Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Gerecke had been afraid of this moment. A committed member of his congregation was asking for the most central sacrament of the church with his final wish. Yet Goering had just disparaged the foundations of the Christian faith. Gerecke knew Goering was, like Rosenberg, Gottgläubig. As a rationalist Goering wanted to go through the motions, believing none of the mysteries of the Church while retaining some insurance in case Christianity really represented the truth.

  “I cannot with a clear conscience commune you because you deny the very Christ who instituted the sacrament,” Gerecke said. “You may be on the church roll, but you do not have faith in Christ and have not accepted him as your savior. Therefore, you are not a Christian, and as a Christian pastor I cannot commune you.”

  Then Gerecke revealed his last card. “Herr Goering, your little girl said she wants to meet you in heaven.”

  “Yes,” Goering said slowly. “She believes in your savior. But I don’t. I’ll just take my chances, my own way.”

  Gerecke thought at that moment Goering would request a German pastor, but Goering said nothing more. Defeated, Gerecke left the cell and moved on.

  Goering read in bed for thirty minutes before getting up and walking to the toilet in the corner of his cell, out of view of his guards. He urinated and then he sat back down on his bed to take off his boots and put on his slippers. He was agitated and restless. He picked up his book, walked to the table in his cell with it, and picked up his reading glasses and then put them down. He moved his suspenders and some writing utensils, placing them on a nearby chair.

  At 9:15 P.M., Goering changed into his silk pajamas and got into bed, covering his chest with his hands. His left hand kept moving between his body and the cell wall while he massaged his forehead with his right hand. As usual, the prison lights were turned down at 9:30 P.M. The cell lights dimmed and the overhead corridor lights were turned out.

  At 10:40 P.M., Goering turned his head to the wall and lay that way for a few minutes. Then he placed his hands at his sides again, and clenched his jaw hard, breaking the glass vial of potassium cyanide he’d placed in his cheek moments before. His guard, Private Harold Johnson, saw Goering stiffen and make a blowing, choking sound through his lips. Goering began grabbing at his throat and gurgling.

  The Cardinals had tied the Red Sox, and the chaplains and a handful of guards were waiting impatiently in the guard office for the next call when they heard Johnson’s voice.

  “Goering’s having some kind of spell!” Johnson yelled. He began unbolting the door as the acrid smell of bitter almonds wafted out of the cell.

  Gerecke and prison officer Lieutenant Norwood Croner arrived within seconds. The chaplain pushed past Johnson and moved toward the cot. Goering, froth coming from his mouth, was “gurgling into death,” Gerecke thought. His heart was still beating, but his eyes had rolled back in his head and the gurgling sound continued. His right arm dangled over the side of the cot. Gerecke picked up Goering’s hand and felt for a pulse.

  “Get the doctor, this man’s dying!” Gerecke yelled at Croner.

  Goering was turning green, and his gasping was growing fainter. His toes were beginning to curl toward the soles of his feet. Gerecke leaned down to Goering’s ear. “The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all our sins,” he said.

  The prison doctor, a German POW named Ludwig Pfluecker arrived, and Gerecke stepped back to let him take Goering’s pulse. It was fading.

  “He’s dying,” Pfluecker said.

  He realized Goering was not having a heart attack, but had swallowed poison, something he had no experience dealing with. Pfluecker yelled for someone to wake Charles Roska, the prison’s American doctor.

  Pfluecker pulled back the blanket covering Goering to check his heart and found two white envelopes in Goering’s left hand. He handed them to Gerecke, telling the chaplain to remember later that he had done so. Gerecke looked inside and found the cartridge case where Goering had hidden the cyanide and folded pieces of paper.

  When Roska arrived at 11:00 P.M., the bitter almond smell was stronger, and Goering’s skin had turned from green to gray. One eye was partly open and dilated. His mouth was also slightly open, and Roska could see glass shards on Goering’s tongue.

  Captain Robert Starnes, the chief prison officer, had also arrived by then. Gerecke turned to Starnes.

  “He’s dead,” Gerecke said, and handed Starnes the white envelopes, which were later classified top secret.

  Within an hour, a three-man board of officers was formed to investigate the suicide. Investigators found a good deal of silk among Goering’s belongings, including a silk dress shirt, a silk robe that was folded under his pillow, two pairs of silk socks, and silk underwear. Investigators also removed a pair of U.S.-made sunglasses, a shoeshine rag, a deck of playing cards, a book of cigarette papers, a quarter-full carton of Velvet tobacco, an eighth-full carton of Edgeworth tobacco, a full sack of Durham tobacco, six books, and two magazines.

  Gerecke later wrote in his chaplain report that Goering had “denied every fundamental doctrine of the Bible. He hinted at Communion, but since he denied the Lord Jesus as Savior, I could not commune him,” Gerecke noted. “Had he been sincere in his quest for Christ and Salvation, he would not have gone the way he did.”

  And yet, something nagged at Gerecke. He worried that he had failed Goering. The reichsmarshal had point-blank asked him about receiving the sacrament—a clear indication that Goering was ready to listen. Gerecke wondered if his rigid ministry with the Lord’s Supper had kept him from understanding how to reach Goering.

  Indeed, other Lutheran pastors later criticized Gerecke for withholding Holy Communion from Goering. Gerecke always defended his decision—he’d been Goering’s pastor, and he knew better than anyone how the Nazi viewed Christianity. But he also noted to his accusers that he was only human, and that it was possible he’d been wrong.

  “If I blundered in my approach to reach this man’s heart and soul with the meaning of the Cross of Jesus, then I’m very sorry,” he later wrote. “I hope a Christian world will forgive me.”

  The envelopes found on Goering’s body contained four suicide notes. The first, addressed to the Allied Control Council, began, “Would that I be shot!” Hanging the German reichsmarshal cannot be permitted, he continued, “therefore I elect to die as the great Hannibal did.”

  Historians have since concluded that another note, addressed to Andrus, was meant to deflect blame from the person who had helped Goering secure the potassium cyanide. Most likely, that person was Tex Wheeler, an American MP.

  “Since my imprisonment I have always kept the poison capsule on my person,” Goering wrote, describing where and how he had hidden three capsules. No one in charge of the “frequent and very thorough” searches of his cell “was at fault because it was almost impossible to find the capsule,” he wrote.

  The other two notes were addressed to Gerecke. In the first, Goering wrote, “Dear Pastor Gerecke, please deliver this last letter to my wife.” In that note, Goering told Emmy, whom he greeted as “My heart’s only love,” that his life had “closed when I last bid you farewell.” He told her that after “intimate prayer to God,” he had decided to take his own life:

  Since then I have been filled with a wonderful tranquility and I perceive death as the last redemption. I take it as a sign from God that through all the months of imprisonment he left me with the means to free me from earthly worry and that it was never discovered. Thus God in his kindness spared me the worst. All my thoughts are of you, Edda and our loved ones. The last beats of my heart beat our great eternal love.

  Your Hermann.

  Goering directed the last note to Gerecke. “Forgive me but I had to do it this way for political reasons,” Goering wrote. “I have prayed for a long time to God and feel that I am acting correctly. Would that I might be shot. Please console my wife and tell her that mine was no ordinary suicide and that she should be certain that God will take me into his grace .
. . God bless you, dear Pastor.”

  Investigators later questioned Gerecke because he was one of the first to arrive at Goering’s side as he was dying. The Russians were especially suspicious of Gerecke’s relationship with Goering.

  But in the suicide’s immediate aftermath, Gerecke had other things on his mind. Within minutes, Andrus asked him to tell the other prisoners what had happened and to warn them that they would be closely watched. Some of the men told Gerecke that Goering’s suicide was a “craven” act. Many of them had heard Goering boast about how brave he would be to the end.

  Andrus and those in charge of the executions began to panic over Goering’s death, and they briefly considered carrying his body into the gallows on a stretcher so that Andrus could tell the press Goering had fainted and then hang the corpse.

  A sense of urgency animated the prison as Andrus was determined to make sure the executions took place without more mistakes. Eight journalists—two from each of the four allied countries—had been selected from a lottery to be the pool reporters. They’d been brought into the prison at 8:00 P.M. and sequestered in a windowless room. At 11:30 P.M., Andrus told them about Goering, but he did not release them to contact their editors. If they wanted to witness the executions, they had to stay. A hundred other reporters waited in the Palace of Justice pressroom. They’d been warned not to wander or lean out the windows. Guards had been given orders to shoot.

  Andrus ordered guards to handcuff themselves to each of the condemned men’s left arm. This would leave the prisoners’ right hands free to eat their final meals. Gerecke and O’Connor made a final round of visits to the cells, and the prisoners were told to dress in their court clothes. Streicher refused and was forced into them by guards.

  At 12:25 A.M., the execution team, along with the doctors, press, and other witnesses, were led across the courtyard and into the gym. It was a cold night. A drizzling rain fell, and snow threatened. Wind whipped through clothing. MPs at the gym door checked each person’s pass.

  At the same time, those working the executions inside the gym were given their instructions. A member of Andrus’s staff would lead the prisoner to the gym door and knock. One of the MPs with the execution team would open the door as Andrus and the prisoner walked three steps inside.

  Andrus had wanted to allow each prisoner to walk from his cell to the gym without handcuffs, but Goering’s suicide had prevented that. Once inside, Andrus would remove the prisoner’s handcuffs and leave the chamber, symbolically relinquishing him to Lieutenant Tilles’s staff, the MPs of the Third Army’s provost marshal.

  Two MPs would hold the prisoner by the arms, walking him toward the gallows. Two more MPs would follow, trailed by Gerecke or O’Connor and an interpreter. The prisoner would be led to members of the tribunal witnessing from a table near the gallows and asked to state his name.

  Then one pair of MPs would lead him up the thirteen steps of the gallows to the platform and a chaplain would follow. The other MP pair would go behind the black curtain that would hide the dangling body. When the doctors present pronounced the man dead, the MPs would cut down the body and place it on a stretcher. They would then take it behind another black curtain where a plain pine coffin was waiting.

  At 1:00 A.M., Andrus, trailed by two German officials, several guards, and the chaplains, went from cell to cell reading the sentences for each man—Tod durch den Strang! the interpreter called to each. Death by the rope. As the party left each cell, one of the chaplains spoke for a moment with the prisoner inside.

  Goering would have been the first to hang, but now that position fell to Hitler’s foreign minister. From the second tier, Speer heard Andrus’s voice: “Ribbentrop!” A cell door opened. Speer heard muffled voices and the scraping of boots.

  Gerecke entered the cell and prayed with Ribbentrop as Andrus waited outside. Ribbentrop said he “put all his trust in the Blood of the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world. He asked that God have mercy on his soul.”

  When Ribbentrop was ready, Andrus called through the door. “Follow me,” he said. Speer heard their footsteps reverberating in the corridor before they slowly faded away. Sitting upright on his cot, his hands icy, he was barely able to breathe.

  Andrus led Ribbentrop out across the exercise yard thirty-five yards to the door of the gym. Gerecke and O’Connor followed. O’Connor wore his Franciscan habit, which consisted of a brown robe designed in the shape of a cross and tied at the waist by a white cord that ended in three knots, signifying the Franciscan vows.

  “It was a long walk,” Andrus wrote later, “for all of us.”

  When they arrived at the gym door, Andrus took off his burnished steel helmet and bowed. Ribbentrop returned the gesture.

  Andrus’s knock startled the execution team, which had been waiting in silence inside the gym. When the door opened, Ribbentrop walked in and shielded his eyes from the bright lights. It was 1:11 A.M. He blinked and looked around the dusty, grimy room.

  Andrus removed Ribbentrop’s handcuffs and left the gym. He had overseen these prisoners for too long to watch them die.

  As the MPs took his arms, Ribbentrop saw the members of the tribunal, German officials, U.S. Army officers, and journalists sitting at the eight folding tables across from the gallows.

  The MPs walked Ribbentrop over to face the tribunal members and asked him to state his name. He did so, and they led him to the gallows. He paused for a moment before walking up. Gerecke followed.

  At the top of the steps, the MPs tied Ribbentrop’s hands behind his back with the leather bootlaces, then tied his legs together with an army web belt.

  As he stood on the trapdoor, he spoke his final words—a wish for peace in the world. Then he looked at Gerecke.

  “I’ll see you again,” he said.

  Gerecke spoke a brief prayer, and the moment he said “Amen,” Woods draped a black hood over Ribbentrop’s head, followed by the noose. Woods looked at the provost marshal officer and waited for the signal. It came quickly, and Woods pulled the hangman’s lever. Ribbentrop dropped through the trapdoor at 1:16 A.M.

  Gerecke and O’Connor walked out of the gym, back across the wet yard, and into the prison corridor where they waited for the signal to bring in the next man.

  Speer again heard Andrus from the second tier. “Keitel!” Again, the cell door opened, and Gerecke walked in to pray with the man he would later call “my friend.”

  “Our period of prayer in his cell was drenched with his tears,” Gerecke later wrote.

  As they walked through the courtyard, Keitel recited Bible verses in German that Gerecke couldn’t decipher. He also all but hummed the melody to Johann Friedrich Raeder’s nineteenth-century hymn, “Harre, Meine Seele” (“Await, My Soul”).

  At the top of the gallows, Keitel said his final words, and then he recited a prayer that his mother taught him when he was a child. Gerecke’s mother had said the same prayer with him when he was young, and now the two men prayed it together: “Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit, das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid; darin will ich vor Gott bestehen, wenn ich zum Himmel werd eingehen. Amen.” “Christ’s blood and judgment are my adornment and robe of honor; therein I will stand before God when I go to Heaven. Amen.”

  Keitel turned to Gerecke. “I thank you, and those who sent you, with all my heart,” he said.

  Woods pulled the black hood over Keitel’s head and the noose around his neck and adjusted it. Keitel dropped at 1:20 A.M., and the chaplains returned to the prison.

  Inside the gym, both Ribbentrop and Keitel were hanging, but still alive, so the proceedings came to an awkward pause while the doctors waited to pronounce each man dead. A colonel from the provost marshal’s office finally spoke up and asked the tribunal to allow smoking. The four judges conferred and granted permission and nearly everyone produced a cigarette. As smoke filled the gym, the only sound was the scratching of reporters’ pens, the buzz from the overhead lights, and the groaning of the two ropes. At 1:30 A.M
., the doctor declared Ribbentrop dead. The MPs cut down his body, and Woods secured a new rope on the first gallows. Keitel was pronounced dead at 1:33 A.M.

  Six minutes later, the chaplains walked in with Kaltenbrunner, and O’Connor escorted him up the gallows steps. “I did my duty according to the laws,” Kaltenbrunner said when he reached the top, looking to one observer like “a haggard giant.” “I regret that crimes were committed in which I had no part. Good luck, Germany.” He dropped at 1:39 A.M.

  Rosenberg, his cheeks sunken and complexion pasty, entered the gym next. He had refused all Gerecke’s attempts at ministry, and before he died, he also refused to make a final statement. In his cell, when Gerecke asked for permission to say a final prayer, Rosenberg smiled and said, “No, thank you.”

  As Gerecke prayed next to Rosenberg on the platform, Rosenberg stared straight ahead, ignoring him. He dropped at 1:49 A.M., and again the proceedings silently came to a halt in a cloud of smoke as the officials waited for Kaltenbrunner and Rosenberg to die.

  A doctor declared Kaltenbrunner dead at 1:52 A.M., and four minutes later, O’Connor escorted a smiling Hans Frank into the chamber.

  Earlier in the evening, when Gerecke had been talking to Goering for the final time, O’Connor had been doing the same with Frank. The two men had prayed together from the service of Christ on Golgotha, when Jesus was dying on the cross. Later in the night, after the prisoners were woken and told the executions were to begin, O’Connor had given Frank Communion.

  Before leaving Frank’s cell for the gym, O’Connor traced a small cross on the prisoner’s head, mouth, and chest—the way Frank’s mother had when he was a child. As they walked to the execution chamber, just before 2:00 A.M., O’Connor gave him the last blessing of the church and forgiveness. Frank was quiet and asked the priest to tell his family that he died well, that he had accepted his death as punishment and penance for his past. As they entered the gym the men were praying to St. Joseph for a good death.