Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  And, over the summer, life among the occupiers in Nuremberg went on. On August 10, Gerecke officiated at the wedding of Anna Likovska, a Czech citizen working in Jackson’s office who was living at the Grand Hotel, and Captain Daniel Sullivan of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Regiment at the church in Mögeldorf. Andrus was a witness.

  Gerecke was also receiving inquiries from German clergy who were curious about “the spiritual welfare of the defendants,” he wrote. In some cases, the pastors left Gerecke with sermons they encouraged him to read to the defendants. “Because of the possibility of some hidden message in these manuscripts, I have never used them,” he wrote. Though “I am deeply grateful for all good intentions.”

  On August 31, 1946, the prisoners made their final statements to the tribunal.

  Goering claimed prosecutors took the defendants’ words and documents they signed out of context. “The Prosecution brings forward individual statements over a period of twenty-five years, which were made under completely different circumstances and without any consequences arising from them at the time, and quotes them as proof of intent and guilt, statements which can easily be made in the excitement of the moment and of the atmosphere that prevailed at the time,” he said. “There is probably not one leading personage on the opposing side who did not speak or write similarly in the course of a quarter of a century.”

  Goering said he hadn’t wanted war, and indeed had tried to prevent it, but that after war broke out he had done everything to assure Germany a victory. “I stand up for the things that I have done, but I deny most emphatically that my actions were dictated by the desire to subjugate foreign peoples by wars, to murder them, to rob them, or to enslave them, or to commit atrocities or crimes,” he said. “The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, [Germany’s] happiness, its freedom, and its life. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people to witness.”

  Hess, whose mental state was constantly in question by Nuremberg officials, had written a letter to his wife the night before. “You most certainly heard over the radio that there has been another ‘miracle’ and I have completely recovered my mind,” he wrote. “I hope you will see the humorous side of all this.” Hess cited the writings of his mentor, the geopolitician Karl Haushofer. “Karl once wrote that for the sake of a great cause one must be able to suffer the strain of seeming to one’s own people, for a time, to be a traitor. To that I would add, or seem to be crazy.”

  In his final statement, Hess focused on a pair of “glazed and dreamy eyes.” Hitler, he said, was not “normal mentally during the last years.” In those years, “the Führer’s eyes and facial expression had something cruel in them, and even had a tendency towards madness.” Hess said that during his imprisonment in England, people with “strange eyes” had visited him.

  Fritzsche wrote that Hess’s statement was “a pitiable exhibition, painful for all of us.” Goering and Ribbentrop tried to get him to stop, pulling on his sleeve. “Shut up!” they pleaded. Hess, gaunt and wild-looking, yelled at them. “They were glassy and like eyes in a dream,” he continued.

  Justice Lawrence, president of the tribunal, interrupted Hess and asked him to conclude, which he did in a bewildering encore:

  I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history. . . . I am happy to know that I have done my duty, to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything. . . . Some day [I will] stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.

  Ribbentrop was next. He told the court that the trial “will go down in history as a model example of how, while appealing to hitherto unknown legal formulas and the spirit of fairness, one can evade the cardinal problems of twenty-five years of the gravest human history.” Hitler’s foreign minister said that when he looked back “upon my actions and my desires, then I can conclude only this: The only thing of which I consider myself guilty before my people—not before this Tribunal—is that my aspirations in foreign policy remained without success.”

  Hans Frank, who had attempted suicide after being caught by the Allies, was in utter despair, and he began his closing statement by discussing Hitler’s suicide. Hitler “left no final statement to the German people and the world,” Frank said. “Amid the deepest distress of his people he found no comforting word. He became silent and did not discharge his office as a leader, but went down into darkness, a suicide. Was it stubbornness, despair, or spite against God and man?”

  Frank had handed over his diary to American GIs when he was captured in 1945. He “revealed his ruthlessly brutal actions,” Speer wrote. “But in Nuremberg he freely confessed his crimes, abjured them, and became a devout Catholic; his capacity to believe fervently and even fanatically had not deserted him.” In fact, during the trial, Frank had come closest of any of the defendants to admitting his guilt on the witness stand.

  When his own attorney asked Frank, “Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews?” Frank’s reply had been “I say ‘yes.’ ”

  He had continued,

  And the reason why I say “yes” is because, having lived through the five months of this trial, and particularly after having heard the testimony of the witness, Hoess, my conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never installed an extermination camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally has laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought against Jewry for years; and we have indulged in the most horrible utterances—my own diary bears witness against me. Therefore, it is no more than my duty to answer your question in this connection with “yes.” A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

  Now four months later, Frank was prepared to take back the essence of his confession. He said,

  There is still one statement of mine which I must rectify. On the witness stand, I said that a thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon our people because of Hitler’s conduct in this war. Every possible guilt incurred by our nation has already been completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct of our war-time enemies towards our nation and its soldiers, which has been carefully kept out of this Trial, but also by the tremendous mass crimes of the most frightful sort which—as I have now learned—have been and still are being committed against Germans by Russians, Poles, and Czechs, especially in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and Sudetenland. Who shall ever judge these crimes against the German people?

  Yet Frank did not leave the Nazis off the hook completely. Nazi leaders, he claimed,

  perhaps as never before . . . still bear a tremendous spiritual responsibility. At the beginning of our way, we did not suspect that our turning away from God could have such disastrous deadly consequences and that we would necessarily become more and more deeply involved in guilt. . . . Hitler’s road was the way without God, the way of turning from Christ, and, in the last analysis, the way of political foolishness, the way of disaster, and the way of death.

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Hitler’s chancellor of Austria and later Frank’s deputy in Poland, told the court that Hitler “remains the man who made Greater Germany a fact in German history. I served this man. And now? I cannot today cry ‘Crucify him,’ since yesterday I cried ‘Hosanna.’ ”

  Fritz Sauckel told the tribunal he was:

  shaken to the very depths of my soul by the atrocities revealed in this trial. In all humility and reverence, I bow before the victims and the fallen of all nations, and before the misfortune and suffering of my own people, with whom alone I must measure my fate. I come from a social level completely different from that of my comrades accused with me. In my nature and thinking, I remained a sailor and a worker.

  During Keitel’s pretrial interrogations by Th
omas Dodd, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg, the former field marshal contemplated taking full blame for his orders to keep responsibility from flowing down to his subordinates. Keitel’s lawyer signaled to the prosecution that his client would contemplate a deal, but prosecutors wouldn’t make any promises. Rather, Dodd suggested that Keitel do whatever his conscience told him was right.

  A confession from Keitel would possibly have mitigated his eventual sentence, “but Keitel was used to acting not on suggestions but on orders from superior officers,” wrote historians Ann and John Tusa. Keitel consulted Goering, who told him under no circumstances should he break ranks with the rest of the defendants. Keitel wrote to his attorney that after rethinking the idea, he’d changed his mind. He would not confess.

  Keitel said during his testimony that he knew nothing of the concentration camps or conditions in the POW camps. He said he only knew about military plans at the very last minute, when Hitler gave him an order to sign. He also said he knew nothing about the handover of prisoners to the SD—the elite intelligence agency founded by Himmler to rival the Gestapo and that rooted out “enemies of the state.” During cross-examination in April 1946, Keitel had implied that turning suspects in to the SD was akin to placing them in police custody.

  But British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had asked him to be honest. “You have been at this trial too long to think that handing people over to the SD means police custody,” Maxwell Fyfe had said. “It means concentration camps and a gas chamber, does it not?”

  Keitel admitted under questioning by Dodd that he had knowingly transmitted criminal orders from Hitler. Justice Lawrence asked Keitel if he’d ever made any protest in writing against any of Hitler’s policies. Keitel could not think of a single time when he’d done that.

  Patrick Dean, a member of the British Foreign Office, said after Keitel’s testimony that the field marshal was “truthful and decent according to his own standards, but his standards are those of a savage.” Until the last portion of the trial the Nuremberg judges and prosecutors saw Keitel as “a weak, if not pathetic, instrument of crime.” They thought he was “confused and shaken,” and that during the trial he’d grown “older, greyer and more grizzled.”

  Now, the court was ready to hear Keitel’s final words. “At the end of this Trial,” Keitel said, “I want to present equally frankly the avowal and confession I have to make today.” He spoke as honestly as he felt he could:

  In the course of the trial my defense counsel submitted two fundamental questions to me, the first one . . . was: “In case of a victory, would you have refused to participate in any part of the success?” I answered, “No, I should certainly have been proud of it.” The second question was: “How would you act if you were in the same position again?” My answer: “I should rather choose death than to let myself be drawn into the net of such pernicious methods.” From these two answers the High Tribunal may see my viewpoint. I believed, but I erred, and I was not in a position to prevent what ought to have been prevented. That is my guilt. It is tragic to have to realize that the best I had to give as a soldier, obedience and loyalty, was exploited for purposes that could not be recognized at the time, and that I did not see that there is a limit even for a soldier’s performance of his duty. That is my fate. . . .

  Keitel’s honesty was rare, and it impressed many. By admitting his weaknesses and therefore, his guilt, Keitel earned something that approximated respect from one or two of the judges and prosecutors. Prosecutor Telford Taylor wrote that the testimony was “the bravest and most thoughtful statement made that day. Keitel had blamed nobody but himself and had acknowledged his own weakness and blindness.” Taylor added, “As I sat at the American prosecution’s table and heard those balanced words, ‘meine Schuld’ (my guilt) and ‘mein Schicksal’ (my fate), I was much moved.” Airey Neave, a member of the British prosecution team, said Keitel spoke “with great dignity.”

  Even Keitel’s codefendants saw something different in him after his time in court. Speer told the prison psychologist that Keitel’s statement was “more honest” than Goering’s. “He not only said that he assumed responsibility for orders he signed, but admitted that they were crimes and that he knew that he would have to suffer the consequences.” Fritzsche wrote, “We had got into the habit of disparaging Keitel’s intelligence and of accusing him of spinelessness. We had called him ugly nicknames. But in the witness stand he displayed not only a keen, logical mentality, but more courage than most.”

  When the defendants had all delivered their statements, Lawrence announced that the tribunal would adjourn while the judges considered their verdicts. After all the time the chaplains had spent with the prisoners, the next ten weeks would prove to be the most intense.

  The prisoners were tense and nervous during the first weeks between the end of the trial and the announcement of the verdicts. Most read or wrote in their cells. Speer, for instance, began writing his “memories of the twelve years with Hitler,” which would one day become his best-selling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. He was able to get the first hundred pages to a friend in Coburg by smuggling them out of the Palace of Justice through one of the chaplains.

  Hans Frank was also working on a memoir. O’Connor smuggled it out of the prison to Frank’s attorney, Alfred Seidel, who had his secretary type the document. The attorney then returned the manuscript to O’Connor, who gave it back to Frank to make corrections, and then smuggled it out again. The epigraph of the manuscript was from Goethe: “To him entrapped in such torments and partial guilt / His God has given voice to utter what he must endure.” After Frank’s death, his wife, Brigitte, published the manuscript, In the Face of the Gallows, herself, peddling it to right-wing Catholic institutions in Germany to feed her children.

  While some of the defendants wrote, others moodily took their short exercise walks in the courtyard. Gerecke held a “devotional service” every night after dinner, and the thirteen Protestants came each time. “It was gratifying to see the working of the Holy Spirit on some of these men,” Gerecke wrote.

  The chaplains agreed they should petition the tribunal to allow the defendants to see their families. Lawrence wrote back, “Have them come before the verdict.”

  Burton Andrus notified the wives that they could come to Nuremberg with their children to see their husbands. The army put the families in nearby homes and provided them with security. After the families arrived, Gerecke helped those wives who were scrambling to maintain a normal existence for their children. He brought them whatever he thought would help—coffee, bedsheets, flour, cigarettes.

  Some of the defendants, including Keitel, asked their wives not to come. “I am too emotionally unstrung, and I simply can not bear up under it,” Keitel told Gerecke. Hess also refused to see his family. Hess’s son Wolf said later he understood why: “He would not show the victors he accepted their dictates and wishes,” Wolf said. “It would have been humiliating to him to have seen us in that way. It is very clear to me. He saw visiting as a moral concession to those who took it upon themselves to sit in judgment upon him.”

  Erich Raeder couldn’t see his wife because the Russians had taken her prisoner. The tribunal had ordered her released for the visit, and even Lawrence had personally taken up the cause to secure her freedom. Yet, when Gerecke went to the Nuremberg airport several times to meet her, she never arrived. The Russians never explained why they didn’t put her on a plane. In fact, the Russians kept Raeder’s wife imprisoned until September 1949 without ever charging her with a crime, except for, as Raeder later wrote, “that of being my wife.” Raeder’s two children did visit the prison to see him.

  For the families that did arrive, Gerecke arranged hour-long visits through his office. For any that were too difficult to set up, the chaplains resorted to desperate measures to bring the families together. In one instance, according to Schirach’s wife, O’Connor smuggled Schirach’s son Richard into his father’s cell under his uniform coat.


  Either Gerecke or O’Connor accompanied the family members to the visitation room and sat next to them while they talked. The first visits were emotional and difficult, even for the chaplains. The families sat on one side of a screen, the prisoner sat on the other side with his guard. The defendant was not allowed to touch his family members or pass anything through the screen.

  Gerecke had surmised that several of the mothers were Christian, though he knew he’d have some problems with Annelies Ribbentrop, whom he considered “the most ungodly woman I ever met.” In their visit, Gerecke overheard Ribbentrop plead with his wife to have the children baptized and bring them up in the church. She gave in, and Gerecke later helped her arrange for the baptism of their children at the church in Mögeldorf.

  For the most part, however, Gerecke thought the wives were “unassuming.” Elisabeth Sauckel, mother of ten, was “simple and kind,” he thought. Julius Streicher’s wife was being held at Nuremberg as a trial witness. Getting her to the visitation was easy—guards simply escorted her down from another wing of the prison.

  Gerecke had traveled to Sackdilling, thirty miles northeast of Nuremberg, to tell Emmy Goering that she and her little daughter, Edda, could visit her husband.

  “I almost flung my arms around his neck,” she wrote later.

  Gerecke considered Emmy a woman of “considerable grace and charm.” He told her about the visiting restrictions such as the guards, mesh screens, and no touching.

  “I was shocked by this at first,” Emmy wrote, “and then I thanked Pastor Gerecke for having warned me so that I would have time to get used to the idea.”

  Emmy and Hermann Goering’s first meeting was emotional. They hadn’t seen each other since just after the war, seventeen months earlier. Emmy wanted desperately to kiss her husband, but Andrus’s rules kept them apart.