CAPE MAN WILL GIVE NUREMBERG LETTER TO LUTHERAN MUSUEM

Henry H. Gerecke of Cape Girardeau knows he holds a piece of history in his hands every time he looks at a World War II-era letter written to his mother.

The letter is signed by 21 men who were on trial at Nuremberg, Germany, for Nazi war crimes. Gerecke's father, an Army officer, was a Lutheran chaplain, and his wife had wanted him to come home to the United States.

The men on trial asked in the letter that the late Alma Gerecke "put off your wish to gather your family around you at home" and let him remain as their chaplain during the trial.

Henry Gerecke will donate the letter Thursday to the Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis, which houses the archives and historical documents for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It also operates the Saxon Lutheran Memorial in Frohna.

"I don't want it to be lost," he said. The letter now remains in a locked, fireproof safe. "It's valuable in the eyes of the beholder," Gerecke said.

Although he has been offered as much as $2,000 for the letter because of the signatures, Gerecke wants the Concordia Historical Institute to store it.

And the Rev. Mark Loest, museum curator, is happy to finally see it.

Loest said he has heard about the letter for many years and knows many people will doubt its existence because such a thing seems unlikely.

"Even to this day these men are considered the worst of the worst," he said. "And here they are asking for spiritual help."

Many people still find it hard to believe that the men could be forgiven. "But that's the essence of the Christian message," Loest said.

Gerecke said it isn't difficult for him to understand because he knows the caliber of person his father was. And those qualities are what Gerecke wants others to know about his father.

His father, the late Henry F. Gerecke, was raised on a farm near Gordonville and later served as chaplain from November 1945 to November 1946 during the Nuremberg trials. He was a chaplain from July 1943 to June 1950.

"We weren't just father and son, we were friends," said Gerecke, who also served in the Army during World War II.

His father didn't like people to put on airs but would go out of his way to help someone. "He was a good man who didn't have a mean bone in his body," said Gerecke, a former Cape Girardeau police chief.

Even the war criminals on trial at Nuremberg "respected and responded to him," he said, as did others he had served in prisons and jails at St. Louis and Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Ill.

While most people would be somewhat daunted to know they were to serve as spiritual counselor to men who had committed such horrible acts, Gerecke wasn't, said his son. He respected what they said in confession as confidential, and he became their friend and spiritual counselor, he said.

The letter written by the defendants in the trial says: "We have simply come to love him. In this stage of the trial it is impossible for any other man than him to break through the walls that have been built up around us; in a spiritual sense even stronger than in a material one."

Loest said that Gerecke took his job as chaplain with both a serious and solemn approach. "He used pastoral wisdom," he said. Gerecke was criticized by many for refusing communion to Hermann Goering because Goering never accepted salvation. Goering was the second-highest ranking official in Nazi Germany.

Henry H. Gerecke's wife, Millie Gerecke, said she seldom heard her father-in-law talk about his work at Nuremberg unless at a public-speaking engagement. "Unless you lived during those years, then you don't know what he went through," she said.

Concordia Institute doesn't want to display the letter to "diminish the evils that were committed" but to acknowledge that "every person has to look at life and ask questions about their eternal position," Loest said.

He hopes that people who visit the museum, which is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., will "see that God is all-forgiving."

The museum doesn't have immediate plans to display the letter but will likely put a reproduction on display soon. It will be added to archives and used with exhibits about the work of the Lutheran Church during the war.