Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend Page A

the clerk rushed past, and the priest ignored him. Gerecke reported the incident to Sullivan, who was Catholic. Within days Sullivan had the priest removed and put in a request with the Chief of Chaplains office for a replacement.
    As Gerecke settled into a routine, he was pleased with how his colleagues were participating in worship and making it easy for patients, too. “Our Medical Staff is cooperating in every way that ambulatory patients may attend divine services,” Gerecke wrote. “Many nurses attend with their charges.”
    In May, he led seventeen services for more than 500 people and had visited 750 patients in the hospital’s wards. Gerecke met with every patient, either on the day he arrived or the next day. The chaplain received a daily sheet with the religious affiliation, ward number, and operation schedule for each new patient. Those scheduled for immediate surgery took priority on his visitation list. When the chaplain visited with patients, he typically started with a friendly greeting to everyone, then a walk up and down the rows of beds, stopping at the side of the most seriously wounded for a brief prayer with any patients who were conscious and able. Each time he met with a patient, he left a folder “containing a spiritual lift”—usually Christian tracts supplied by religious organizations in the United States and the name of the appropriate chaplain, based on the soldier’s designated religious preference.
    During one of his rounds, Gerecke discovered a soldier with a serious head injury. He’d lived through his operation but had permanently lost his sight. The soldier was a Missouri-Synod Lutheran from Nebraska who had performed his confirmation in German. After Gerecke said a prayer in German, the soldier wouldn’t let go of his hand. Finally, he said, softly, “God, help me see again.” The man wanted to know how his family would treat him now. Would his girlfriend still want to marry him? Gerecke had plenty of hospital ministry experience in peacetime, but sitting with young men whose lives had just changed so dramatically was new, and it took him some time to get used to it.
    The body of a pilot named Henry Smith had been ripped apart by shrapnel. He was close to death for nearly a week after he arrived at the hospital. His nurse, one of Gerecke’s Christian flock, asked the patient to allow the chaplain to pray with him. Breathing heavily, the pilot’s words came in short bursts as he labored to say the Lord’s Prayer with the chaplain. As they prayed, both Gerecke and the nurse dropped to their knees next to the pilot’s bed. It was the first devotional prayer Smith had ever been part of, he told the chaplain later, and in the coming weeks he would not go to sleep until Gerecke visited his bed at 10:00 P.M. each night to pray with him.
    Gerecke also talked to hundreds of men in the hospital’s rehabilitation ward. The army had designated the Ninety-Eighth a Neurological Center in addition to its status as a general hospital. The influx of patients suffering from what the army then called battle fatigue meant another round of expansion to accommodate a program for soldiers suffering from the psychological horrors of war. The neuropsychiatric recovery section had its own corner of the hospital campus with 120 beds. Here patients were screened, sorted, and organized into platoons.
    The symptoms may have been less severe than those Gerecke had been accustomed to in his visits to the asylums of St. Louis during the Depression, but these psychological wounds were fresher. The men were given lectures about combat fatigue and what the army was doing to try and help them deal with it. Most were given duties around the hospital, and after observation, some returned to duty. In the first two months of the hospital’s British operation, 829 officers and enlisted men came through the doors of its neuropsychiatric division. More than