Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis Paperback - 2014

Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke was fifty years old when he enlisted as an army chaplain during World War II. At the close of the European theater, Gerecke received his most challenging -assignment: he was sent to Nuremberg to minister to the twenty-one imprisoned Nazi leaders awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Detailed, incisive and emotionally charged, Mission at Nuremberg unearths groundbreaking new research and compelling first-hand accounts to take us deep inside the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, into the very cells of the accused, and the courtroom where they answered to the world for their crimes. These twenty-one Nazis had sat at the right hand of Adolf Hitler: Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank and Ernst Kaltenbrunner were the orchestrators of the most methodical genocide in history. As the drama leading to the court's final judgments unfolds, Townsend brings Henry Gerecke's impossible moral quandary to life. As he worked to form compassionate relationships with these men, how could he preach the gospel of mercy, knowing full well the devastating nature of the atrocities they had committed? And as the day came when he had to escort each of these men to the gallows, what comfort could he offer--and what promises of salvation could he make--to evil itself?