Mission at Nuremberg Read Free Page B

Redeemer in south St. Louis, the Benders were living about four blocks from the church and a fifteen-minute walk to Otto Stifel’s Union Brewery, where Alma’s father, Jacob, worked as a brewer.
    Jacob Bender’s own father had come to St. Louis from Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Jacob married an American girl, Alma Isselhardt, from Staunton, Illinois, and they had three children. Roy and his little sisters, Alma and Virginia, grew up in St. Louis, in an apartment next to their grandparents and close enough to Jacob’s workplace—and several other breweries—that, for Alma, the earthy, sweet fragrance of hops in the wind became the smell of growing up.
    After Alma and Henry were married, on July 23, 1919, Henry moved in with his in-laws. The wedding was a happy moment in a difficult year for the family. That fall, as Henry began his second year at Concordia, the U.S. Congress adopted the Volstead Act, which enabled it to pass the Eighteenth Amendment in favor of Prohibition, putting many people in St. Louis, including Jacob Bender and his boss, Otto Stifel, out of work. The next year, Stifel—in what became a pattern for beer barons of the time—shot himself.
    The second crisis that fall emerged from the seminary itself. Studying at Concordia was something Henry had been dreaming about since high school. But the seminary, Henry was told, did not allow its students to be engaged or married (or to sing “frivolous and uncouth songs,” “read romances,” or play cards). Concordia tossed him out for marrying Alma, and he had to go to work answering correspondence in the office of New World Commercial Co., an insurance agency in downtown St. Louis. Henry feared he would never become a preacher.
    The entire family was now living above Wehrenberg’s Tavern on Cherokee Street, which Fred Wehrenberg, a former blacksmith, had opened at the turn of the century with the help of Otto Stifel and William Lemp. There was an ornately carved hardwood bar with brass tap handles, posters of beautiful women promoting various beer brands lining the walls, and sawdust covering the floor. All Fred had to do was serve the beer and the various German-style salted foods—pretzels, spiced ham, potato salad, roast mutton, sauerkraut, pickled pig’s feet—that kept customers thirsty.
    Groups gathered at tables for games of poker, bridge, or gin rummy and listened to piano and accordion music. Chess and checkers players hovered over the boards balanced on oak beer barrels. Customers huddled in “hot stove leagues” engaged in debates about boxing or baseball. In the garden, beer drinkers tossed horseshoes.
    As other bars opened nearby, Fred and his wife, Gertrude, decided on a gimmick to make themselves stand out. At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis’s Forest Park, Fred had seen an exhibit that featured a replica of a train car that people clambered into. Once they were seated, images of the Alps flickered by outside the car’s windows, giving those seated inside the impression of motion.
    Wehrenberg “saw how the crowds were flocking to the exhibit” and realized what a boon this new technology could be for beer sales. Within two years, he’d set up an annex to the saloon for motion pictures with the original bar serving as a kind of early concession stand. So when the Benders and Gereckes moved into the Wehrenbergs’ old apartment above the saloon, the bar was still lively, despite Prohibition.
    Henry was the sole provider for his now-pregnant wife, her parents, and her six-year-old sister, all living in the Cherokee Street apartment. His relationship with his own parents, already strained because Henry had married a city girl, nearly ruptured completely at the beginning of 1921 after Henry’s little sister, Nora, died of meningitis at age seventeen. Henry’s mother had begged her husband to let Nora see a