Mission at Nuremberg Read Free Page A

for man, and man’s redemption from sin through Christ’s death on the cross.
    Gerecke was very slow to give Holy Communion to a new, or returning, Christian. He needed to be convinced that a candidate not only understood the significance of the sacrament, but that, “in penitence and faith,” he was ready for it. This was the real reason Gerecke took the Nuremberg assignment. These were men who had spit on the notion of traditional Christianity while promoting an idea that a cleansed Germany would mean a better world and a more pure future. They had broken a contract with God, set down in the Ten Commandments, and Gerecke believed his duty as a Christian minister was to bring redemption to these souls, to save as many Nazis as he could before their executions. After studying the sacrament during the first months of the trial, Keitel asked Gerecke if he could celebrate Communion under the chaplain’s direction. The general chose the Bible readings, hymns, and prayers for the ritual and read them aloud. He kneeled by the cot in his cell and confessed his sins.
    â€œOn his knees and under deep emotional stress, [Keitel] received the Body and Blood of our Savior,” Gerecke wrote later. “With tears in his voice he said, ‘You have helped me more than you know. May Christ, my Savior, stand by me all the way. I shall need him so much.’ ”
    Henriette von Schirach, the wife of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, who was also on trial at Nuremberg and was a member of Gerecke’s prison flock, spoke to Gerecke shortly after the verdicts were announced by the court. Gerecke had given a sermon about the trial from the pulpit of a small, five-hundred-year-old church he pastored in Mögeldorf, a village in the eastern part of Nuremberg, where his congregation was mostly other American officers and enlisted men, with a few Germans included.
    â€œThe church was half destroyed and one could see the sky through the burnt-out roof,” Schirach wrote. “Gerecke preached in English. His subject—the executions. He did not want our men”—the Nazi prisoners—“to be killed.”
    Gerecke told Schirach the executions would take place in the gymnasium of the prison, not—as rumored—in public, in the square outside Nuremberg’s great St. Lawrence Church where Hitler had spent hours reviewing the troops as they marched past during the Nuremberg rallies.
    â€œGerecke had made friends with Field Marshal Keitel, Hitler’s military adviser,” she wrote. “They were about the same age, but Keitel’s sons had been killed or captured while Gerecke’s sons were alive. Physically there was a certain resemblance between them—both had short grey hair and jovial expressions. The pastor was bound to take the farewell from the prisoner very hard.”
    After reaching the top of the thirteen steps of the gallows, Keitel was asked if he had any last words.
    â€œI call on the Almighty to be considerate of the German people, provide tenderness and mercy,” he said. “Over two million German soldiers went to their death for their Fatherland. I now follow my sons.”
    A United Press account reported that the field marshal then “thanked the priest who stood beside him.” Then the executioner pulled a lever, and just twenty minutes after Gerecke and Keitel had first kneeled in prayer on the general’s cell floor, Keitel dropped through the platform’s trapdoor.
    In the seconds that followed, the only sound in the gym was the creaking of the rope against its huge steel eyebolt at the top of the gallows. Gerecke walked out into the rain to retrieve the next prisoner.

CHAPTER 2
    Zion
    God our Father has made all things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything and whoever does not have faith will have nothing.
    â€”MARTIN LUTHER
    I N 1918, WHEN HENRY met Alma Bender, at the Lutheran Church of Our