Read Online Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend - Free Book Online

are thankful. We have some very poor families who will be thankful, too. Understand?” One year when a destitute member of his Good Shepherd congregation invited the Gereckes to his hovel for Thanksgiving dinner, Henry accepted. Alma was furious, and at first she refused to go. But by Thanksgiving day she relented, and they all hopped in the car and made their way to a desperately poor section of the city to give thanks.
    Gerecke’s schedule made family outings like that rare. His children didn’t see much of him during the week, so the boys looked forward to Saturday afternoons, which were often spent around the kitchen table, where they listened to a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. Gerecke told his sons stories about his childhood on the farm, or about working the Kansas oil fields. Gerecke hated to drive, so when Hank and Corky were old enough, they became his Sunday chauffeurs. Hank drove his father around for his marathon preaching circuit of hospitals, jails, convalescent homes, and churches. After a while, Gerecke let his son stay in the car.
    â€œYou’ve heard the sermon four times already,” he’d say. “You can sit here and wait.” But Hank always chose to go with his dad to the 9:00 A.M. services in the City Jail. Going inside a jail was too exciting for a teenager to miss.
    Just before Christmas in 1940, Hank enlisted in the army. He was nineteen years old and five feet, six inches—short, like his father. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor a year later, he was sent to the Aleutian Islands to defend them from Japanese forces. In the spring of 1942, five months after the United States declared war on Japan and Germany, the message of Lutheran Mission Industries became patriotic: “Mission Industries Trucks are busy collecting old clothing, furniture, rags, newspapers, magazines and iron,” Gerecke wrote. “Save your old papers for Defense. We want to do our bit toward victory for our Country and every pound of paper you save will help to that end. At this moment we need your old overcoats for homeless men in the settlement missions.” But gas rationing finally felled Gerecke’s efforts, and he was forced to shutter the Industries arm of City Mission.
    Corky followed Hank into the army in September 1942, when he was twenty years old (and five foot five). Suddenly, a house once crammed with people felt spacious—even Roy had his own room.
    With two of his sons in the fight, Gerecke thought more and more about the war and less about City Mission. Readers of his April 1943 newsletter could tell that his heart was elsewhere: “Oliver Grosse assists at the piano,” he wrote, listlessly. “Noonday talks on Wednesdays in dining hall. . . . Warden and guards cooperate to the last detail. . . . Every one is questioned about spiritual matters. Some are so young. All need Jesus.”
    By the time Gerecke wrote that newsletter, he had already asked for the synod’s endorsement for him to volunteer for the army’s Chaplain Corps. The Army and Navy Commission of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States had received his application for ecclesiastical endorsement on February 8, 1943, and then the recommendation letters began to pour in.
    Pastor O. Rothe of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in St. Louis said he believed Gerecke’s “experience in hospitals, jails and other institutions qualify [ sic ] him, in my estimation, in a remarkable way, for the position of chaplain.”
    P. E. Kretzmann, director of Concordia’s library, wrote the commission that if Gerecke “was not beyond the age limit, I feel that you will have a real acquisition.”
    The Reverend George Wittmer, who was the chairman of the City Mission board, said Gerecke had “proven himself to be a psychologist in his dealings with all types and classes of people from every stratum of society.”
    And Rev. Louis