler's blitzkrieg of the western front began in May 1940, and his invasion of Russia began in June 1941. From the Russian invasion until the last year of the war, Germany lost sixty thousand men each month to the eastern front alone.

To counter some of the problems created by the demand for troops, the German army lowered the minimum age of conscription and raised the maximum age in 1942. It began taking men from the arms industry who had previously been exempt from recruitment.

Germany also needed help on the home front. After Hitler assigned Sauckel the job of plenipotentiary-general for labor mobilization in 1942, Sauckel conducted slave raids into Germany's occupied territories in an attempt to slake the Reich's quenchless thirst for free labor. And they were effective. In one day, a “Sauckel action, ” as they came to be called, rounded up fifty thousand men in Rotterdam. By the end of 1942, Germany was using more than 4.5 million foreign workers.

In a letter to Rosenberg in October 1942, Sauckel demanded “the ruthless application of all measures” to acquire two million Russian workers. A report three weeks later from Rosenberg's office on the roundup said that “recruiting methods were used which probably have their precedent only in the blackest periods of the slave trade. A regular manhunt was inaugurated.”

There wasn't enough room in Nazi Germany for all those people brought to work there, and consequently the workers' living and work conditions were subhuman. After the SS caught civilian workers in the occupied territories, they sometimes manacled them and jammed fifty to eighty of them in freight cars headed to their destinations, often without food or water for days.

The average workday was thirteen hours, and fines, taxes, and other deductions made any promised wages theoretical. Laborers beginning work at 4:00
A.M.
might have gotten a few cups of tea, followed fourteen hours later by a quart of nondescript soup and some bread—the daily ration for hard labor. Some resorted to cooking mice over fires after skinning them with bits of glass and metal. Food for workers from the east was worse than for others. If these workers were fed meat, it was from cats or horses that had been slaughtered because they had contracted tuberculosis.

Sauckel maintained that all he wanted was a workforce, and he repeatedly said that mistreating that workforce was antithetical to the Reich's goals. In March 1943, Sauckel wrote to Hitler to say that “all the workers of foreign nations are being unexceptionally treated correctly and decently, well taken care of and well clothed. . . . Never before in the history of the world have foreign workers been so well treated.”

Sauckel evoked a warped sense of caring for Germany's slaves that stemmed from the utilitarianism required by his job. “Beaten, half-starved and dead Russians do not supply us with coal and are entirely useless for iron and steel production,” he said.

By the fall of 1944, there were eight million foreign workers in the Reich. Foreign nationals comprised 46 percent of those working in agriculture and a third of those working in mining, construction, and the metal and chemical industries. In the last year of the war, more than a quarter of the workforce in Germany consisted of citizens of other countries. Nearly five hundred thousand of them died there during the war. A quarter, or 1.2 million, of the Reich's POWs in forced labor across Europe had died by mid-1945. At Nuremberg, Sauckel told prosecutors he was responsible only for finding Germany's labor, not for how they were treated after he delivered them to the work camps.

Within seconds of meeting Gerecke, Sauckel told the chaplain he would come to chapel services. But first, he wanted to know what arrangements were being made for serving Communion to prisoners who wanted it. “I want to ask you how I can prepare myself for the Lord's Supper,” he said.

Gerecke told Sauckel to take it easy and that he would be happy to instruct him. They would go over Christian teaching with a catechism and the Bible. “This time, Mr. Sauckel, you don't want to go through the motions,” Gerecke said. “You want to let the motions of God's Holy Spirit go through you.”

The men discussed their children. Sauckel mentioned, proudly, how devout his wife was. When Gerecke motioned to leave, Sauckel asked the chaplain to pray with him. They knelt together on the stone floor of the cell, next to the steel cot.

Each time the chaplain visited, the two men ended their time together in prayer, kneeling on the floor by the cot. Many times, Sauckel asked for God's mercy and wiped away tears as he called himself a sinner. Sauckel would take his Bible study seriously during the months of the trial, often bringing the catechism to court with him to read during sessions.

Eventually, after one Sunday church service, Sauckel asked Gerecke if he could take Communion. “All right, Mr. Sauckel,” Gerecke told him. “I'll be down to see you.” When Gerecke arrived, Sauckel was on his knees, praying on the cement floor of his cell.

Gerecke entered the cell and prepared the Communion kit against the wall. Sauckel got off his knees, threw his hands in the air, and cried out so loudly that every guard on the floor came rushing to Sauckel's cell. “
Gott sei mir gnädig, ein Sünder!
” Sauckel yelled. “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

“I believe he meant every word of it,” Gerecke said later. “He virtually crawled to the communion kit and partook of the Lord's Supper. The first one to come back!”

After Sauckel, Gerecke's success leading prisoners back to Christ continued with the three “big men,” as he put it. Through Gerecke, the three prisoners learned about Sauckel's work, relearning the faith with the chaplain. They asked him for their own catechisms, and Gerecke began guiding them through the scriptures.

The first of these men was Albert Speer, the Third Reich's architect and eventually the Reich's minister for armaments and war production. In Gerecke's postwar writing, he portrayed Speer as a lively and willing congregant. “Of course I'm coming to Chapel!” Speer told Gerecke when they first met in Speer's cell. Gerecke wrote that over time he found Speer “a delightful conversationalist” who admitted to him the guilt of the Nazi regime, telling the chaplain “that the neglect of genuine Christianity caused its downfall.”

As an architect, Speer had been continuing the family business. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was one of the busiest architects in Mannheim, in west-central Germany, where Speer was born. In 1930, Speer—a twenty-five-year-old student of architecture at the time—heard Hitler speak at Berlin University, and he was mesmerized. He joined the Nazi Party the following year. In 1932, he received his first commission from the party, and thereafter became the chief designer of the Nazi movement's parades and rallies. More than anyone else, Speer was responsible for the look of Nazism. Hitler called him an “architect of genius.”

In 1942, Speer became minister of armaments and war production and proved useful to Hitler again as he successfully managed the massive machinery of the Reich's industrial output, largely by improving efficiencies in the bureaucracy and exploiting slave labor.

At the end of the war, Hitler gave orders to destroy much of Germany's infrastructure and factories to keep them from the Allies, but Speer refused, ordering instead for factories to be “paralyzed” by removing and hiding key parts. His view was that no one had the right to destroy Germany's postwar future.

When it became obvious that Hitler's despondency would lead to a kind of murder-suicide with the German people, Speer planned to kill him by throwing poison gas grenades in the ventilation system of Hitler's bunker. But when he found out Hitler had built a huge brick wall around the vents to prevent such an attack, he backed off the plan.

In an evangelical tract,
The Cross and the Swastika,
British writer F. T. Grossmith “tried to continue Gerecke's ministry” by corresponding with the Nuremberg defendants who were still alive in the late 1970s. For instance, he sent Karl Doenitz “some Christian literature,” which he hoped “he read and applied to his life.” He also wrote that he visited Speer's home in Heidelberg many years after the trials to ask about Gerecke. Speer told Grossmith that Gerecke was “a man with a warm heart . . . he cared,” and that without him, he “could never have got through those days at Nuremberg.”