The leading Nazi party leaders who were still alive stood trial after the war in the Nuremberg Trials. The commandant of the Nuremberg prison (where the defendants where detained) Colonel Burton Andrus personally requested that Henry Gerecke be assigned there as chaplain. Gerecke became the Protestant chaplain and Father Sixtus O'Connor was the Roman Catholic chaplain. The Lutheran church was the largest Protestant denomination in Germany and Gerecke was a Lutheran minister, his prior prison chaplaincy experience also suited him to the role, and he had studied German at St John's.