Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Most of the men were quiet. “The silence in the big prison was so profound that it hurt,” Gerecke wrote. He and O’Connor had promised their congregations Christmas Eve services, but the press had delayed them. Newspapers from across the world were demanding to know what the defendants were eating, whether they were praying, if they were allowed any celebration. “As a result,” wrote Fritzsche, “the officers responsible got into a state of nervous tension approaching panic for fear they might be publicly criticized for showing humane treatment to ‘inhuman creatures.’ And yet—and yet—there was an island of peace in this ocean of bitterness.”

  The chaplains had created this island out of respect for the importance of Christmas to Germans. Later that night, Gerecke led his congregation into the chapel, and to the defendants’ surprise, the guards stayed outside. Unlike typical Sunday service, where Andrus demanded that each prisoner’s guard be present in the chapel at all times, the rules were relaxed. Army-green blankets lined the chapel’s rough walls, and a silver cross perched on top of the portable altar covered in white cloth at the front. A tiny Christmas tree sat in one corner with lighted candles. The moment belonged to Gerecke and thirteen war criminals.

  “For the first time for months, we were free from continual observation and I felt the suppressed agitation which had been a normal part of my life, slip from me like a loosened chain,” Fritzsche wrote. “And it seemed to me that the nervous tension among my neighbors had likewise relaxed.”

  The SS organist began to play carols, and one by one, the Nazis began humming. A few started singing, and by the time they got to “Silent Night,” each man was singing at full volume. No one was louder than Goering, who sat in the front row, as he always did.

  The chaplain began reading from the Gospel of Luke. “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn,” Gerecke said, in what Fritzsche called “the soft unaccustomed accents of the English tongue.” Gerecke went on, “And the angel said to them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. . . . And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

  The men stared at the silver cross on the altar as Gerecke spoke. The chaplain’s focus was on Christ who “seemed to gather all the light of the little chapel into Himself and give it forth again,” Fritzsche wrote. “Here more clearly than in the most richly-decorated church He stood out as the focal point of all action, all thought.”

  Gerecke continued reading from Luke: “And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even to Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.” Gerecke’s voice began to rise. “And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.”

  The light of the Star of Bethlehem guided the shepherds, and it seemed to Fritzsche as if it was guiding those in this chapel on Christmas Eve. “Did not the light that flowed from Him penetrate the darkness that encompassed the immeasurable human suffering of my country and of the whole world?” he wrote. “Man must shoulder the blame and the responsibility for those sufferings, and because of them may, indeed must, strive against his fellow man. But he has yet to acknowledge his faults before God.”

  “And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds,” Gerecke told the men. “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told to them.”

  Gerecke finished with a short sermon, and then Sauckel spoke: “We never took time to appreciate Christmas in its biblical meaning,” he said. “Tonight we are stripped of all material gifts and away from our people. But we have the Christmas story.”

  Gerecke gave a benediction and the group sat in silence for five minutes. On the way out, Gerecke wished each man the peace of Christmas. Even the guards seemed a little less grim.

  DURING GERECKE’S WEEKLY SERVICES in the winter, Fritzsche always sat in the front row between Goering and Ribbentrop. “Again and again I noticed how, in the tiny chapel, the masks dropped and the faces relaxed,” he wrote. The winter was, as Fritzsche put it, “a time of reflection.”

  At each service, thirteen guards stood against the chapel’s back wall. The guards didn’t allow any talking, and if a guard thought his charge wasn’t being reverent enough, he used his baton to prod the offender. For the most part, the thirteen defendants didn’t attend every service together; Goering attended them all, telling Gustave Gilbert at one point, “Prayers, hell! It’s just a chance to get out of this damn cell for a half hour.” But when all thirteen did attend chapel, the men had “to squeeze up close to one another to find room,” according to Fritzsche.

  Hjalmar Schacht, the former Reichsbank president, wrote later that he “longed for a German pastor,” but that request—despite Gerecke’s own support for the idea—had been turned down. “It was not so much a question of services and sermon as of the opportunity to unburden the mind in spiritual matters,” Schacht wrote. He noted that Gerecke was not fluent in German, so he had to read his sermons. “And it was all the more difficult for him to carry on a pastoral conversation with any of us.”

  Nevertheless, Schacht continued, “there was a most moving quality in Pastor Gerecke’s zeal and devotion to his task. He was a dear, good, thoroughly well-intentioned man.” There was something to the chapel that comforted the doomed men. Even those who would go on to survive the trial preferred Gerecke’s chapel to the one at the center of the prison. Fritzsche found the larger chapel to be “a non-descript kind of place, lacking the comfort and peace that had enfolded us in the tiny chapel.”

  The prisoners sang hymns together, and their sounds made lighter moments in a dark place. Schacht and Raeder were the backbone of the little choir, since many of the other defendants were less skilled vocally. Goering began and ended each hymn happily and loudly, regardless of whether he had found the correct key. Ribbentrop’s singing “was almost terrifying,” Fritzsche wrote. Hitler’s former foreign minister typically remained silent until his voice could blend into a crescendo of others. “Then,” Fritzsche added, “cautiously, he would begin with a few long-drawn-out notes which increased in volume till they rose to a trumpet-call and the singer’s face assumed an ecstatic expression. A visible sign of how much this rather unprofessional performance meant to a man who, as a rule, had but little opportunity to express his feelings.”

  After Andrus and the chaplains found some of the defendants’ families, the chaplains began to visit them, often taking food or other supplies to help a Nazi wife and her children survive postwar destitution. In February 1946, Gerecke visited Emmy Goering, Luise Funk, Margarete Frick, and Henriette von Schirach. “One defendant said it touched his heart that the American Prison Chaplain should visit his people,” Gerecke wrote in his monthly report. “The families were deeply grateful.”

  Gerecke’s responsibilities didn’t end with the defendants and their families. He and O’Connor were the chaplains for the Americans, too. Gerecke conducted services at the small church in Mögeldorf each Sunday at 11:00 A.M. and provided army transportation for any member of the 6850th who wanted to attend. And, as he had during the war, he encouraged Jewish members of the unit to seek out Jewish chaplains among the vast Allied occupation of the city. He also encouraged his superiors to erect an army chapel “complete in every detail” somewhere on the two-mile road between the Palace of Justice and the Grand Hotel. “Open for prayer at all times for men and women of all faiths,” he wrote in his monthly
report. “Just a touch of home.”

  O’Connor’s smaller flock of four Catholic defendants also used the tiny chapel. Two of them, Hans Frank and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, were particularly murderous.

  Hans Frank had been a quiet, scholarly child who preferred his books, chess, and music to the company of other children. He had married a typist when he was twenty-five and became a doting father to five children.

  In 1926, nearly straight out of law school, Frank became the chief legal authority of the Nazi Party, defending its activities in several hundred cases across Germany. Frank even served as Hitler’s personal attorney before enjoying a string of party posts—Bavarian minister of justice, Reich leader of the Nazi Party, Reich minister of justice. Hitler named him governor general of Poland in 1939, where he would earn nicknames like “Slayer of Poles” and the “Butcher of Krakow.”

  Hitler’s goal in that country was to eradicate the Polish intelligentsia by closing the universities and sending intellectuals to concentration camps. By eliminating the intellectual class, the Nazis believed they’d be left with a Polish “nomadic labor” class that they could turn into slaves for the greater good of the Reich. To that end, Frank had every professor at the University of Krakow arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany. The Jews, on the other hand, were sent to ghettos across Poland where they would starve to death.

  The position of governor general came with the perks of unlimited confiscation and endless luxury. When American troops took an inventory of Frank’s house in southern Germany in 1945, they found a da Vinci portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, a landscape by Rembrandt, a gilded chalice, an ivory chest, and a fourteenth-century Madonna with child. The paintings had both been stolen from the Krakow Czartoryski gallery, the chalice and chest had been taken from the Krakow Cathedral, and the Madonna had been swiped from the Krakow National Museum.

  As people were starving in the Warsaw ghetto, the Franks were tireless hosts—consuming one thousand eggs each month, along with huge quantities of meat, geese, and butter at the governor’s table. Frank also owned a luxurious armored Mercedes and a private railroad car with Governor General inscribed in bronze.

  In the labor camps, the Germans gave the Jews wages of forty cents per day, which Frank considered charity rather than earnings. In 1940, he told a gathering of German soldiers that they should tell people back home that there were fewer lice and Jews in Poland these days, adding, “of course, I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year’s time.” Krakow, he said once, was “crawling with Jews so that a decent person would not step into the street.”

  In July 1941, six months after Goering signed the document that would set into motion the “final solution to the Jewish problem,” Frank sent a deputy as his representative to the Wannsee Conference in the Berlin suburbs, where Nazi officials discussed how to implement the Jewish genocide. A bizarre plan to send four million European Jews to Madagascar—which Frank supported as an alternative to sending them into Poland—had fallen through.

  Instead, the men at the conference decided that the Jews would be sent east, organized into giant labor camps, and worked to death. Those who survived would be sent to extermination camps. The evacuations to the labor camps would begin in Poland.

  “Before I continue, I want to beg you to agree with me on the following formula,” Frank told his cabinet five months after Wannsee.

  We will principally have pity on the German people only, and on nobody else in the entire world. . . . This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they just disappear. They must be done away with. . . . Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible. . . . The General Government will have to become just as free of the Jews as the Reich.

  By December 1942, the Germans had transported to the extermination camps 85 percent of the Jews of the General Government, which made for roughly 1.4 million people.

  Hans Frank was Chaplain O’Connor’s greatest success at Nuremberg. Over the winter, O’Connor rebaptized Frank, who seemed by all accounts to have been a serious student of the faith. He gave Frank a copy of Franz Werfel’s novel The Song of Bernadette, which Frank read in his cell. Werfel, an Austrian Jew fleeing the Nazis across France in 1940, fictionalized the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a nineteenth-century miller’s daughter who had seventeen visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes. Werfel first heard Bernadette’s story in Lourdes, where he and his wife had found refuge from the Nazis.

  If Frank sent thousands to the Reich’s concentration camps, it was Ernst Kaltenbrunner who received them. Ernst was born in 1903 in Ried on the Inn, Austria, a small town near Hitler’s birthplace, Braunau, and where he and Adolf Eichmann were boyhood friends.

  His father and grandfather were lawyers, and Kaltenbrunner too studied law. He set up a practice in Linz in 1926, married, and had three children. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and in 1935 became commander of the Austrian SS. The massive intelligence network Kaltenbrunner created in Austria and spread into Hungary and Yugoslavia impressed SS chief Henrich Himmler, and after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was named head of the Reich Security Main Office.

  A relative unknown among Nazi leadership at the time, Kaltenbrunner suddenly found himself controlling the Gestapo, the SD—or Security Service—and the Security Police. He had authority over the Einsatzgruppen units that roamed eastern Europe killing as many Jews as they could find, and as Eichmann’s superior, he was responsible for the administrative apparatus behind the entire concentration and extermination camp system. From January 1943 until the end of the war, it was Kaltenbrunner’s responsibility to see that the Final Solution ran smoothly.

  Kaltenbrunner was a giant man—nearly seven feet tall with massive shoulders and bulging arms. His neck was more like a block connecting his shoulders to his head. An alcoholic who smoked a hundred cigarettes a day, Kaltenbrunner’s square chin jutted forward when he spoke, which he did in a clipped, precise manner, through thin lips and crooked teeth. A scar that ran from the left side of his mouth up toward his nose was rumored to have come from a duel he fought in college but was actually the result of an accident that launched him through the shattered windshield of his car. Much of the rest of his face was pockmarked, and his eyes were narrow and brown. Rebecca West wrote that Kaltenbrunner “looked like a vicious horse.”

  By the end of the war, even Himmler was afraid of Kaltenbrunner, who was a terrifying combination of smart, devious, deceitful, and sadistic. He loved to hear about the various methods of execution used at his camps, and he was especially intrigued by the gas chambers. Unlike so many of the Nazis who were ideologues, Kaltenbrunner was loyal to no place and no one—not Austria, not Germany, not Himmler, not Hitler.

  “He was a gangster filled with hatred and resentment and plans for improving his own condition,” according to historian Eugene Davidson. He “would use any weapon to advance himself and anyone might be his victim.”

  When Kaltenbrunner took the witness stand at Nuremberg in April 1946 to defend himself, the prosecution asked him repeatedly about his association with the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. Prosecutors wanted to implicate Kaltenbrunner in the crimes that took place there, and they produced a photo of Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Himmler on either side of Mauthausen’s commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Ziereis. In the photo Ziereis stands inside the camp and points to something unknowable in the distance, possibly something beautiful.

  HIGH ABOVE THE DANUBE, on a plateau overlooking blending shades of green pastureland, purple and white wildflowers bow in the breeze. To the east, small farmhouses dot distant hills, and to the south, the snowy peaks of Mount Kremsmauer on the Austrian Alps frame the end of the Danube Valley. Atop the plateau is a granite wall enclosing Camp Ma
uthausen, and the best views of the Alpine scenery in the distance come while standing on stones that enclose a gas chamber just below. In this spot in the middle of Europe, nearly one hundred thousand people were tortured and murdered. Less than half of those killed have been identified.

  The town of Mauthausen, with its colorful ice cream shops and comfortable pubs on the bank of the Danube, is a suburb of Hitler’s childhood city of Linz, situated twelve miles northwest, up the river. In May 1938, two months after Austria was swallowed into the Third Reich, the Nazis chose Mauthausen as a site to hold Austria’s political prisoners. Inmates from the German camp at Dachau built the camp with granite from nearby quarries. By November, one thousand of the former Dachau prisoners lived and worked as slave laborers in Mauthausen. In February 1939, Ziereis was named the camp’s commandant. Nearly three thousand inmates were imprisoned at the camp by September 1939, almost all of them from Austria and Germany.

  As the camp’s population grew, so did its operations and its death toll. In 1938, as construction on Mauthausen began, thirty prisoners died, according to Ziereis’s camp death register, which he called “the book of numbers.” After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the killings at Mauthausen began to increase dramatically, and the number of those killed grew to 445. As the German war effort ramped up, Mauthausen served as the hub to an ever-increasing array of satellite camps around Austria.

  Ziereis oversaw seven SS officers and heads of divisions. Under them were ninety-one block officers and labor-gang officers, who were German SS men from the Death’s Head Battalion. Below them were kapos, typically violent criminals, who were given supervisory duties over their fellow prisoners and wide latitude to punish them as they wished.