Did Nazi leaders sign a copy of the New Testament as they faced judgment?
By BENJAMIN ROSENDAHLHermann Goering 224 88(photo credit: )
The renowned German writer Günter Grass once wrote: "History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising."
Grass, himself the subject of a scandal involving his long-denied past in the SS, summarized the sentiment quite well. The Nazi past keeps on haunting the Germans (and not only them): newly published photographs of high-ranking Nazis in party mood in Auschwitz, the 25th anniversary of the Hitler diaries, which turned out to be a forgery, and, most of all, the new pope, a former member of both the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.
How can his identities - Catholic, Nazi, German - be reconciled? Was joining the Hitler Youth the right choice for a pious Catholic, young but nevertheless old enough to make this judgment? This raises a different question, not only to Germans, but also to followers of the Christian faith: Could the famous question from Goethe's Faust - what is religion to you? - be asked to the heads of the Nazi Party and ideology? And what would their answer be? A most peculiar volume offers some possible answers and raises new questions.
The mysterious book
A year ago, a New Testament arrived at a rare book dealership in Los Angeles. It appeared to be signed by 19 defendants of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, including some of the most high-ranking Nazis - Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher.
(Goering, Hitler's designated successor, was convicted at Nuremberg of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. He committed suicide the day before he was to be hanged. Ribbentrop, the Third Reich's foreign minister, was convicted of war crimes and hanged on October 16, 1946. Speer, Hitler's architect and minister of war, was released after a 20-year jail term in 1966 and died in 1981. Streicher, the founder and publisher of Der Sturmer, was convicted of crimes against humanity and also hanged on October 16, 1946.)
The book dealer (who asked that his identity not be revealed) is Jewish, but deals with Naziana, original Nazi material, quite a lot. Naziana is an interesting field. As The New York Times reports, this business started with the Nuremberg trials. Prison guards "acquired souvenirs from the Nazis in exchange for cigarettes or favors" (Tony Perrottet, "The doctor and the Nazis," September 24, 2006). By the 1960s, these items came up for auction. Among them was Goering's suicide canister, Hitler's water color paintings and personal belongings of top Nazi officials.
The article refers to Dr. John Lattimer, who served as a physician at the tribunals and has many of these memorabilia: "Some people, he realizes, may have a superstitious dread of such intimate items, believing that an aura of evil still lingers around them. Dr. Lattimer does not... To him, they simply offer direct connections to both a personal and a global past."
Did this New Testament fit the description? I asked the book dealer, and he answered in the affirmative. It was, he believed, a prison guard who got the New Testament signed, in exchange for cigarettes or favors. But why a New Testament? And why would the defendants sign it?
National Socialism and Christianity
A New Testament seems an interesting choice for heads of the Nazi Party to have signed, since Nazi ideology had an ambiguous attitude to Christianity at best. The accepted historical view is that the Christian and the Nazi belief systems were incompatible: After all, the Nazi ideology tried to abolish Christian principles like compassion and turning the other cheek and replace them with a social Darwinistic "survival of the fittest" (race) attitude. Known atheist Friedrich Nietzsche ("God is dead") and his "übermensch" seem to have been a source of inspiration rather than Jesus.
Furthermore, National Socialism tried to establish itself as a religion, with Hitler as its messiah and the party as the church. Hence, it meant to replace rather than integrate either of the Christian churches, whose Jewish origins are undeniable. It is no wonder, then, that priests and other religious officials were persecuted.
Why, then, would the heads of the Nazi Party sign a New Testament, a work for which they would only have contempt? Did Nazi ideology collapse in the final years? Was it at the end of the war, when it became clear that Nazism had failed, that the old Christian faith reoccurred? Or was it the inevitable death these individuals were facing that made them change their minds? Did they change their minds at all?
Before answering these questions, it is important to point out that the above-described view of the Nazi-Christianity antagonism has been disputed in recent years, especially by Richard Steigmann-Gall (The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, Cambridge, 2003). He points out the Christian vocabulary of the Nazis, the integration of Christian anti-Semitism (even though it differs extensively from the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis) and anti-Semites, even in high-ranking positions, and the establishment by the Nazis of a Nazi-friendly Christianity. Hitler even appointed a believing Protestant, Hanns Kerrl, as minister of church affairs.
Hitler's diaries and other forgeries
How can one reconcile all of this?
One possibility is that the signatures on the New Testament are forgeries, just like Hitler's famous diaries, published by Stern 25 years ago.
When asked about this, the book dealer pointed out to me that he'd had the signatures verified by experts and they appeared to be real.
Appeared is the key word here, since Hitler's diaries also appeared to be real when they were first published: On April 25, 1983, Stern announced at a press conference that it had found Hitler's secret diaries and that it would publish them soon. The diaries had been discovered by established reporter Gerd Heidemann, who - in a historic coincidence - had once been the partner of Edda Goering, Hermann Goering's daughter. Renowned historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and signature experts Max Frei-Sulzer and Lothar Michel said the diaries were authentic.
What these experts didn't check, however, was the paper. The Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und Prüfung (Federal Agency for Materials Research) found that the paper could not have been produced earlier than 1950 (it was luminescent under ultraviolet light). Within a week, Stern had to back down. As it turned out, an amateur forger named Konrad Kujau had written Hitler's diaries.
Could the signatures on the New Testament be a forgery, too? It would, however, be a lot more difficult to imitate 19 different handwritings than one. And if it were all a forgery, what was the object? Profit, like in the case of Kujau? Or something bigger, like changing the historic narrative?
Naziana dealers, Nuremberg trial experts and other experts
The next step, then, was to verify the document, a task easier said than done. My first contact was Tom Teicholz, who had written an article in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles about an original typescript of the infamous Nuremberg Laws, but he knew nothing about it.
I then contacted Wolfgang Hermann, from the Hermann Historicum in Munich, an auction house that focuses heavily on Naziana. He also told me he had never heard of such a document. However, he passed my request on to Gerd Schulz, a military historian who works for Hermann Historica. Schulz's father was a clerk who had worked for the International Military Tribunal and participated in the Nuremberg trials. According to him, his father was very familiar with the atmosphere of the trial and assured him that it would have been impossible for defendants to either create or sign a document together.
After having reached a dead end with both auction houses and historians (and I contacted a few more), I tried the Bundesarchiv (the German National Archives). Again, the answer was negative. The Bundesarchiv referred me to the city archive of Nuremberg which gave me the same answer. No one seemed to ever have heard of this Nazi document that a Jewish bookseller was trying to sell for thousands of dollars.
A vain photographer?
And then, a new development: Eckart Dietzfelbinger, from the Nuremberg Municipality, wrote to me that while he had never heard of the New Testament, the city of Nuremberg did have a few documents signed by the defendants. It would be possible to check if the signatures on the New Testament matched the ones on the documents. Dietzfelbinger's answer affirmed that the signatures had a certain historic - and market - value.
This sentiment was strengthened by Gerda-Marie Reitzenstein, a judge at the Regional Appeals Court in Nuremberg. She admitted that my request had awakened her curiosity and led her to consult the main books on the Nuremberg trials. When these books did not produce any result, she asked the former head of the regional court, Dr. Klaus Kastner, author of a few books on the Nuremberg trials. He hadn't heard of the document.
However, Reitzenstein did find out that the main photographer of the trials, Ray D'Addario, asked the defendants for autographs. Furthermore, he always kept a photograph with their signatures on him. Was that the solution of the riddle? A witness to history trying to become part of it? Vanity? But again, why a New Testament?
Reitzenstein referred me to Dr. Radisoglou, an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, who confirmed that D'Addario was still alive. Would he personally confirm that the Nuremberg defendants signed a New Testament? But D'Addario had suffered a stroke and was not able to answer any questions. Radisoglou, however, confirmed that the signatures matched the ones D'Addario had and believed them to be authentic. However, he did not think that D'Addario, a fairly secular person, would have initiated a signing of a New Testament.
He gave me a different hint: There seemed to have been a religious awakening process within most of the Nuremberg defendants. Faced with death, the creators of hell on earth for millions of people feared just that - eternal damnation. Most of them started going to religious services, one of them started carrying a New Testament with him at all times and almost all of them confided in a Lutheran US Army chaplain named Henry Gerecke.
The devils' advocate?
Who was Chaplain Henry F. Gerecke? Not much is known about him. He was born in Gordonville, Missouri, in 1893. He was raised bilingual in English and German (a fact that played a significant role in getting him the Nuremberg trial assignment). Ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1926, he served as minister of Christ Lutheran Church in St. Louis until 1935, when he was appointed as executive director of St. Louis Lutheran City Mission. After the assignment in Nuremberg, Gerecke became assistant pastor of St. John Lutheran Church in Chester, Illinois, in 1950, where he stayed until his death in 1961.
Is he connected to the New Testament? Of all the possibilities, this seemed to be the likeliest. However, Gerecke died more than 40 years ago; his wife and most of his descendants have also passed away. And while the Nazi-signed New Testament passed into the hands of book dealers and auction houses, his story never became more than a footnote in history.
Perhaps the most important account of Gerecke's time as chaplain of the (Protestant) defendants at Nuremberg is an article he wrote in the Saturday Evening Post (September 1, 1951) titled, "I Walked to the Gallows with the Nazi Chiefs." He writes: "It is five years since I served my stretch in Nuremberg prison - as chief chaplain during the trials of the Nazi leaders by the International Military Tribunal and spiritual adviser to the 15 Protestant defendants. My assistant, Catholic chaplain Sixtus O'Connor, and I spent 11 months with the perpetrators of Word War II. We were the last to counsel with these men, and [made] 10 trips to the execution chamber. The world has never heard our story."
Only Gerecke has left a detailed written account of the experience. O'Connor maintained silence till his death.
Gerecke had legitimate grounds to have refused the Nuremberg assignment - his oldest son had been "literally ripped apart in the fighting," his middle son had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and his third son was about to enter the army. Nevertheless, he decided to accept the task, and succeeded in convincing almost all of the defendants to take part in church services.
The bond between Gerecke and the prisoners was so strong that hearing rumors that he would be sent back to the US in the spring of 1946, the prisoners wrote a letter to his wife urging him to stay, since it would be "impossible to break through the walls that have been built up around us; in a spiritual sense even stronger than a material one." Gerecke decided to stay on.
He also discovered that some prisoners were religious Christians to begin with: "Former Field Marshal [Wilhelm] Keitel, Hitler's pet general, was also deep in a book when I entered... [Keitel was convicted of war crimes and hanged.] I asked what he was reading. He all but knocked me speechless by replying, 'My Bible'... Keitel said he had carried his Bible through both world wars and in between."
Was this the smoking gun? Is Gerecke referring to the New Testament that turned up at a Jewish book dealer in Los Angeles 60 years later? Was Keitel the initiator of the "book-signing" as an act of reverence to Gerecke?
It's possible.
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