CHAPTER 1
Death by Hanging
There had been men who had thought they could make a pet of cruelty, and the grown beast had flayed them.
âREBECCA WEST
WILHELM KEITEL HAD BEEN general field marshal, second only to Adolf Hitler in Germanyâs military hierarchy. Now, on a cold, rainy October morning, at 1:00 A.M. in 1946, he stood shackled to a guard outside cell 8 of Nurembergâs Palace of Justice. In half an hour, Keitel would be hanging by his neck from a rope, his hands tied behind his back with a leather bootlace, a black hood over his head. Outside the prison, no moon marked the sky above the destroyed city of Nuremberg.
The prisonâs commandant, U.S. Army colonel Burton Andrus, spoke loudly, with both custom and history in mind. His voice was high pitched but authoritative, and it echoed off the prisonâs dull stone walls and traveled up the metal staircases, past the mesh wiring that had been strung across the three tiers of cells to prevent suicides. It traveled past a small chapel that had been created by knocking down the wall between two cells.
Andrus felt the weight of the moment, but he didnât relish it. He walked along the cell block on the first level, stopping at each prisonerâs cell and repeating his sentence. The men had heard the same words two weeks earlier when the justices of the International Military Tribunal read the verdicts and sentences aloud in court.
The colonel was simply going through with a formalityârequired by the armyâs standard operating procedure and the Geneva Convention. The men in these cells were the former elite of the Third Reich, but they had long since been stripped of any military rank or privilege. In Nurembergâs prison, they were treated by most as persons without status.
The other major war criminalsâthose who had avoided the tribunalâs supreme penalty and had been moved to the prisonâs second tierâcould hear the details of each sentence as Andrus stopped at the cells. So could those on the third tier, the lesser Nazi criminals, used as witnesses by prosecution attorneys for testimony that had convicted the men below.
Andrusâs strict adherence to by-the-book army rules and regulations had become something of a joke among the courtroom lawyers, and a headache to the twenty-one Nazis in his care during the yearlong trial. Before being assigned to Nuremberg, Andrus had served under General George Patton. He idolized Patton and tried to emulate him. He once wrote to a friend, âI will go anywhere with Georgie, anytime, for any purpose.â
This morning Andrus was dressed, as he always was, in his green, four-pocket uniform tunic with brass buttons imprinted with the United States coat of armsâan eagle carrying thirteen arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other. The colonel wore a burnished steel olive-drab helmet and carried a riding crop tucked under his arm.
Andrus was anxious and annoyed as he eyed Keitel. This was the date the tribunal had set for the executions, and while the prisoners didnât know it officially, most of them had guessed these were their final hours. Earlier in the night, Hermann Goering, Germanyâs former reichsmarshal, Hitlerâs designated successor and the former head of Germanyâs air force, had killed himself by swallowing cyanide, cheating justice and outfoxing Andrus, who had vowed that his prison would be suicide-free. The commotion that followed Goeringâs death had woken the other prisoners. At 12:45 A.M., they were told to dress and were given their last meal: sausage, potato salad, cold cuts, black bread, and tea.
Most didnât touch the food. Keitel had made his bed and asked for a brush and duster to clean his cell.
Like Andrusâs, Keitelâs life had been ruled by army regulations. Since his capture by the Allies eighteen months earlier he had played the part of a disciplined soldier. His bearing was erect, his silver hair and mustache always perfectly trimmed. A year earlier, when Keitel arrived at the Nuremberg prison, Andrus had torn the shoulder boards from the generalâs uniform. Heâd told Keitel he was no longer a soldier; he was now a war criminal. Nevertheless, each day in court, Keitel had proudly worn the plain tunic, blooming breeches, and black boots of a Wehrmacht officer. Keitelâs defense attorney had played on the notion of following orders. He had only been doing a job heâd trained for his entire life. Keitelâs commanding officer was the fĂŒhrer, and questioning orders was never even a consideration.
The tribunal had seen it differently. âSuperior orders, even to a soldier, cannot be considered in mitigation where crimes so shocking and extensive have been committed,â the justices had said about Keitelâs defense. They found him guilty on all four counts of the Nuremberg indictment. When the justices told Keitel heâd been sentenced to death, the general nodded curtly and left the courtroom.
Now Keitel was hearing his sentence for the second and final time. âDefendant Wilhelm Keitel,â Andrus announced, âon the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the Tribunal has sentenced you to death by hanging.â
Once Andrus had moved to the next prisoner and Keitel had returned into his cell, a stocky man with glasses, receding gray hair, and a doughy face followed the field marshal to his cot. Chaplain Henry Gerecke, a captain in the U.S. Army, was carrying a Bible. He asked Keitel if heâd like to pray.
Gerecke (rhymes with âCherokeeâ) had also been rattled by Goeringâs suicide. An ocean away, Gereckeâs St. Louis Cardinals had been battling the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. The prisonâs other chaplain, Father Sixtus OâConnor, was rooting for the Sox. Though from upstate New York and really a Dodgers fan, heâd chosen Boston in a bet with Gerecke. They had been in the guardsâ booth on the prison floor awaiting a telephone call when Goering bit down on the cyanide. With the Palace of Justice locked down for the executions, the only way the chaplains and guards had of receiving updates after each half inning was through phone calls from an American officer outside the prison walls. Just after a call came in that Bostonâs Dom DiMaggio had doubled in the top of the eighth, driving in two runs to tie St. Louis, Goeringâs guard began yelling that something was wrong; Gerecke was the first to get to the reichsmarshal as he died.
Two hours later, Gerecke was with Keitel. They sank to their knees in Keitelâs cell, and Gerecke began to pray in German. Andrusâs words must have triggered in Keitel the realization that his life was over, because his soldierly demeanor was suddenly shattered. His voice faltered. His prayer trailed off. He began to weep, then sobbed uncontrollably, his body jerking as he gasped for air. Gerecke raised his hand above Keitelâs head and gave the general a final benediction. Most likely it was Martin Lutherâs favorite, from the book of Numbers: âThe Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make his face shine on you, and be gracious to you; The Lord lift up his countenance on you, and give you peace.â Then the chaplain was called to the next cell, and he rose to his feet.
A LITTLE MORE THAN three years earlier, on June 3, 1943, Henry Gerecke was late for dinner. He burst through the front door and bounded up the wide wooden steps, two and three at a time, leading to the three-bedroom apartment at 3204 Halliday Avenue in south St. Louis that he shared with his wife, three sons, and sister-in-law. Gereckeâs wife, Alma, was the only one home. Her younger sister, Ginny, was out. The coupleâs youngest son, fifteen-year-old Roy, was at a church youth group meeting. Gereckeâs two older sons had already joined the army. The eldest, twenty-two-year-old Hank, was in the Aleutian Islands, fighting off the Japanese threat to the North American mainland. Twenty-one-year-old Carltonâeveryone called him Corkyâwas training at Fort Bliss, Texas, for the Normandy invasion that would take place the next year.
As Henry reached the top of the steps, panting, he knew he was about to tell a woman with two sons in the war that her husband was headed there, too. That, and he was late for dinner. He walked through the long hallway, over the creaking hardwood floorboards toward the back of the apartment, where the kitchen was, and sat down at the table. Almaâs back was to him. His dinner was already on the table. It was lukewarm, but Henry began shoveling the food down, praising Alma for her cooking. Alma was silent.
âDo you know something?â he asked brightly. âI got the idea today Iâd like to join the Chaplains Corps.â More silence. Henry kept eating. Still nothing from his wife. âI asked you something,â he said.
âI heard you,â Alma said, finally. âIâve heard you right along.â She took her time. She dried another dish. âBut I want to tell you something. If the army has come to such straits that men of your age have to go into the Chaplainsâ Corps, I feel sorry for the army.â
Alma had a point. By the summer of 1943, the army was desperate for chaplains. It needed thousands more. The ratio of one army chaplain for every thousand soldiers was better than in the First World War, when the ratio was one chaplain for every twenty-four hundred men. But it wasnât quite good enough. âAs the tempo of the war increases, the soldiersâ interest in spiritual matters also increases,â General William R. Arnold, the armyâs chief of chaplains, told a newspaper that summer. âReports from our chaplains in the battle areas tell of the increased opportunities afforded them and because such conditions prevail, I believe you will agree that we dare not fail these men by not supplying them with enough chaplains.â
He urged church organizations to ârob their parishes of priests and ministers, if necessary, to supply spiritual advisors for our troops.â Arnold stressed that the army wanted chaplains under the age of forty-five for service with combat troops. âAt present there are no vacancies for those over 50.â
Gereckeâs fiftieth birthday was two months away. Almaâs joke about the Chaplain Corps was her way of letting her husband know sheâd accepted the situation. She knew he had already made up his mind.
Their marriage was of the opposites-attract variety. Henry was short and portly; Alma was tall and beautiful. He came from farm country; she from the city. (When they met, in the 1920s, his relatives from downstate referred to her as âthe flapper.â) Henry was an idealist; Alma was a materialist. He was dedicated to the poor; she wanted fur coats and big cars. He played the supplicant and she was the roost ruler, though they both knew the opposite was true. He had nicknames for her: Boss, Speaker of the House, Brown Eyes. She called him Henry.
Gerecke had decided to become an army chaplain, and he hadnât consulted his wife about it. Three-quarters of the men in Almaâs family would be at war, but after twenty-five years of marriage, she also knew there wasnât much she could do about her husbandâs decision.
Gerecke volunteered just before his birthday, and two months later he reported for duty at the Chaplains School at Harvard University. Five weeks after that, the army assigned him to the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital, a newly formed unit at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. For the next several months, he wasnât even sure the Ninety-Eighth would be called overseas. But in February 1944, the army directed the hospital unit to Camp Myles Standish in Massachusetts, and then on to England. Eighteen months later Gerecke was in Germany and was handed an assignment he was allowed to refuse. He could go home to St. Louis, to Halliday Avenue, to Alma. Instead, he took the assignment, and later he considered his time in Nuremberg the most important year of his life. Gereckeâs ministry at Nuremberg has been called âone of the most singular . . . ever undertaken by U.S. Army chaplains.â It was a historic experiment in how good confronts radical evil. And at its center was a farm kid from Missouri.
Gerecke, the Lutheran preacher from St. Louis who ministered to the agents of the Third Reich, was one player in a judicial improvisation we now call simply the Nuremberg trials. They were âtrialsââpluralâbecause the most famous proceeding, officially called the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, was only the first in a series that took place in the German city of Nuremberg lasting until 1949. But that first trial overshadows the rest. When most people refer to âNuremberg,â they mean the Trial of the Major War Criminals. For the first time in history, the international community held a stateâs major leaders accused and convicted them of conspiring to commit crimes against humanity. Nuremberg was, in the words of one of its American prosecutors, âa bench mark in international law and the lodestar of thought and debate on the great moral and legal questions of war and peace.â
One actor in that historic examination of evil was an unassuming man whose importance to the trials revealed itself only in time. Hans Fritzsche, on trial as Hitlerâs radio propaganda chief and a member of Gereckeâs Nuremberg flock, wrote later that when Gerecke first arrived at the prison in November 1945, just days before the trials began, the chaplain âmade scarcely any impression on us. Some of us may even have smiled at his simple, unequivocal faith and unpretentious sermons.â It was the victorious Allies who were judging the crimes of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, but it would be a pastor of the Lutheran ChurchâMissouri Synod who would try and convince those criminals that it was really Godâs judgment that they should fear.
For Gerecke, the decision to accept the assignment wasnât easy. He wondered how a preacher from St. Louis could make any impression on the disciples of Adolf Hitler. Would his considerable faith in the core principles of Christianity sustain him as he ministered to monsters? During his months stationed in Munich after the war, Gerecke had taken several trips to Dachau. Heâd seen the raw aftermath of the Holocaust. Heâd touched the inside of the campâs walls, and his hands had come away smeared with blood.
The U.S. Army was asking one of its chaplains to kneel down with the architects of the Holocaust and calm their spirits as they answered for their crimes in front of the world. With those images of Dachau fresh in his memory, Gerecke had to decide if he could share his faith, the thing he held most dear in life, with the men who had given the orders to construct such a place.
Fritzsche wrote later:
Pastor Gereckeâs view was that in his domain God alone was Judge, and the question of earthly guilt therefore had no significance so far as he was concerned. His only duty was the care of souls. In a personal prayer which he once made aloud in our queer little congregation he asked God to preserve him from all pride, and from any prejudice against those whose spiritual care had been committed to his charge. It was in this spirit of humility that he approached his task; a battle for the souls of men standing beneath the shadow of the gallows.
WHEN GERECKE RETURNED TO Keitelâs cell about thirty minutes after his initial visit in those early morning hours, he was visibly shaken from just having escorted Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitlerâs foreign minister, to the gallows. It was the first time Gerecke had seen someone put to death. Now he was at Keitelâs cell, and the two again prayed through Keitelâs tears.
But then it was time to go, and they started down the corridor. Andrus was in front, his cavalry boots clacking on the prisonâs cement floor. He was followed by Gerecke, then Keitel, who was handcuffed to a guard. They walked out the door and into the cold, wet darkness of the courtyard that separated the cell block from the prison gymnasium where the gallows had been erected hours earlier.
Outside the walls of the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg tried to get along as best it could. Ninety percent of the beautiful medieval city had been destroyed by Allied bombs. Now its residents slept wherever they found warmthâbetween large pieces of broken masonry, behind the crumbled wall of a former church, in the dark cellars of demolished homes. Near the cityâs ancient imperial castle, a group of children had hung Hermann Goering in effigy, then built a bonfire, marching around it and watching its shadows play on the rubble.
When Andrus reached the gymnasium door, he knocked to let those inside know the next prisoner was ready. A military police officer opened the door, and Andrus led the other men in. They blinked their eyes in the bright lights. Looming ahead of them, just to the left, were two black gallows, which, in the words of the lieutenant in charge, were âhuge, foreboding and hopelessly out of place next to the basketball hoop at the end of the chamber.â A third gallows, held in reserve in case one of the other two failed, stood to the right. A curtain next to it hid eleven wooden coffins. The gym was a grimy building with nothing much in it other than two iron stoves in one corner. One of the walls had a single poster of a U.S. Armyâsponsored slogan seen everywhere in occupied Nuremberg over the last year: âVD ...