Mission at Nuremberg (34 page)

The congregation at St. John's accepted the Gereckes immediately, even becoming a bit possessive of the couple and their time. “We soon realized we would have to ‘share' them with everyone in the community—black and white, rich and poor, members of the church and non-members,” wrote Eileen Gordon, St. John's secretary.

Gerecke's gentleness with others continued through his years in Chester. “If the sun wasn't shining in your life that particular day, it surely was after his cheerful smile,” Gordon wrote. “When someone writes of Pastor Gerecke, they must write of love, because this, indeed, was the essence of the man,” she continued. “He was the personification of caring—caring for all the children of God.”

Gerecke may have loved everyone in Chester, but he was frustrated by the reluctance of some parishioners to make financial contributions to the church. He groused about the man who would give only if he happened to have something left over from his paycheck at the end of the week. “And then, he expects God to know that He was mighty lucky to get that,” Gerecke would say. At the same time, he didn't want people's money if it was coming to the church for the wrong reasons. After an extensive stewardship campaign one year to raise church money, Gerecke told his congregation, “Don't give unless it's from the heart. Because if it isn't, it won't help the church, or you.” The sermon “probably motivated more people than all the letters and pamphlets and pleas our committee had sent out,” Gordon wrote.

Later in the new year, Gerecke told his Nuremberg story to Merle Sinclair, the wife of veteran
Milwaukee Journal
crime reporter Frank Sinclair, best known for his coverage of the famous 1934 shootout between federal agents and John Dillinger's gang at the Little Bohemia Lodge in the northern Wisconsin woods. The result was a first-person narrative of Gerecke's year in Nuremberg that Sinclair wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post
that September.

Reaction to the story was mixed. More requests for Gerecke to speak to audiences rolled in, but so did hate mail calling Gerecke a “Nazi lover.” These letters were painful, but not as much as the letters from Jewish Americans who called him an anti-Semite who had conspired with, and offered redemption to, men who had set out to destroy the Jewish people. Instead of throwing the letters away, Gerecke hid every piece of hate mail in the compartment behind the drawers of his desk as a reminder that his attempt to save Nazi souls could be interpreted in so many different ways.

On February 4, 1951, the church put on a concert to honor Gerecke's twenty-five years as a pastor. The seven musical numbers—with new words to well-known songs—were a sort of “This Is Your Life” for Henry and Alma. One, set to the tune of “Sweet Genevieve,” was a tribute to the Gereckes' three decades of marriage.

 

Sweet Alma Bender

My Alma Bender

You are so sweet, you are so tender

My love songs I to you will render

Will you be mine,

Sweet Alma Bender.

 

Gerecke preached at St. John's every other Sunday, but when he was not in church he spent the rest of his time doing other jobs. Some days he would minister to the bedridden at Chester Hospital, while on others he acted as a chaplain to two Chester veterans' groups—the VFW and the American Legion. The men in the groups regarded him as a sort of celebrity member. Gerecke also began doing radio work for a show he created called
Courage for Today
on KSGM 1450 AM. The Saturday program featured Gerecke remembering “the people in nursing homes and shut-ins,” Gordon wrote, “people who had been removed from the main stream of community life and who were probably forgotten by most of us.”

Often Gerecke would dedicate a birthday song on the program to an older person living in a home. Shortly afterward he might visit the same person's bedside as he lay dying. Often the elderly Lutherans were German farmers, and Gerecke would lean close and offer the Lord's Prayer in German to remind them of their youth and homeland.

Most of Gerecke's time was spent as chaplain at the Menard penitentiary, a maximum-security facility filled with twenty-five hundred murderers and rapists who he believed needed to hear the Gospel in the most desperate way. The inmates manufactured much of the underwear, clothing, caps, gloves, furniture, brooms, brushes, and other necessities utilized in the prison. Those who could be trusted to leave the prison walls worked a three-thousand-acre farm, planting and harvesting fruit, vegetables, grain, and tobacco. They helped care for herds of cattle.

Gerecke's work paid him little and wasn't easy. When he first arrived, prisoners were suspicious that he was an undercover snitch sent by prosecutors to gather information. At first, Gerecke only attracted sixty prisoners to his services. But Gerecke's fascination with technology helped him. In 1953, the chaplain tapped into television broadcasting and began showing inmates 16 mm film episodes of a half-hour drama called
This Is the Life,
created for network television by the Lutheran Church. The warden gave Gerecke permission to show the episodes in the prison's auditorium on a large screen.

The show was often casually referred to as
The Fisher Family
after the fictional midwestern family it portrayed. Each episode dealt with a problem such as racism, infidelity, or alcoholism, which was eventually tackled using a Christian solution.

Attendance at services soon quadrupled, and Gerecke had more requests for personal counseling sessions than he had time for. The chaplain told a church magazine,
The Lutheran Witness,
that as a result of the TV show, men who had considered Christianity irrelevant to their own lives suddenly made a connection with God. “Pastor, I never knew what it was all about but that picture made it plain as day,” one prisoner told Gerecke, according to the magazine. “If only I had seen that picture a couple of years ago, I wouldn't be here now.” Another prisoner who had been coming to the
This Is the Life
screenings for a few months tearfully told Gerecke, “If I had never seen these pictures, I would never know that Jesus is my savior. God bless you, Chaplain.”

Gerecke not only worked in the correctional facility, but also the State Security Hospital, which was often referred to as “North 2.” There was no chapel in North 2 so Gerecke held his services in the dining hall, where about 150 men from the hospital's 600 patients sat on benches at long tables bolted to the concrete floor.

Here, like every other place Gerecke had preached, music was a dominant feature, and a member of St. John's accompanied Gerecke to the asylum to play the piano. Gerecke always encouraged the men to sing the hymns loudly as he walked among their tables, smiling and singing just as loudly. As he walked, they reached out to him, and he grasped their hands or gave their shoulders a squeeze of encouragement.

“The inmates looked to Rev. Gerecke for compassion, for friendship, and for assurance of God's forgiveness,” Gordon wrote.

The warden of the prison, Ross Randolph, was a Christian man, a former FBI agent, and a prison reformer. His motto at Menard was “prisoners are people,” and he hoped, he wrote, to build an atmosphere among the inmates “to reclaim the maladjusted lives of men who have failed to conform to the demands of modern society.”

Gerecke had written in a Lutheran magazine of an inmate at the Menard psychiatric hospital he called only “Otto—No. 25,281,” whom he considered “troubled” by Satan. Otto had been baptized as a Lutheran, but “his mental capacity was not strong enough to carry through those spiritual imperatives his Christian faith dictated.”

Gerecke was nevertheless able to slowly bring Otto back to the church. When Otto took Communion for the final time, Gerecke wrote that he “saw teardrops of repentance fall into the little cups on the tray. He cried for heavenly love and got it, assurance of forgiveness and all the blessings with it.”

Otto died the following day. His family had provided no money for a funeral service, and a relative told prison officials the family didn't want the body. They asked the prison to bury Otto for them. Gerecke had what he called a “gentlemen's agreement” with his flock that if they died in prison, Gerecke would try and have them buried in St. John's Lutheran cemetery. St. John's senior pastor, Rev. Eric Cash, and the church's cemetery committee gave Gerecke the approval to bury Otto there. Ross Randolph provided the casket and clothing. The town funeral director prepared the body, as well as arranging for transportation from the prison hospital to the cemetery and the grave preparation.

Gerecke did not specify what crime Otto had committed, but by the time Otto died, he was completely alone in the world. Others may have concluded that, as a criminal, Otto got what he deserved, but Gerecke could barely make it through the service without breaking down. No one aside from Gerecke and the gravedigger was at the cemetery, and yet the chaplain had difficulty conducting the burial ritual.

“Otto got the same reading all ‘asleep in Jesus' get,” Gerecke wrote. “The wrens, the sparrows, blackbirds, and crows furnished the music” as Otto was lowered into his grave, not far from where Gerecke himself would soon be laid to rest. “The prodigal son, the lost sheep, returned this time to his heavenly home in the spirit of the publican who said: ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner,' ” Gerecke wrote—an echo of Fritz Sauckel's last words just before Gerecke watched him disappear through the trapdoor in the Nuremberg gymnasium.

“Just a number, perhaps to some,” Gerecke wrote of Otto, “but a precious blood-bought penitent believing soul who, unworthy of himself and unwelcome among his own people, heard the angels of heaven rejoice when he came ‘home.' ”

In 1956, Menard welcomed Orville Enoch Hodge as an inmate. Hodge didn't fit the profile of the penitentiary's violent inmates. The burly, backslapping former politician had pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.5 million in state funds over four years as state auditor, the equivalent of $13 million today. Hodge had been a golden boy of the Illinois GOP and had been viewed as a future candidate for governor. The
Chicago Tribune
had even called him “the model of a successful small-town businessman and politician.”

As an auditor, Hodge's main responsibility had been preventing the forging of state warrants authorizing the expenditure of public funds. However, the
Chicago Daily News
exposed the fact that Hodge had taken the money from his warrants and bought two private planes, four cars, a mansion on Lake Springfield in the state capital, and an apartment in Fort Lauderdale. The
Daily News
won a 1957 Pulitzer Prize for teasing apart Hodge's crimes.

When Hodge arrived at Menard, Randolph had Gerecke take charge of the politician. Randolph had also connected Gerecke with prisoner David Saunders, who edited the monthly
Menard Time
. With these influential inmates, Gerecke was able to spread the Christian Gospel more effectively through the prison.

Hodge and Gerecke piped Christian programming directly into the inmates' cells whether they wanted it or not. Hodge helped Gerecke run the A/V equipment to screen Lutheran TV shows in the auditorium, while Gerecke helped Hodge get his life back together. Each Tuesday at 8:00
A.M.
, Hodge and Gerecke met to discuss the “kites,” which were requests for a counseling session with the chaplain that Hodge had collected from his fellow inmates. The two men would then go over each prisoner's permanent record and Hodge's notes to gauge the length of time Gerecke would spend with each prisoner.

In 1961, Hodge wrote that he'd experienced “many, many lonesome days and nights during the past five years of my imprisonment”:

 

Most of us have faults that are secret from others. Yet, by contrast, others' faults are known and are associated with them throughout life. A person in prison is more or less blessed in that his imperfections are known and his debt to society satisfied. Pastor Gerecke contends, and I agree, that a person who has completed his penal sentence and returned to the free world should be accepted by society. . . . I pray that my heart will not falter or my faith weaken. Being Chaplain Gerecke's “helper” has brought me an association I will always cherish.

Hodge believed Gerecke so inhabited the Christian way of life that when he saw Gerecke, he often thought of a sixteenth-century English prayer that Gerecke had taught him: “God be in my head, and in my understanding / God be in mine eyes, and in my looking.” The prayer was typed into a small, three-ring journal of sermons and notes that Gerecke kept. At any given moment, he could page through the journal for a scripture reference, a verse from a favorite poem, or a full sermon outline.

A couple pages down from Hodge's favorite prayer, Gerecke had typed a summary of Leo Tolstoy's short story “What Men Live By.” He'd typed the last lines of the story verbatim. Tolstoy tells of a poor cobbler named Simon and his wife who take in a frightened, naked stranger who'd been left for dead in the Russian winter streets. The couple gives him clothing and food and eventually a job assisting the cobbler.

The stranger, the reader learns, is actually an angel who was banished from heaven by God. At the end of the story, God forgives the angel, allowing him to return to heaven. But first, “clad with light so bright that the eyes could not endure to look upon him,” he tells the cobbler about the lesson God has taught him. Gerecke typed in his journal:

 

I have learned that all men live not by care for themselves but by love. I remained alive when I was a man, not by care of myself but because love was present in a passer-by and because he and his wife pitied and loved me. . . . I knew before that God gives life to men and that he wants them to live; now I understand more than that. I understand that God does not wish men to live apart, and, therefore, he does not reveal to them what each one needs for himself. He wishes them to live united; thus he reveals to each of them what is necessary for all. I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth, it is love alone by which they live. He who has love is God, and God is in him, for God is love.