Mission at Nuremberg (31 page)

Earlier in the evening, when Gerecke had been talking to Goering for the final time, O'Connor had been doing the same with Frank. The two men had prayed together from the service of Christ on Golgotha, when Jesus was dying on the cross. Later in the night, after the prisoners were woken and told the executions were to begin, O'Connor had given Frank Communion.

Before leaving Frank's cell for the gym, O'Connor traced a small cross on the prisoner's head, mouth, and chest—the way Frank's mother had when he was a child. As they walked to the execution chamber, just before 2:00
A.M.
, O'Connor gave him the last blessing of the church and forgiveness. Frank was quiet and asked the priest to tell his family that he died well, that he had accepted his death as punishment and penance for his past. As they entered the gym the men were praying to St. Joseph for a good death.

Gerecke, standing near the door, noticed that O'Connor was beginning to crack. As O'Connor followed Frank up the steps, the war hero who had ministered to troops in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, and who had buried thousands of victims of the Holocaust, nearly fainted from the stress.

Frank thanked Andrus “for the kindness which [he] received in this incarceration.” On the gallows, O'Connor read a short prayer. Frank looked at him. “May Jesus have mercy on me,” he said, and then he dropped.

When Streicher entered the gym a few minutes later, he was twitching and anxious. He got his right arm free from the MP and raised it in a party salute, while yelling “Heil Hitler” at the tribunal judges. O'Connor prodded Streicher to state his name, but he refused. Finally, O'Connor lost his temper. In German he screamed, “For God's sake, Julius, tell them your name!”

“Heil Hitler,” Streicher screamed instead.

When he reached the top of the gallows, Streicher spat at Woods and shouted that the Bolsheviks would hang him one day. “I am now by God my father!” he yelled. “Adele my dear wife. I die innocently.”

Streicher dropped at 2:14
A.M.
Tilles said later that Woods had adjusted Streicher's noose, placing the coils off center so the rope wouldn't immediately snap his neck, and he would strangle. “Unlike the other men who died soundlessly, Streicher's gasps and gurgles filled the chamber,” Tilles wrote. “Everyone heard his gasps, and everyone denied hearing them. No one moved to Streicher's aid, no one objected, no one uttered any type of comment.” The doctors declared Streicher dead at 2:23
A.M.

When Andrus called for Sauckel, Gerecke's breath caught. Sauckel had been the most troubled of all the condemned men in the last days. He was having difficulty composing himself, and he seemed disoriented as he walked into the gym. When Gerecke got him to the top of the platform, Sauckel yelled out, “I'm dying an innocent man.” He began to talk about his wife and children, and Gerecke became unsteady. “I felt I could not go on,” he said later. Gerecke shakily said a prayer and Sauckel fell through the trapdoor at 2:26
A.M.
Moments later, General Jodl spoke his final words as if addressing his troops: “I salute you, my Germany.”

O'Connor stood next to the final man, Seyss-Inquart, as he dropped at 2:45
A.M.
The process had taken less than two hours.

As Jodl and Seyss-Inquart were still hanging, guards brought Goering's body into the gym on a stretcher. They removed a blanket to show the tribunal his body and then deposited it with the others behind the black curtain hiding the coffins. The judges announced the proceedings closed, and at 2:57
A.M.
, the witnesses left the gym.

The chaplains returned to the prison in silence and rested. An hour or so later, they were summoned back to the gym to give what Gerecke called “committal prayers.” They wanted the families, especially the children, to know that chaplains had performed final rites for their husbands and fathers.

Gerecke and O'Connor ducked behind the black curtain where each body was positioned atop its coffin. The Army Signal Corps had been tasked with photographing the bodies, both naked and clothed, and with the nooses still around their necks. No photographs of anyone involved with the executions were allowed, nor were photographs of the chamber itself allowed.

What the chaplains saw astonished them. The Nazis' faces were destroyed. Whether on purpose or not, Woods had miscalculated the amount of rope needed for each man. He'd also poorly designed the hinge on the trapdoor and tied the ropes improperly. The result was that the Nazis' faces smashed into the platform on their way down, breaking their noses and tearing their faces. Some, like Streicher, may have strangled to death rather than died from broken necks. Exactly what the chaplains saw, Gerecke wrote later “could never be told.”

Both performed a final blessing over the bodies of the dead men, and O'Connor held a special Mass for mourning. Gerecke quickly realized that the army had other plans for the bodies, and he wouldn't be able to fulfill the favor Keitel asked of him—burial in a cemetery lot near a family chapel in Brunswick.

After the chaplains left the gym, the coffin lids were nailed shut, and at 4:00
A.M.
MPs loaded the eleven coffins into two army six-by-six trucks that had pulled up to the gym.

The trucks left Nuremberg at 5:30
A.M.
, escorted by two machine-gun-mounted jeeps carrying armed MPs. Fifty more MPs stood at the gates of the Palace of Justice as the trucks departed. The convoy headed north, then doubled back in an effort to elude journalists who were following. Reporters were eventually dissuaded when the MPs swung the machine guns in their direction. The best guess among members of the press was that the bodies were being taken to an airfield in nearby Erlangen for a flight to Berlin.

Inside the gym, Woods and his team began the four-hour process of breaking down the gallows, which they then drove back to Landsberg and burned to prevent anyone from collecting souvenirs.

When the remaining prisoners woke up on the prison's second tier that morning, the guards escorted them down to the ground floor and instructed them to clean the cells of their dead colleagues. Inside the cells they found the remains of last meals—partially eaten sausage, bits of potato, crumbs of bread—scattered papers, and unfolded blankets. Seyss-Inquart had marked his wall calendar with a large X on October 16, the last day of his life.

In the afternoon, several guards escorted Schirach, Hess, and Speer to the gym and handed them mops and brooms. Speer tried to keep his composure. Hess stopped at what looked like a large bloodstain on the floor and raised his arm in the Nazi Party salute.

Gerecke returned to his apartment in Mögeldorf and tried to sleep. He reflected on “the gross hates and cruelties which climaxed in the careers of the Nazi leaders” that had begun with “petty hates, prejudices and compromises.” He was convinced that the eleven who died “to pay a debt to the world” were “men of intelligence and ability” who, in different circumstances, could have been “a blessing to the world instead of a curse.”

In his monthly report, Gerecke said he believed that Frick, Sauckel, Ribbentrop, and Keitel “died as penitent sinners trusting God's mercy for forgiveness. They believed in Jesus who shed his blood for their sins.”

As he lay in bed that night, Gerecke thought about the Lutheran Church and all the good it did in the world. He thought about the work of Lutheran youth societies, the Lutheran Layman's League, the missionary program of the Lutheran Women's League, and of “all that we have,” he said later. “Oh, it's a glorious thing.”

In the days that followed, Emmy Goering told Edda that her father was dead. Then, Emmy later wrote, “something marvelous happened.”

Gerecke came to visit them in their tiny house north of Nuremberg. “Frau Goering,” he said. “I wanted to tell you that the act your husband committed is not a suicide in the eyes of God.”

When he left, Edda looked at her mother. “Mummy, how happy I am!” she said. “Now I'm not worried. We shall see Papa again.' ”

O'Connor also tended the families of his flock. Hans Frank's sixteen-year-old son Norman had written O'Connor on the day of the executions, and five days later, O'Connor wrote back, expressing his sympathy and telling Norman about his father's final moments.

“His last thoughts were with you,” he wrote. “But he did not fear for you. He was convinced that you would understand, and that you had the courage and faith to master your future.”

O'Connor told Norman that his task now was to look after his mother and siblings “with love and a man's courage,” and “to represent the name of your father in this world, and to defend his honor.”

He told Norman that his father had gone “straight to heaven” and that “he found a fair verdict in front of God's judgment chair. Now he surely found quiet and peace and love—those things that this world doesn't give.”

He signed off, “Please be always true to God and to yourself. —O'Connor.”

 

FORGIVENESS IS CENTRAL TO
the story of Jesus of Nazareth, who, nailed to the cross, prayed to God, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And it is, therefore, the core theological and ethical concept of Christianity. Forgiveness is simply what is expected of Christ's followers. When Christ taught his disciples to pray, he told them to ask God: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

The Nazis killed eleven million noncombatants, but more than half of those were Jews killed because they were Jewish. Judaism's theology is ancient and broad, and there is no one settled-upon concept of forgiveness. Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, said one of the thirteen fundamental truths of Judaism was divine reward and retribution: God rewards those who keep his commandments and punishes the wicked. In Judaism, forgiveness requires that the original violation actually be removed. The Hebrew word for forgiveness is
mehillah,
the wiping away of a transgression. True forgiveness means the victim must be prepared to reestablish a relationship with the perpetrator. If God is forgiving, according to Jewish theology, in imitation of God, Jews must forgive.

But those who commit acts of violence against God's creation must also ask forgiveness of the creator. Perpetrators must do more than pray for God to pardon them. They must take an active role in the process of asking God's forgiveness: admitting the wrong they've committed, humbling themselves before God and promising not to sin again. As the author of Psalm 32 puts it: “Then I acknowledged my sin to You; I did not cover up my guilt; I resolved, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,' and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”

God, however, sees through false penitence. “Because that people has approached Me with its mouth and honored Me with its lips, but has kept its heart far from Me, and its worship of me has been a commandment of men, learned by rote,” God says through the prophet Isaiah, “I shall further baffle that people with bafflement upon bafflement; and the wisdom of its wise shall fail, and the prudence of its prudent shall vanish.”

Broadly, forgiveness in Judaism has two working parts, at extreme opposite ends of the good-evil spectrum: desisting from the evil act, and then doing good. That shift, according to Rabbi David Rosen, is summed up in a word that “dominates the penitential literature of the Bible”—
shuv,
which means “to turn.” It is the central idea in the Jewish concept of
teshuva,
which literally means “return.”
Teshuva
has come to mean repentance and is itself central to the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. On that day, the Day of Atonement, the victims of wrong are obligated to forgive the wrongdoer, but only after the wrongdoer has done
teshuva
: recognized the wrong he's done, stopped doing that wrong, confessed the wrong and asked forgiveness of the victim, and resolved not to repeat it. If the wrongdoer fails to go through the process, the victim can still forgive as an act of charity. But tradition generally insists that the wrongdoer earn his forgiveness through
teshuva,
rather than having it gifted to him for “free” by the victim.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis, disparaged the idea of free forgiveness, which he called “cheap grace,” and which he described as “forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins.” In that framework “grace alone does everything,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “and so everything can remain as it was before.”

When
teshuva
is accomplished, the wrongdoer has returned to his former state of good, and all that is left to complete the process is for his victim to accept the wrongdoer's confession and recognize it by forgiving it.
Teshuva
implies “that man has been endowed by God with the power of ‘turning,' ” says Rosen. “He can turn from evil to the good, and the very act of turning will activate God's response and lead to forgiveness.” If the wrongdoer has asked for forgiveness three times in the presence of others, and the injured party refuses to forgive him, the tables are turned and the original victim becomes the sinner.

Even when
teshuva
is completed, and a path is opened up for the resumption of a relationship between the former wrongdoer and the former victim, it isn't incumbent on the former victim to reestablish the relationship. Memory of an evil act can linger, and in Jewish tradition, reconciliation isn't required the way forgiveness is after the completion of
teshuva
. Conversely, forgiveness isn't a necessary prerequisite to reconciliation. The theologian Rabbi Elliott Dorff has said that the modern relationship between Jews and Germans illustrates such a circumstance.