Saturday, October 26, 2013

A World Away, the Seventh Game; Close at Hand, Condemned Nazis

From The New York Times-

The Protestant minister and the Roman Catholic priest had a $10 bet riding on the 1946 World Series. The minister, a Lutheran from Missouri, went with the St. Louis Cardinals, naturally. The priest, a Franciscan from upstate New York, was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, but he went with the Boston Red Sox to make things interesting.

These men of the cloth had earned this minor vice.

For the last 11 months, they had served as the chaplains at Nuremberg prison in Germany, offering spiritual counsel to the first Nazis to be tried for war crimes in the rubbed-raw wake of World War II. Among their flock were architects of genocide, responsible for the murder of many millions, most of them Jews.

Now it was mid-October, and this initial phase of postwar judgment was nearing its climactic end in a courts-and-prison complex called the Palace of Justice. The pastoral work of the Lutheran, the Rev. Henry Gerecke, and the Franciscan, the Rev. Sixtus O’Connor, was almost done.

More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/sports/baseball/a-world-away-the-seventh-game-close-at-hand-condemned-nazis.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

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