Mission at Nuremberg

Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend is the story of Henry Gerecke, brought up in the early 20th century by German immigrant parents on a farm in southern Missouri. In the 1920s, Gerecke was ordained a Lutheran pastor in St. Louis, and during the Depression he became a missioner in the city's hospitals, jails and insane asylums. In 1943, at age 50, Gerecke volunteered as a U.S. Army chaplain, and when the war ended the Army assigned him to the most difficult year of his life. As prison chaplain at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, he was pastor to the 21 major Nazis on trial for crimes against humanity. He walked ten of them to the gallows.

Mission at Nuremberg, to be published March 11, 2014 by William Morrow, asks why the Allies provided spiritual comfort to the architects of the Holocaust, and whether good always eliminates evil.

Tim Townsend is a former religion reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, and holds master's degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Divinity School. The Religion Newswriters Association has named him Religion Reporter of the Year three times.

Henry Gerecke praying in a cell in the Palace of Justice. Nuremberg, 1946. Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.