Mission at Nuremberg (33 page)

Though Gerecke and O'Connor had wrestled with the idea of forgiveness of the men they had ministered to, the world's media showed less mercy. For years, the stories circulating about the fate of the Nazis' remains evoked a logic of revenge and poetic justice. For instance, in his book
Justice at Nuremberg,
published nearly forty years after the trials, Robert Conot wrote that the trucks carrying the bodies of the Nazis drove from Nuremberg to Dachau, where, at dawn, “the crematorium was fired up once again,” and the bodies were burned in the concentration camp's ovens.

Though the truth was slightly less symbolic, it was no less powerful. After the trucks left Nuremberg on the morning after the executions, they drove to Ostfriedhof Cemetery on the outskirts of Munich, arriving at 9:00
A.M.
The Germans who worked at the crematorium there were told that the army was delivering eleven American soldiers who had been killed and buried during the war and that their ashes were now being returned to their families. Each coffin was labeled with a fake name. Goering's was marked “George Munger,” which was the name of the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania's football team at the time.

Guards surrounded the crematorium and the eleven pine boxes were taken into the basement where the fires were already blazing. The cremations—which included the nooses and black hoods—lasted until 11:00
P.M.
The ashes were placed in eleven aluminum cylinders sixteen inches tall and six inches around. The next day they were taken to a white stucco villa nearby that had been transformed from the home of a wealthy merchant into U.S. Army Mortuary No. 1. The grand home was perched high on a hill above a large stream called the Contwentzbach.

A group of U.S. Army officers carried the urns to the grassy bank of the stream, where they smashed the aluminum cylinders with axes and stomped them with their boot heels. The waters of the Contwentzbach carried the Nazis' ashes to the Isar River, which took them to the Danube, and then to the sea.

CHAPTER 11

It Was You Who Invited Me Here

Christ died for the ungodly.

—ROMANS 5:6

T
WO WEEKS AFTER THE
executions, Gerecke received orders to return to the United States, and Chaplain Eggers took over Protestant Ministry duties at Nuremberg. In Andrus's push to have Gerecke promoted to major, he wrote to the army's chief of chaplains to commend Gerecke on his “sincere devotion to his faith and his constant effort on behalf of the prisoners in this jail” and to say that his efforts had “been a constant source of admiration.” He believed that Gerecke should “receive recognition for this work.”

Andrus also recommended that “after a reasonable time at home” Gerecke should return to Nuremberg “to continue his ministrations which he has already so nobly advanced.”

On the way home, Gerecke stopped in Frankfurt to see his son Hank in the hospital. He had already been there several times. Over the summer, when stationed in Bremerhaven, Hank had been severely injured in an accident. Hank, an MP officer, had discovered that a deserter was spotted an hour south of his position and had jumped in a jeep to track down the man. Just as he was heading off, a drunk soldier in a stolen two-and-a-half-ton truck smashed into him. Hank flew out of the jeep, lost consciousness, and woke up a few minutes later on cobblestones.

At the hospital, he began running a temperature, and doctors eventually discovered that the crash had ruptured his colon in three places, giving him an infection, gangrene, and peritonitis. Doctors had determined that Hank's injuries were too severe to fly him back to the United States, and he'd been admitted to an army hospital in Frankfurt instead. At certain points during the trial, Gerecke had been worried his son might not survive.

As Gerecke disembarked in Frankfurt, a group of German teenagers ripped the suitcases from his hands and took off into the rail yard. Army MPs eventually found the cases close by. They were mostly empty, except for a pair of Goering's gloves. The reichsmarshal told Gerecke he'd worn them only once. “I won't need them again,” he told the chaplain. But gifts from some of the other Nazis, including a leather cigar case Constantin von Neurath gave Gerecke after the chaplain had brought cigars into his cell to celebrate the seventy-three-year-old's birthday, were gone. Souvenirs Gerecke had collected for Alma during the war were also gone, as were the papers in another suitcase carrying extensive notes of his time in Nuremberg.

At the end of November, the army ordered Gerecke to report to Washington for two weeks to debrief the Office of the Chief of Chaplains on the trial. Gerecke was then given a leave to head home to St. Louis for Christmas before reporting to the Fifth Army's disciplinary barracks in Milwaukee. He hadn't seen Alma or Roy in three years.

While he was home in St. Louis, Gerecke spoke at various clubs, youth groups, churches, and high schools where he packed in audiences by the hundreds. Even Concordia Seminary now invited Gerecke to speak, even though decades earlier it hadn't allowed him to take classes on campus. Gerecke soon found himself telling his story before a crowd of six hundred at the DeSoto Hotel downtown. The reception was being held in Gerecke's honor, and the program included a photo of Gerecke in uniform in front of his chaplain's jeep as well as a copy of the letter that the Nuremberg defendants had sent to Alma. Gerecke's speech was a tour through the Nuremberg prison, and he introduced his listeners to each member of his Nazi congregation along the way.

He also told the crowd that the children of Germany, who survived the Nazi regime, needed prayer and material help. “If we will offer up some aid to the little folk of Europe, we shall do things for the Kingdom of God,” Gerecke said.

Before the event, Rev. E. L. Roschke wrote a letter to Gerecke summing up what most Lutheran pastors felt about Gerecke's work. “How very happy and proud I am that you were placed in such a very important position of service over in Europe and that you were privileged to render such a fine service not only to your friends and fellow citizens but also to those who were our enemies,” Roschke wrote. “The Lutherans of St. Louis and your friends of the Western District, both among the clergy and the laity, are extremely proud of you.”

Over the next decade, Gerecke gave his DeSoto speech hundreds of times. He always ended it with the most dramatic and disturbing part of his Nuremberg experience—walking the men he'd come to know well to their deaths. Gerecke used his considerable preaching skills to slow his tempo and lower his voice at places where he wanted his audience to pay particularly close attention. He would pause for dramatic effect so that the old women in the audience would nearly fall off their chairs in anticipation, while ribbing veterans of the war with knowing cracks about overbearing sergeants or army food.

There was always an element of a lesson in the speech, a self-effacing acknowledgment of his clumsy efforts at converting demons back into worshippers of Christ.

“For all my own blunderings and failures with them,” Gerecke would say, “I ask forgiveness.”

And he always ended the same way, with the prayer that wrapped up his radio show,
Moments of Comfort:
“Lord, lay some soul upon my heart and love that soul through me. And may I nobly do my part, to win that soul for thee.”

But now he added a new line borrowed and often attributed to Corrie ten Boom, the Christian woman who hid Dutch Jews in her house in Haarlem during the Holocaust: “And when I come to the beautiful city, and the saved all around me appear, I want to hear somebody tell me: It was you who invited me here.”

On February 1, 1947, Gerecke reported to the disciplinary barracks in Milwaukee where he began ministering to the U.S. Army's troubled souls. His work with most of the inmates at the barracks consisted of setting up personal visits, accompanying them to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, lecturing to men who were being released back into active duty, and making hospital visits. Those in isolation, segregation, or solitary confinement all received as much attention from Gerecke as anyone else.

As he'd grown accustomed to doing during the war, Gerecke sought out the Jewish men in the detachment and urged them to attend synagogue in Milwaukee. He later partnered with the Jewish Welfare Committee “to look after the Spiritual welfare” of the Jewish inmates.

He led Christian services for the inmates on Sunday mornings and Wednesday and Friday evenings. By the middle of 1948, fifty-five inmates were doing what Gerecke called “homework”—a correspondence course through Lutheran Hour Ministries. His flock was made up of “mostly young men whom the world wanted to forget,” he wrote later.

Before Hank had found himself in the Frankfurt hospital, he had married a nurse he met in France named Millie. In early 1947, Millie gave birth to David. The Gereckes were proud grandparents and Gerecke soon took to being “Grandpopsie,” as he called himself. After David's birth, Gerecke wrote to his daughter-in-law, “Congratulations darling little Mother. A kiss to you and to your first-born, David Henry. You are Mother, Hank is Daddy, I'm Grandpop and Browneyes is a pretty Grandmother. Corky is Unk and so is Roy. . . . From now on I shall speak of my grandson.”

When Gerecke wasn't busying himself with the army's rehabilitated soldiers and with his grandson, he was officiating at weddings, baptisms, and funerals at the base. He also started a Wednesday evening “Youth for Christ” Bible study for the young adults on the post. He made sure there was a good organ on hand for hymns, and a decent organist to play it, and he began a bus service to pick up personnel on Sunday mornings from parts of the base that he believed were too far for them to walk to chapel.

Gerecke's speaking engagements outside the disciplinary barracks continued during his free time. His talks in Milwaukee and surrounding Wisconsin towns—to men's clubs, Lutheran churches, rotary clubs, and Jewish centers—now expanded to nearby cities, such as Chicago, Joliet, Valparaiso, Minneapolis, and Omaha. “I still feel that I have never in all my life heard any address that impressed me so much as your story,” one teacher wrote to Gerecke after hearing him speak in Fort Wayne.

By March 1947, just a month after he was back to work, Gerecke had pieced together a report that the Office of the Chief of Chaplains had requested about his time at the trials. The report contained almost the same stories he'd been telling at public events and he'd hoped to publish it in two installments over the summer in a Lutheran church magazine called the
Walther League Messenger
.

At the end of March, Gerecke received a letter from Washington telling him the War Department's public relations division had rejected his report for publicity purposes.

“It is felt that the nature of the contents of the report is too personal to divulge and that it might possibly be construed as a betrayal of confidence by some readers,” Major Matthew Imrie of the Chief of Chaplains office wrote. Imrie also wrote to the editor of the
Walther League Messenger,
explaining that the report “revealed intimate confidences which were deserving of the secrecy of the confessional. The War Department discourages anything that would possibly suggest to men that chaplains did not zealously guard intimate knowledge and confidences.”

Gerecke reworked the report and resubmitted it to the War Department claiming that he had worked out the kinks. Yet, privately, Gerecke fumed at the hypocrisy of the War Department, which had asked him to exploit POW confessions for strategic information in England during the war. Their accusations that he had betrayed the confessional in Nuremberg implied he had committed the worst ethical breach a pastor could make. He knew what it was to keep confessional confidence, and in his report he had never crossed that line. In April, the War Department approved for publication the second version, titled “My Assignment with the International Military Tribunal as Spiritual Advisor to the High Nazi Leaders at Nuernberg, Germany, November 1945 to November 1946.”

 

O'CONNOR ALMOST NEVER SPOKE
of his experience at Nuremberg, even though he was pursued by magazine editors and book publishers who were eager for him to tell his story. Instead, he went about teaching at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure College, and Siena College, where he eventually chaired the philosophy department.

O'Connor served as vice president of Siena from 1956 until 1964, though he spent a great deal of his time caring for the flower gardens on campus. While he didn't talk about his wartime experiences, his students often called him a “chatterbox” on many other subjects. He also liked a cocktail at night and even gambled a bit at Saratoga Race Course thirty miles north.

O'Connor loved teaching, but he considered himself primarily a priest and missionary—especially in his work with the Nazis. A Franciscan missionary is both preacher and confessor, according to the Reverend Bede Hess, a former minister general of one of the three branches of the Franciscan order. As a preacher, the Franciscan missionary “moves his hearers to repentance,” wrote Hess, but in the confessional “by the God-given power of absolution he forgives their sins, and grants peace and pardon in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Hess invoked the Gospel of Luke, instructing confessors to “be merciful, as your Father also is merciful” to the young, perplexed, weak, the less disposed and indisposed, the shamelessly sinful and the obstinate. According to Hess, the confessor should “expend his zeal” toward the shamelessly sinful.

In 1983, O'Connor was at the Franciscans' headquarters in Manhattan when a newly ordained Franciscan priest came to him with an ethical dilemma. The new priest had just heard the confessions of two murderers at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, known as “New York's confessional” because everyone from cops to Wall Street bankers to mobsters traveled to it for penance. After the priest heard the confessions, he went to O'Connor and asked if he'd been right to absolve the murderers of their sins. “Yes, you give them spiritual counsel, a worthy penance and unconditional absolution,” O'Connor said. Then O'Connor gripped the younger priest's arm. “You absolve them of their sins, but you don't absolve them of their actions,” he said.

That same year, O'Connor gave up attending to all the flowers on Siena's campus. At seventy-four, the strain of being on his feet had become too much, though he planned a full teaching schedule for the fall. On a Sunday morning in July 1983, the deacon at the local parish church arrived at the Siena friary to pick up O'Connor so the priest could celebrate the 10:00
A.M.
Mass. He found O'Connor dead in his bed. He'd had a heart attack in his sleep in the middle of the night.

Thirty priests and fifty friars helped celebrate his funeral Mass three days later, then buried him in St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands, New York. At the funeral, Siena's president, Father Hugh Hines, said that O'Connor was a man who “gave totally of himself.” And though O'Connor had been a popular professor, “He not only taught philosophy, he was a true philosopher.”

 

IN 1949, THE GERECKES
left Milwaukee. After Gerecke served a nine-month stint at Fifth Army Headquarters in Chicago, the army relieved him of active-duty service and he was “installed” as an assistant pastor of St. John Lutheran Church. The church, on a bluff above the Mississippi River in the small town of Chester, Illinois, was small with a white steeple and made of brick. Gerecke's installation took place on a Sunday evening. Eight hundred people jammed into the tiny church and others spilled out of its doors. The Reverend H. C. Whelp, president of the denomination's Southern Illinois district, performed the installation service and the congregation sang an eighteenth-century hymn, “Come, Thou Almighty King.”

They then heard a passage from Isaiah 35: “Say to them that are of a fearful heart, be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense; he will come and save you.”