An aerial shot of the courtroom showing Pastor Gerecke speaking at the Thanksgiving Day service in Nuremberg in 1945. Justice Jackson's head is bowed respectfully—perhaps in keeping with his assignment from President Truman and U.S. representational role, his general irreligiousity notwithstanding. And throughout the courtroom, many other heads are bowed too. Courtesy photo

In summer 1953, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote to an old friend, Father Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. He was a Catholic priest, the Vice-President of Georgetown University, and the Regent of its School of Foreign Service. Father Walsh then had been hospitalized for many months, and Justice Jackson was writing, actually while on vacation in California, to inquire about Walsh's health and to wish him well.

Justice Jackson and Father Walsh had been friends for many years. They became acquainted in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s.

In 1945, they formed a close bond when Walsh, then a United States Army Captain, served on U.S. Chief of Counsel Jackson's staff prosecuting the principal Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Walsh performed a number of significant tasks before and during the trial, including supervising the gathering of evidence on Nazi religious persecution.

At Nuremberg, the second trial day had been simply that, a Thursday, November 22, 1945. But in the U.S., that was Thanksgiving Day.

And around the world, that November was the first November of peace following years of world war.

So in Nuremberg that afternoon, after the trial day had concluded, hundreds of military and civilian Allied personnel—from France, the U.K., the U.S., and the U.S.S.R.—remained in Courtroom 600 to observe the American holiday.

Eight years later, this occasion was vivid in Father Walsh's mind. He wrote to Justice Jackson that:

[a]mong other things preserved in my memory one will always stand out very prominently, the day you said to me: "Father Walsh, this is Thanksgiving Day and I intend to convene all the personnel of the American Delegation in the courtroom for an appropriate ceremony. The ceremony will include the reading of the President's proclamation after which you will please give an interpretation of the document, after which the Protestant chaplain will do the same to be followed by a spokesman of the Jewish faith." I have a picture of that occasion and I often look at it to study the look of puzzlement on the faces of the Russian Delegation. They would probably understand that the name of God would be mentioned in church, but that the 
legal fraternity, headed by your distinguished self, should openly thank God for the graces and benefits of the past year was something outside the tenets of the Communist Manifesto and surely alien to any protocol contrived by the 
Kremlin.

Father Walsh was, in 1953, remembering the ceremony quite accurately. Justice Jackson had, opening it—as his trial opening statement the previous day had begun the prosecution cases—explained briefly the U.S. history and tradition of Thanksgiving.

Jackson had then called on Captain/Father Walsh, who offered an opening prayer. Lieutenant Commander Harold Leventhal (U.S. Coast Guard Reserve), a prosecutor on Jackson's staff and a Jew, then read from the Psalms.

Lieutenant Henry F. Gerecke (U.S. Army Chaplain Corps), newly appointed as chief Protestant chaplain at the Nuremberg prison to minister to defendants and other prisoners there, gave the closing benediction.

On this coming Thursday, whether or not you are in the U.S., I hope that you will gather with others, have things to be thankful for, and do that in the way that is meaningful to you.

These photographs below capture the Thanksgiving 1945 observance in Nuremberg's Courtroom 600.

John Q. Barrett is a Professor of Law at St. John's University and Robert H. Jackson Center board member and Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow.

Pictured above is Pastor Gerecke speaking during Thanksgiving 1945 observance in Nuremberg's Courtroom 600. Justice Jackson (in dark suit) and Father Walsh (in military uniform), both at far left, watch and listen to him. Courtesy photo.

This photograph, taken from the other side, again shows Pastor Gerecke delivering closing prayer. Leventhal is seated behind him. Jackson, center, is leaning on the edge of a table. At its far end, seated along the bench inside the courtroom's well, are, left to right, Judge Norman Birkett (U.K.), Colonel Robert J. Gill (U.S. Army, Corps of Military Police and Jackson's Executive Officer, in uniform); General Iona T. Nikitchenko (U.S.S.R. judge, in uniform), interpreter Oleg Troyanovsky (U.S.S.R.), and Lt. Col. Alexander F. Volchkov (U.S.S.R. judge, in uniform). This photograph is what Father Walsh had in his possession and described in his 1953 letter to Justice Jackson. Courtesy photo