Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis by Tim Townsend (review)

Mission at Nuremberg is the lucid and personable account of US Army Chaplain Henry Gerecke, who after joining the Army near the end of World War II, was assigned to minister to the twenty-one imprisoned Nazi leaders awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Some of these Nazis belonged to Hitler's inner circle, and Gorecke was assigned to minister to thirteen of them, with another chaplain ministering to the remainder. Gerecke's Lutheran religious identity, along with the fact that he was the son of German-born immigrants and fluent in German, made him the chaplain of choice for the Nuremberg mission. In addition to a record of his ministry related to the Nuremberg trial, Townsend's work also offers an intimate overview of Gerecke's life, family, career, and ministry in the chaplain corps prior to this assignment.

Townsend takes the reader through an abridged biography of Gerecke as well as a careful and studious tour of the trials of the Nazi officers and politicians who were tried at Nuremberg. Based on scrupulous research, including interviews with stillliving participants, and featuring sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, Townsend presents the reader with a rarely seen, inside look at the lives of these twenty-one Nazis standing trial at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. The book is written as a mixture of novella and history, and presents the cultural background of twentieth-century American life in a candid manner through a nuanced portrait of Gerecke's family life. In addition, readers will find that they will learn much about the twentieth-century Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, a rich and thorough examination of the US Army Chaplain Corps' history, and its unique mission within the US Army. Moreover, both chaplains and lawyers may find this work to be an informative and historically applicable study in relation to their respective fields. Chaplains will be challenged to wrestle with the reality of forgiveness and the raw reality of humanity's need for justice, while lawyers may benefit from an examination of perhaps one of the swiftest war crimes trials in modern legal history.

Two weeks after the trial had ended and the Nazis were executed in Nuremberg, Gerecke received orders to return home after nearly three years of separation from his family. Townsend records the remainder of Gerecke's life as he lived out his days in Chester, Illinois, serving as a Lutheran pastor and prison chaplain until his death. Gerecke's ministry to the Nazis and service in the Nuremberg trials had forever changed him. His three years of military service in Nuremberg and previous ministry with the US Army Chaplain Corps had separated him from his family for three years in all before he returned home, and had brought him face to face with a complex mixture of justice and forgiveness which was embodied in the very jail cells in which Gerecke ministered.

Townsend, a long-serving reporter on religious affairs, has written this compelling account of Gerecke and his ministry to the Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. He skillfully brings to life the developing relationship between Gerecke and Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other infamous Nazi leaders as they were imprisoned and awaiting their trial. Townsend composes this work with riveting emotionality, and not only reports on the history of the Nuremberg trials, but explores the deep emotional wells of morality, sin, hate, revenge, forgiveness, and repentance. In typical reporter fashion, Townsend's inclusion of riveting details, privileged conversations, personal correspondence, recorded confessions, and individual emotions provides ample material to assist the reader in understanding this unique event in the history of World War II.

Filled with personal accounts and intimate scenes from the courtroom to the prison cells of Nuremberg, the reader is invited into a rarely seen, and exceptionally intimate, historical world concerning one of the most important...