Mission at Nuremberg (52 page)

Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division, 149

This Is the Life
(film), 300–301

“This too shall pass,” 62–64

Tilles, Stanley, 256–58, 270, 275

Times
(magazine), 130

Tolstoy, Leo, 304

Torah, 248–49

Tours, France, 50–52

translatio imperii,
105–7

transubstantiation, 262–64

Treblinka extermination camp, 211–12

Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal.
See
Nuremberg trials

Triumph of the Will
(film), 112

Truman, Harry, 129–30

Turner, Henry M., 54

Tusa, Ann and John, 163, 230, 245

Twelfth United States Army Group, 136

Twenty-Eighth General Hospital, 64

Twenty-Sixth Alabama Regiment, 55–56

typewriters, for chaplains, 57

typhoid epidemic, 88–89

 

U-852 (German submarine), 166

Unaltered Augsburg Confession, 21–22, 24, 264

Union Brewery (St. Louis), 13, 14

United Nations War Crimes Commission, 124, 129, 133–34

University of Bonn, 139

University of Krakow, 191

University of Munich, 139, 141

USO shows, 80

usury, 109–10

 

VE Day (March 7, 1945), 85–86

Verdun, France, 86–87

Vetlesen, Arne, 218

Vienna, and Schirach, 176, 181

Volf, Miroslav, 249–51

volksdeutsche,
196

Volstead Act, 14

 

Wagner, Richard, 92, 112

Waller, James, 218–19

Wallis, Frank, 157–58

Walsh, Edmund, 157

Walsh, Father, 75, 87, 89

Walther League Messenger,
294–95

Wannsee Conference, 192–93

war, relationship between the divine and, 52, 60

war crimes, defining, 128, 132

war crimes planning, 125–36

War of 1812, 54

Warsaw Ghetto, 157, 191–92

Washington, George, 53–54

Wehrenberg, Fred, 14–15

Wehrenberg, Gertrude, 14

Wehrenberg's Tavern (St. Louis), 14–15, 16

Werfel, Franz, 193

Wesley, Captain, 92

Wessel, Henry, 23

West, Rebecca, 1, 114–15, 161, 164, 194

Westphal, Otto, 111

“What Men Live By” (Tolstoy), 304

Whelp, H. C., 297

Wichita Natural Gas Co., 28–29

Wickham, Louis, 46

Wiener Graben quarry, 198–99

Wiesenthal, Simon, 281–86

Wild, Johannes, 179

William, Peter, III, 310–12

William I, German Emperor, 106

Williams, Dorothy “Dot,” 33, 66, 73

Willig, Mark, 311–12

Winfield, Kansas, 26

Wireless News Service, 178

Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, 62

Wittmer, George, 45–46

Woods, John, 256–57, 272, 273, 275, 276–77

World Series (1946), 4, 259, 266

World's Fair (1904), 14–15

World War I, 30–31, 49, 56–57, 106

Wray, T. J., 220–21

Wright, Robert, Baron Wright, 133, 135

 

Yale, Wesley, 200–201

Yalta Conference, 126–27

Yom Kippur, 63, 80, 279–80

 

Ziereis, Franz, 194–96, 200, 207, 210–11

Zion Lutheran Church (Gordonville), 20–24

Zirndorf, Nuremberg, 163

Zugspitze, Germany, 93–94

Zwingli, Ulrich, 222

Zyklon B, 197–98, 212–13

Photographic Inserts

Henry Gerecke in the 1918 yearbook of St. John's Academy and College in Winfield, Kansas, which prepared high-school- and college-aged would-be Lutheran pastors for graduate-level seminary.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

Gerecke entered Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in 1918, and married Alma Bender, the daughter of a city brewer, the following year.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

Part of Gerecke's ministry was a radio show called
Moments of Comfort
—a combination of scripture recitation and soothing sermonizing. Here he is in an undated photograph doing a live broadcast in the KFUO-AM studios.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

Gerecke (left) training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where he arrived in September 1943 at the age of fifty. He'd been assigned as a chaplain to the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital, which deployed to Hermitage, England—sixty miles west of London—five months later.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

Richard O'Connor, the son of a New York schoolteacher and a construction worker, was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1934 at the age of twenty-five and took the name Sixtus. Pictured here in 1943, he volunteered to be a chaplain with the Eleventh Armored Division.

Permission of Holy Name Province.

Prisoners carried large stones up the “Stairway of Death” (Todesstiege) from the Wiener Graben quarry (left), part of Mauthausen Concentration Camp near Linz, Austria, in 1942. In May 1945, after O'Connor and the Eleventh Armored Division helped liberate Mauthausen, an American soldier poses (right) near the edge of the “parachute jump” at the top of the quarry. Often the SS guards simply pushed Mauthausen's inmates over the quarry wall to their deaths, calling such victims “parachutists.”

Left: Archiv der KZ-Gedenkstaette Mauthausen Federation Nationale des Deportes et Internes Resistants et Patriotes Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, courtesy of SPB.
Right: Permission of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Janet Peters.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner—pictured here on the right during an inspection of Mauthausen on April 27, 1941—oversaw the Nazis' concentration camp system. Kaltenbrunner was Catholic, and O'Connor was his chaplain during the trial.

Z-Gedenkstaette Mauthausen Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes Yad Vashem Photo Archives, courtesy of Amicale, France.

As a chaplain with the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital, Gerecke ministered to wounded GIs and to hospital staff. The Ninety-Eighth was fifteen miles east of the Ramsbury and Membury airfields, and after the D-Day landings began in June 1943, the army used the Ninety-Eighth as a transit hospital for air evacuations from the Continent.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

Gerecke's two eldest sons served in Europe during the war. Hank (left) and Corky (middle) both visited their father (right) when they could get leave.

Permission of Henry H. Gerecke.

During the Second World War, Colonel Burton C. Andrus (center, pictured here with Gerecke) had been a combat observer with the Army's G-3 Combat Lessons Branch. He was variously described at Nuremberg as “pompous,” “officious,” “strict,” and “an insecure peacock of a man.” Andrus fought hard to get Gerecke to the Palace of Justice. “I knew of no one else qualified for [the situation],” he wrote later.

U.S. Army and Heritage Education Center, Burton C. Andrus Collection.