by Tim Townsend
“Here was a dying man,” thought Wiesenthal, “a murderer who did not want to be a murderer but who had been made into a murderer by a murderous ideology. He was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers. In his confession there was true repentance, even though he did not admit it in so many words. Nor was it necessary, for the way he spoke and the fact that he spoke to me was a proof of his repentance.”
Karl wanted to die in peace, and peace was only achievable through forgiveness. “In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. . . . I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.”
Wiesenthal stood up and looked at Karl’s folded hands. And then he turned around and left the room.
When he returned to the camp, Wiesenthal told his fellow prisoners about Karl. “So you saw a murderer dying,” one said. “I would like to do that ten times a day. I couldn’t have enough hospital visits.”
But another, a devout man named Josek, said that as he’d begun listening to the story of Karl, he’d feared that Wiesenthal was going to forgive the SS man by the story’s end.
“You would have had no right to do this in the name of the people who had not authorized you to do so,” Josek said. “What people have done to you, yourself, you can if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience with other people’s sufferings.”
Wiesenthal argued that he was part of a community “and one must answer for the other.” He was unsure that he’d done the right thing by remaining silent and leaving the man to die. But Josek told Wiesenthal he had done the right thing. Karl had not made Wiesenthal suffer, and what Karl had done to other people, Josek said, “you are in no position to forgive.”
“If you had forgiven him,” Josek said. “You would never have forgiven yourself all your life.” Two years later, an SS guard shot Josek for being “work-shy.”
Wiesenthal survived Janowska. He also survived Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald. When he eventually landed in Mauthausen he was assigned to Block 6—the death block. The camp’s gas chamber “was working at full pressure,” he wrote later. But it “could not keep up with the enormous number of candidates. Day and night above the crematoria there hung a great cloud of smoke, evidence that the death industry was in full swing.”
At Mauthausen, Wiesenthal befriended a young Polish man named Bolek, who had survived exhaustion, exposure, and starvation on a three-hundred-mile death march from Auschwitz only to end up in Block 6 at Mauthausen. Wiesenthal heard Bolek praying—something most of those in Block 6 had given up on—and eventually found out that the young man had been originally arrested outside the Catholic seminary in Warsaw. His time at Auschwitz had been especially difficult, because the SS guards knew Bolek was a priest in training.
Wiesenthal told Bolek about his encounter years earlier with the dying Nazi. “Should I have forgiven him?” Wiesenthal asked. “Had I in any case the right to forgive him? What does your religion say? What would you have done in my position?”
Bolek thought that Karl had turned to Wiesenthal in the hospital that day because “he regarded Jews as a single condemned community.” For Karl, Wiesenthal was a member of that community, and therefore his last chance to confess. By simply listening to Karl’s confession Wiesenthal had liberated the Nazi’s conscience and allowed him to die in peace, returned to his childhood faith through confession, Bolek said. If the man had shown sincere repentance for his sins, as Wiesenthal believed, then he deserved the mercy of forgiveness. “In our religion repentance is the most important element in seeking forgiveness,” Bolek said.
If Wiesenthal struggled with his moral authority to forgive a dying, repentant Nazi who had taken part in the massacre of Jews, what is the moral standing of a non-Jew, like Bolek, a Catholic seminarian, to offer mercy to a murderer of Jews? Christian theologians speak of a counterpart to forgiveness that’s not quite forgiveness, but more like compassion for a wrongdoer. Forgiveness entails identifying the guilt of another, placing that person in a moral universe, assigning blame, lifting blame, and then letting the person go. Compassion and mercy are analogues to that.
When Bolek told Wiesenthal that in Christianity “repentance is the most important element in seeking forgiveness,” he was not quite right. It is in this fissure that the difference exists in Christian forgiveness theology and Jewish forgiveness theology. Christian tradition has consistently said that forgiveness precedes repentance. Forgiveness can happen on its own, without repentance. Christians believe God has already accepted and forgiven them.
There are questions in the face of that Christian tenet: So all Christians just get a blank check? They can do whatever they want in their life because they’ve already been forgiven ahead of time? They’re not accountable for their behavior because Christ’s death on the cross has relieved them of that responsibility? Each Christian has already received God’s grace so they can live their lives with a lack of morality? And historically the answer from theologians is that Christians are motivated to do good because they are loved by God, not because they are threatened.
But the Christian concept of forgiveness must be strained by the idea of genocide. Could Christians really believe that their God was crucified to forgive those who conceived of the gas showers at Auschwitz or the “parachutist” jump into the quarry at Mauthausen?
In the Christian tradition, since forgiveness isn’t earned, the question about whether someone is worthy of forgiveness simply doesn’t apply. Just by being human one is worthy of forgiveness. Those who are wronged forgive the wrongdoer, not the evil deed the wrongdoer committed. Forgiveness is a way of separating the doer from the deed. The person doing the forgiving—the victim who has been harmed by the wrongdoing—acknowledges the wrongdoer’s evil deed, but doesn’t count it against him. It’s the person who is forgiven, not the deed. The deed can’t be changed. The past can’t be undone. Wrongdoers can be disassociated from the wrong. That’s what forgiveness does.
But what right does anyone other than those who died in the Holocaust have to forgive anyone for having created or participated in the Holocaust? Because the majority of the Holocaust’s victims were Jewish, it would seem right to honor the Jewish sensibilities about forgiveness. Christians like Gerecke and O’Connor would argue that they had to act toward the Nazis in their flocks, and their families, in ways that honored their deepest understanding of humanity, and its relationship to God. The chaplains believed that their duties toward the Nazis and their families revolved around how to return them to the good.
Martin Luther would have supported the idea of offering spiritual consolation to those who have committed wrongs against others. He believed every human being is both sinner and justified as righteous through God’s grace. He would have seen no principal difference between a criminal and an innocent. He would not have divided people into children of light and children of darkness. No one is innocent—neither a Gerecke nor a Kaltenbrunner—but everyone, Christians believe, is saved.
Even though Nazi war criminals had committed a different kind of wrong than ordinary people do, Gerecke would not have seen the monsters he pastored at Nuremberg as children of darkness. And he certainly would not have seen their wives and children that way. Without forgiving the deeds of those responsible for wiping out six million Jews, by the nature of their faith in God, Gerecke and O’Connor saw these men and their families as part of a single human community. Once they recognized the men in Nuremberg as just men, ministering to them, despite the horrors they’d executed, became a matter of attempting a transformation. The Nuremberg chaplains’ one single burden was to return these children of God from darkness to the good of their own light.
THE DAY AFTER THE executions, Andrus announced to the press on behalf of the Allied Control Council that the bodies ha
d been cremated and that the ashes had been “dispersed secretly.” The decision for cremation countered German law, which stated that relatives had a right to the remains. The commandant said he couldn’t elaborate on what “dispersed secretly” meant, but reporters surmised that the intention of the secret dispersal was, as the New York Times put it, “to destroy absolutely any possibility that the location of the Nazi leaders’ remains ever could become a shrine for some future brand of Nazis.”
Though Gerecke and O’Connor had wrestled with the idea of forgiveness of the men they had ministered to, the world’s media showed less mercy. For years, the stories circulating about the fate of the Nazis’ remains evoked a logic of revenge and poetic justice. For instance, in his book Justice at Nuremberg, published nearly forty years after the trials, Robert Conot wrote that the trucks carrying the bodies of the Nazis drove from Nuremberg to Dachau, where, at dawn, “the crematorium was fired up once again,” and the bodies were burned in the concentration camp’s ovens.
Though the truth was slightly less symbolic, it was no less powerful. After the trucks left Nuremberg on the morning after the executions, they drove to Ostfriedhof Cemetery on the outskirts of Munich, arriving at 9:00 A.M. The Germans who worked at the crematorium there were told that the army was delivering eleven American soldiers who had been killed and buried during the war and that their ashes were now being returned to their families. Each coffin was labeled with a fake name. Goering’s was marked “George Munger,” which was the name of the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania’s football team at the time.
Guards surrounded the crematorium and the eleven pine boxes were taken into the basement where the fires were already blazing. The cremations—which included the nooses and black hoods—lasted until 11:00 P.M. The ashes were placed in eleven aluminum cylinders sixteen inches tall and six inches around. The next day they were taken to a white stucco villa nearby that had been transformed from the home of a wealthy merchant into U.S. Army Mortuary No. 1. The grand home was perched high on a hill above a large stream called the Contwentzbach.
A group of U.S. Army officers carried the urns to the grassy bank of the stream, where they smashed the aluminum cylinders with axes and stomped them with their boot heels. The waters of the Contwentzbach carried the Nazis’ ashes to the Isar River, which took them to the Danube, and then to the sea.
CHAPTER 11
It Was You Who Invited Me Here
Christ died for the ungodly.
—ROMANS 5:6
TWO WEEKS AFTER THE executions, Gerecke received orders to return to the United States, and Chaplain Eggers took over Protestant Ministry duties at Nuremberg. In Andrus’s push to have Gerecke promoted to major, he wrote to the army’s chief of chaplains to commend Gerecke on his “sincere devotion to his faith and his constant effort on behalf of the prisoners in this jail” and to say that his efforts had “been a constant source of admiration.” He believed that Gerecke should “receive recognition for this work.”
Andrus also recommended that “after a reasonable time at home” Gerecke should return to Nuremberg “to continue his ministrations which he has already so nobly advanced.”
On the way home, Gerecke stopped in Frankfurt to see his son Hank in the hospital. He had already been there several times. Over the summer, when stationed in Bremerhaven, Hank had been severely injured in an accident. Hank, an MP officer, had discovered that a deserter was spotted an hour south of his position and had jumped in a jeep to track down the man. Just as he was heading off, a drunk soldier in a stolen two-and-a-half-ton truck smashed into him. Hank flew out of the jeep, lost consciousness, and woke up a few minutes later on cobblestones.
At the hospital, he began running a temperature, and doctors eventually discovered that the crash had ruptured his colon in three places, giving him an infection, gangrene, and peritonitis. Doctors had determined that Hank’s injuries were too severe to fly him back to the United States, and he’d been admitted to an army hospital in Frankfurt instead. At certain points during the trial, Gerecke had been worried his son might not survive.
As Gerecke disembarked in Frankfurt, a group of German teenagers ripped the suitcases from his hands and took off into the rail yard. Army MPs eventually found the cases close by. They were mostly empty, except for a pair of Goering’s gloves. The reichsmarshal told Gerecke he’d worn them only once. “I won’t need them again,” he told the chaplain. But gifts from some of the other Nazis, including a leather cigar case Constantin von Neurath gave Gerecke after the chaplain had brought cigars into his cell to celebrate the seventy-three-year-old’s birthday, were gone. Souvenirs Gerecke had collected for Alma during the war were also gone, as were the papers in another suitcase carrying extensive notes of his time in Nuremberg.
At the end of November, the army ordered Gerecke to report to Washington for two weeks to debrief the Office of the Chief of Chaplains on the trial. Gerecke was then given a leave to head home to St. Louis for Christmas before reporting to the Fifth Army’s disciplinary barracks in Milwaukee. He hadn’t seen Alma or Roy in three years.
While he was home in St. Louis, Gerecke spoke at various clubs, youth groups, churches, and high schools where he packed in audiences by the hundreds. Even Concordia Seminary now invited Gerecke to speak, even though decades earlier it hadn’t allowed him to take classes on campus. Gerecke soon found himself telling his story before a crowd of six hundred at the DeSoto Hotel downtown. The reception was being held in Gerecke’s honor, and the program included a photo of Gerecke in uniform in front of his chaplain’s jeep as well as a copy of the letter that the Nuremberg defendants had sent to Alma. Gerecke’s speech was a tour through the Nuremberg prison, and he introduced his listeners to each member of his Nazi congregation along the way.
He also told the crowd that the children of Germany, who survived the Nazi regime, needed prayer and material help. “If we will offer up some aid to the little folk of Europe, we shall do things for the Kingdom of God,” Gerecke said.
Before the event, Rev. E. L. Roschke wrote a letter to Gerecke summing up what most Lutheran pastors felt about Gerecke’s work. “How very happy and proud I am that you were placed in such a very important position of service over in Europe and that you were privileged to render such a fine service not only to your friends and fellow citizens but also to those who were our enemies,” Roschke wrote. “The Lutherans of St. Louis and your friends of the Western District, both among the clergy and the laity, are extremely proud of you.”
Over the next decade, Gerecke gave his DeSoto speech hundreds of times. He always ended it with the most dramatic and disturbing part of his Nuremberg experience—walking the men he’d come to know well to their deaths. Gerecke used his considerable preaching skills to slow his tempo and lower his voice at places where he wanted his audience to pay particularly close attention. He would pause for dramatic effect so that the old women in the audience would nearly fall off their chairs in anticipation, while ribbing veterans of the war with knowing cracks about overbearing sergeants or army food.
There was always an element of a lesson in the speech, a self-effacing acknowledgment of his clumsy efforts at converting demons back into worshippers of Christ.
“For all my own blunderings and failures with them,” Gerecke would say, “I ask forgiveness.”
And he always ended the same way, with the prayer that wrapped up his radio show, Moments of Comfort: “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.”
But now he added a new line borrowed and often attributed to Corrie ten Boom, the Christian woman who hid Dutch Jews in her house in Haarlem during the Holocaust: “And when I come to the beautiful city, and the saved all around me appear, I want to hear somebody tell me: It was you who invited me here.”
On February 1, 1947, Gerecke reported to the disciplinary barracks in Milwaukee where he began ministering to the U.S. Army’s troubled souls. His work
with most of the inmates at the barracks consisted of setting up personal visits, accompanying them to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, lecturing to men who were being released back into active duty, and making hospital visits. Those in isolation, segregation, or solitary confinement all received as much attention from Gerecke as anyone else.
As he’d grown accustomed to doing during the war, Gerecke sought out the Jewish men in the detachment and urged them to attend synagogue in Milwaukee. He later partnered with the Jewish Welfare Committee “to look after the Spiritual welfare” of the Jewish inmates.
He led Christian services for the inmates on Sunday mornings and Wednesday and Friday evenings. By the middle of 1948, fifty-five inmates were doing what Gerecke called “homework”—a correspondence course through Lutheran Hour Ministries. His flock was made up of “mostly young men whom the world wanted to forget,” he wrote later.
Before Hank had found himself in the Frankfurt hospital, he had married a nurse he met in France named Millie. In early 1947, Millie gave birth to David. The Gereckes were proud grandparents and Gerecke soon took to being “Grandpopsie,” as he called himself. After David’s birth, Gerecke wrote to his daughter-in-law, “Congratulations darling little Mother. A kiss to you and to your first-born, David Henry. You are Mother, Hank is Daddy, I’m Grandpop and Browneyes is a pretty Grandmother. Corky is Unk and so is Roy. . . . From now on I shall speak of my grandson.”
When Gerecke wasn’t busying himself with the army’s rehabilitated soldiers and with his grandson, he was officiating at weddings, baptisms, and funerals at the base. He also started a Wednesday evening “Youth for Christ” Bible study for the young adults on the post. He made sure there was a good organ on hand for hymns, and a decent organist to play it, and he began a bus service to pick up personnel on Sunday mornings from parts of the base that he believed were too far for them to walk to chapel.
