Mission at Nuremberg (15 page)

A compromise between the two allies put the final number of major war criminals to be tried at twenty-two, which was reduced after Robert Ley committed suicide. Some of the candidates would represent entire factions of the Nazi machinery, making for a dubious legal proposition since one man would stand for whole forces under the Hitler system. Hans Fritzsche, for instance, would represent the Third Reich's propaganda ministry in the absence of its chief, Joseph Goebbels, who had killed his wife, his six children, and himself in Hitler's Berlin bunker the day after the führer's suicide. Walter Funk and Hjalmar Schacht would represent Hitler's economic apparatus. Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl would represent the German army, the Wehrmacht.

The United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union would each seat one judge and one alternate on a tribunal. Each state would also staff a prosecution team to argue the cases against the defendants and Nazi organizations.

The tribunal arguably was considering “retrospective justice—creating crimes in order to punish them.” Some legal minds in the West regarded the concept suspiciously, and the defendants and their counsel accused the tribunal of imparting victor's justice. In fact, the Soviet Union had already committed three of the four crimes listed in the formal indictment against Germany that came months later.

In July 1945, Robert Jackson wrote to Lord Wright of Durley, the new chair of the U.N. War Crimes Commission, outlining the plan for a major trial. The defendants, he wrote:

 

• 
Entered into a common criminal plan or enterprise aimed at establishment of German domination of Europe and eventually the world. A plan that went back “many years before the commencement of the war” and that would result in “atrocities and other crimes.”

•  Invaded other countries, in breach of treaties between nations, and planned and launched wars of aggression.

•  Violated the laws, rules and customs of war, part of a criminal enterprise that was calculated to result in mass murders and ill-treatment of prisoners of war and civilians.

• 
Persecuted political, racial and religious populations as part of their criminal enterprise both inside and outside Germany.

 

“Those offenses were committed by members of the SS, the Gestapo, Nazi party leaders, Third Reich government officials and groups within the military establishment,” Jackson wrote. “Accordingly, the defendants should be individuals who led those organizations, such as Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and others.”

Jackson went on, “The objective would be to try all the leading defendants in a single main case before an International Military Tribunal, where we shall prove the broad criminal plan and such specific acts as may be desired. Defense of sovereign unity and superior orders would not be entertained.”

The four powers settled on the basic structure of the trial in August in a document known as the London Agreement and Charter, which created the International Military Tribunal. After the Allies' conference, Jackson publicly stated that for the first time, “four of the most powerful nations have agreed not only on principles of liability for war crimes and crimes of persecution, but also upon the principle of individual responsibility for the crime of attacking the international peace. . . . If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner's dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something towards making the peace more secure.”

The trial would be awkward, Jackson said, because the Allies would be knitting together Anglo-American criminal procedure with European continental criminal procedure. It would be slow, he said, because every word spoken in the tribunal would have to be translated into English, German, French, and Russian. “But I do not think the world would be poorer,” he said, “even if it takes a month or so, more or less, to try these men . . .”

Ultimately, the Allies would have to summon all that they had “of dispassionate judgment to the task of patiently and fairly presenting the record of these evil deeds in these trials,” Jackson said. “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.”

Jackson's ability to summon dispassionate judgment took conviction, but organizing the prosecution's case for the trial of the century within a few months took a lot of sweat and worry. As a start date approached, Jackson's staff of attorneys and his assistant grew increasingly anxious about their readiness. On September 6, Telford Taylor wrote Jackson a memo that opened with the words: “We are all worried about.” Among his worries were: “The fact that the list of defendants is in many respects not representative of the accepted purpose of our mission,” “the fact there are more defendants within the scope of our mission than can be readily dealt with in one proceeding,” “the fact that the evidence in hand to date does not ‘mesh well' with the published list of defendants,” “drafting an indictment against these defendants with only a little of the evidence at hand,” and, finally, “lots of other things.”

On October 19, 1945, prosecutors filed an indictment that was broken into the four charges that Jackson had previously outlined for Lord Wright. One of those was that Germany had persecuted various populations of Europe based on politics, race, and religion.

Religion was something the Allies were also going to have to contend with, specifically, whether to supply the architects of the Holocaust with a Christian minister to comfort their spirits as they explained to the world the murder of six million Jews. The decision for adding this provision had come late and was possibly more controversial even than putting the Nazis on trial.

But those organizing the tribunal knew that if they were going to try some of the world's most notorious criminals for war crimes, they also had to follow the Geneva Convention. Article 16 of the convention's regulations regards the “Treatment of Prisoners of War” and states that prisoners of war are permitted “complete freedom in the performance of their religious duties, including attendance at the services of their faith. . . . Ministers of religion, who are prisoners of war, whatever may be their denomination, shall be allowed freely to minister to their co-religionists.”

The Allies had been capturing war criminals for years. As victory, and with it the certainty of holding many more prisoners, loomed in February 1945, General Omar Bradley, leader of the Twelfth Army Group, wrote a letter to the commanding generals of several U.S. Army units. Bradley stated that all war criminals would be “granted the protection and privileges afforded by the Geneva Convention.”

Several months later, the army's European Theater of Operations headquarters under General Dwight Eisenhower issued “Standing Operating Procedure No. 49: Employment of Prisoners of War,” which outlined regulations for the religious rights of POWs, allowing for the freedom to attend religious services, for clergymen who were POWs to minister to prisoners, for visiting ministers to privately administer to the spiritual welfare of prisoners, and for officers at POW camps to bring in ministers from other camps.

Visiting clergy were to “discuss only matters which pertain to their religious duties” and were not to—among other things—“deliver to, or receive directly from, prisoners any letters, papers, documents or articles.”

 

BEFORE THE NUREMBERG TRIALS,
there are no records of American military chaplains being assigned to provide religious support to the enemies of their country. Throughout history, captured clerics typically ministered only to their own flocks in prisoner-of-war camps where they, too, were prisoners.

But the strict security at Nuremberg made it impossible to assign German army chaplains to look after the spiritual needs of Hitler's inner circle. Instead, with the world's attention turned to postwar Germany, the Allies decided that despite the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity leveled against the defendants, these men deserved spiritual succor. So the U.S. Army gave the men two of its own. This would be something new for the army chaplaincy. An experiment.

The trial had not yet begun when Gerecke arrived in Nuremberg on November 15, 1945, to join the 6850th Internal Security Detachment—Andrus's Nuremberg prison unit.

“You're going to find another chaplain downstairs,” Andrus told Gerecke as the commandant led him out of his office after that first meeting. “He'll be your assistant.”

In the small chaplain's office, Gerecke met chaplains Sixtus O'Connor and Carl Eggers. The men filled in Gerecke on the particulars of each of the twenty-one prisoners, the witnesses, and other Nuremberg prisoners whose souls they would be responsible for.

Along with Gustave Gilbert, Gerecke and O'Connor were the only members of the prison staff who spoke German. Gerecke was impressed with O'Connor's accent. “How does a man with a name like O'Connor speak German so well?” Gerecke asked him. O'Connor explained that his mother spoke German as he was growing up, and he'd studied the language since high school. He said he'd come to Germany to study theology in Munich before the war.

As a child, Richard O'Connor, the son of a schoolteacher and construction worker who'd come to upstate New York from Ireland, had enjoyed a classical education studying the works of Virgil, Cicero, and Horace in Latin (and getting mostly Cs). He spent the latter half of his college years at St. Bonaventure in New York in philosophy classes: logic, cosmology, criteriology, ethics, metaphysics. His grades were average—mostly Bs and Cs. In theodicy—the study of why a good and loving God allows evil—he got a B.

As O'Connor had grown as an intellectual, he became interested in how modern philosophy and science were attacking “the great Doctors of the Church.”

“Materialism and positivism have attempted to replace scholastic thought as the guiding light to truth,” he wrote in St. Bonaventure's literary magazine,
The Laurel,
in 1926. In Italy's universities, “science had absorbed philosophy and religion proclaiming itself the infallible guide to man in his unceasing search for truth.”

O'Connor was writing about one of his heroes, Agostino Gemelli, an Italian scientist and a Franciscan. If science was infallible, Gemelli thought, the Catholic Church was only “the symbol of all that is ignorance and superstition,” according to O'Connor.

Gemelli became a successful doctor and scientist, but toward the end of the nineteenth century, O'Connor wrote, “Europe began to throw off the fetters of positivism and fanatic idealism and to return to the only true guide to nature's problems. Men saw that these false systems were limited and when success and truth seemed at hand the doors were bolted, and the candle, their only guiding light wavered and went out, leaving them again in the darkness of oblivion from whence they had started.”

Gemelli eventually founded the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. In his essay, O'Connor told the story of a morning in 1903, when Gemelli was still studying for the priesthood. He had left his home in Pavia for the Franciscan novitiate in Pezzato, “high in the Alps of Brescia.”

As Gemelli gazed out from his cell window and saw the landscape, filled with sunshine and the brilliant color of the meadow, his glance strayed far off where the meadow and hills converged to one point on the far horizon. “All that is real, all that is true,” he mused, “converges in one absolute truth, God.”

In 1929, O'Connor dropped out of St. Bonaventure College and followed Gemelli's example into the Order of the Friars Minor. He moved to Paterson, New Jersey, and entered the novitiate—the period of training prior to taking vows when a candidate for the priesthood discerns whether the life is right for him. On August 19, 1929, O'Connor received the name “Sixtus,” after Pope Sixtus IV, the fifteenth-century Franciscan pontiff who is credited with transforming Rome from a medieval city to a Renaissance hub that housed papal art collections, Vatican libraries, and the eponymously named Sistine Chapel.

O'Connor professed his temporary vows after a year in the novitiate and then made his perpetual vows years later after completing the intense spiritual reflection and academic study necessary for ordination as a priest.

After his ordination at Catholic University in Washington in 1934, O'Connor celebrated his first Mass at St. Joseph's parish, the church across from his boyhood home in Oxford, New York. His father was dying and too sick to attend, so the pastor of St. Joseph's rigged a sound system that piped the Mass into the O'Connor house.

That fall, O'Connor left for the Franciscan Monastery in Fulda, Germany, to complete his final year of theology and learn German. His plan was to become fluent enough that he could do graduate work at the great universities in Germany, and in September 1935 he began at the University of Munich.

At that time, Munich was home to the Nazi Party, which had recently assumed power in Germany. A year after O'Connor arrived, one of his professors, who was Jewish, was harassed by party thugs and fled the city. O'Connor followed, enrolling at the University of Bonn to study philosophy and the classics. Three years later, after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, O'Connor returned to New York and taught philosophy and classical languages at Siena College, a Franciscan school in Loudonville. It was the beginning of his love affair with teaching.

Despite his happiness at Siena, as the United States became more involved in the war, O'Connor felt called to be a part of it. The thirty-four-year-old was anxious to become an army chaplain and the Franciscans granted his request. In his application for the chaplaincy, O'Connor listed his height as five seven and a half and his weight as 150 pounds. He listed his philosophy-teaching credentials under “experience,” and under “additional experience,” wrote, “Amateur theatricals, college professor four years. Track and golf.” Under “languages,” he said he knew Latin, German, and French. The closest person in the priest's life was his fifty-eight-year-old mother, and he listed “Mrs. E. A. O'Connor” as his contact on any official army documents that asked for one.