Mission at Nuremberg (16 page)

When he arrived in Nuremberg, O'Connor was thirty-six. He'd had a hard war, and Gerecke guessed the priest to be in his forties. After their introductions, Eggers led Gerecke to the cells on the ground floor of the prison. They stopped first at the cell of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy who had flown a secret solo mission to Scotland during the war to try to broker a peace agreement between Germany and the United Kingdom. Most of the attorneys and judges at Nuremberg were sure that Hess was mentally unstable, but the tribunal had decided to go through with his trial.

Gerecke was frightened as they approached Hess's cell door. “How could I say the right thing, and say it in German?” he thought. When they entered, Hess, who was six three, stood up from his bunk, towering over Gerecke.

“This is Chaplain Gerecke, who will be on duty here from now on,” Eggers told Hess. “He will conduct services and be available for counsel if you wish to have him.”

Gerecke offered the Nazi his hand, and Hess took it.

The act of an army chaplain physically touching a Nazi so repelled Americans that Gerecke was later severely criticized for even shaking hands with the defendants. It wasn't an easy gesture for the chaplain to make, and it didn't mean that he was unconcerned with their crimes. Yet he wrote later that he had offered his hand “in order that the Gospel be not hindered by any wrong approach I may make. . . . I knew I could never win any of them to my way of thinking unless they liked me first.”

“Furthermore,” he continued, “I was there as the representative of an all-loving Father. I recalled too, that God loves sinners like me. These men must be told about the Saviour bleeding, suffering and dying on the Cross for them.”

After the men shook hands, Eggers excused himself, leaving Gerecke and Hess alone. In meeting these men, Gerecke strived to remember that before their alliance with Hitler, before the choices they made that led to mayhem and murder, they had all been boys once and that they were still God's children.

Rudolf Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1894, the son of a wealthy German import-exporter. Rudolf was being groomed to take over his father's business when the First World War broke out and he was drafted into the German army. He fought in the same regiment as Adolf Hitler, though the two didn't know each other during the war.

Rudolf later rose to the rank of first lieutenant in the army air force but was discharged after suffering a chest wound in 1917. After the war, he attended the University of Munich, where he studied with a geography professor named Karl Haushofer, founder of the theory of
geopolitik,
which bridged traditional German imperialism and the rising ideas of national socialism. Haushofer took the concept of
lebensraum
—which means habitat, or living space—and applied it to post–First World War Germany. He promoted the idea of German expansion to the east, beyond its own borders, as a means of ensuring future national growth and prosperity.

Hess entered the Nazi Party in 1920 after hearing Hitler speak. He was jailed with Hitler in 1924 for his part in Hitler's failed revolutionary attempt in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch, which had occurred a year earlier. In jail, Hess helped his cellmate write his autobiography,
Mein Kampf
. Hess had taken stenography before the war, and Hitler dictated much of the book to him. But some of
Mein Kampf
's basic ideas—including those on
lebensraum,
Britain's role in history, and the organization of the Nazi Party—came from Hess.

As Hitler amassed power, he kept Hess at his side. The two had become close in prison, and while it was obvious that Hess didn't have any particularly useful skills, Hitler promoted him to deputy leader in 1933 and then, in 1939, to be third in line to lead the Reich. Hess was one of the few men whom Hitler addressed in the familiar form of “you,”
du
.

Hess was introverted, shy, and insecure. He had sought out father figures such as Haushofer and Hitler and had clung to them. He had repaid Hitler's loyalty by near-comic, childlike allegiance and fetishistic devotion. “There is one man who is always above criticism,” Hess said in one speech. “That is the Führer. This is because everyone knows and feels he is always right and always will be right. . . . We believe that the Führer has a higher calling to the shaping of Germany's fate.” All that was needed was “faith without criticisms, surrender to the Führer, not to ask why but the silent carrying out of his orders.”

Hess's take on “the Jewish problem” was aligned with Hitler's. He wanted more than just
lebensraum;
he wanted Germany and all its future holdings to be rid of Jews.

After the failed attempt at peacemaking with Britain that involved Hess flying from Germany under cover of night and parachuting into Scotland, Hess was deemed insane by Hitler. He spent years in prison, some in the Tower of London. Even so, his loyalty to Hitler remained.

Hitler may have been right about Hess's sanity. Hitler's sycophant was on trial for his part in planning Germany's invasions of Poland, Norway, and Yugoslavia, yet his mind in Nuremberg seemed to wander back to his days in prison in Britain.

In Hess's cell, Gerecke tried out his German. “Would you care to attend chapel service Sunday evening?” he asked.

“No,” Hess replied in English.

Gerecke needn't have worried about his own German. Hess's English was excellent, and so Gerecke switched to English. “Do you feel you can get along as well without attending as if you did?”

“I expect to be extremely busy preparing my defense,” Hess said. “If I have any praying to do, I'll do it here.”

Gerecke tried to leave Hess with a copy of St. John's Gospel and a folder of other Christian materials, but Hess refused to take it, saying it would appear as if he was accepting the material only because he was facing trial, and he did not want to look weak.

Gerecke backed out of the cell, wondering if he should have done as Sullivan had suggested in Munich and played the old-age card to get a ticket home. “My first attempt and a good failure,” the chaplain thought.

He paced up and down the corridor outside Hess's cell a few times, waiting for Eggers to return. The guards stared. Gerecke realized Eggers wasn't coming back, and that he could either retreat or forge ahead.

As Gerecke approached the next cell he realized it belonged to Hermann Goering, the Nazi he dreaded meeting more than any of the others.

“You want in now, Chappie?” Goering's guard asked.

“Yes, but don't push!” Gerecke said. He watched Goering through the Judas window for a minute before going in. Hitler's number two was reading a book and smoking his meerschaum pipe. Gerecke entered the cell, and Goering shot up, clicking his heels to attention. When Gerecke greeted Goering in German, Goering bowed. They shook hands.

“I heard you were coming, and I'm glad to see you,” Goering said. He offered Gerecke his only chair. “Will you come in and spend some time with me?” he asked.

Like Gerecke, Goering had not seen his family in some time, and he welcomed any visitors into his cell who he believed would offer substantial conversation.

Ten weeks after Hermann Goering had been born, his mother, Franny, sailed to Haiti, where Hermann's father, Heinrich, held a ministerial post, leaving newborn Hermann with family friends. Hermann wouldn't see his mother again, nor meet the rest of his family, until he was three years old. Goering biographer Willi Frischauer wrote that later in life, Goering “was always trying to recapture the mother love which he had missed in his infancy.”

When he was ten, Hermann was shipped off to boarding school in Ansbach, Germany, which he despised. He wrote about his godfather and namesake, Hermann von Epenstein, in an essay for an assignment about “the man I admire most in the world,” and he was hauled into the principal's office the next day to answer why he so admired a Jew. He answered that Epenstein was Catholic, but he was forced nevertheless to write “I shall not write essays in praise of Jews” a hundred times. He was then forced to march around campus with a sign around his neck that read, “
Mein pate ist ein jude
,
” which meant “my godfather is a Jew.”

The next day, Hermann cut the strings of all the instruments in the school band, smashed his own violin, and hopped a train back to his parents' house. The Goerings then sent Hermann to military academies—where he thrived—for the rest of his academic career; he eventually graduated at age nineteen with a commission in an infantry unit known as the Prinz Wilhelm Regiment No. 112 and was posted to its headquarters at Mülhausen.

In his hagiography of the reichsmarshal, Charles Bewley wrote that Goering's “highest aspiration even in his most youthful days was to become an officer and play a role in his country's history. It was the typical romantic dream of a German youth, and only a greater determination to realize his dream at all costs distinguished him from thousands of contemporaries of his class.”

Goering graduated from military school directly into combat in the First World War. He went on to become a war hero, flying in the Imperial German Army Air Service under Manfred von Richtofen, the famed Red Baron.

The prestige he won during the war and his aristocratic background made Goering an ideal recruit to Hitler's young political movement. In 1922, Hitler made Goering leader of the SA Brownshirts, the early paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

In 1923, Goering was wounded in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, and he spent the next four years in exile in Austria, Italy, and Sweden, where he developed an addiction to morphine. In 1927, Goering and his Swedish wife, Carin, returned to Germany, where he rejoined the Nazi Party and the following year became one of its first officials elected to the Reichstag, Germany's parliament.

For the next five years, Goering's contact in the business and military worlds helped Hitler amass power. Carin died of tuberculosis in 1931, and a heartbroken Goering threw himself into politics. In 1932, he became president of the Reichstag, and the following year, Hitler became Germany's chancellor. As the Nazis claimed control of Germany, one of Goering's rewards from Hitler was authority over the party's security apparatus, and he immediately created the first concentration camps for Hitler's political opponents. In 1935, Hitler appointed Goering commander of Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe, and the following year also put him in charge of Germany's economic vision for the future, called the Four Year Plan. That position allowed Goering to accumulate a massive fortune through the state-run Hermann Goering Works, a network of industrial businesses that eventually employed seven hundred thousand people.

Goering was married a second time, in 1935, to an actress named Emmy Sonnemann, and their only child, Edda, was born in 1937. He built a huge country hunting estate in the forest northeast of Berlin and named it Carinhall, after his first wife. Goering called himself “the last Renaissance man,” and he had a taste for the theatrical. He used Carinhall as an official meeting place for the Third Reich and entertained heads of state and diplomats, as well as Nazi leaders, with huge feasts during which he would descend from a staircase dressed in a sixteenth-century German hunting costume and carrying a boar spear.

Carinhall was a hunting estate, built by a man who loved animals. Tame lions padded around inside the house. Goering was Germany's chief forester and made sure laws were passed that banned the inhumane treatment of animals. Unusual or cruel traps were forbidden, as was hunting with horse and hounds. Hunters had to employ dogs that would retrieve game that had been wounded by shot.

When Goering left Carinhall, he did so in style on his own train—ten cars led by one called “the bomb clearer.” The ceiling woodwork and furniture in Goering's car were made of cherry. The car included two bedrooms, a library with plush carpeting, and shelves filled with detective stories. Only Goering was allowed to use the bathroom, and when he wanted to take a bath, the train stopped for as long as that took, delaying all other trains on that section of track until he was out and dried off. The following car included a movie theater and showed films including
Gone with the Wind
and
Ninotchka,
starring Greta Garbo. On either end of the train, which staffed 171 crew and guards, 20 soldiers manned air defense batteries. The dining car served strawberries or lobster flown in from Italy by courier planes accompanying the train, or cakes baked in the train's own ovens.

In 1939, Hitler named Goering his designated successor, and the following year he promoted him to reichsmarshal—a title held previously by only one other, the eighteenth-century Habsburg military commander Prince Eugene of Savoy.

While Goering's personal anti-Semitism was restrained, compared to the obsessions of other Nazi leaders, because of his position at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, it was Goering who gave some of the most genocidal orders of the Second World War. On July 31, 1941, he sent an order to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA. “I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe,” Goering wrote. It was the order that put in motion the Holocaust. Six months later, Nazi leaders met in Wannsee, outside of Berlin, to work out the logistics of the mass slaughter of Europe's Jews.

The timing of Goering's most famous order coincided with the end of his favor with Hitler. In 1940, Goering led Operation Eagle, the air attack on Great Britain. Tactical errors doomed the mission, and consequently Operation Sea Lion, the planned Nazi invasion of England. In 1941, the Luftwaffe failed to produce victories on the Russian front, and later it couldn't defend Germany's own soil from enemy bombers. Hitler blamed the change in momentum in the war on Goering and began isolating him, handing responsibilities and influence to his rivals—Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Albert Speer.