Mission at Nuremberg (35 page)

At the very back of the little journal are notes from a series of sermons Gerecke preached during Lent in the final year of his life, 1961. They referenced the work of his Concordia classmate, the writer and pastor O. P. Kretzmann. It would be his last Easter, and as only seems fitting, his theme that year was forgiveness. His first sermon, on Good Friday, was on Luke 23:34, which describes Jesus's crucifixion on Golgotha between the two criminals.

“This was not the first mistake Roman justice had made,” Gerecke said to the congregation. “Other innocent men had been crucified and had protested their innocence through lips swollen with agony. But here was something new on a Roman cross.” Christ's words were “no cry of protest or of pain. Only a prayer that those who were doing this thing to Him might be forgiven.”

Gerecke continued:

 

When men crucify their God they can expect to hear something different. His first word is His last prayer. It sweeps up to Heaven burdened as no other prayer in the history of men. Burdened with sin—all the loneliness and hate and terror of the centuries before or after. . . . The sum of man's years and man's shame and the greater sum of God's forgiveness and God's love. This is our faith. A religion without forgiveness is only the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope.

 

ON OCTOBER 11, 1961,
Gerecke was parking at Menard when he had a heart attack. He slumped over the wheel, and a guard, sensing something was wrong, approached the car. Gerecke thanked the guard for his concern but waved him off. He turned around and drove back home.

Alma had him lie down on the living room couch and called the hospital, which was across the street. The doctors told her to bring her husband in. The Gereckes walked to the hospital and nurses put him in a bed there. Alma walked back across the street to call their sons. When she returned a few minutes later, just after 10:00
A.M.
, the doctors met her at the hospital's front door. Henry had died of a heart attack. He was sixty-eight years old.

Most of Chester's senior citizens remember where they were on a warm Wednesday in October 1961 when they heard about Gerecke's death. His official death announcement gave Chester's citizens the time and locations of his wake and funeral and also carried words from the Twenty-Third Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me: thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Maybe it was apocryphal, but as news spread of Gerecke's death, so did the rumor of his last words: “How quickly God can change your plans.”

At 9:00
A.M.
on October 14, Gerecke's body lay in state inside St. John's. The Boy Scouts set up chairs on the church lawn and loudspeakers nearby so that the expected overflow crowd could participate in the service. Throughout the morning, people filed by the pastor's casket, and by 2:00
P.M.
, when the service began, more than a thousand had arrived.

Rev. Eric Cash told many grieving people that day, “No matter how many more years he might have had, Pastor Gerecke's work would never have been finished.” Cash preached a funeral sermon based on the same verses from the Gospel of Matthew that Andrus had quoted to the chief of chaplains when recommending Gerecke for a promotion, and that F. W. Herzberger had used as a motto for the St. Louis Lutheran City Mission, and that Martin of Tours embodied when he tore his cape and gave half to a freezing beggar. The Gospel teaches what Jesus will say to his followers at the end of time: “Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

 

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.

The righteous respond, confused, asking Jesus when it was that they gave him food and drink, when it was that they welcomed him as a stranger or gave him clothing, when it was that they visited him in prison. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these,” Jesus replies, “you did it to me.”

In his sermon at Gerecke's funeral service at St. John's, Cash said that the “pens of the multitudes” whom Gerecke had reached in his ministry, “the combined voices of thousands, rich and poor, important and unimportant, could never do justice to adequately describe the life and dedication of this man. Without any question or doubt we return to the Savior today the soul of a great man.”

When the service was over, Alma took the hands of two of her grandchildren and walked out of the church.

“He had become a friend in every sense of the word; to many, he had become the personification of the love of God,” Eileen Gordon wrote later. “He cared—for each and every person he met. I think if there's one thing he would want us to remember about his ministry, it would be a phrase that I heard him use many times: ‘God loves you . . . so much more than you know.' ”

As well attended as Gerecke's funeral was, there were hundreds of Chester residents who couldn't be there because they were behind bars. The day after Gerecke died, Warden Ross Randolph called Alma. He relayed a request from his prisoners, including some of the most hardened, that Gerecke's body be brought to the prison so they could pay their final respects. “They held him in high esteem,” Randolph told the Associated Press. “He talked their language.”

Alma and her sons agreed, and after state officials approved the request, the funeral home took Gerecke's body back to the prison the night before the funeral. The warden thought it was the first time in Illinois history, and maybe in the nation's history, that such arrangements had been made for prisoners to pay tribute to an individual.

At 8:00
P.M.
, Orville Hodge announced over the prison loudspeaker that all inmates could come to the chapel to pay their last respects. Alma, Hank, Corky, and Roy watched as eight hundred of the most dangerous men in the country filed past Gerecke's casket.

“There were tears,” the warden said later.

Speaking of the Nuremberg defendants, Gerecke had once written that “evil is always its own destruction.” At Menard, as in Nuremberg, good had bested evil.

“Inmates at Menard State Prison marched through the prison chapel yesterday,” the Associated Press reported, “for a last look at the man many considered their only friend.”

Epilogue

H
IGHWAY Z WINDS TO
the edge of St. Genevieve County, Missouri, past stands selling tomatoes and sweet corn, huge cylindrical steel grain bins, and front yard signs offering
CUSTOM ROCK CRUSHING.
Where Highway Z meets Highway H, it drops into Perry County and then enters Chester, Illinois. Population: 8,400.

The Chester Bridge winds from the bottomlands, over the Mississippi and up above the brown waters lazing by below, into Chester's bluffs. The bridge, which spans the river's narrowest point between St. Louis and New Orleans, opened in 1942, eight months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In downtown Chester, St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church sits across from a statue of Popeye the Sailor Man's nemesis, Bluto, an homage to Elzie Segar, a native of Chester and the cartoon's creator.

In the weeks following Gerecke's death in 1961, the prisoners at Menard took up a collection. At first, they hoped to help furnish a family prayer room at a planned new hospital as a memorial for Gerecke. But instead, the offerings—which ranged from thirteen cents to five dollars—finally went toward a white neon cross to be placed atop St. John Lutheran School, directly across the street from the church.

The cross went up in 1963, and for nearly fifty years, it stood atop the brick school. But eventually the light in the cross disappeared. It had been battered by storms and time. Wires had frayed.

Yet now a new assistant pastor was coming into the congregation. The church and wider community had raised $6,000 to replace the original Gerecke cross, and they thought it would be best to dedicate the new cross on the evening of the new pastor's installation. So, on a hot Sunday in 2010, the Lutherans of Chester gathered to witness the ordination and installation of St. John's newest assistant pastor.

Inside, the church's simple stained glass ushered in volumes of light. Twenty-eight wooden pews sat in lines below a relief of Jesus stepping out from a piece of green marble built into an array of brass organ pipes behind the altar. Banners bearing messages of faith hung down from the choir lofts above the church's altar. The top half of a red banner directly above the altar podium was decorated with a white cross that radiated yellow rays in every direction. Below the cross were words that also summed up Henry Gerecke's mission: “Tell the Good News.”

Most of the elderly people in the congregation had German surnames. The women wore patterned summer dresses or matching shirt-pants sets. Some wore pearls. The men wore short-sleeved, button-down shirts—mostly plaid, some with stripes—and khakis. Everyone wore a watch.

As a number of pastors from across Illinois marched down the church's center aisle, the congregation sang them in.

The newly installed priest was twenty-six-year-old Michigan native Peter William Ill. Like Gerecke, he had spent time in a foreign land—in his case, India—on a mission to spread the Gospel. He married a girl he met when both were counselors at a Lutheran summer camp in Indiana, and now, also like Gerecke, he was an alumnus of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.

As part of the church's old and formal ceremony, a small battalion of God's pastor-soldiers—old, young, bald, whisper voiced and booming voiced, tall, short, bespectacled and not—laid hands on Ill's head as verses from the New Testament floated from their mouths, speaking of “the Office of Holy Ministry.”

One read from 1 Timothy: “Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you.”

St. John's senior pastor, Rev. Mark Willig, stood on the altar, dressed in a white alb and red stole embroidered with a gold Greek cross. He looked out into the pews and led its members in an invocation and exhortation.

“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” Willig said.

“Amen,” the congregation responded.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” Willig said.

“But if we confess our sins,” the congregation replied, “God, who is faithful and just, will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

In the next two hours, these midwesterners would, as a community, recognize a young man's call to teach and preach the Gospel. And together they would witness him become a man of God.

Just as Gerecke was, Ill was asked if he believed the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments were the inspired Word of God, if he would forgive the sins of those who repent, and if he promised never to divulge the sins confessed to him.

Yes, he would, with the help of God, Ill responded.

After Ill was welcomed to St. John's, the congregation moved across the street to the corner of High and German Streets to sit close together at long tables, on metal folding chairs. Here at St. John's Veterans Memorial Hall, which is also the gym for St. John Lutheran School, the congregation stood in line, chatting and waiting their turn among the potluck noodle casseroles and fried chicken.

Ill walked into the gym in his casual clothes, and the congregation gave him a round of applause. He shyly asked them to stop making a fuss. Then they all ate together in celebration of friendship and their faith.

At 8:30
P.M.
, as dusk fell, about one hundred people walked from the gym, up the hill to the front lawn of the school. Willig climbed three sets of stairs to the school's roof and stood next to the new cross. He addressed his congregation three stories below.

“Why have we called this the Gerecke Memorial Cross?” Willig asked. “It is not so much to honor Pastor Gerecke as to honor and celebrate the Gospel that he so much loved. It was Pastor Gerecke's great vision and passion to reach out to everyone with the message of God's love for us in Jesus Christ,” Willig continued. “He followed that vision during World War II as a chaplain. Then he was called upon to serve as chaplain to the worst and the lost at the Nuremberg Trials. Upon coming to Chester he served as prison chaplain at Menard.”

And then Willig prayed—“Stay with us, Lord, for it is evening.”

And the congregation replied, “And the day is almost over.”

“Let your light scatter the darkness,” Willig said. He shouted down to his flock the words of Isaiah: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.”

Then Rev. Ill, feet planted firmly on the school's lawn below, read from the Gospel of John. “In Him was life and the life was the light of men,” Ill said. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

As the people sang “Lift High the Cross,” St. John's bells began to clang. Willig threw the switch, sending the light from the Gerecke Memorial Cross into the night sky and across the valley below.

Acknowledgments

A
S A READER OF
books, I'm sure I appreciated in theory that a work of nonfiction took more than the diligence of its author. As a writer of a book, I've now realized in a profound and concrete way the magnitude of that understatement. Without even just one of the people named below, this would be a different book.

None of those names would be more prominent than Henry H. Gerecke, Henry and Alma's eldest son. On a cold day in December 2007, I walked into Millie and Hank Gerecke's house in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to learn about Hank's father. It was the first of many times we sat around the Gereckes' kitchen table or at one of their favorite local restaurants (always, at Hank's insistence, his treat). Hank—a former army colonel and city police chief—is a natural storyteller, and I owe much of the color that comes through about his parents to those anecdotes. For the time Hank took with me and the stories and photos and documents he shared, but mostly for his friendship, I thank him. I also want to thank Millie and Hank's children, David, Stephen, and Jan, and their own families, for allowing me to tell their grandfather's story.

I have to thank so many more people for their help, too: Laura Marrs, Patrice Russo, Marvin Huggins, Andrea Schultz, Todd Zittlow at the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis. Steven Pledger and Andrew Blattner at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson, Missouri. The late Whitney Harris of St. Louis. Ryan Reed of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis. Tom Geist of Eastmeadow, New York. Paul Brown, Richard Peuser, Robin Cookson, and Don Singer of National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Phil Budden of Munich, Germany. Brother Michael J. Harlan, OFM, Secretary of the Holy Name Province, and Father Brian Jordan, OFM, of St. Francis College, New York. The staff of the Missouri Historical Society Library and Research Center in St. Louis. The staff of the National Archives National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Peter Black, senior historian at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum Library. The staff of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Marcia McManus and John Brinsfield of the U.S. Army Chaplain Museum, Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Chaplain Carleton Birch, Colonel Christopher Wisdom, Chaplain Charles Lynde of the U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains office in Washington, and Julia Simpkins of the U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School in Fort Jackson. Ambassador Stephen Rapp (and his wife, Dolly Maier), Anne Luehrs, Anna Cave, and Carolina Hidea of the U.S. State Department. Stuart W. Symington, former U.S. ambassador to Rwanda, and his wife, Susan. Philip Gourevitch. Stephan Lebert of
Die Zeit
and Birgit Asmus of
Stern
. Judge Hans-Peter Kaul and Sonia Robla of the International Criminal Court, The Hague, the Netherlands. Henrike Zentgraf and Eckart Dietzfelbinger of the Nazi Party Rally Grounds Documentation Centre, Nuremberg, Germany. Georg Schneider of the Palace of Justice prison. Irene Kornmeier of St. Louis. Jerry Legow of St. Louis. Mary Stallman, Collette and Paul Powley, Don Gentsch, and June Cash of Chester, Illinois. Irwin F. Gellman. Daun van Ee of the Library of Congress. Dennis Frank of St. Bonaventure University, New York. Father Julian Davies of Siena College in Loudonville, New York. John O'Connor of Oxford, New York. Father Moritz Fuchs of Fulton, New York. Father John Nakonachny of St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma, Ohio. Sally Ray and Larry Junker, St. John's College Alumni Association. Sabrina Sondhi, Columbia University Law School Library, Special Collections in New York City. Nick Young of the Thatcham Historical Society, Thatcham, England. The faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Katharina Czachor of Mauthausen Memorial Archives and Library. Charles R. Hill, Eminent Commander, San Diego Commandery No. 25, Masonic Order of the Knights Templar. John Tusa. Gerhard Schorr, pastor, St. Sebald Church, Nuremberg. And Julia Gabbert for her transcription skills.

Thanks to Mark Silk of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and the faculty of the Religion Department at Trinity College in Hartford for reading and critiquing an early chapter of the book. And to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office for a thoughtful conversation at a hectic time. To Miroslav Volf and his sons, Nathaniel and Aaron Volf, and to Peter Kuzmic. Thank you, Miroslav, for letting me tag along on Memory Lane, and for the insights of a truly great teacher. Speaking of good teachers, thanks to Sam Freedman at Columbia University for the early encouragement that the right good idea really can, and should, become a book, and to my mentor and champion at Columbia, Michael Janeway. To Steve Hayes and Brent Cunningham, for their friendship and guidance as we all became authors.

Special thanks to Professor Michael C. Rea and Professor Samuel Newlands of the University of Notre Dame's Center for the Philosophy of Religion. The center's generous grant toward my reporting, through its “The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought” initiative, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, helped fill a number of holes in my research.

For the time each took out of their lives to read various sections of the manuscript for accuracy, thank you to Rabbi Hyim Shafner, Rabbi Mark Shook, Rabbi Jeffrey Stiffman, the Reverend Travis Scholl, and John Q. Barrett.

Thanks to my former colleagues at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
who gave me advice, moral support, and—most important—their friendship as I wrote this book. I discovered Henry Gerecke's name while writing a story for the
Post-Dispatch
. And it was also in the
P-D
newsroom that I discovered, over nearly a decade of journalism's darkest days, that great reporters and editors do inspiring and important work regardless of obstacles. They can't help it.

Thank you to my editor at William Morrow, Henry Ferris, for his patience and direction, and to Cole Hager, Danny Goldstein, and Laurie McGee.

My agent, Eric Simonoff, was the calm pool I dove for each time I felt overwhelmed or unsure or like I might die. Thank you, Eric, for your friendship, and for not letting me die.

Thank you to the Michauds for their love, their wine, and their beautiful daughters, Alabama and Hattie, who offered the best title suggestions. Thank you to Ingrid and George Gustin, the generous codirectors of the Yellow Cave Foundation for Nonfiction Immersion. The YCFNI was the only writers' colony that would have me, and I wouldn't have wanted to write the first draft of this book anywhere else. To my parents, Patty and Ted Townsend, who allowed their children to be anything they wanted to be, and celebrated them even when those choices were weird along the way. Thank you. I love you.

Finally, Georgina—as Toots said—it is you.