Mission at Nuremberg

Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend's account of Henry Gerecke, an American Army chaplain sent to minister to the Nazi leaders held at Nuremberg after World War II. Gerecke was fifty when he enlisted, tending wounded and dying soldiers near London before being assigned, after the war, to the twenty-one Nazi officials awaiting trial for war crimes. Based on archival research and interviews with surviving participants, the book follows Gerecke inside the Nuremberg Palace of Justice and the cells of the accused as he builds a working relationship with Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and others, through the trial and its verdicts. It examines the moral and theological questions the assignment raised for Gerecke and for the men he served.