"I Was the Nuremberg Jailer" Book Review

 

When the “Master Race” Sat in a Jail Cell

A powerful book unveils Nazism after the lights went out.

I Was the Nuremberg Jailer is 211 pages long, inclusive of an index and black-and-white photographs. Coward-McCann Incorporated published Nuremberg Jailer in 1969 and it is currently out of print. I found a copy through inter-library loan. It is also available at Archive.org.

I've read a lot of books about World War II. I Was the Nuremberg Jailer may be my favorite. It's a punchy, no-nonsense exposé by US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus. For eighteen months, Andrus served as commandant of the prison housing twenty-one Nazis who were to face the International Military Tribunal, or IMT, at Nuremberg in post-World-War-II Germany in 1945.

The accused under Andrus' care included Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering; Rudolf Hess, who, in prison with Hitler, transcribed and edited Mein Kampf; Hans Frank, the "Butcher of Poland," who bragged about how many Jews and Poles he massacred; Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, who crafted a public image of himself as the "Good Nazi;" Julius Streicher, the slimy publisher of the primitive hate rag Der Sturmer; Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth; and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a very tall man with a deeply scarred face, he oversaw the Gestapo and concentration camps.

Andrus writes, "I worked among" these Nazi prisoners "at often stiflingly close quarters and talked with them almost every day. I saw them in their worst depressions, arrogance and petulance. I walked with ten of them to the gallows as they went to their deaths."

In Nuremberg Jailer, Andrus introduces himself by quoting a TIME magazine article. Andrus "arranged anti-suicide cells in which even the tables were designed to collapse under a man's weight. He posted twenty-four-hour guards before each cell and insisted that the prisoners sleep with their hands outside the blankets. He required the prisoners to take exercise periods during which their cells were searched."

One might think that the man charged with seeing to Nazi prisoners' bedding, toilets, meals, reading material, spiritual needs and execution was himself, like his prisoners, something of a monster. Not so. Andrus was just another American soldier tapped by his superiors to do the rough, risky work of defeating a demonic enemy in a far-away war.

Journalist Desmond Zwar collaborated with Andrus on Nuremberg Jailer. Zwar described Andrus when, in 1966, Zwar met 74-year-old Andrus, "as fit and alert as any soldier half his age." Zwar writes,

"He was a man with a brown, wrinkled face, iron-gray hair, neat clipped mustache and penetrating eyes behind spectacles. He was neither tall nor frightening. He spoke in a warm, slow drawl and took me home to meet his wife Katharine, to enjoy her coffee and cookies. He seemed more like a gentle schoolmaster and he turned out to be just that. 'I work at the University of Puget Sound, just a short way from here,' he smiled, helping himself to a third – forbidden because he was dieting – cookie. 'I am a professor of geography and business administration.'"

Zwar's description speaks volumes. Nazis insisted that they were the "master race." Nazi Germany devoted massive amounts of energy to brainwashing their population and intimidating audiences beyond Germany's borders. There were the Nuremberg Rallies with "cathedrals of light" designed by Albert Speer. These "cathedrals" consisted of vertical beams of light from 152 anti-aircraft searchlights pointed directly toward the night sky. There were Mein Kampf and the Hitler Youth, Goebbels' many propaganda films, Streicher's hate rag Der Sturmer. Everyone in Germany was drowning in propaganda blasting Nazi values deep into minds, hearts, and hands. Even with all that regimentation to create zombified soldiers of the master race, Nazis were ultimately defeated by people they belittled and detested as their racial and cultural inferiors.

In the end, men who sold filthy antisemitism and racism sat behind prison bars overseen by just a regular American guy, a man taught to believe in the values of the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And Andrus was immersed in the Judeo-Christian tradition. After the war ended, he served as a lay preacher in Tacoma's oldest church, and was active in the Boy Scouts.

Not only were defeated Nazis dependent on and subject to Colonel Andrus, but as his book describes, they were dependent on the good will and civilized decency of several Jews. Jewish psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert and psychiatrist Leon N. Goldensohn ministered to the Nazis' well-being. Nazi defendants would say that they preferred talking to Goldensohn rather than to others, according to Goldensohn's son Dan. Goering told Goldensohn, "I feel freer to talk to you than to some other psychologists." Goldensohn's younger brother Eli said, "The Nazi prisoners respected Leon because he was an objective person and was fundamentally a gentleman who was able to meet them on any level." John Kalish, writing in The Forward quotes Marty Goldensohn, another relative. Marty observes that though Leon Goldensohn "was in the middle of something that the historian Tony Judt once described as 'a seam of evil' … Leon was a Jewish doctor and he had compassion."

Another Jew the imprisoned Nazis depended upon was US Army Sergeant Howard Triest. Triest had been born Hans Heinz Triest in Munich, Germany, in 1923. He was the only member of his immediate family who made it to the US before the war. Nazis murdered his parents in Auschwitz. Triest landed on Omaha Beach two days after D-Day. He witnessed the Buchenwald concentration camp. He left the army in 1945 and became the interpreter for the Nuremberg prisoners.

Triest was tall, blond, and blue-eyed, and German was his first language. Streicher, who claimed he could "smell" Jews from a mile away, declared Triest a "true Aryan." Triest dealt with Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. On the witness stand at Nuremberg, Hoess calmly and in detail confessed to murdering millions of human beings. Ninety percent of those murdered in Auschwitz were Jews, like Howard Triest's parents. Tens of thousands of Poles, Gypsies, and Soviet POWs were also imprisoned and died in Auschwitz under Hoess' command.

Triest says,

"You stand in front of a man who murdered your parents, and what can you do? I would have liked to have done the same thing to these guys that they did to so many millions of people … but we weren't here to do that. We were here to get information, to relay that information to the proper authorities, and that we did … We treated them in a civil way, I kept my hate under control when I was working there. You couldn't betray how you really felt because you wouldn't get anything out of their questioning."

Triest was courteous, dignified, and professional to Nazis who would have murdered him, had they been able. Triest and doctors Douglas Kelley, Gilbert, Goldensohn and others were seeking information, unlike Nazis, not to destroy, but to uplift humanity. They wanted to know, what kind of person commits evil acts? How can such evil be prevented in the future?

Christian Picciolini is a 52-year-old American activist from Chicago. When he was 14 years old, he was a lonely, needy kid. His Italian immigrant parents were small business owners. They worked very hard and had little time for him. One day Picciolini was smoking a joint in an alley and a neo-Nazi recruiter approached him and informed him that Jews caused all his problems. Picciolini was sucked into a neo-Nazi group. He now works against neo-Nazism. Picciolini says that every human being needs identity, community, and purpose. The promise of these, he said, lured him into a hate group.

Internet influencer Nick Fuentes claims that "Hitler was cool." On December 8, 2025, news broke that Branham High School students in San Jose, California, lay down on a football field to form the shape of a swastika. They posted a photograph of their pathetic stunt online, along with a 1939 quote from Hitler calling for "the annihilation of the Jewish race." Branham High made headlines before. In April, 2025, teachers at Branham called Israel a "settler colonial state" guilty of "genocide."

Hitler was not "cool." He was a jerk who destroyed the country he claimed to love. He celebrated tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, genetic perfection. Hitler was a chronically ill, constantly farting drug addict with brown hair, brown eyes, and he stood only 5' 9". He suffered from genetically deformed genitalia.

Distorted ideas of what Nazism was in real life make it seem attractive to some desperate and immature minds. Movies, novels, and video games depict Nazis as they wanted to be seen. The Hugo Boss uniforms are crisp and runway-ready. Nazis are depicted as strutting, jut-jawed masters of life and death. Colonel Burton C. Andrus comments on this media image, one he saw in newsreels from the 1930s and 40s. "From newsreels and newspapers the outside world had an image of the Nazi leaders as ruthless, impeccably uniformed men, showing a cold correctness on their steps to power."

Young men hope to be strong. They want to be part of an intact group of comrades committed to the same ideal. They want to master the messier emotions that come with youth. What could be more attractive to someone lacking identity, community, and purpose than to join up with the master race?

Documentaries like Journey to Justice, about Howard Triest, and books like I Was the Nuremberg Jailer, serve as correctives to glamorous images of Nazis. Nazis were no master race. Andrus comments on one top Nazi in his prison, a man "stooped, aging, and smaller than one had imagined. The eyes were baggy and tired." "When they were finally defeated," Andrus writes, when they were "finally made aware of their sinning, they turned out … to be cringing cowards … they panicked … characters awe-inspiring in their hideousness nearly died of fright. Pomp had been washed away, to reveal heart-thumping fright, tears, and pleadings."

Nazis were opportunists who preyed on defenseless Eastern European peasants and Jews who, as one Nazi, SS Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, clearly stated, had no recent history of organized military action and no real means to defend themselves from genocidal Nazi blitzkrieg. Von dem Bach-Zelewski was personally responsible for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilian Jews, Poles, Belarussians, and Latvians. After the war, he articulated that Nazi ideology was absurdly incorrect in its stereotype of Jews controlling the world. "This is the greatest lie of antisemitism because it gives the lie to that old slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized ... If they had had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions, but instead, they were taken completely by surprise."

The Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen photograph, of a Nazi shooting an unarmed Jewish mother and toddler at close range, the Last Jew in Vinnitsa photograph, of a Nazi shooting an unarmed Jewish man, the photo of Nazis leading blindfolded, unarmed, civilian Polish women into the forest near Palmiry village to be shot, and the photograph of Nazis shooting Father Piotr Sosnowski, an unarmed Polish Catholic priest, in Tuchola, do not depict a master race at work. These photos expose Nazism for what it was: blind, putrid thuggery.

Triest says, "They may be larger than life as far as history is concerned, but they certainly did not offer any picture of superiority. They were just plain, ordinary people, and some were pitiful looking." Striecher was "cruddy." Ribbentrop was "shaky, yellow." Hoess wanted to talk about how cold his feet were. Few had the manhood to admit to their own deeds. Rather, Triest explains, they blamed someone else, preferably someone dead. It was Hitler's, or Himmler's, or Heydrich's fault. Of course all three of those top Nazis were already dead. Triest was troubled by how "normal" Nazis seemed. "If you took away the names of these Nazis, and just sat down to talk to them, they were like your friends and neighbors," he says in a 2011 BBC interview.

Triest went on to work in denazification, in Munich, the city of his birth. "I was never a Nazi," everyone insisted. Germans seeking Triest's help brought photos and other evidence "proving" that they had had Jewish friends. When he was a Jewish teen in Munich, some of these same people turned their backs on him. Now that he was part of a conquering army, these former arrogant masters of the universe bowed and scraped. People who had formerly filled the streets and cheered on mass murder – see the outpourings of love for Hitler starting at the two-minute mark of this video – those same fanatical cult-of-personality members became sheep when they were on the losing side.

I Was the Nuremberg Jailer, like Howard Triest's testimony, shows Nazis as they were when the "cathedral of light" had been switched off, and the cheering throngs had dribbled away to dig their children, their parents, their spouses, out of bombed-out rubble. Their Thousand Year Reich ended with an estimated eight million of their fellow Germans dead, and twenty percent of their nation's infrastructure destroyed. $272 billion of damage had been done to that same Germany that was "Deutschland uber alles," "Germany above all," the Germany they claimed to "love" so very much, but that they all but murdered in their frenzy of hatred for their imaginary enemies. Hans Frank, "butcher" of humans, summed up, in his Nuremberg testimony, perhaps the most serious burden Germans had to bear. "A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased."

I Was the Nuremberg Jailer, as its sensational title suggests, is written in pulp fiction style. Sentences are short and punchy. Andrus does not pause to engage in philosophical musing. To him his Nazi prisoners are just another challenge the military has thrown at him.

The value system that US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus brought to his job as a jailer of top Nazis is revealed in a preface by Andrus' co-author, Desmond Zwar. They began their project in the late sixties, in an America in love with the Beatles and "flower power;" a world light years removed from post-World-War-Two Nuremberg. Many other publishers had invited Andrus to submit his memoirs; previously, he had always declined. Why was he telling his story now? To Andrus, whatever his prisoners had done, Zwar writes, "they were still human beings. I thought it was only decent to wait twenty years before I wrote about them."

Yes, imprisoned Nazis were human beings, and Andrus' book and cinematic treatments of the trials encourage us to recognize our shared humanity in Nazis. Interestingly, three films, 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, the 2000 televised miniseries, Nuremberg, and, again, 2025's Nuremberg, though very different treatments, all make an identical choice. They all include the exact same black-and-white footage shot by liberators of Nazi concentration camps.

This footage, to the naive eye not used to such images, is almost impossible to watch, and the stuff of not just nightmares, but trauma. I know – my mother encouraged me to watch such footage, to drill into me what "they" did to "us." My mother was not Jewish; she was born in Czechoslovakia, and to her the 1938 Munich betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the West was a never-removed thorn.

Why do three such different films include the same soul-searing footage of mounds of skeletal human corpses and naked concentration camp inmates breathing their final breaths? Because the films want us to see Nazis as human in the way that we are human. Because the films want to warn us that even people like us can commit atrocity if we make the wrong choices. And the films want to, metaphorically, rub our noses in exactly how ugly atrocity can get.

The viewer must know that the charming Goering character they come to sympathize with – the Goering who tells jokes and loved his wife and child – the Goering played by charismatic Brian Cox in 2000 and Russell Crowe in 2025 – that Goering was personally responsible for those corpses. Perhaps not history, or sociology, or even psychology can encompass the ethical distance man spans. Perhaps only Biblical vocabulary can limn this territory. We are with Satan, the snake underfoot that drags us into the muck of sin; we are with angels, the winged creatures that kneel at the throne of eternal light.

Andrus' book is not a film, but he, too, does what the films do, not with images, but with words. He opens chapter one, "Airlift from Hell," with a description of Allied POWs released from Nazi internment.

"There were some who died as we arrived, others who passed away in the arms of our medical team that night. Russian prisoners in their ragged overcoats, sitting or leaning against walls, fixing us with that glassy, blank stare that a man wears when he is close to death … Men too emaciated and ill to raise their hands to their heads tried to salute … thin, ragged, waiting creatures tried to raise a cheer. Instead, out of their mouths came horrible, frog-like croaking … Sudden tears ran down men's cheeks. Others could not make a sound. In this moment of high emotion they just turned away." 

At first, Andrus' Nazi prisoners were housed in Luxembourg. During the occupation, Nazis encouraged Luxembourgers to consider themselves German. Indeed, the country's national language, Luxembourgish, is related to German, and most Luxembourgers are Christian. In spite of the pressure brought by Nazi occupiers, in a 1941 survey, 95% of citizens self-identified as Luxembourgish, rather than German. Nazis recognized their vote as resistance to Nazi rule, so for this and other forms of resistance, Luxembourgers were sent to Dachau. Andrus watched some survivors return. "Shakily and weakly, the sick and starved people climbed down to the roadway. Some were helped; others were carried. Many were living skeletons with yellowish, parchment skin and hollow, sunken eyes."

Yes, see Andrus' prisoners as human beings just like you and me. But never forget what they did. Never forget that Goering, loving husband and father; that Speer, who desperately wanted to be the "Good Nazi;" that Frank, who insisted that he repented of his evil deeds; Hess, who insisted that he couldn't remember his evil deeds; Kaltenbunner, his face twitching, who "plaintively" blamed Himmler and Heydrich for his evil deeds; Keitel, who was "just following orders," every one of these human beings just like you and me, were personally responsible for torture, murder, and genocide. 

This disconnect between the cowed Nazi prisoners Andrus encountered in their cells and the so-called "master race" who committed mass murder is captured in his reaction to Artur Seyss-Inquart. Seyss-Inquart served as deputy governor to Hans Frank and then as Reichskommissar in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Seyss-Inquart, Andrus writes, "walked with a limp. He had a vapid, bespectacled face that gave no impression of the cruelty and viciousness it undoubtedly concealed … He was a vague sort of man … there seemed nothing more to him than the limp."

Goebbels, like Seyss-Inquart, also walked with a limp; one of his legs was also shorter than the other. Robert Wagemann was a five-year-old German boy living in Mannheim. He had a limp. He was ordered to report to a hospital where he would be euthanized – because of his limp. This was part of Aktion T4, the Nazi mass murder of handicapped people. Robert's mother escaped the hospital with him, thus saving his life. That Seyss-Inquart and Goebbels became powerful Nazis, in spite of the same handicap that would have condemned five-year-old Robert to death is just one of many inconsistencies in the so-called "Master Race."

Andrus nursed "pitiful wreck" Hans Frank back to health, after Frank's failed suicide attempt. Ribbentrop was "meek and full of self-pity." Robert Ley headed the German Labor Front. "Ley's years of alcoholism showed on his face." Ley had "a dissipated, bleary look."

"Rude, bombastic, and annoyed" Goering arrived with finger and toe nails painted red to complement his sixteen pieces of matching red leather luggage. His toes curled under from wearing too-tight boots. Goering traveled with gold, silver, and bejeweled chains, watches, cuff links, brooches, cigarette lighters, cigar cutters, and rings. In addition to enough cyanide to commit suicide several times over, he also had 20,000 Paracodine pills. Goering needed forty of these opioid tablets just to get through the day. Andrus would gradually wean a kicking-and-screaming Goering from his addiction. Goering would, of course, later lie and falsely claim that he went cold turkey all by himself. "The truth is" that Goering "whined and complained like a spoiled child throughout the weaning" from drugs.

A thunderstorm gave Goering a fright so bad he claimed he was having a heart attack. Andrus needed back-up, a healthcare professional who could monitor the whiny Nazi. The Army sent Dr. Douglas Kelley, subject of the 2025 film Nuremberg. Kelley reported that since captivity had forced Goering to lose weight and drop his addiction, Andrus was responsible for an improvement in Goering's overall health. 

Everyone hated Streicher. The 5' 4" pornography collector, as Andrus repeatedly calls him, repelled even his fellow Nazis. Admiral Doenitz "and several others immediately moved their chairs and refused to sit with" Streicher in the mess-room. Andrus informed them that they had to eat with whomever he placed at their table. In prison, Streicher claimed that he had a change of heart and didn't hate Jews any more. Andrus is dubious, as is the reader.

German POWs served meals. Goering complained to one that the "food isn't as good as I fed to my dogs." The German POW snapped, "Well, if that's the case, you fed your dogs better than you fed any of us who served under you in the Luftwaffe."

Andrus praises where praise is due. Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Keitel, his guards noticed, was sitting up all night. He had a carbuncle on his neck that prevented him from lying down, yet he did not request medical attention. After his sleeplessness was noted, his American captors removed the carbuncle and provided him with a special pillow.

Field Marshall Albert Kesselring and others sent letters to Eisenhower demanding better treatment. "I have always been a chivalrous opponent," this Nazi war criminal astoundingly claimed. Kesselring had ordered massacres of Italian civilians. He would argue these massacres were "just and lawful." "I have served my forty years in war and peace in decent fashion … My quarters not only run counter to my position and age, but also to my health." Eisenhower responded that captured Nazis were to receive "only minimum essential accommodation … all prisoners will be fed strictly upon the ration" that lower-ranking prisoners also received.

Russians arrived and wanted access. Goering was "terrified" and begged to be excused. Andrus informed Goering that he would see whomever Andrus ordered him to see.

Andrus decided to show his prisoners footage taken at Buchenwald. He wanted the prisoners to know that he knew, and the world knew, the true face of Nazism. "The considerate treatment you receive here is not because you merit it, but because anything less would be unbecoming to us."

Hans Frank "held a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged on it for fifteen minutes." Ribbentrop chickened out and left. "Kesselring went white." Streicher wrung his hands. Goering was unimpressed, and Doenitz said, "Why don't they shoot me now?"

Reichsbank president Walter Funk was "small, pudgy, and bald, a nondescript little character." American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson labeled Funk "The Banker of Gold Teeth" because he presided over gold stolen from Jews, including that ripped from dental work. After watching the Buchenwald film, Funk approached Andrus. Andrus reports that Funk "had come to us suffering from the organic damage of past venereal disease and was now devoid of all semblance of manliness … It seemed a mystery that he had ever been allowed any responsibility. He was always whimpering and whining." Funk looked "incapable of running a filling station, never mind a bank." In his one-on-one session with Andrus, Funk confessed to everything. "I have been a bad man, Colonel, and I want to tell you about it." Funk confessed to the theft of gold dental work as well as Jews' eyeglasses and even the precious metal embroidered into rabbis' ceremonial robes. I wish Andrus had had a camera running. Funk would later, tearfully, plead not guilty at his war crimes trial.

In the 2025 film, Nuremberg, Andrus (John Slattery) warns Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann) not to give a stiff-armed salute. You can see that scene in the film's trailer, here. That really happened, although as Andrus describes it, he did not put hands on Hess, but merely informed him verbally that he must never do that again. "I told him that it was I who decided the nature of greetings in Nuremberg Prison." Otherwise, Andrus dismissed Hess as a "total fake."

One of the myriad of problems that Andrus had to solve was that some wanted his prisoners dead, and he had to protect them from potential assassins. Once, while Goering was exercising outside, "a heavy, eight-inch SS combat knife … buried itself in the wooden walk behind Goering." It came from above. Andrus had no way of knowing who threw it or why, but it was another headache. Andrus faults the Army for not providing him adequate staff. "I experienced a 600 percent turnover in staff, enough to cause many men to give up." But he didn't.

Dr. Leonardo Conti "who had advocated guinea pig experiments with human beings, who had empowered German jails, insane asylums, homes for the aged and other institutions to kill inmates under the guise of mercy," committed suicide in his cell. His suicide note read, "For months now I have had the gravest moods, depressions, ideas of death, feelings of fear, visions, although I have never been a coward." Then "the friendless Dr. Robert Ley," who would "pace his cell in carpet slippers, sleepless, often weeping, shattered" somehow managed to commit suicide on his toilet. His note read, "Farewell. I can't stand the shame any longer Physically nothing is lacking. The food is good. It is warm in my cell. The Americans are correct and partially friends." The banality of suicide notes written by the evil.

But Ley also wrote,

"We have forsaken God and therefore we were forsaken by God. Antisemitism distorted our outlook, and we made grave errors. It is hard to admit mistakes, but the whole existence of our people is in question. We Nazis must have the courage to rid ourselves of antisemitism. We have to declare to youth that it was a mistake. The youth will not believe our opponents. We have to go all the way. We have to meet the Jews with open hearts. German people! Reconcile yourselves with the Jew; invite him to make his home with you … A complete reconciliation with the Jews has the priority over any economic or cultural reconstruction."

If only Ley had had the courage to remain alive long enough to deliver this stirring message at the IMT.

After Ley's suicide, Andrus increased security, for example placing one sentry outside every cell, rather than assigning four cells to each sentry.

The very tall Gestapo chief Kaltenbrunner – some sources say he was 6' 4", others 6' 6" – though he presided over the deaths of concentration camp prisoners, was physically and psychologically weak, and was often hospitalized with possibly psychosomatic illnesses. He was "hysterical for three weeks. He weeps at the slightest provocation. He is the bully type, strong and hard when on top, cringing and crying when not." At one point, "he nearly died of fright." Dr. Gilbert reported that "his massive frame conceals a weak, vacillating will and an emotionally unstable schizoid personality. Stripped of his power, he now cringes and complains."

Ribbentrop was "haggard and distraught … frightened and dejected." His cell was messy with papers on which he wrote "fragmentary and non-constructive notes." He suffered from insomnia and a chronic headache that Hitler had given him in 1941.

Nazi theorist Rosenberg admitted "Maybe we went a little too far." Hitler Youth head von Schirach said that his movement "was much like the Boy Scouts, really." Henry Ford made me an antisemite, von Schirach claimed.

Many prisoners, though the leaders of a movement that planned to eliminate Christianity, made use of the Lutheran and Catholic pastors serving them. Both Reverend Henry Gerecke and Father Sixtus O'Connor believed their charges to be sincere in seeking repentance before their deaths. Neither man was wearing rose-colored glasses. The chaplaincy had the third highest casualty rate of all branches in the U.S. military during World War II. Gerecke "touched the walls of Dachau and his hand came away smeared in blood." Father O'Connor was a Bronze Star recipient for his service in the Battle of the Bulge. O'Connor was part of the US Army liberation of Mauthausen. In "some buildings they found one or two living among the hundreds of dead." Nazis had imprisoned thousands of Catholic priests in concentration camps. O'Connor encountered his fellow priests among the prisoners in Mauthausen. At this one camp, O'Connor conducted almost three thousand funerals and gave last rites to two thousand inmates. At Nuremberg, one of the prisoners O'Connor had to minister to, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, had helped establish the Mauthausen concentration camp. In a typically mysterious and profound Catholic pronouncement, O'Connor would later say, "You absolve them of their sins. You don't absolve them of their actions."

Not all prisoners benefited from Gerecke's and O'Connor's ministry. Goering and Rosenberg, for example, rejected belief. Goering did attend chapel and sing loudly, but that was just to get out of his cell. Rosenberg wanted no part of the Christianity he had denigrated in his role as Nazi theorist-in-chief. Near his death, Goering "hinted" about a desire to receive communion, but given his disbelief, Gerecke declined. Nuremberg Jailer includes the text of a letter that the prisoners who accepted Gerecke's ministration wrote to his wife. They had heard a rumor that Gerecke missed his wife and was returning to the US. They begged his wife to allow him to stay with them. They needed him.

Goering received a lot of mail, much of it from Germans expressing their dissatisfaction with the fate of the promised Thousand Year Reich. "The Nazis have ruined Germany," one stated, plainly. "The war was lost when Stalingrad fell, and now Berlin looks like Stalingrad." "I am now in complete poverty because of Hitler's crimes," one complained. A "hunted little woman" who had begged leniency for her brother, a noble artist and opponent of the regime." She received no leniency and wrote, "Our wish is that you will be treated in the same way as you treated your political prisoners in your time … I see again the silly grin on your face as you read the request for the pardon of my brother."

"Chaplain Gerecke held a special service on Christmas Eve in the silent prison .. Many of the men softly humming 'Stille Nacht' realized that it would be the last Christmas they would ever see." In spite of such special moments, the prisoners were no longer united by an overarching ideology. The "old enmities and jealousies " were "coming up to the surface." The prisoners "seized every opportunity to blame one another … there wasn't a glimmer of team loyalty, few of them making any attempt to hide the contempt they had for each other."

Andrus includes detailed accounts of the hangings. I will refrain from summarizing those awesome, mysterious moments when rope snuffs out a human life. At the end, Andrus says, "A big businessman was prepared to give me twenty-five thousand dollars for the rope that had hanged Goering."

There's another lesson for us today in Andrus' book. Andrus describes his Nazi prisoners twice being shown black-and-white footage of the liberation of concentration camps. This footage graphically records the horrors that took place in those camps. Prisoners were shown this footage once before their trial, to inform prisoners that their guards knew exactly what the Nazis were responsible for. They were shown the footage again at the IMT. Andrus reports Nazi defendants "cringing" Defendant Hans Fritzsche had served as Ministerialdirektor at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. It had been his job to present a "softer, wittier, more popular and entertaining side of Nazism," according to the Encyclopedia of Radio. At the IMT, after viewing the concentration camp footage, Fritzsche said, "I have the feeling I am drowning in filth … I am choking in it."

The question is, of course, why? These very defendants were the authors of the torture and murder they witnessed onscreen. Why did they suddenly cringe and cry, turn pale and choke?

I think the answer is that when viewing their crimes through others' eyes, others who demonstrated, as Triest, Andrus, Goldensohn, Gerecke, O'Connor, and the tribunal itself, that they lived by a completely different value system, Nazis suddenly saw how horrible their ideas were. Nazis like Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf, who devised methods to ease his men into mass murder, knew that even those formed by years of propaganda and Hitler Youth marches hesitated before committing crimes, and suffered afterwards. Mass murderer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski had to be hospitalized with guilt-induced hallucinations, morphine addiction, and gastrointestinal distress. Gas chambers and the use of prisoners, rather than Nazi soldiers, to handle the details of execution were devised in order to spare those Nazi soldiers the trauma of mass killing. Nazis, like us, had a conscience. That conscience was manipulated by an evil ideology.

At Nuremberg, though, top Nazis saw through the eyes of non-Nazis exactly what Nazism looked like when put in practice. And they cringed, they looked away, they begged for mercy from the God they had denied and betrayed, had crucified millions of times, in the bodies of their fellow men made, as Genesis teaches, in the image and likeness of God. We can and do perform a necessary righteousness, as did the IMT, when we speak forthrightly and invite our fellow humans to confront the reality and eternal consequences of immoral action.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.