Mission at Nuremberg (2 page)

Fritzsche wrote later:

 

Pastor Gerecke's view was that in his domain God alone was Judge, and the question of earthly guilt therefore had no significance so far as he was concerned. His only duty was the care of souls. In a personal prayer which he once made aloud in our queer little congregation he asked God to preserve him from all pride, and from any prejudice against those whose spiritual care had been committed to his charge. It was in this spirit of humility that he approached his task; a battle for the souls of men standing beneath the shadow of the gallows.

 

WHEN GERECKE RETURNED TO
Keitel's cell about thirty minutes after his initial visit in those early morning hours, he was visibly shaken from just having escorted Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, to the gallows. It was the first time Gerecke had seen someone put to death. Now he was at Keitel's cell, and the two again prayed through Keitel's tears.

But then it was time to go, and they started down the corridor. Andrus was in front, his cavalry boots clacking on the prison's cement floor. He was followed by Gerecke, then Keitel, who was handcuffed to a guard. They walked out the door and into the cold, wet darkness of the courtyard that separated the cell block from the prison gymnasium where the gallows had been erected hours earlier.

Outside the walls of the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg tried to get along as best it could. Ninety percent of the beautiful medieval city had been destroyed by Allied bombs. Now its residents slept wherever they found warmth—between large pieces of broken masonry, behind the crumbled wall of a former church, in the dark cellars of demolished homes. Near the city's ancient imperial castle, a group of children had hung Hermann Goering in effigy, then built a bonfire, marching around it and watching its shadows play on the rubble.

When Andrus reached the gymnasium door, he knocked to let those inside know the next prisoner was ready. A military police officer opened the door, and Andrus led the other men in. They blinked their eyes in the bright lights. Looming ahead of them, just to the left, were two black gallows, which, in the words of the lieutenant in charge, were “huge, foreboding and hopelessly out of place next to the basketball hoop at the end of the chamber.” A third gallows, held in reserve in case one of the other two failed, stood to the right. A curtain next to it hid eleven wooden coffins. The gym was a grimy building with nothing much in it other than two iron stoves in one corner. One of the walls had a single poster of a U.S. Army–sponsored slogan seen everywhere in occupied Nuremberg over the last year: “VD walks the Streets.”

Left of the main gallows, the four tribunal judges sat at folding tables, and near them, at four other tables, were eight members of the press. After taking three steps into the gym, Keitel was stopped by another MP who removed his shackles. Keitel's eyes went instinctively to the first gallows, where he saw a rope, taut and twisting. He knew Ribbentrop was dying on the other end. Two MPs took Keitel by the arms, and Gerecke followed as they stood Keitel before the tribunal. The judges asked him to state his name.

“Wilhelm Keitel!” the general said, loudly and clearly.

He then turned on the heels of his gleaming black boots and walked briskly up the thirteen steps of the second gallows. Gerecke followed him up, and the two men looked at each other. Gerecke began a German prayer he had learned from his mother. The chaplain knew Keitel's mother had taught him the same verse as a child, and the general joined Gerecke in prayer.

The prayer was just one thing the two men had in common. Brunswick was another. Keitel had been raised on a farm outside Brunswick in central Germany, and Gerecke's great-grandfather had left that city when he sailed to America. Keitel had hoped to follow his family's farming tradition, but his father pushed him into the army instead, and he became a professional soldier. In 1940, Hitler appointed him general field marshal. He was the führer's closest military adviser and most dependable sycophant—an obsequious figure, the archetypal Nazi bootlicker.

Keitel was ten years older than Gerecke, but both men had been brought up on farms, and both had married the daughters of brewers. During the year of the trial, Gerecke and Keitel had become close. Gerecke found that Keitel was always “devotional in his bearing” when the chaplain visited his cell. He found the field marshal penitent and “deeply Christian.” Keitel was interested especially in hymns and verses from scripture that dealt with the evidence of God's love for man, and man's redemption from sin through Christ's death on the cross.

Gerecke was very slow to give Holy Communion to a new, or returning, Christian. He needed to be convinced that a candidate not only understood the significance of the sacrament, but that, “in penitence and faith,” he was ready for it. This was the real reason Gerecke took the Nuremberg assignment. These were men who had spit on the notion of traditional Christianity while promoting an idea that a cleansed Germany would mean a better world and a more pure future. They had broken a contract with God, set down in the Ten Commandments, and Gerecke believed his duty as a Christian minister was to bring redemption to these souls, to save as many Nazis as he could before their executions. After studying the sacrament during the first months of the trial, Keitel asked Gerecke if he could celebrate Communion under the chaplain's direction. The general chose the Bible readings, hymns, and prayers for the ritual and read them aloud. He kneeled by the cot in his cell and confessed his sins.

“On his knees and under deep emotional stress, [Keitel] received the Body and Blood of our Savior,” Gerecke wrote later. “With tears in his voice he said, ‘You have helped me more than you know. May Christ, my Savior, stand by me all the way. I shall need him so much.' ”

Henriette von Schirach, the wife of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, who was also on trial at Nuremberg and was a member of Gerecke's prison flock, spoke to Gerecke shortly after the verdicts were announced by the court. Gerecke had given a sermon about the trial from the pulpit of a small, five-hundred-year-old church he pastored in Mögeldorf, a village in the eastern part of Nuremberg, where his congregation was mostly other American officers and enlisted men, with a few Germans included.

“The church was half destroyed and one could see the sky through the burnt-out roof,” Schirach wrote. “Gerecke preached in English. His subject—the executions. He did not want our men”—the Nazi prisoners—“to be killed.”

Gerecke told Schirach the executions would take place in the gymnasium of the prison, not—as rumored—in public, in the square outside Nuremberg's great St. Lawrence Church where Hitler had spent hours reviewing the troops as they marched past during the Nuremberg rallies.

“Gerecke had made friends with Field Marshal Keitel, Hitler's military adviser,” she wrote. “They were about the same age, but Keitel's sons had been killed or captured while Gerecke's sons were alive. Physically there was a certain resemblance between them—both had short grey hair and jovial expressions. The pastor was bound to take the farewell from the prisoner very hard.”

After reaching the top of the thirteen steps of the gallows, Keitel was asked if he had any last words.

“I call on the Almighty to be considerate of the German people, provide tenderness and mercy,” he said. “Over two million German soldiers went to their death for their Fatherland. I now follow my sons.”

A United Press account reported that the field marshal then “thanked the priest who stood beside him.” Then the executioner pulled a lever, and just twenty minutes after Gerecke and Keitel had first kneeled in prayer on the general's cell floor, Keitel dropped through the platform's trapdoor.

In the seconds that followed, the only sound in the gym was the creaking of the rope against its huge steel eyebolt at the top of the gallows. Gerecke walked out into the rain to retrieve the next prisoner.

CHAPTER 2

Zion

God our Father has made all things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything and whoever does not have faith will have nothing.

—MARTIN LUTHER

I
N 1918, WHEN HENRY
met Alma Bender, at the Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer in south St. Louis, the Benders were living about four blocks from the church and a fifteen-minute walk to Otto Stifel's Union Brewery, where Alma's father, Jacob, worked as a brewer.

Jacob Bender's own father had come to St. Louis from Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Jacob married an American girl, Alma Isselhardt, from Staunton, Illinois, and they had three children. Roy and his little sisters, Alma and Virginia, grew up in St. Louis, in an apartment next to their grandparents and close enough to Jacob's workplace—and several other breweries—that, for Alma, the earthy, sweet fragrance of hops in the wind became the smell of growing up.

After Alma and Henry were married, on July 23, 1919, Henry moved in with his in-laws. The wedding was a happy moment in a difficult year for the family. That fall, as Henry began his second year at Concordia, the U.S. Congress adopted the Volstead Act, which enabled it to pass the Eighteenth Amendment in favor of Prohibition, putting many people in St. Louis, including Jacob Bender and his boss, Otto Stifel, out of work. The next year, Stifel—in what became a pattern for beer barons of the time—shot himself.

The second crisis that fall emerged from the seminary itself. Studying at Concordia was something Henry had been dreaming about since high school. But the seminary, Henry was told, did not allow its students to be engaged or married (or to sing “frivolous and uncouth songs,” “read romances,” or play cards). Concordia tossed him out for marrying Alma, and he had to go to work answering correspondence in the office of New World Commercial Co., an insurance agency in downtown St. Louis. Henry feared he would never become a preacher.

The entire family was now living above Wehrenberg's Tavern on Cherokee Street, which Fred Wehrenberg, a former blacksmith, had opened at the turn of the century with the help of Otto Stifel and William Lemp. There was an ornately carved hardwood bar with brass tap handles, posters of beautiful women promoting various beer brands lining the walls, and sawdust covering the floor. All Fred had to do was serve the beer and the various German-style salted foods—pretzels, spiced ham, potato salad, roast mutton, sauerkraut, pickled pig's feet—that kept customers thirsty.

Groups gathered at tables for games of poker, bridge, or gin rummy and listened to piano and accordion music. Chess and checkers players hovered over the boards balanced on oak beer barrels. Customers huddled in “hot stove leagues” engaged in debates about boxing or baseball. In the garden, beer drinkers tossed horseshoes.

As other bars opened nearby, Fred and his wife, Gertrude, decided on a gimmick to make themselves stand out. At the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis's Forest Park, Fred had seen an exhibit that featured a replica of a train car that people clambered into. Once they were seated, images of the Alps flickered by outside the car's windows, giving those seated inside the impression of motion.

Wehrenberg “saw how the crowds were flocking to the exhibit” and realized what a boon this new technology could be for beer sales. Within two years, he'd set up an annex to the saloon for motion pictures with the original bar serving as a kind of early concession stand. So when the Benders and Gereckes moved into the Wehrenbergs' old apartment above the saloon, the bar was still lively, despite Prohibition.

Henry was the sole provider for his now-pregnant wife, her parents, and her six-year-old sister, all living in the Cherokee Street apartment. His relationship with his own parents, already strained because Henry had married a city girl, nearly ruptured completely at the beginning of 1921 after Henry's little sister, Nora, died of meningitis at age seventeen. Henry's mother had begged her husband to let Nora see a doctor, but he refused. Herman Gerecke denied that his daughter was very sick, and besides, he said, doctors cost too much.

Herman relented eventually, but it was too late. Henry was furious with his parents but also with himself for not protecting Nora from their father's ignorance and miserliness.

There had been almost no time for grieving Nora's death. A month later, Alma and Henry's first child was born. They named him for his father and grandfathers, Henry Herman Jacob Gerecke, but Alma and Henry called him Hank.

When he'd first arrived in St. Louis in 1918, Henry had become friendly with a prominent Lutheran pastor, Rev. Richard Kretzschmar, and his family, who allowed him to live in their basement before he started seminary. After Concordia forced Henry to withdraw because of his marriage, Pastor Kretzschmar directed Henry's private studies, with the approval of a Concordia faculty committee and the help of individual professors. In the summer of 1920, Henry took classes at Harris Teachers College and St. Louis University so he could get out of the insurance business and into teaching as he pursued his private studies in theology. In the fall of 1921, he started teaching at Emmaus Lutheran, where Kretzschmar was pastor. Henry taught there for five years, later calling it “the beginning of my comeback.”

Life was lively, if crowded, above a tavern in Prohibition St. Louis. And it became even more so in January 1922, when Corky was born exactly eleven months after Hank's arrival. But Corky and his grandpa Bender lived together for only a short time. Just ten days after Corky arrived, Jacob, who had been suffering from ulcers, died of a stomach hemorrhage at age forty-nine.

When Hank and Corky were a little older—four or five—Alma's mother often sent them downstairs with a bucket and a dime to Wehrenberg's with explicit instructions not to spill any “near-beer,” a malted beverage with trace amounts of alcohol popular during Prohibition, on the way back up to the apartment. Their reward was a sip from the bucket. At the end of each day, the boys ran down to the front of the building to watch for Henry as he arrived home from work on his bike, a black briefcase swinging from the handlebars. Henry, a dedicated musician, practiced violin, piano, and trumpet in the little apartment. His trombone playing made his young sons cry, so Alma made him practice in the bathroom.

In the fall of 1925, after years of extracurricular help from Kretzschmar and other Concordia professors working with him in their free time, Gerecke passed his exams at Concordia and graduated, making him eligible to be “called” to lead a congregation as its pastor. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod divides the country up into geographical districts, each with an elected president and a certain number of congregations. District presidents traditionally have some influence in matching up ministers and congregations in his district.

When Gerecke became eligible for call, Kretzschmar was a district president of the synod, and he engineered Gerecke's call to the ministry. Kretzschmar had also cofounded the church's KFUO radio station in St. Louis in 1924 and would be influential in developing Gerecke's side career in broadcasting. After teaching for five years at Emmaus, on January 24, 1926, Gerecke, at age thirty-two, was ordained at Christ Lutheran Church and installed as its pastor by Rev. A. P. Feddersen. Christ Lutheran was about three miles from Wehrenberg's, at an address that shared a name with Gerecke's mother and grandmother—3506 Caroline Street. Two years later, in 1928, as Henry was settling in to life leading a congregation, Alma gave birth to the couple's third son, Roy David.

In the small vicarage house, Alma and Henry had one room, with the three boys in another, two of them—Hank and Corky—sharing a bed and constantly fighting. Grandma Bender and Aunt Ginny—a not-very-auntly eleven-year-old when they moved in—had a room as well.

As is traditional in churches, cliques within the congregation tested Gerecke at first and tried to keep him in line with their goals and agendas. One of the first summers there, the congregation was meeting in the church hall, and all the windows were open to the St. Louis humidity. The family was sitting on the back porch and could hear raised voices as Gerecke led the meeting inside.

Finally, they heard Gerecke boom, “If you want to step out into the alley, I'll show you who's running this church!”

Afterward, Grandma Bender counseled her son-in-law. “Henry,” she said, “you can't talk to the congregation like that.”

He sure could, Gerecke told her. “They've got to realize who is in charge.”

After the trial period, the cliques settled into their own debates and left Gerecke to run the church. As for the vicarage, each year a committee of church members came in and fixed anything that was broken and gave the place a fresh coat of paint. Alma supplied the food—her braunschweiger sandwiches were a favorite. On Gerecke's fifth anniversary as pastor, the congregation threw him a surprise party.

St. Louis has always been a Catholic town, and Christ Lutheran existed within the borders of Immaculate Conception parish. That church was about nine blocks away from Christ Lutheran, and the neighborhood between the churches was populated by Catholics. Most of Hank's and Corky's friends were Catholic. Henry got along well with the priests at Immaculate Conception and with his Catholic neighbors, often attending the wakes of those who died. Even though they were only a few miles from their old apartment, Hank and Corky were still the new kids, and their Lutheranism was an invitation for childhood cruelty.

One afternoon, when Hank was about eight, a group of teenagers approached him on the street outside Christ Lutheran and “beat the hell” out of him. He ran inside the house and told his father, who ran after the teens, eventually capturing all four of them. He dragged them back, two in each hand, to the house and called out to Hank, “Which one?”

The Gereckes socialized with other Lutheran pastors and their wives. Their best friends were Pastor Henry “Woods” Holls and his wife, whom the kids called “Aunt Agnes.” The couples and their friends gathered at each other's homes to play bridge and talk or attended functions at each other's churches. Occasionally, on a Sunday after services, they'd all pile their kids in cars and drive out to the banks of the Meramec, a tributary of the Mississippi that flows through the Ozarks.

Gerecke thought dancing was “sinful” in those days, but he loosened up later. He hated smoking and forced those who were going to light up to retreat elsewhere. His dress style was the same on Sunday as on any other day of the week—a dark suit and tie. He wore a black gown over his suit when he was preaching, and a homburg hat when he was outside. He never donned a clerical collar for worship services, but he always wore a watch on his left wrist, rimless glasses, and a cross on a chain tucked into his suit pocket. His sermons were casual but authoritative, and he wrote them in outline form in order to better speak off the cuff when he felt the need. When Gerecke delivered a sermon, every person in every pew felt like he was speaking just to them—an effect similar to a meaningful conversation with a learned friend. Preaching was perhaps Gerecke's greatest talent as a minister.

Grandma Bender could be a dire presence in the little apartment. One time, when Hank stole some money out of his grandmother's purse, she taught him a lesson by turning on the stove and forcing his hand over the fire—not close enough to burn him, just enough to get his attention. And on the rare occasions when Henry's parents visited, the country versus city feud continued. The Gereckes blamed Alma for Henry's awkward withdrawal from Concordia. Herman Gerecke hadn't wanted his son to be a preacher, but once Henry was traveling down that road, Herman didn't want any bumps in the way. For the Gereckes, Alma represented an obstacle, and they saw her parents as a potential corrupting influence on their grandchildren.

There wasn't a lot of love going the other way either. Whenever the Gereckes came up to St. Louis to visit, Grandma Bender called her grandchildren over to her and instructed them: “When your Grandma Gerecke comes over, she's going to kiss you. Don't kiss her back.”

Like a lot of people who are hard on their children, Herman Gerecke was a pushover with his grandchildren. On visits to St. Louis or when the family traveled down to Cape Girardeau, Herman loved taking the boys for long walks, showing them off to his friends and buying them the ever-present near beer and pails of ice cream.

Grandma Bender had a soft spot for Henry, and he for her. She often took his side in family debates. She lent him money to buy a car from someone's estate—a Marmon Roosevelt. On Saturday nights, he would drive down near the Mississippi where the German bakeries were and buy his mother-in-law her favorite brain sandwiches.

In 1932, Hank, now eleven, came home from school and his mother called him into the kitchen. “Your father has something to tell you,” she said. Grandma Bender had died of a ruptured gangrenous appendix, at age fifty-one. Years before her death, she had lost a child—her oldest, Roy, who had died in the First World War. On her deathbed, she didn't ask after Alma—her oldest daughter, who had taken her widowed mother into her home, or Ginny—her seventeen-year-old youngest child. She spoke only about her dead son.

Soon after his mother-in-law's death, Gerecke realized he was bored with congregational life. For a couple of years, he'd been doing mission work in his free time among the “unchurched” in St. Louis's poor black neighborhoods, and he'd come to love this work more than what he was doing with his own flock. He wanted to be among people he felt were more desperately in need of hearing the Gospel message. The members of his congregation, sitting in the pews at Christ Lutheran, were good, faithful Christians. They had their problems, like anyone else, Gerecke believed, but they were already on a path toward a salvation they could grasp. Gerecke had become more interested in the city's wounded, those who were at risk of dying without hearing God's message of love for them.