Mission at Nuremberg (6 page)

The program also promoted the work of City Mission, allowing Gerecke to use the huge reach of radio to scare up more funding or to ask for old clothing and furniture for Lutheran Mission Industries. In turn, he promoted the show through the City Mission newsletter.

At the end of each
Moment,
Gerecke recited what he called a “mission prayer.” But the words were really the lyrics of a nineteenth-century hymn: “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.” The program and its host became so successful that a rival station, KMOX, approached Gerecke about a full-time broadcasting job. But he realized it would mean leaving the ministry and turned it down.

At City Mission, Gerecke had clearly found his life's calling. He enjoyed the frenetic pace, and he thrived on the energy it took to keep up with his schedule. Mostly, though, he loved the challenge of harvesting a mission field he believed so hungry for God's grace. All of that personal, professional, and sacred satisfaction, however, came at the expense of an easy home life. When Gerecke left Christ Lutheran, he had to give up the vicarage, and the family moved to an apartment with creaky hardwood floors, three bedrooms, and one bathroom. It was about the same size the Gereckes were used to, but it was more cramped because Gerecke didn't have an attached office and the kids were now older.

Alma had a rule against children in the dining room except during meals, or in the family room—it was reserved for company—leaving the boys to make do in their small bedroom, the kitchen, or in the neighborhood outside. Life as a pastor's kid is never easy, but the boys' clothes and shoes frequently came off the Lutheran Mission Industries trucks, and this became well known at their school, leading to taunts of: “Hey, Gerecke got dressed on the charity trucks again.” Naturally that led to fights.

Hank and Corky earned fifty cents a day sorting donated materials at the City Mission warehouse. They were so close in age they fought from the time they woke up until they went to sleep at night. Alma often had to use a “Wait until your father gets home” threat to settle them down. When Henry did get home, Alma would tell him what happened and demand that he discipline the boys.

He did as instructed, calling each of his sons into the bedroom, where he took off his belt and then issued his own instructions: “Make it sound like this hurts.” And then he'd slap the bed hard with his belt, while his sons would smile gratefully and howl in fake pain.

“Okay, Henry. Stop it. You're hurting them,” Alma would call from the kitchen.

As the wife of a pastor, Alma attended church and was part of the Ladies' Aid Society, but once her husband was no longer leading a regular congregation, some of those social responsibilities disappeared. The trade-off was financial. This was the Depression, and the Gerecke family's existence was hand to mouth. Henry was satisfied that they, as he liked to say, had a roof over their heads and food on the table. God would take care of the rest. But Alma liked cars and clothes. She liked money, and the absence of it became a major point of contention in their marriage.

Henry believed Thanksgiving was an important American holiday, writing in the City Mission newsletter: “This is Thanksgiving month. We are thankful. We have some very poor families who will be thankful, too. Understand?” One year when a destitute member of his Good Shepherd congregation invited the Gereckes to his hovel for Thanksgiving dinner, Henry accepted. Alma was furious, and at first she refused to go. But by Thanksgiving day she relented, and they all hopped in the car and made their way to a desperately poor section of the city to give thanks.

Gerecke's schedule made family outings like that rare. His children didn't see much of him during the week, so the boys looked forward to Saturday afternoons, which were often spent around the kitchen table, where they listened to a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. Gerecke told his sons stories about his childhood on the farm, or about working the Kansas oil fields. Gerecke hated to drive, so when Hank and Corky were old enough, they became his Sunday chauffeurs. Hank drove his father around for his marathon preaching circuit of hospitals, jails, convalescent homes, and churches. After a while, Gerecke let his son stay in the car.

“You've heard the sermon four times already,” he'd say. “You can sit here and wait.” But Hank always chose to go with his dad to the 9:00
A.M.
services in the City Jail. Going inside a jail was too exciting for a teenager to miss.

Just before Christmas in 1940, Hank enlisted in the army. He was nineteen years old and five feet, six inches—short, like his father. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor a year later, he was sent to the Aleutian Islands to defend them from Japanese forces. In the spring of 1942, five months after the United States declared war on Japan and Germany, the message of Lutheran Mission Industries became patriotic: “Mission Industries Trucks are busy collecting old clothing, furniture, rags, newspapers, magazines and iron,” Gerecke wrote. “Save your old papers for Defense. We want to do our bit toward victory for our Country and every pound of paper you save will help to that end. At this moment we need your old overcoats for homeless men in the settlement missions.” But gas rationing finally felled Gerecke's efforts, and he was forced to shutter the Industries arm of City Mission.

Corky followed Hank into the army in September 1942, when he was twenty years old (and five foot five). Suddenly, a house once crammed with people felt spacious—even Roy had his own room.

With two of his sons in the fight, Gerecke thought more and more about the war and less about City Mission. Readers of his April 1943 newsletter could tell that his heart was elsewhere: “Oliver Grosse assists at the piano,” he wrote, listlessly. “Noonday talks on Wednesdays in dining hall. . . . Warden and guards cooperate to the last detail. . . . Every one is questioned about spiritual matters. Some are so young. All need Jesus.”

By the time Gerecke wrote that newsletter, he had already asked for the synod's endorsement for him to volunteer for the army's Chaplain Corps. The Army and Navy Commission of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States had received his application for ecclesiastical endorsement on February 8, 1943, and then the recommendation letters began to pour in.

Pastor O. Rothe of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in St. Louis said he believed Gerecke's “experience in hospitals, jails and other institutions qualify [
sic
] him, in my estimation, in a remarkable way, for the position of chaplain.”

P. E. Kretzmann, director of Concordia's library, wrote the commission that if Gerecke “was not beyond the age limit, I feel that you will have a real acquisition.”

The Reverend George Wittmer, who was the chairman of the City Mission board, said Gerecke had “proven himself to be a psychologist in his dealings with all types and classes of people from every stratum of society.”

And Rev. Louis Wickham, whom Gerecke had replaced as head of City Mission in 1935 and was now a first lieutenant at Fort Hayes in Ohio, said his ten months in the chaplaincy had given him a perspective on the type of person it required.

“When I review in my mind the type of work required in the many situations that arise, I am confident that Brother Gerecke could efficiently and with distinction serve as a Chaplain,” Wickham wrote. “He is very personal in his presentation and can inspire men. He can be emotional as well as stern. . . . I know of no reason why he will not make a GOOD chaplain, and the army knows there are too many of the other kind.”

Wickham's letter to the synod's Army and Navy Commission was dated June 2, 1943, the day before Gerecke told Alma he planned to volunteer. At least a dozen men, and probably many more, knew Gerecke was joining the army before he told the mother of his children.

A week after the tense moment in the kitchen with Alma, Gerecke received word that the synod's Army and Navy Commission had approved his application and forwarded it to the army's Chief of Chaplain branch.

On July 15, the U.S. Army named Gerecke a chaplain (1st Lt.) and ordered him to report to Chaplain School at Harvard University a month later. In his last City Mission newsletter, written in August 1943, Gerecke told the delegates that he'd be replaced by an able pastor to lead the agency, but that
Moments of Comfort
would be “suspended for a time.” He thanked people for listening.

“My dear Friends, I ask your blessings upon my new assignment,” he wrote. “You and many others have sent good wishes for great spiritual blessings as a chaplain in the Army. . . . Keep your eyes fixed upon Jesus. If I have blundered, forgive me, please. If I have done normally well, thank God for it.”

Then he quoted two verses from the Old Testament. From Genesis: “The Lord watch between me and you when we are absent one from another.” And from Deuteronomy: “The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

As Gerecke left the safety of St. Louis for the heart of the most violent, destructive war man had ever fought, he might have added a proverb he penned himself in the November 1941 City Mission newsletter. “God give us strength, to carry on through the shadows.”

CHAPTER 3

God of War

Before you join battle, the priest shall come forward and address the troops. He shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel! you are about to join battle with your enemy. Let not your courage falter. Do not be in fear, or in panic, or in dread of them. For it is the Lord your God who marches with you to do battle for you against your enemy, to bring you victory.”

—DEUTERONOMY 20:2–4

H
ENRY GERECKE RECEIVED A
letter on June 23, 1943, from the army's Chief of Chaplains office informing him that he'd been provisionally recommended for the Chaplain Corps. Three days later, he sent a letter back to Washington. “Kind Sir!” Gerecke wrote. “The day I receive the official assignment shall be the happiest day of my life. My family, including two fine boys in the Army, are agreeable and praying blessings on me. There is no intention of backing down.” On August 17, 1943, he said good-bye to Alma and fifteen-year-old Roy and reported for duty at Harvard the next day.

When he arrived on campus, Gerecke was given a welcome letter written by the army chief of chaplains, General William R. Arnold, the first Catholic priest to become chief of chaplains and the first chaplain to rise to the rank of major general, a tradition the army has maintained ever since. Arnold called himself “a priest in khaki,” but before entering the priesthood, he had held a number of jobs. He'd worked at his father's cigar-making operation in Worcester, Ohio; at a steel mill in Muncie, Indiana, where he was a bar straightener; and at the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus in Peru, Indiana, where he worked—and sometimes bunked—with the performers. Arnold was ordained in 1908 and sent to the Philippines as a chaplain in the First World War.

In December 1937, Roosevelt appointed Arnold to head the Chaplain Corps, and at the end of the war—just before Gerecke was tapped for the job in Nuremberg—Pope Pius XII made him a bishop. Arnold later served nearly two decades as an aide to New York Cardinal Francis Spellman and as the Catholic Church's delegate to the military.

In his last days leading the Chaplain Corps, in 1945, Arnold wrote about his love for his fellow military priests, ministers, and rabbis in his book,
Soldiers of God
. For many soldiers, he wrote,

 

Chaplains of all faiths have been their sole link between the battlefield and home. These Chaplains volunteered to be with your men, to share the dangers of battle so they might help to keep alive the spiritual values for which we went to war—spiritual values without which lasting peace cannot be attained. In the performance of their duties, some of them have been wounded; others have died. The War Department has given to many of these clergymen the highest honors. These are your Chaplains. These are clergymen from your community. You have good cause to be proud of them.

Arnold's letter to Gerecke at Harvard began: “With hearty congratulations and best wishes we welcome you to active duty with the Regular Army.” This might have been a form letter, but it also served as a pep talk from the top chaplain in the country, and it gave Gerecke a good sense of what the chaplaincy expected of him and what he could expect from the army in return.

“Inconveniences, difficulties and hardships will be your portion,” Arnold continued. “Military life is a life of discipline, and the essential military virtues of courage, loyalty, obedience, devotion, and self-sacrifice are also religious virtues.”

Arnold spoke of “the alarming increase” in the number of young soldiers unfamiliar with God or religious worship. “How shall they know if they are not taught, and by whom shall they be taught if not by an able and zealous chaplain?” he asked.

Each chaplain's responsibility was tremendous, he wrote, and each chaplain's own salvation would be determined “by the efforts and sacrifices you make to teach and train men.”

“Your earnest words, pregnant with Divine wisdom and power, will establish convictions and train consciences in these young men that will strengthen and comfort them every hour of every day,” Arnold wrote, “in daylight or in darkness . . .”

 

EARLY IN THE FOURTH
century, probably in 316, a boy named for Mars, the god of war, was born to a soldier and his wife in the village of Sabaria in modern-day Hungary. Only a few years before the birth of the boy, who would later be known as Martin of Tours, Constantine freed the Christians from two centuries of secret meetings, persecution, and murder. By declaring the Edict of Milan, Constantine—the leader of the Roman Empire—had allowed Christians to practice their faith openly.

While his parents worshipped and offered sacrifices to the Roman gods and the emperor himself, Martin, even as a child, was drawn to Christianity, specifically to its followers who had so recently been killed by Constantine's slaughterous predecessor Diocletian, and the ascetics—hermits who adopted a form of martyrdom by living a life of prayer, alone in the woods or the desert.

When Martin was fifteen years old, a decree was sent down from the emperor that required all sons of veterans to join the army, changing Martin's plans of a solitary life for Christ. Instead, Martin found himself a member of the extravagantly uniformed imperial guard, one of five hundred cavalrymen protecting the emperor himself during military campaigns.

The imperial guard was stationed in Amiens, a city in Gaul near the Roman frontier. During a particularly cold Amiens winter, in 335, many of the city's poor were freezing to death. One day, as Martin came through the city gates, he saw a beggar sitting on the ground, shivering. Martin had no money to give the man, so instead, he cut his cape in two with his sword and gave one half to the beggar. The white cape, lined with lambskin and fastened at the right shoulder with a broach, was distinct to the elite corps that protected the emperor.

The cape, or
chlamys,
gave the men their name—the
candidate
—or men clothed in white. Those watching the scene between the soldier and the beggar laughed as Martin put the other half of the white cape back around his own shoulders. That night Martin, who was still not baptized, dreamed that he saw Christ wearing the half of his cape he'd given to the beggar.

It was a scene straight out of the Gospels, when Matthew predicted that at the Second Coming, Christ will say, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Martin became a Christian, then a bishop, and he founded a monastery. After his death, he became France's patron saint, and his cape became an object of veneration, preserved in the city of Tours. For centuries, French kings carried the cape into battle in a portable shrine called the
capella
. The priest who cared for the shrine was called the
capellani,
or
chapelains
in French. In English it became “chaplain.”

The relationship between war and the divine is ancient, and chaplains—though called something else—have been around a lot longer than the cape of St. Martin of Tours. It is said that soldier-priests once carried maces into battle to avoid spilling blood. The priests of Amun-Ra worked among the ancient Egyptian armies, and the priests of Joshua's forces carried the Ark of the Covenant, blowing rams' horns before the assault on Jericho.

In the United States, chaplains have been ministering for more than 230 years to the fifty-five million Americans who have served in the military. In the colonial period, civilian pastors simply volunteered their services to commanders in times of war. During the Pequot Wars, beginning in 1637, Samuel Stone of Hartford was the first military chaplain to begin his service in the New World. During King Philip's War in 1675, seven chaplains served in military units fighting Native Americans.

At the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which set off the Revolutionary War, four ministers were among the minutemen facing British general Thomas Gage's British troops on Lexington Green. Other pastors went to the battlefield to support their flocks fighting the British. Two hundred and twenty army and navy chaplains served during the Revolutionary War, but they received no military training and had no uniforms. At regimental inspections, when other soldiers raised their muskets at “present arms,” chaplains often raised their Bibles.

In northern colonies, where Congregationalists were accustomed to choosing their own ministers, militias held boisterous elections to choose a chaplain from among many choices in the community. Chaplains counseled soldiers, led daily prayer services and Sunday worship services, and visited the sick and wounded, helping doctors where they could.

On July 29, 1775, the Continental Congress recognized chaplains as a distinct branch of the army and authorized one chaplain for every two regiments, setting pay at $20 per month, the same amount received by captains. On November 28, 1775, the Continental Navy adopted regulations allowing divine services on ships, and Congress appointed chaplains to serve in hospitals.

In the field, chaplains often had their own quarters or bunked with the commanding officer. Unlike the way the Chaplain Corps sees itself today—as a force that stands for free expression of religion—Revolutionary War chaplains were enforcers of religious responsibility among their troops. On August 23, 1776, Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister, endorsed Rev. Christian Streit for the Eighth Regiment of Regulars of Virginia, certifying that Streit was “an ordained Minister of the Gospel, sound in Protestant Principles and sober in life, desirous and virtuous to promote the Glory of God and Welfare of the State and therefore recommended to all Friends and Well-wishers of Religion and State.”

Benjamin Franklin told the story of a “zealous Presbyterian” chaplain who was part of a militia guarding Pennsylvania's northwest frontier and who complained that too few of the militiamen attended worship services. Franklin suggested a creative solution. “It is, perhaps, below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum,” Franklin advised the chaplain. “But if you were to deal it out and only just after prayers, you would have them all about you.” The chaplain liked the idea. “[N]ever were prayers more generally and punctually attended,” Franklin reported.

When George Washington was desperate for a chaplain to minister to his drunken Virginia backcountry troops, he asked the governor to provide one, writing that the absence of a chaplain reflected “dishonor on the regiment.” Some of Washington's soldiers told him they'd pay a chaplain's salary from their own pockets, but Washington said he'd rather have a chaplain appointed as an officer because that would have “a more graceful appearance.” A chaplain, Washington wrote, “ought to be provided, that we may at least have the show if we are said to want the substance of Godliness.” When Washington became commander of the Continental Army on July 2, 1775, he found fifteen chaplains among the army's twenty-three regiments. He encouraged the chaplains to lead weekly worship services, and he eventually admitted ministers of eight denominations into the chaplaincy and urged his commanders to facilitate the free exercise of religion among their troops.

In 1780, Washington and his British counterpart began working toward an agreement that chaplains captured during hostilities would be released instead of made prisoners of war, and two years later, Washington wrote that chaplains were “exempted from being considered as prisoners of War on either Side; and those then in Captivity were and have been Since mutually released.” When the war was over, Washington's vision for a peacetime military included a chaplain in a staff officer's position for each regiment—recognition that a chaplain's duties extended beyond providing pastoral services to soldiers. Washington saw chaplains as integral to the military strategy, providing commanders with advice on matters dealing with morals, morale, and religion.

No Catholic chaplains served in the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812, but in 1846, President James Polk called together several bishops to discuss the Catholic chaplaincy and suggested they name two priests as chaplains. The bishops did so, and Polk appointed them. In 1850, the government put together a “Board of Clergymen” made up of chaplains and civilian clergy, whose job it was to screen army and navy chaplain candidates.

But looming war killed that church-state debate and by the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, the military employed nearly four thousand chaplains of twelve denominations and multiple ethnic backgrounds. In 1862, Congress changed legislative language from “Christian denomination” to “religious denomination,” allowing the first Jewish chaplain—Rabbi Jacob Frankel—to enter the army. Henry M. Turner, the first black army chaplain, served only black soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. Ella E. Gibson, an ordained minister of the Religion-Philosophical Society of St. Charles, Illinois, received President Abraham Lincoln's somewhat reluctant approval as the first female chaplain, serving with the First Wisconsin Heavy Artillery. Among the thirteen hundred chaplains in the Confederate army was the first Native American chaplain, Unaguskee, who served with a Cherokee battalion in North Carolina.

In May 1861, the army ordered its commanders to appoint chaplains approved by their state governors. But soon complaints of uneducated, unprepared, or unethical chaplains surfaced, prompting Congress to create legislation requiring chaplains to be ordained. It also barred anyone “who does not present testimonials of his present good standing with recommendations . . . from some authorized ecclesiastical body.” It was the first step toward ecclesiastical endorsement so central to today's Chaplain Corps.

When the War Department issued General Order 126 on September 6, 1862, requiring chaplains to be mustered into service by an officer of the Regular Army, it did not address age limits. Chaplain Charles McCabe of the 122nd Ohio Volunteers referred to a colleague, then sharing his prison cell, as “Father” Brown, not because the chaplain was a Catholic priest, but because he was eighty years old.