Mission at Nuremberg (18 page)

Men in uniform and others in suits were waved through the front door by two armed MPs, and then down a hall to the Marble Room, where they danced the jitterbug with the young American girls who were employed by the court as secretaries, clerks, stenographers, and interpreters. Most nights, a German band played jazz, but there were also cabarets composed of a company of singers, dancers, jugglers, acrobats, and a midget who balanced half a dozen cups and saucers on his head, then threw in lumps of sugar. The young ladies made the rounds at the dinner parties about town, and they often ended up at the Marble Room.

General Eisenhower had implemented a rule to prevent the Americans from draining the small amount of resources from the German population by preventing married occupation forces from bringing their wives or children to Nuremberg. The result was that the American girls were hugely popular—and not just with the American men, but with the British, French, and Russians as well. A related rule said all Allied personnel in Nuremberg had to be there for official purposes. That meant judges with Czech girlfriends had to find them jobs doing translation or other menial tasks around the Palace of Justice.

“Most of the senior personnel, including the lawyers, were married men, while most of the women were single and young and not a few very attractive,” wrote Taylor. “This gave the society a relaxed, tolerant and philanderous ambience which many of us found agreeable.”

“There was hardly a man in the town who had not a wife in the United States, who was not on the vigorous side of middle age and who was not spiritually sick from a surfeit of war and exile,” West wrote. “To the desire to embrace was also added the desire to be comforted and to comfort.”

Some of the occupiers felt a visceral discomfort, however, as starving Germans pressed their faces to the glass at the Grand Hotel. “Inside, we, the conquerors who had brought their leaders to trial, were disporting ourselves in a manner certainly vulgar and virtually callous,” said one member of the war crimes community.

Enlisted men frequented another building that had survived the bombing—the Opera House—which played movies downstairs and provided a dance hall and club upstairs. Allied rules against fraternization with German women were largely ignored. Those connections, along with the contact Allied personnel had with waiters and other service industry people, were the only real relations the war crimes community had with Nurembergians.

Despite the fun many of the occupiers were having with Nuremberg's locals, the war's victors eventually became bored with one another. For the most part, the Americans and British were friendly, the French less so, and the Russians largely kept to themselves. The French and British were mostly housed in a district west of the city called Zirndorf, where the French had set up their own club for drinking and dancing that was less busy and garish than the Grand Hotel.

During certain celebratory occasions, and at dinner parties thrown by the higher-ranking war crimes court officials, members of the four victorious nations mixed together. At a St. Andrew's Night party, British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe had haggis flown in, entrancing the Russians. The dinner parties “were quite unrefreshing,” West wrote. “For the guests at these parties had either to be co-workers grown deadly familiar with the passing months or VIPs . . . who, as most were allowed to stay only two days, had nothing to bring to the occasion except the first superficial impressions, so apt to be the same in every case. The symbol of Nuremberg was a yawn.”

After several months, life on the war crimes island did become tedious for most. The day began at 8:30 and ended at 5:30. If there was no dinner party invitation, many simply ate at home and worked again until going to sleep. Because of the need to translate every word of the trial into four languages, the court proceedings themselves were slow. Despite the fact that the world was watching, in the fishbowl of Nuremberg, everyone saw the same people each day and each night. Gossip was rife. Nuremberg was “water-torture, boredom falling drop by drop on the same spot on the soul,” West wrote. To live in the city “was, even for the victors, in itself physical captivity.”

There was a lot of drinking, and weekends were highly anticipated events. “Those working on the trial were still mopping up the War, subject to a military atmosphere and far from home,” wrote Nuremberg historians Ann and John Tusa. “If they were to be denied the satisfactions of repatriation, family, and peacetime careers, they would wring what pleasure they could from the situation they were in.”

Weekends provided a chance to get out of Nuremberg, and most of the war crimes community took advantage of the countryside as frequently as possible, including a lot of skiing over the winter—in Czechoslovakia, Berchtesgaden, or Garmisch.

With 170 total staff, the British contingent was the second largest of the war crimes community. The French and Soviet staffs were much smaller, while the American staff—including the military and all the Palace of Justice (court and prison) employees—was more than a thousand.

That was the atmosphere and structure of Nuremberg. The meaning of Nuremberg, West wrote, “was that the people responsible for the concentration camps and the deportations and the attendant evocation of evil must be tried for their offenses.”

 

GERECKE WANTED ALL THE
Nazis in his care to receive Holy Communion before they were executed. But these believers in particular were likely to take more time than most to understand the significance of Communion to Gerecke's satisfaction, and with the looming prospect of the gallows for so many in his care, the chaplain knew he didn't have much time.

“I must feel convinced that each candidate not only understands its significance, but that, in penitence and faith, he is ready,” he wrote later.

After several months at Nuremberg, the chaplains often arrived in their offices to find that guards had placed notes from certain prisoners expressing a desire to see the chaplains on their next visit through the cell blocks. Because the court operated from 10:00
A.M.
to 1:00
P.M.
, and 2:00
P.M.
to 5:00
P.M.
, the chaplains made calls before the defendants left for court in the morning or after trial in the evening. Weekends were busy for the chaplains—they often made cell calls on Saturdays and on Sundays between services.

During the proceedings, Gerecke felt it was important to visit the sessions nearly every day. It was crucial to his ministry, he thought, to “watch both sides of the story and try to keep [his] balance in speaking with the defendants by hearing a part of the evidence brought out at trial.”

Yet, despite Gerecke's efforts to fully understand the situation around him, some of the defendants were skeptical. When Karl Doenitz first met Gerecke, the admiral insisted that Gerecke wouldn't be able to preach the Gospel without bringing Hitler and the war into the conversation.

“I know little about your politics,” Gerecke responded. “And since you wouldn't be interested in mine, we'll simply deal with the World of God in relation to the hearts of men.”

Doenitz challenged Gerecke to show him what he was talking about regarding the Gospel. “If you have the courage to come [to our cells], I'll attend your services. I think you'll probably help me,” Doenitz said.

Doenitz had joined the German Imperial Navy in 1910 and had become an officer at the age of twenty-three. He was an admiral in 1942 when he engineered the rescue of about two thousand enemy survivors of the
Laconia,
a British passenger ship that a German U-boat had torpedoed in the shark-infested mid–South Atlantic between West Africa and Brazil. Doenitz had ordered the rescue against a standing rule from Hitler that waging war takes precedence over rescue missions. In ordering the rescue, Doenitz risked Allied attacks on the German submarines and U-boats taking part in the rescue, angering Hitler.

To appease the führer, Doenitz instituted a new rule known as the Laconia Order, which forbade commanders from rescuing lifeboats.

The Nazis believed that American production could replace ships, but it was much more difficult for the enemy to replace and train the men who worked those ships, so killing them would create a bottleneck and slow the U.S. Navy.

U-boat commanders later testified that Doenitz had given them verbal orders that both ships and their crews should be the target of future attacks, and so the main charge against Doenitz at Nuremberg was that he had ordered his men to fire on survivors of crippled Allied ships.

While Doenitz was on trial in Nuremberg, U-boat commander Lieutenant Heinz Eck was on trial in a British military war crimes court in Hamburg for doing just what Doenitz had ordered. Eck was the commander of U-852, which sank an Allied merchant vessel, the
Peleus,
in March 1944. The Greek steamship was torpedoed and sank within three minutes. Most of its thirty-five-member crew were able to get to two liferafts or debris floating in the water.

When Eck's U-boat surfaced, the German sailors brought aboard two men to be interrogated. Then they put the men back in the water. The sub moved about half a mile away to prepare her guns, then returned, flashed her signal light, and her crew began firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades at the
Peleus
's crew for five hours. Three men—the Greek first officer, a Greek seaman, and a British seaman—survived the attack and were picked up twenty-five days later by a Portuguese steamship. In Nuremberg, prosecutors pointed to the
Peleus
case as a clear example of how men following the supreme commander's orders had committed a war crime.

Many prisoners were not as open to receiving help as Doenitz. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi's chief philosopher, told Gerecke he had no use for his childhood faith. “Don't bother with me,” he told Gerecke with a smile.

Gerecke offered him a devotional book.

“No thank you,” Rosenberg said. He told Gerecke politely that he felt no need for his help, but said Gerecke would be welcome to visit his cell. Rosenberg said he was a
Gottgläubig—
a believer in God but not in Christ.

In about 1936, a movement to leave the Catholic and Protestant churches began to resonate with Nazi Party members who were replacing traditional faith with a newfound faith in the Reich. Those revoking their church memberships were designated
Gottgläubige
, or “believers in God.” The phrase became a way for party members to publicly differentiate themselves from both Christians and nonbelievers.

Rosenberg suggested Gerecke's time might be better spent with the other prisoners. “If my colleagues are naive enough to accept this, you go ahead and work with them, but don't bother with me.”

Many of the prisoners were difficult to convert at first. Erich Raeder, the grand admiral and commander in chief of the German navy before Doenitz, had initially told Gerecke that he could not accept certain Christian tenets, and so the chaplain placed him as an intellectual skeptic. But after learning something of Raeder's history, it was clear to Gerecke that Raeder was actually more suspicious of the American army than he was of Christianity.

Raeder was born near Hamburg in 1876, the son of a schoolteacher, and was brought up in a religious home. He joined the navy when he was eighteen and was an officer by the time he was twenty-one. He served in the First World War, taking part in mining operations on the British coast. In 1928, Raeder was promoted to admiral and chief of the naval command, and in 1935, Hitler promoted him to commander in chief of the navy. In a fit of jealousy, Goering once told Hitler that while it was true that Raeder had built a great navy, he also went to church, and so Hitler could draw his own conclusions about whether Raeder's loyalties really stood with the Nazi Party.

In a speech in 1939, Raeder voiced enthusiasm for the “clear and relentless fight against Bolshevism and international Jewry whose nation-destroying deeds we have fully experienced.” But he also used his influence to help Jews whom he knew; took up the case of Reverend Martin Niemoeller, a former submarine officer and anti-Nazi pastor who became an enemy of the state; and opposed the Nazi attack on the Lutheran and Catholic churches, including its threat to military chaplains.

In 1939, Hitler made Raeder grand admiral and placed him in charge of unrestricted U-boat warfare, but differences with Hitler later in the war forced Raeder's retirement in 1943, and his title of grand admiral went to Doenitz.

At Nuremberg, Raeder was an ardent Bible reader and one day joined Baldur von Schirach, the former Nazi Youth leader, on his way to chapel. He eventually acknowledged to Gerecke that he was interested in learning more from him. Raeder began reading the scripture for the coming Sunday's sermon. He also prepared questions for Gerecke when the chaplain visited his cell and began marking scriptural passages in the English tracts he couldn't quite understand and sending them to Schirach, who spoke English, for translation. Soon enough, Gerecke allowed him to take Holy Communion.

Joachim von Ribbentrop also proved unrepentant in the beginning. When Gerecke first visited Ribbentrop's cell, Hitler's foreign minister said, “This business of religion probably isn't so serious as you consider it.” He told Gerecke that his wife had led him away from the church. Their two little boys, five and seven, had also been removed from the church and were never baptized. After receiving a few letters from Mrs. Ribbentrop saying that she would offset Gerecke's influence on her husband in any way possible, the chaplain didn't doubt it. Gerecke later called Ribbentrop's wife “the nastiest, the most disagreeable person I ever met in my life.”

Born in Wesel, in northwest Germany near the Dutch border, Ribbentrop volunteered for service in the First World War at the age of twenty-one. After the war, he set up shop in Berlin exporting wines and spirits to England and France. Ribbentrop was fluent in French and he'd spent time in both England and Canada. He married into a wealthy family of German sparkling wine manufacturers, which gave him entrée with the country's elite. Those contacts were important for Hitler, and soon after Ribbentrop joined the Nazi Party in 1932, he was made an SS colonel and Hitler's adviser on foreign affairs. In 1936, Hitler named him ambassador to London, and in 1938, he became the Third Reich's foreign minister.