Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Gerecke had learned that photographers were camped out to get pictures of Emmy, and so he devised an alternate route out of the building that required them to exit the interview area on the other side of the partition. They passed the chair that Hermann had just been sitting in. Emmy stopped and put her hand on it. The chair was still warm.

  After Gerecke got Emmy out of the building, he went to Goering’s cell. Goering told Gerecke that it didn’t matter what happened to him now. He had died when he’d left his wife upstairs.

  THE U.S. ARMY HAD already been hanging men for several months. Even before the Nuremberg trials started, in June 1945 the Dachau trials had begun one hundred miles to the south, inside the former concentration camp. Unlike the Trial of the Major War Criminals at the Palace of Justice, the U.S. military conducted the Dachau trials to bring to justice concentration camp personnel, Nazi officials, and German civilians. Until December 1947, the U.S. Army prosecuted 1,676 lesser war criminals in 462 trials. One of the first of those trials was for officials of Dachau, and in December 1945, thirty-six were sentenced to death and sent to War Criminal Prison Number 1, or Landsberg Prison, where Hitler and Hess had spent their time after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, writing Mein Kampf.

  In May 1946, the U.S. Army’s executioner, Master Sergeant John Woods, hanged twenty-eight men. Woods oversaw the construction of two gallows, which would make the process more efficient. The army hanged seven men each morning and afternoon on two successive days. Among them were Dachau’s former commandant and a seventy-four-year-old doctor who had killed four hundred prisoners while experimenting with malaria.

  Woods learned his trade as a teenager from a neighbor who was a prison hangman, eventually becoming the man’s assistant. Woods was a short, stocky Texan who, while on duty, was a competent, friendly, and respectful soldier. But he was also a belligerent drunk off duty with a seething hatred for Germans. During the Battle of the Bulge, the German army had massacred several of his friends at Malmedy, Belgium, after taking them as prisoners. Those responsible had been tried at Dachau.

  Lieutenant Stanley Tilles, who coordinated the Landsberg and the Nuremberg hangings, also was an expert in the field. “Hanging does not immediately kill a man,” he wrote later:

  However, in a proper hanging he loses all consciousness and feeling the moment the large coils of the noose snap his neck. At that point his brain is disconnected from his body and his respiration stops. Complete cession of his heart beat, the official determination of death, occurs within eight to twelve minutes after he drops. During that time he does not gasp or choke; he may have bitten off his tongue and lost control of his bowels when his neck snapped, but he would not be aware of either.

  After their work at Landsberg, army officials ordered Tilles and Woods to team up again. This time all the planning would be top secret. The army drafted papers stating that Tilles would be assigned to register army vehicles. In fact, he and Woods, along with a team of five military police officers, would spend from August until October coordinating the Nuremberg execution plan, constructing three mobile gallows at Landsberg, then secretly transporting them to the Palace of Justice 125 miles away.

  On October 3, 1946, Colonel Phillip C. Clayton, provost marshal—head of the military police—for the U.S. Third Army, told Tilles the Nuremberg executions would take place in the early morning hours of October 16. Clayton said Tilles, Woods, and their team of MPs would arrive at the Palace of Justice under cover of darkness, set up the gallows, perform the executions, dismantle the gallows, and leave Nuremberg as soon as possible the same day. To keep the execution team’s arrival secret, the army would issue orders for Woods and the MPs to join the 6850th and to take up quarters at the Grand Hotel. All orders would be verbal. There would be no paper trail assigning anyone to the execution.

  The three gallows had three parts each—the frame, which had to be bolted together, the platform, and the steps. When assembled, the platform was eight feet high and eight feet wide, with thirteen steps leading up the front. A heavy black curtain obscured the area beneath the platform where the bodies would drop. The trapdoor was in the center of the platform, and the hangman’s handle that released it was at the rear. An eyebolt used to secure the rope sat in the middle of the frame, which formed a square arch several feet over the platform. The entire gallows was fifteen feet high.

  The men had timed themselves putting the gallows together and estimated it would take eleven to twelve hours to assemble them in the Palace of Justice. Woods spent hours testing them, stretching his ropes, making eleven black hoods, and tying nooses. By October 10, he had thirteen nooses, one for each of the condemned men and two extras. He packed a duffel bag full of leather bootlaces and army web belts that would be used to tie the prisoners’ hands and feet together. Clayton told Tilles that they were to leave for Nuremberg the morning of October 14. Three semitrailer trucks would deliver the gallows the day before.

  The prisoners began to hear the sound of hammering. Speer was irritated at first, thinking someone was carrying out repairs at night. Then it dawned on him what was happening. “Several times I thought I heard a saw; then there came a pause, finally several hammer blows,” he wrote in his diary. “After about an hour, complete silence returned. Lying on my cot, I could not shake off the thought that the executions were being prepared. Sleepless.”

  Tilles’s team did most of the gallows assembly on October 15. The executions would take place in the gym. The team blacked out the windows and hung a long black curtain from the basketball hoop to obscure eleven coffins before finishing the gallows. They were told to stay within the confines of the Palace of Justice until they received their final instructions at 11:00 P.M.

  As Tilles’s team worked, the chaplains went from cell to cell on the ground floor, sitting with each man for a few minutes, listening as they “unburdened their hearts,” Gerecke later wrote, “because they felt they were soon to go into eternity.”

  That morning, Andrus had summoned Gerecke and O’Connor to his office. He told them the condemned men would be awakened at 11:45 P.M., served a last meal, and then walked to the gym. The executions would begin just after midnight. Andrus had ordered the chaplains not to tell the men, nor anyone else, of the execution plans. They shouldn’t know until they were woken up that night, he had told them. The day should proceed normally.

  In the afternoon, as the chaplains visited the men’s cells, O’Connor asked Kaltenbrunner, Frank, and Seyss-Inquart whether they would like to confess their sins and receive Communion. Their eyes grew large as they realized why he was asking. What did he know? they demanded. Would it happen at dawn tomorrow?

  O’Connor told them he hadn’t heard anything.

  Gerecke sat with each of the six condemned men in his charge—Goering, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, and Frick—and delivered a copy of a devotion he’d written in German for them. He asked them each to join him in a prayer he’d also written. Only Rosenberg refused. “No, please do not,” he said to Gerecke.

  Goering demanded to know what was going on with the execution timetable. He was also refusing to leave his cell, and he was adamantly against exercising or showering. He took all the family photos that had decorated his flimsy table and put them in an envelope for this attorney. In the early afternoon, Goering requested a visit from Gerecke. “What time are the executions scheduled for, Pastor?” Goering asked. Gerecke didn’t answer.

  The reichsmarshal was a likable man, and Gerecke wished he could have been honest with him. Even Chaplain Carl Eggers, who hadn’t known Goering for as long as Gerecke, called him a “good-natured charmer” with “a good sense of humor.” Eggers had been surprised that Goering also knew quite a bit about the Bible. “Of all the doomed men, he impressed us the most,” O’Connor said later. “You felt that with his brain, he could have accomplished a lot.”

  Goering had been fascinated with baseball, and he often discussed the game with O’Connor during routine visits. He wanted to know ab
out the Dodgers and how baseball worked as a business. “Is there money in it?” Goering would ask. O’Connor told him that Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager, made $90,000 a year. “Maybe I should have gone into that business,” Goering had said.

  The World Series was on the radio that night, and Gerecke’s St. Louis Cardinals were playing. In between visiting the prisoners in their cells, Gerecke and O’Connor hurried to the guard booth to get caught up on the score. There was ten dollars at stake between the two chaplains.

  At about 3:15 P.M., Otto, the prison’s German librarian, had brought Goering a book and some writing paper. A kitchen worker brought Goering tea fifteen minutes later, and he began writing a letter. Around 7:30 P.M., Gerecke returned to Goering’s cell, number 5, in a final attempt to get him to accept Christ. Goering had been a regular at the prison chapel, but he had resisted Gerecke’s efforts to bring him more seriously into the fold of the church. Gerecke told Goering he’d written a special devotional for him. Goering told the chaplain to leave it on his table. He’d read it later. What he really wanted to discuss was the executions.

  Gerecke tried again to steer the conversation toward how a man prepares his soul for death. He asked Goering to join him in prayer. No, Goering said. He would watch Gerecke pray from his cot.

  Gerecke thought Goering seemed more depressed than he had earlier, which was not surprising given what was coming. Goering asked how the other men were doing. In particular, he was concerned about Sauckel, whom he could hear crying and moaning with fear. He asked Gerecke if he might be able to see Sauckel to help him get through this.

  Then he started in on the method of execution again. Hanging, Goering said, was a most dishonorable way for him to die, given his former position with the German people.

  Gerecke didn’t respond. He’d heard this same complaint dozens of times from Goering since the sentencing. Silence fell between them.

  Somewhat desperately now, Gerecke tried one last time to engage Goering on the “eternal values and how a man can be prepared to die, to meet his God.”

  “Surrender your heart and soul completely to your savior, Herr Reichsmarshal,” he said.

  Goering was in no mood to listen. For the last time, Goering told Gerecke that he was a member of the Christian church, but that he couldn’t accept the teachings of the Christian faith. He began to make fun of the creation story in the Old Testament. He ridiculed the idea that the Bible was written by scribes divinely inspired by God. He refused the fundamental Christian doctrine of atonement—that Jesus, through his suffering and resurrection, died for the forgiveness of man’s sin and to reconcile God and his creation.

  Gerecke pleaded with Goering. “This is what Jesus said,” Gerecke told him. “This isn’t what Gerecke is saying, but this is God speaking to you. Won’t you accept this? Just say, ‘Jesus, save me.’ ”

  “No!” Goering barked. “I can’t do that. This Jesus you always speak of—to me he’s just another smart Jew.”

  “Herr Reichsmarshal,” Gerecke said. “This Jesus is my savior who suffered, bled and died that I may go to heaven some day. He paid for my sins.”

  “Ach!” Goering yelled. “You don’t believe that yourself. When one is dead, that’s the end of everything.”

  In a softer tone, he continued, “Pastor, I believe in God. I believe he watches over the affairs of men, but only the big ones. He is too great to bother about little matters like what becomes of Hermann Goering.”

  He fell silent for a moment. Then he looked at Gerecke.

  Pastor, he said finally, “how do you celebrate the Lord’s Supper?”

  Gerecke was astonished. “You claim membership in the church,” Gerecke said. “You must be familiar with its sacraments.”

  THE LORD’S SUPPER—THE CHRISTIAN sacrament of Holy Communion—was particularly meaningful for Gerecke. As a Lutheran, the chaplain believed that when Christ offered bread to his apostles at the Last Supper, telling them it was his body, it actually became his body. When bread and wine were consecrated in Gerecke’s Lutheran church, those in the pews had been taught to believe the body of Christ was “truly present . . . in, with, and under” the elements of bread and wine.

  In Holy Communion, some Christians believe God is mitigating their suffering through the sacrifice of Christ, his son. Their sins disappear each time they receive Communion and they grow a little closer to God. These convictions stem from Christianity’s central belief in atonement.

  After Christ’s death, his apostles continued to meet together, and early Christian believers received Communion in their homes on Sundays. The tradition of Sunday Mass—indeed the idea of “church”—grew directly out of Holy Communion, or the Eucharist, which derives from the Greek word eucharistia, meaning “thanksgiving.” Eucharistic traditions are mentioned in an early-second-century Christian instruction manual called The Lord’s Teaching to the Heathen by the Twelve Apostles, or simply the Didache—the Teaching. The pages of the manual lay out how Christians should organize their churches and worship services.

  The Didache echoes the New Testament with a warning: “You must not let anyone eat or drink of your Eucharist except those baptized in the Lord’s name. For in reference to this the Lord said, ‘Do not give what is sacred to dogs.’ ” Similarly, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that “whoever . . . eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all those who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.”

  The church waited one thousand years to debate formally the theology of the Eucharist. Was it actually Christ’s body and blood? In the thirteenth century, the fourth Lateran Council answered that question in the affirmative and the term transubstantiation entered the Christian lexicon. The council’s conclusions followed from a long line of tradition still practiced in the Roman Catholic Church today. Christ’s followers believed that those who consumed his flesh would receive grace and become united with him, and that the living bread of Christ would keep them supernaturally alive forever. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die . . . the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

  In the Roman Catholic tradition, “when a priest consecrates the elements of bread and wine, the accidents of bread remain the same but the substance is miraculously changed by the power of God into the body and blood of Christ,” writes historian of Christianity David Steinmetz. “The bread and wine still feel, smell, taste, and look like bread and wine, but appearances in this case are deceiving. The reality which is present is Christ himself.”

  The nature of the Eucharist was central to Martin Luther’s idea of church reform, and in the early sixteenth century he rejected the concept of transubstantiation. He argued that the church had invented transubstantiation to give priests the power to perform a miracle by changing bread into the substance of Christ. Yet, he also disagreed with other reformers who said Christ’s substance was completely absent from the Eucharist and that bread and wine only symbolically represented Christ’s body and blood.

  Luther’s compromise was a 1527 tract called That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics, in which he argued for an idea that combined his own beliefs about the sacraments with a theory about the promises between God and men. According to Luther, in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, God promises to be present for each of his children. “It is one thing if God is present, and another if he is present for you,” Luther wrote. “He is there for you when he adds his Word and binds himself saying, ‘Here you are to find me.’ ” Those who follow the Lutheran doctrine believe that Christ was making a promise to his apostles when he said, “This is my body.” For Lutherans, this promise, or covenant, ran through Chris
t’s apostles to all believers and bound them to a promise that they would remember him in return for his body.

  In many ways, Lutherans tried to simplify the logic of the sacrament: here’s what Christ said. We trust Christ. The rest is a mystery. For instance, Lutherans speak of “partaking” of Holy Communion because in doing so, Christians trust Christ’s promise that their sins are forgiven. When Lutherans say it is a “means of grace” that God uses to pour out grace upon those who received the sacrament, they are alluding to Christ’s exercise of grace in establishing the covenant with his followers to forgive all of man’s sins.

  This philosophy also informs the Lutheran understanding of the sacraments. The church reformers who crafted the Augsburg Confession, the sixteenth-century foundational document of the Lutheran Church, wrote that in “the Holy Supper the two essences, the natural bread and the true, natural body of Christ, are present together here on earth in the ordered action of the sacrament, though the union of the body and blood of Christ with the bread and wine is not a personal union, like that of the two natures of Christ, but a sacramental union.”

  The wording “in, with, and under,” is crucial for Lutherans because the phrase means that the bread is simultaneously both bread and body, and that wine is both wine and blood.

  IN GOERING’S CELL, GERECKE reminded Goering of the church doctrines, emphasizing that only the truly penitent should partake. He had administered communion to Keitel, Ribbentrop, Sauckel, Raeder, Speer, Fritzsche, and Schirach because they had requested it and had suffered through a great deal of self-examination under Gerecke’s guidance.

  “Herr Reichsmarshal,” Gerecke said. “This is the way it is: Only those who believe that Jesus is really their savior, who believe in him who instituted the supper should be permitted to attend the Lord’s Supper. The others are unfit.”

  “I have never been refused the Lord’s Supper by a German pastor,” Goering said. “Never.”