MISSION AT NUREMBERG by Tim Townsend is about the American Army chaplain appointed to handle the spiritual needs of the Nazis during the Nuremberg trials. The chaplain was a Missouri farm boy named Henry Gerecke. The leaders of the Third Reich had wives and children, people they loved and were worried about on the eves of their inevitable executions. Gerecke received a lot of hate mail because he believed in forgiveness. The remarkable thing about this book is the depiction of Gerecke’s struggle to find humanity in the monstrous. We tend to view evil as primarily a lack of empathy, but most of these men did not lack empathy. And that’s why this is a haunting book. Seeing the architects of the holocaust as human makes their acts all the more terrifying. If you’re a student of WWII, or just a student of humanity, you will definitely want this book in your library.