by Tim Townsend
Gerecke’s speaking engagements outside the disciplinary barracks continued during his free time. His talks in Milwaukee and surrounding Wisconsin towns—to men’s clubs, Lutheran churches, rotary clubs, and Jewish centers—now expanded to nearby cities, such as Chicago, Joliet, Valparaiso, Minneapolis, and Omaha. “I still feel that I have never in all my life heard any address that impressed me so much as your story,” one teacher wrote to Gerecke after hearing him speak in Fort Wayne.
By March 1947, just a month after he was back to work, Gerecke had pieced together a report that the Office of the Chief of Chaplains had requested about his time at the trials. The report contained almost the same stories he’d been telling at public events and he’d hoped to publish it in two installments over the summer in a Lutheran church magazine called the Walther League Messenger.
At the end of March, Gerecke received a letter from Washington telling him the War Department’s public relations division had rejected his report for publicity purposes.
“It is felt that the nature of the contents of the report is too personal to divulge and that it might possibly be construed as a betrayal of confidence by some readers,” Major Matthew Imrie of the Chief of Chaplains office wrote. Imrie also wrote to the editor of the Walther League Messenger, explaining that the report “revealed intimate confidences which were deserving of the secrecy of the confessional. The War Department discourages anything that would possibly suggest to men that chaplains did not zealously guard intimate knowledge and confidences.”
Gerecke reworked the report and resubmitted it to the War Department claiming that he had worked out the kinks. Yet, privately, Gerecke fumed at the hypocrisy of the War Department, which had asked him to exploit POW confessions for strategic information in England during the war. Their accusations that he had betrayed the confessional in Nuremberg implied he had committed the worst ethical breach a pastor could make. He knew what it was to keep confessional confidence, and in his report he had never crossed that line. In April, the War Department approved for publication the second version, titled “My Assignment with the International Military Tribunal as Spiritual Advisor to the High Nazi Leaders at Nuernberg, Germany, November 1945 to November 1946.”
O’CONNOR ALMOST NEVER SPOKE of his experience at Nuremberg, even though he was pursued by magazine editors and book publishers who were eager for him to tell his story. Instead, he went about teaching at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure College, and Siena College, where he eventually chaired the philosophy department.
O’Connor served as vice president of Siena from 1956 until 1964, though he spent a great deal of his time caring for the flower gardens on campus. While he didn’t talk about his wartime experiences, his students often called him a “chatterbox” on many other subjects. He also liked a cocktail at night and even gambled a bit at Saratoga Race Course thirty miles north.
O’Connor loved teaching, but he considered himself primarily a priest and missionary—especially in his work with the Nazis. A Franciscan missionary is both preacher and confessor, according to the Reverend Bede Hess, a former minister general of one of the three branches of the Franciscan order. As a preacher, the Franciscan missionary “moves his hearers to repentance,” wrote Hess, but in the confessional “by the God-given power of absolution he forgives their sins, and grants peace and pardon in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Hess invoked the Gospel of Luke, instructing confessors to “be merciful, as your Father also is merciful” to the young, perplexed, weak, the less disposed and indisposed, the shamelessly sinful and the obstinate. According to Hess, the confessor should “expend his zeal” toward the shamelessly sinful.
In 1983, O’Connor was at the Franciscans’ headquarters in Manhattan when a newly ordained Franciscan priest came to him with an ethical dilemma. The new priest had just heard the confessions of two murderers at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, known as “New York’s confessional” because everyone from cops to Wall Street bankers to mobsters traveled to it for penance. After the priest heard the confessions, he went to O’Connor and asked if he’d been right to absolve the murderers of their sins. “Yes, you give them spiritual counsel, a worthy penance and unconditional absolution,” O’Connor said. Then O’Connor gripped the younger priest’s arm. “You absolve them of their sins, but you don’t absolve them of their actions,” he said.
That same year, O’Connor gave up attending to all the flowers on Siena’s campus. At seventy-four, the strain of being on his feet had become too much, though he planned a full teaching schedule for the fall. On a Sunday morning in July 1983, the deacon at the local parish church arrived at the Siena friary to pick up O’Connor so the priest could celebrate the 10:00 A.M. Mass. He found O’Connor dead in his bed. He’d had a heart attack in his sleep in the middle of the night.
Thirty priests and fifty friars helped celebrate his funeral Mass three days later, then buried him in St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands, New York. At the funeral, Siena’s president, Father Hugh Hines, said that O’Connor was a man who “gave totally of himself.” And though O’Connor had been a popular professor, “He not only taught philosophy, he was a true philosopher.”
IN 1949, THE GERECKES left Milwaukee. After Gerecke served a nine-month stint at Fifth Army Headquarters in Chicago, the army relieved him of active-duty service and he was “installed” as an assistant pastor of St. John Lutheran Church. The church, on a bluff above the Mississippi River in the small town of Chester, Illinois, was small with a white steeple and made of brick. Gerecke’s installation took place on a Sunday evening. Eight hundred people jammed into the tiny church and others spilled out of its doors. The Reverend H. C. Whelp, president of the denomination’s Southern Illinois district, performed the installation service and the congregation sang an eighteenth-century hymn, “Come, Thou Almighty King.”
They then heard a passage from Isaiah 35: “Say to them that are of a fearful heart, be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense; he will come and save you.”
The congregation at St. John’s accepted the Gereckes immediately, even becoming a bit possessive of the couple and their time. “We soon realized we would have to ‘share’ them with everyone in the community—black and white, rich and poor, members of the church and non-members,” wrote Eileen Gordon, St. John’s secretary.
Gerecke’s gentleness with others continued through his years in Chester. “If the sun wasn’t shining in your life that particular day, it surely was after his cheerful smile,” Gordon wrote. “When someone writes of Pastor Gerecke, they must write of love, because this, indeed, was the essence of the man,” she continued. “He was the personification of caring—caring for all the children of God.”
Gerecke may have loved everyone in Chester, but he was frustrated by the reluctance of some parishioners to make financial contributions to the church. He groused about the man who would give only if he happened to have something left over from his paycheck at the end of the week. “And then, he expects God to know that He was mighty lucky to get that,” Gerecke would say. At the same time, he didn’t want people’s money if it was coming to the church for the wrong reasons. After an extensive stewardship campaign one year to raise church money, Gerecke told his congregation, “Don’t give unless it’s from the heart. Because if it isn’t, it won’t help the church, or you.” The sermon “probably motivated more people than all the letters and pamphlets and pleas our committee had sent out,” Gordon wrote.
Later in the new year, Gerecke told his Nuremberg story to Merle Sinclair, the wife of veteran Milwaukee Journal crime reporter Frank Sinclair, best known for his coverage of the famous 1934 shootout between federal agents and John Dillinger’s gang at the Little Bohemia Lodge in the northern Wisconsin woods. The result was a first-person narrative of Gerecke’s year in Nuremberg that Sinclair wrote for the Saturday Evening Post that September.
Reaction to the story was mixed. More requests for Gerecke to speak to audi
ences rolled in, but so did hate mail calling Gerecke a “Nazi lover.” These letters were painful, but not as much as the letters from Jewish Americans who called him an anti-Semite who had conspired with, and offered redemption to, men who had set out to destroy the Jewish people. Instead of throwing the letters away, Gerecke hid every piece of hate mail in the compartment behind the drawers of his desk as a reminder that his attempt to save Nazi souls could be interpreted in so many different ways.
On February 4, 1951, the church put on a concert to honor Gerecke’s twenty-five years as a pastor. The seven musical numbers—with new words to well-known songs—were a sort of “This Is Your Life” for Henry and Alma. One, set to the tune of “Sweet Genevieve,” was a tribute to the Gereckes’ three decades of marriage.
Sweet Alma Bender
My Alma Bender
You are so sweet, you are so tender
My love songs I to you will render
Will you be mine,
Sweet Alma Bender.
Gerecke preached at St. John’s every other Sunday, but when he was not in church he spent the rest of his time doing other jobs. Some days he would minister to the bedridden at Chester Hospital, while on others he acted as a chaplain to two Chester veterans’ groups—the VFW and the American Legion. The men in the groups regarded him as a sort of celebrity member. Gerecke also began doing radio work for a show he created called Courage for Today on KSGM 1450 AM. The Saturday program featured Gerecke remembering “the people in nursing homes and shut-ins,” Gordon wrote, “people who had been removed from the main stream of community life and who were probably forgotten by most of us.”
Often Gerecke would dedicate a birthday song on the program to an older person living in a home. Shortly afterward he might visit the same person’s bedside as he lay dying. Often the elderly Lutherans were German farmers, and Gerecke would lean close and offer the Lord’s Prayer in German to remind them of their youth and homeland.
Most of Gerecke’s time was spent as chaplain at the Menard penitentiary, a maximum-security facility filled with twenty-five hundred murderers and rapists who he believed needed to hear the Gospel in the most desperate way. The inmates manufactured much of the underwear, clothing, caps, gloves, furniture, brooms, brushes, and other necessities utilized in the prison. Those who could be trusted to leave the prison walls worked a three-thousand-acre farm, planting and harvesting fruit, vegetables, grain, and tobacco. They helped care for herds of cattle.
Gerecke’s work paid him little and wasn’t easy. When he first arrived, prisoners were suspicious that he was an undercover snitch sent by prosecutors to gather information. At first, Gerecke only attracted sixty prisoners to his services. But Gerecke’s fascination with technology helped him. In 1953, the chaplain tapped into television broadcasting and began showing inmates 16 mm film episodes of a half-hour drama called This Is the Life, created for network television by the Lutheran Church. The warden gave Gerecke permission to show the episodes in the prison’s auditorium on a large screen.
The show was often casually referred to as The Fisher Family after the fictional midwestern family it portrayed. Each episode dealt with a problem such as racism, infidelity, or alcoholism, which was eventually tackled using a Christian solution.
Attendance at services soon quadrupled, and Gerecke had more requests for personal counseling sessions than he had time for. The chaplain told a church magazine, The Lutheran Witness, that as a result of the TV show, men who had considered Christianity irrelevant to their own lives suddenly made a connection with God. “Pastor, I never knew what it was all about but that picture made it plain as day,” one prisoner told Gerecke, according to the magazine. “If only I had seen that picture a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t be here now.” Another prisoner who had been coming to the This Is the Life screenings for a few months tearfully told Gerecke, “If I had never seen these pictures, I would never know that Jesus is my savior. God bless you, Chaplain.”
Gerecke not only worked in the correctional facility, but also the State Security Hospital, which was often referred to as “North 2.” There was no chapel in North 2 so Gerecke held his services in the dining hall, where about 150 men from the hospital’s 600 patients sat on benches at long tables bolted to the concrete floor.
Here, like every other place Gerecke had preached, music was a dominant feature, and a member of St. John’s accompanied Gerecke to the asylum to play the piano. Gerecke always encouraged the men to sing the hymns loudly as he walked among their tables, smiling and singing just as loudly. As he walked, they reached out to him, and he grasped their hands or gave their shoulders a squeeze of encouragement.
“The inmates looked to Rev. Gerecke for compassion, for friendship, and for assurance of God’s forgiveness,” Gordon wrote.
The warden of the prison, Ross Randolph, was a Christian man, a former FBI agent, and a prison reformer. His motto at Menard was “prisoners are people,” and he hoped, he wrote, to build an atmosphere among the inmates “to reclaim the maladjusted lives of men who have failed to conform to the demands of modern society.”
Gerecke had written in a Lutheran magazine of an inmate at the Menard psychiatric hospital he called only “Otto—No. 25,281,” whom he considered “troubled” by Satan. Otto had been baptized as a Lutheran, but “his mental capacity was not strong enough to carry through those spiritual imperatives his Christian faith dictated.”
Gerecke was nevertheless able to slowly bring Otto back to the church. When Otto took Communion for the final time, Gerecke wrote that he “saw teardrops of repentance fall into the little cups on the tray. He cried for heavenly love and got it, assurance of forgiveness and all the blessings with it.”
Otto died the following day. His family had provided no money for a funeral service, and a relative told prison officials the family didn’t want the body. They asked the prison to bury Otto for them. Gerecke had what he called a “gentlemen’s agreement” with his flock that if they died in prison, Gerecke would try and have them buried in St. John’s Lutheran cemetery. St. John’s senior pastor, Rev. Eric Cash, and the church’s cemetery committee gave Gerecke the approval to bury Otto there. Ross Randolph provided the casket and clothing. The town funeral director prepared the body, as well as arranging for transportation from the prison hospital to the cemetery and the grave preparation.
Gerecke did not specify what crime Otto had committed, but by the time Otto died, he was completely alone in the world. Others may have concluded that, as a criminal, Otto got what he deserved, but Gerecke could barely make it through the service without breaking down. No one aside from Gerecke and the gravedigger was at the cemetery, and yet the chaplain had difficulty conducting the burial ritual.
“Otto got the same reading all ‘asleep in Jesus’ get,” Gerecke wrote. “The wrens, the sparrows, blackbirds, and crows furnished the music” as Otto was lowered into his grave, not far from where Gerecke himself would soon be laid to rest. “The prodigal son, the lost sheep, returned this time to his heavenly home in the spirit of the publican who said: ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner,’ ” Gerecke wrote—an echo of Fritz Sauckel’s last words just before Gerecke watched him disappear through the trapdoor in the Nuremberg gymnasium.
“Just a number, perhaps to some,” Gerecke wrote of Otto, “but a precious blood-bought penitent believing soul who, unworthy of himself and unwelcome among his own people, heard the angels of heaven rejoice when he came ‘home.’ ”
In 1956, Menard welcomed Orville Enoch Hodge as an inmate. Hodge didn’t fit the profile of the penitentiary’s violent inmates. The burly, backslapping former politician had pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.5 million in state funds over four years as state auditor, the equivalent of $13 million today. Hodge had been a golden boy of the Illinois GOP and had been viewed as a future candidate for governor. The Chicago Tribune had even called him “the model of a successful small-town businessman and politician.”
As an auditor, Hodge’s main responsib
ility had been preventing the forging of state warrants authorizing the expenditure of public funds. However, the Chicago Daily News exposed the fact that Hodge had taken the money from his warrants and bought two private planes, four cars, a mansion on Lake Springfield in the state capital, and an apartment in Fort Lauderdale. The Daily News won a 1957 Pulitzer Prize for teasing apart Hodge’s crimes.
When Hodge arrived at Menard, Randolph had Gerecke take charge of the politician. Randolph had also connected Gerecke with prisoner David Saunders, who edited the monthly Menard Time. With these influential inmates, Gerecke was able to spread the Christian Gospel more effectively through the prison.
Hodge and Gerecke piped Christian programming directly into the inmates’ cells whether they wanted it or not. Hodge helped Gerecke run the A/V equipment to screen Lutheran TV shows in the auditorium, while Gerecke helped Hodge get his life back together. Each Tuesday at 8:00 A.M., Hodge and Gerecke met to discuss the “kites,” which were requests for a counseling session with the chaplain that Hodge had collected from his fellow inmates. The two men would then go over each prisoner’s permanent record and Hodge’s notes to gauge the length of time Gerecke would spend with each prisoner.
In 1961, Hodge wrote that he’d experienced “many, many lonesome days and nights during the past five years of my imprisonment”:
Most of us have faults that are secret from others. Yet, by contrast, others’ faults are known and are associated with them throughout life. A person in prison is more or less blessed in that his imperfections are known and his debt to society satisfied. Pastor Gerecke contends, and I agree, that a person who has completed his penal sentence and returned to the free world should be accepted by society. . . . I pray that my heart will not falter or my faith weaken. Being Chaplain Gerecke’s “helper” has brought me an association I will always cherish.
Hodge believed Gerecke so inhabited the Christian way of life that when he saw Gerecke, he often thought of a sixteenth-century English prayer that Gerecke had taught him: “God be in my head, and in my understanding / God be in mine eyes, and in my looking.” The prayer was typed into a small, three-ring journal of sermons and notes that Gerecke kept. At any given moment, he could page through the journal for a scripture reference, a verse from a favorite poem, or a full sermon outline.
