On April 12, 1945, behind a wooden shed in central Germany, out of sight of the cameras, out of sight of his staff, and out of sight of the two other generals who had entered the shed without him, a 59-year-old American commander knelt in the mud and vomited onto the grass.
He carried three stars on each shoulder. He had led armies from North Africa to the Rhine. His men called him "Blood and Guts." If your father or uncle or grandfather served in Europe in the spring of 1945, he may have written home about what the U.S. Army found that month. This is what he saw. This is the price that was paid. And this is the story of what one general did about it before he betrayed everything he had learned.
This is the story of how a man's pattern shattered in less than 30 minutes. It is the story of a camp called Ohrdruf. It is the story of what the U.S. Army found there. And it is the story of what one general decided to do about it — a decision that would force an entire nation to look at itself, a decision that would end with a mayor and his wife hanging from the beams of their own home, a decision that Patton himself would betray six months later.
Before we begin, a simple correction. You may have heard that Patton took German prisoners to Dachau. He did not. Patton's army did not liberate Dachau. That credit belongs to the men of the Seventh Army, the 42nd "Rainbow" Division, and the 45th "Thunderbird" Division on April 29, 1945. The camp Patton actually saw, the camp that made him vomit, and the camp where American policy toward the German people was born, was not Dachau. It was Ohrdruf. And the truth is worse than the myth.
To understand what happened behind that shed, you have to understand the man walking toward it. George Smith Patton Jr. was 59 years old in the spring of 1945. He had commanded troops in North Africa. He had driven the Germans out of Sicily. He believed, sincerely and without embarrassment, that he had lived past lives as a Roman soldier and an officer in Napoleon's army. He carried a pistol with an ivory grip on his hip. He swore constantly. He wrote poetry. He read the Bible.
He was also the general who, in August 1943, walked into a field hospital in Sicily, found two American soldiers suffering from what we now call combat stress, and slapped them. He called one a coward. He threatened to shoot him. When the story spread, Eisenhower nearly ended his career. Patton was pulled from the front lines for nearly a year. He was humiliated. He kept silent. And for a time, he was useless.
They brought him back for one reason. He was the best pursuit commander in the U.S. Army. When the German line collapsed in the summer of 1944, Patton's Third Army raced across France faster than any army had moved since the invention of the internal combustion engine. It crossed the Rhine in March 1945. It crawled east. It seized a salt mine at Merkers containing most of the German central bank's gold reserves. His tanks were moving through Thuringia so fast that supply trucks could not keep up. His men were exhausted. His men were covered in dirt. His men were, by every measure of war, winning.
Then on April 4, 1945, a reconnaissance unit from the 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division reached a wire fence outside a town in central Germany called Ohrdruf. The wire was cut. The gate was open. The guards were gone. What the guards left behind was something the U.S. Army had no vocabulary to describe.
One of the men who walked through that gate was a 19-year-old soldier from Kansas. His name was Charles Payne. He lived to see his nephew, a boy named Barack Obama, become president of the United States 64 years later. But on that morning of April 4, 1945, he was a 19-year-old soldier staring at a scene his mind refused to absorb.
Bodies in the courtyard. Bodies slumped against the fence. Bodies stacked like firewood along the railroad tracks, some charred, some still recognizable as human. In one corner of the compound was a shed. Inside the shed were 30 more bodies, dusted with white lime powder to hide the smell. The official operations report of the Third Army that day used one sentence. Battle-hardened veterans who had seen death many times before stared in silence at the Nazi slaughterhouse. Death on a battlefield was something they could understand. This was beyond their imagination.
The word "slaughterhouse" in a U.S. Army field report. That is not a metaphor a colonel writes if he can find any other word. There was no other word.
The commanders of both divisions arrived by noon. The commander of the 89th Infantry, Brigadier General Joseph Catrona. The commander of the 4th Armored Division, Major General Thomas Finley. Both men had seen the Battle of the Bulge. Both had walked past frozen bodies in the Ardennes. Neither had ever seen anything like this. They sent an urgent request up the chain of command. Someone from Third Army headquarters needed to come immediately.
Patton arrived at 3:30 in the afternoon. He entered through the gate the same way his soldiers had. He saw the courtyard. He saw the bodies. Within 30 minutes, according to the official records of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, "Old Blood and Guts" vomited. The nickname was still on his shoulder patch. His stomach could not bear the sight. He sent a message to higher headquarters. He told them: "You should actually come and see this for yourselves. You would not believe me if I merely described it."
Eight days later, on April 12, 1945, three men in olive uniforms stepped out of a military car at the gate of Ohrdruf. General Dwight David Eisenhower, 54, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. General Omar Nelson Bradley, 52, commander of the U.S. Twelfth Army Group, quiet and methodical, the soldier the men trusted more than anyone else. And Patton standing between them.
After they learned what was inside the fence, a surviving prisoner led them through the camp. The bodies were still lying on the ground. A burned pit in the courtyard revealed charred bones of prisoners the SS had tried to destroy in the final hours before the Americans arrived. Other survivors demonstrated the torture methods the guards had used. Whipping posts, hanging beams, iron rings fixed into wooden walls. Then they reached the shed. Thirty bodies inside. Lime powder, and flies.
Eisenhower went in. Bradley went in. Patton stopped at the door. He turned away. He did not enter. He had already vomited once at this camp. He knew he would vomit again. He did not want to do it in front of the Supreme Commander. He did not want to do it in front of a photographer. He walked past the shed, out of sight of the entrance, and waited.
Inside the shed, Eisenhower looked at the bodies for a long time. He said very little. He came out. He stood in the courtyard. Then, in front of the officers who had come with him, and in front of the correspondents he had personally ordered to fly in from London, New York, and Washington, he said the sentence that would define the moral memory of World War II.
"We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against."
That evening, Eisenhower sent a cable to General George Marshall in Washington. The cable ordered members of Congress and the Senate, editors and publishers, and all the political and journalistic institutions of the United States and Great Britain to travel immediately to Germany at the expense of the War Department, to see for themselves what had been found in the camps. He wrote that he was issuing this order because he suspected, correctly, that someone would one day say this never happened. He was preparing the evidence file for a trial that had not yet been organized in a city called Nuremberg. Patton stood beside him as Eisenhower dictated. Patton nodded. Patton agreed.
Patton at noon on April 12, 1945, was a changed man. He would carry that change for exactly 36 days. Because that is the second thing you need to know about George Patton. And it is why this story will not end the way you expect.
The general who vomited behind the shed at Ohrdruf. The general who could not speak for hours afterward. The general who signed the order forcing 1,200 civilians from the city of Weimar to walk through the corpses of Buchenwald. He was also the general who would write in September of the same year, in his private diary, that the Jewish survivors of those same camps were, quote, "lower than animals." The same hand, the same man, the same year.
That is the story we are about to tell. It begins in dust and lime powder and the wire of a small camp in Thuringia. It ends with a car accident outside Mannheim on a cold December morning. Between those two points, we will follow the U.S. Army as it enters the German machinery of genocide and tries to decide what a democracy is supposed to do next.
We will watch mayors in dinner jackets hang themselves from their own ceiling beams. We will watch American soldiers, whose disgust has passed the limits of discipline, line SS guards against the wall of a coal yard and open fire. We will watch a general who forced Germany to look in the mirror refuse to prosecute his own men for a war crime. And we will watch him, in the last months of his life, turn into something none of the men who entered Ohrdruf with him would recognize.
But first, we return to the wire. Because on the night of April 12, 1945, after Eisenhower and Bradley had returned to their headquarters, after the correspondents had sent their first cables home, and after the photographers had developed their film, the mayor of the nearby town of Ohrdruf was ordered to tour the camp the next day, April 13, accompanied by his wife. Whatever they saw behind that wire, whatever Third Army soldiers forced them to see, touch, or count, was enough that by dawn on April 14, the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife were dead, hanging from the beams of their own house.
The note found beside them, according to details passed down in Third Army unit histories, though never confirmed in official records, contained seven words. We did not know, but we knew. The process of forcing the German people to bear witness had begun.
To understand the message left beside the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife, you have to go back four days. Not to Ohrdruf, but to another camp 40 miles to the north, on a hill above the German city of Weimar. A camp the SS called Buchenwald.
Buchenwald was not a small camp. It was not hidden from view. It had operated for nearly eight years within close distance of one of Europe's cultural capitals. The city of Goethe, the city of Schiller, the city where Germany's 1919 constitution was written. The residents of Weimar had watched trains climb the hill for eight years. They had watched trucks come down. They had smelled the smoke.
On April 8, 1945, four days before Patton stood behind that shed, the prisoners inside Buchenwald knew the Americans were close. They also knew the SS had orders to kill them all before the Americans arrived. Somewhere inside the camp, in a barracks the guards had never searched, a secret committee of political prisoners had hidden a shortwave radio transmitter. They turned it on. They sent a message in Morse code in Russian, English, and German. The message consisted of three repeated words. To the Allies. To the Allies. This is Buchenwald concentration camp, a distress call. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to exterminate us.
The message was received. It was passed up the chain of command. It reached Patton's Third Army by nightfall. And on the morning of April 11, 1945, tanks of the 6th Armored Division climbed the hill above Weimar and breached the gate of Buchenwald. There were 21,000 prisoners still alive inside the wire. Many of them weighed less than 70 pounds. They could not stand. They could not walk. And when the tank crews dismounted and saw what was in the barracks, some of them sat down on the ground and wept — hard men, professional soldiers who had fought their way from Normandy to central Germany.
The bodies at Buchenwald were not stacked inside a shed. They were stacked in a courtyard behind the crematorium in a pile as high as a house. The 6th Armored Division had liberated its fourth German camp of the war by then. None of them were prepared for the pile behind the crematorium. And Buchenwald was three miles from Weimar, a 30-minute walk along a paved road.
Five days later, on April 16, 1945, General Patton issued an order. It was one of the coldest orders of the European war. It was directed to the U.S. military government then occupying the city of Weimar. The order effectively stated that no fewer than 1,000 adult citizens of Weimar, selected at random, were to assemble the following morning and be escorted by American soldiers on a three-mile march up to Buchenwald. They were to see every barracks. They were to see the crematorium. They were to see the pile.
The final number, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was more than 1,200 civilians — men in suits, women in Sunday dresses, elderly citizens who had lived in Weimar their whole lives. They walked in a long, silent column along the same road the trains had taken for eight years.
Photographs from that day still exist. You can look at them. They are in the National Archives, thanks to a doctor named Colonel Frank Stinchfield, who was there. In one photograph, civilians line the fence, looking in. It is hard to read their faces at first. Some cover their mouths. Some stare at the ground. Some look directly at the camera with an expression that is not shame. It is discomfort — which is the first thing to say, because it is the first thing the American soldiers noticed.
Not every German civilian walked out of Buchenwald a changed person. Some entered laughing. Some said the bodies were a trick, that the Americans had brought the bodies in trucks, that this was propaganda. American soldiers who were there wrote in letters home that they had to physically force some civilians to look at the pile. One woman, according to a soldier of the 6th Armored Division, kept insisting the whole thing was staged until an American sergeant grabbed her by the wrist and forced her to touch the arm of one of the dead. She did not laugh after that. But she also did not speak.
That was the shape of the reckoning. It was not universal. It was not clean. Some walked out of Buchenwald sobbing so hard they could not stand. Others walked out with cold hearts. Some left angry — not at the SS, not at Hitler, but at the Americans for forcing them to see it.
The forced witnessing that Eisenhower ordered, and that Patton enforced, was a policy built on a hope. The hope was that seeing would produce understanding. What the Third Army learned in the third week of April 1945 is that seeing produced whatever the person brought inside. The mayor of Ohrdruf brought guilt, and hanged himself in his own home. Some citizens of Weimar brought contempt, and went home to dinner.
That is the truth that histories of that period do not always tell us. It is a truth harsher than the myth, but it is the more important one, because it answers the question the entire war was asked to answer. What are human beings really, when the evidence is placed in front of their eyes? Some are like the mayor of Ohrdruf. Some are like that woman at the fence.
And that is not the last turn in this chapter, because the U.S. Army was about to discover something harder than the woman at the fence. The U.S. Army was about to discover what forced witnessing does to the witness.
On April 29, 1945, 13 days after the civilians of Weimar climbed the hill toward Buchenwald, two American infantry divisions were approaching a small town in Bavaria, 13 miles northwest of Munich. The town was called Dachau. They were not from Patton's Third Army. They were from the Seventh Army under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch. The lead units were the 42nd Infantry Division, known as the Rainbow Division, and the 45th Infantry Division, known as the Thunderbird Division. They had been fighting almost continuously since landing in southern France the previous summer. They were exhausted. They were angry. And by the last week of April 1945, they had passed the point where discipline could be guaranteed.
They knew there was a camp near the town. They did not know what was inside. What was inside was 32,000 human beings, most of them slowly starving, and behind the main camp, standing on a rail spur, were 39 train cars. The cars had been sent from Buchenwald three weeks earlier, packed with 3,000 prisoners the SS did not want the Americans to find. The train had wandered through southern Germany for 21 days, unable to reach any destination because Allied bombing had destroyed the rail junctions. When American scouts approached the track on the morning of April 29, the smell reached them before they reached the site.
They opened the first car. Two thousand of the 3,000 prisoners on that train were dead. Bodies filled the cars. Bodies had fallen out of the cars. Bodies lay along the rails in the positions in which they had died, some still gripping the wire of a car door with their fingers.
The lead battalion of the 45th Infantry, the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment, was commanded by a lieutenant colonel named Felix Sparks. He was 28 years old. He was from Arizona. He had already been wounded four times in the war. He had lost, according to his later account, most of the men he had trained with. When he saw the train cars, according to the testimony he gave to the Inspector General six weeks later, he stopped being able to think in complete sentences.
His men rushed through the wire into the main camp. Prisoners inside surged toward them, some collapsing at their feet. Some tried to kiss their boots. In the far corner of the camp, a group of SS guards — some Waffen SS, others Hungarian conscripts forced into service in the last weeks of the war — threw down their weapons and raised their hands. The SS officer in charge of the camp had left. A young officer named Heinrich Wicker came forward carrying a white flag. He formally surrendered the camp to Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42nd Division, who had arrived from a different direction. Wicker's surrender was accepted at about 2:30 in the afternoon. Wicker was dead by 3:00.
He was not the only one. In a coal yard on the west side of the camp, an executive officer of Company C — a lieutenant of Cherokee descent named Jack Bushyhead, 32 years old, born in the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma — ordered SS prisoners separated from German army prisoners. The SS men were lined up against a brick wall. A machine gun was set up in front of the wall. Then the machine gun began to fire.
A later investigation by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker of the Inspector General's office counted 17 SS bodies in the coal yard, 17 more at Tower B, and an unknown additional number killed by American soldiers and surviving prisoners throughout the camp that evening. The best modern estimate, published by the German historian Jürgen Zarusky in 1997, suggests that between 25 and 50 SS men were killed after surrendering.
That is the definition of a war crime under the same Geneva Convention that German prisoners in Patton's camps had been citing five months earlier. The men who committed it were U.S. Army infantrymen. The men who committed it had walked past 2,000 bodies in train cars that same morning.
That is the paradox the myth of forced witnessing does not tell you. Eisenhower's policy, the enforcement of patterns, the great moral education of the German people in front of the piles of Buchenwald, rested on an assumption. The assumption was that when a human being is forced to see evil, the seeing will make him better. At Dachau on April 29, 1945, the men who saw it were Americans, and what the seeing produced in them in the first hour was not moral education. It was killing.
Colonel Whitaker's investigation was completed on June 8, 1945. His recommendation was direct. The evidence, in the opinion of the Seventh Army's Judge Advocate, would support charges of murder against Lieutenant Walsh, Lieutenant Bushyhead, Technical Sergeant Wells, and Private Bute. The recommendation was to try them before a general court-martial on charges of murder.
The recommendation went up the chain of command. It reached the office of the officer who now held jurisdiction over the case. The officer who had recently been appointed military governor of Bavaria. The officer who had stood at the gate of Ohrdruf seven weeks earlier and watched Eisenhower dictate a cable about documenting Nazi atrocities for history. That officer was General George S. Patton.
And in the same summer of 1945, in the same office, with the same hand that had signed the order forcing 1,200 civilians up the hill to Buchenwald, General Patton took the Whitaker report, read it, and dismissed the charges. No court-martial was ever held. No American soldier was ever tried for what happened in the coal yard at Dachau. The witnesses were never questioned. The records were sealed. They were not declassified for nearly half a century.
The men who fired the machine gun went home. The men who ordered the machine gun went home. And the general who had stood behind a shed at Ohrdruf, the general who had ordered the mayor's wife to look, the general who had built the Nuremberg case, sat at his desk in Bad Tölz in the summer of 1945 and began to change. That change is not recorded in rumor. It is not slander. It is his diary, his own, written in his own hand. And when we open the pages of that diary and read what General George Smith Patton Jr. wrote about the survivors of the camps he had liberated, six months after he vomited behind that shed, we will meet a man none of the soldiers of the Third Army would have recognized on April 12, 1945.
This is where we go next. The office was in a town called Bad Tölz, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps about 30 miles south of Munich. A stone building with tall windows, a desk, a leather blotter, a telephone, and by mid-May 1945, a nameplate on the door that read Military Governor of Bavaria.
The war in Europe was over. Germany surrendered on May 8. The concentration camps had been liberated. The pile behind the crematorium at Buchenwald had been photographed, documented on film, catalogued, and shipped in reels of 16mm Signal Corps film to a courtroom being prepared in the city of Nuremberg. The forced witnesses were finished. The reckoning had begun. And the man in the office in Bad Tölz was the same man who had stood at the gate of Ohrdruf on April 12, 36 days earlier, and issued the order that ended with a mayor and his wife hanging from the beams of their home.
But something inside him had already begun to change. The first sign was administrative. Patton had been appointed military governor of Bavaria partly because Eisenhower needed a commander who could impose order on a shattered region of nearly 10 million people, most of whom had been loyal to the National Socialist system for 12 years. Patton took the job seriously. He wanted order. He wanted the trains running. He wanted the water running. He wanted the police organized. And to accomplish all of that quickly, he made a decision Eisenhower had explicitly forbidden.
He kept Nazis in their positions. Official Allied policy was denazification. It required the removal of every German government employee with a Nazi Party membership record from public office, screening them, and then either clearing or prosecuting them before returning to work. It was a slow policy. It was a painful policy. It emptied Bavarian ministries of most of their trained staff overnight. Patton did not have time for that. In the first six weeks of his administration, he quietly instructed his subordinates to leave former party members in their posts if they were competent.
He said at a press conference on September 22, 1945, that the Nazi Party question in Germany was, in his own words, similar to the argument between Democrats and Republicans in the United States. He said this to reporters publicly, in front of a microphone. The story reached Eisenhower within 24 hours. But that was not what was in his diary. The diary entry came earlier, on September 15, 1945, in his own handwriting, preserved in the Patton papers at the Library of Congress. A private notebook the general believed no one would read until after his death.
He was writing about the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps — displaced persons, as they were now called, or "DPs." There were hundreds of thousands of them still in Bavaria, in the camps the Germans had built for them, because they had nowhere else to go. Palestine was closed. The United States was closed. Their homes in Poland and Ukraine had been burned or taken by others. In the summer of 1945, they were in the care of the U.S. Army. And the U.S. Army in Bavaria was under the command of George Patton.
The sentence he wrote in his private diary on September 15, 1945, reads as follows. Others believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not. And this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals. Read it again. Lower than animals.
This is the same hand, the same pen, the same man who had stood behind a shed at Ohrdruf five months earlier and vomited onto the grass because he could not bear to see the 30 bodies inside. The bodies inside that shed included many Jewish prisoners — the same category of human beings he described 156 days later as lower than animals.
This is the turn that an honest history of World War II must tell. And it is the turn the Patton myth usually does not tell. Witnessing does not save. Witnessing does not automatically change the person who witnesses. Patton saw the camps. Patton broke down. Patton recorded the records. And Patton came out of the summer of 1945 with the same prejudices he had entered it with. Perhaps they were sharper. Perhaps they were harder. But they had not changed.
Eisenhower had expected this. On September 28, 1945, Eisenhower summoned Patton to a personal meeting. What was said between them was not fully recorded. What is known is that on that same day, orders were issued relieving General George S. Patton Jr. of command of the U.S. Third Army and of his position as military governor of Bavaria. He was reassigned to command a small paper unit called the Fifteenth Army, which existed mostly to write the historical record of the European campaign. For a man like Patton, that was a coffin with a desk in it.
Before the reassignment, he wrote a bitter letter to his wife. He drove to his new headquarters. And on December 9, 1945, on a country road near Kaiserslautern in the outskirts of Mannheim, on the way to a hunting trip he did not particularly want to attend, the 1938 Cadillac he was riding in collided with a two-and-a-half-ton military truck turning left across the road. The impact was at low speed. The other passengers walked away from the accident. Patton was thrown forward. His neck struck the metal partition behind the driver. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He remained in a military hospital in Heidelberg for 12 days. He knew he would not recover. He knew he would not walk again. He knew it because he told the doctors that a soldier's end should not be like this. On December 21, 1945, at about a quarter to five in the evening, a blood clot moved to his lung. General George Smith Patton Jr., 60 years old, died of a pulmonary embolism. His wife Beatrice was beside him. He was buried three days later, at his request, in the U.S. military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg, alongside the soldiers of the Third Army who fell in the Battle of the Bulge. His grave marker is identical to theirs. No stars, no rank, just a name and a date and a cross.
And that could have been the end of the story. But it is not the end of the story, because there is one more thing to say, and it is the hardest thing. Three men entered the gate of Ohrdruf on April 12, 1945. Bradley, Patton, and Eisenhower. Three men, the same day, the same evidence, the same bodies, the same shed.
Bradley went home to become a five-star general and the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wrote his memoirs. He described his tour of Ohrdruf. Honestly, without exaggeration and without decoration, he became for the American public in the 1950s a model of the citizen soldier. He died in 1981 at the age of 88, having spent the last decades of his life speaking quietly and without cameras about the memory of the war.
Eisenhower went home and was elected in 1952 as the 34th president of the United States. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce desegregation at Central High School. He warned the country in his farewell address on January 17, 1961, about the danger of what he called the military-industrial complex. Whatever you think of his presidency, this cannot be denied. The man who wrote the cable from Ohrdruf on the night of April 12, 1945. The man who ordered correspondents flown in to document the record. The man who understood before anyone else in the U.S. Army that the evidence of what happened in Germany would one day be denied, spent the rest of his life working from what he had seen.
As for Patton, the third man, the only one of the three who could not stay inside the shed, the man who collapsed behind it, the man who signed the order that killed the mayor of Ohrdruf, he wrote in his diary that the survivors of those camps were lower than animals, protected the American soldiers who killed SS prisoners at Dachau, and died in a hospital bed in Heidelberg without ever telling any of it.
Three men, the same gate, the same day, three different endings. This is the answer to the question the war ended with. Not who won, and not how many died, but what human beings become when they are finally forced to look.
Some, like the mayor of Ohrdruf, cannot bear the weight and go home to end their lives. Some, like the citizens of Weimar who called the bodies a trick, refuse to see what is directly in front of them until a sergeant grabs one of them by the wrist and forces his hand to touch the arm of the dead. Some, like Omar Bradley, carry the memory in silence for a lifetime and become the moral backbone of a generation. Some, like Dwight Eisenhower, use what they saw to shape their country for the next 15 years. And some, like George Patton, see everything, collapse behind the shed, vomit, sign the orders, build the records, preserve the evidence for Nuremberg, and then six months later sit behind a desk in Bavaria and write in a private notebook that the survivors are not really human at all.
Witnessing does not guarantee salvation. Witnessing only creates the possibility of salvation. What a person does with what he has seen is that person's own decision. It is the hardest work that can be asked of anyone, because it requires accepting that the story he has told himself about who he is, about his country, and about the other may be wrong. Some do that work. Some cannot. Some do half of it and then, in a quiet office in Bavaria in the last September of their life, return to the prejudice they were born with.
That is the story of the U.S. Army in Germany in April 1945. That is the story of Ohrdruf, and Buchenwald, and Weimar, and Dachau, and the coal yard, and the shed, and the note beside the mayor and his wife. We did not know, but we knew. Seven words left on a table beside two bodies, written by a German civilian in his final hours.
But those seven words are not only an epitaph for the mayor of Ohrdruf. They are the final epitaph for every human being who has been shown the truth and then had to decide what to do with it. The evidence has been placed in front of your eyes. The question is the same one Eisenhower asked in a cable to Washington on the night of April 12, 1945. Now that you have seen it, what will you do?