I still feel sorry for Mr. Thiessen, all these years later. It couldn’t have been easy trying to teach Sunday school to a rambunctious group of young boys back in the late 1960s.
What made it harder was that we liked to try to stump the teacher with hard questions. One of our favourites was about Hitler. Mr. Thiessen liked to tell us that God loved and offered forgiveness to everyone who asked for it. So, we wanted to know, what if Hitler had asked forgiveness—would he go to heaven, too?
I don’t remember what Mr. Thiessen said. But I now know that Christian forgiveness was indeed extended to 21 of the top Nazis prosecuted during the famous Nuremberg trials in 1945—and that at least three of them took it.
I know this because I read the book Mission At Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis (Harper/Collins, 2014) by Tim Townsend. The book is about U.S. Army chaplain Henry Gerecke, and how he ministered to some of the worst criminals in history.
Before the war, Gerecke was a Lutheran pastor in Missouri. During the war, he served U.S. troops in England and Europe. Since he spoke German, when the war ended he was ordered to Nuremberg, along with Roman Catholic chaplain Sixtus O’Connor, to be a pastor to the 16 Protestant German defendants while O’Connor served the Catholics.
Why did the victorious allies offer spiritual support to Nazis? The Geneva Convention was the reason. According to the Convention, prisoners of war were entitled to perform religious duties, such as attending worship services, and to be served by ministers of religion.
After the war, Gerecke admitted he was terrified of the prospect of being so close to men who had committed such horrific crimes. He had seen American soldiers killed and wounded by the German military. He has also visited the death camps.
But he also knew that, as a “representative of an all-loving Father,” he needed to go so the prisoners could “be told about the Saviour bleeding, suffering and dying on the cross for them.”
The book records time Gerecke spent with Fritz Sauckel, chief of slave labour recruitment. Each time the two men met they ended their time kneeling on the floor of the cell in prayer.
“Many times, Sauckel asked for God’s mercy . . . and called himself a sinner,” Gerecke said, adding that before he was executed, Sauckel asked for communion.
After the trial, Gerecke wrote that he believed that Sauckel, minister of the interior Wilhelm Frick, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel of the German high command, died “as penitent sinners trusting God’s mercy for forgiveness.”
Hermann Goering, head of the German air force, also asked for communion prior to committing suicide. Gerecke refused, not believing he was sincere.
Among the remarkable stories told in the book is the time a rumour circulated that Gerecke would be transferred home because his wife, Alma, whom he had not seen in over two years, wanted him back. One of the defendants wrote her a letter, pleading with Alma to let her husband stay.
“Please consider that we cannot miss your husband now,” he wrote. “During the past months he has shown us uncompromising friendliness of such a kind that he has become indispensable for us.” All the defendants signed it. Gerecke stayed.
According to Townsend, the chaplains believed “that God loves all human beings, including perpetrators, and so their decision [to accept the assignment] was more about how to minister to the Nazis, not whether they should.”
He added: “The process of ministering to those who have committed evil involves returning the wrongdoer to goodness . . . for Gerecke and O’Connor that challenge meant using what they had learned about each defendant to spiritually lead him back from the place where he had fallen to a place of restoration.”
Townsend went on to say they were attempting to bring “God’s light into a dark heart” by giving “Hitler’s henchmen new standing as human beings before their impending executions.”
Near the end of the book, Townsend wonders if it was really the place of Gerecke and O’Connor to offer forgiveness, especially to men who had committed such cruelty against Jews.
“What right does anyone other than those who died in the Holocaust have to forgive anyone” who was part of that Holocaust? The Christian concept of forgiveness “must be strained by the idea of genocide,” he added.
Gerecke, who died in 1961, likely wouldn’t have seen it that way, Townsend wrote, noting that the former chaplain would have seen those “monsters” as men in need of salvation and forgiveness, who needed someone to minister to them.
“The Nuremberg chaplains’ one single burden was to return these children of God from darkness to the good of their own light,” Townsend said.
Originally published in
the Winnipeg Free Press in 2014. Also in my book, Can Robots Love God and Be Saved (CMU
Press).
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