Posted on 04/05/2026 12:37:47 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Henry Gerecke was in his early 50’s when he went, cell by cell, to introduce himself to his infamous “congregation.” He invited them to chapel services. Some refused, others wavered, and still others promised to be there. Of the fifteen chairs set up for the first service, thirteen of them were filled. Scriptures were read, sermons preached, hymns sung, prayers prayed...
Soon some of the very lips that had once barked, “Heil Hitler!” spoke an Amen as they knelt to receive the body and blood of their forgiving Lord.
They expressed a desire for their children to be baptized. One of them began reading the Bible to find justification for his unbelief, but ended up being led to faith by the very same divine words.
So reliant did these men become upon their pastor that, when a rumor surfaced that he might be relieved of his duty and allowed to return home, they wrote a letter to Mrs. Gerecke and begged her to ask him to stay. On that letter were the signatures of all these former Nazis. Men who had enjoyed power and rank were now humbly beseeching a housewife in America, who had not seen her husband for two and a half years, to let him stay. In her brief reply to her husband, “They need you,” is packed a whole volume about sacrifice and love.
Pastor Gerecke’s story has already been told...it deserves to be retold, again and again, to every generation, for two very important reasons.
The first has to do with the men to whom he ministered, the ones who repented and believed in Christ. The scandal of Christianity is not that these men went to heaven; it is that God loved them so much that he was willing to die to get them there...
(Excerpt) Read more at 1517.org ...
In contrast, many if not most other defendants at Nuremberg welcomed the chaplain and wanted communion, e.g. Keitel, Ribbentrop, Speer etc.
Fascinating. Thank you. It’s amazing to me that the chaplain who was equipped and called by God to this was from middle America.
When Jesus died on the cross he said ‘forgive them Father, for they know not what they do’.
Did this mean they were innocent dupes? or were they forgiven for being misled by Satan?
Did the evil they did hide from their eyes under the guise of Roman policy?
Is it about the devil or men being misled by men themselves?
What is evil?
In the grand eternal scheme of things...we’re all equal but by Christ.
“What is evil?
There you go, getting all existential, lol...
Amen.
😆
“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
— Samuel Johnson
You had some atheists and agnostics like Bormann and Goering, but the majority saw atheism and scientific materialism as a symptom of Marxist thought. On the other hand, they had little use for traditional Christianity with its Jewish roots, so Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler promoted "Gottglaubig" - belief in a creator God, providence, etc, without reference to Christianity or any of the Abrahamic faiths. Some of the more eccentric party elite (Rudolf Hess perhaps) wanted to resurrect Germanic and Norse paganism with its polytheism.
On the other hand, the Nazi rank and file, i.e. your typical Germans who joined the party or supported it, remained conservative Lutherans or (in southern Germany) traditional Catholics. For those, there was an effort to co-opt Christianity by purging much of the Old Testament (as well as the book of Matthew, which is the Gospel most aligned with Judaism) claiming that Christ was a non-Jew waging a war against Judaism.
My previous post was meant as a response to you, not to myself - I clicked “reply” on the wrong post.
And Martin Luther - who had so much influence over German spiritual tides - himself was quite anti-Semitic!
There’s a fundamental difference between the theological Anti-Judaism of Luther (or of the Spanish Inquisition) and the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. I doubt Martin Luther would have had anything against a sincere Jewish convert to Christianity, whereas to the Nazis, having Jewish ancestry regardless of the person’s religion (or culture, or sense of national identity) was enough for persecution and eventually murder.
This is true. I posted in another thread about having taken a class on “Judaism & Darwinism” with a rabbi in college. (The class explored Jewish responses to Evolution and how it shaped in their own sense of identity, Zionism, their understanding of Genesis account in the Torah, etc…)
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