In the summer of 1945, an American guard walked past a barbed-wire compound in Bavaria and saw something that stopped him cold. A row of captured German officers stood at attention in the morning cold, their right arms raised in the salute of a dead führer.
The war had been over for weeks. Their country had surrendered. Their leader had put a pistol to his own head in a bunker in Berlin. And still, in front of the American flag, they saluted Hitler.
The guard reported what he had seen. The report climbed the chain of command. It reached, eventually, a four-star general in a stone building in Bad Tölz — a man who had liberated a Nazi camp with his own eyes just weeks before, and who did not forget what he saw there.
To understand what that general did next, it is necessary to go back six weeks, to a morning in April in a town called Ohrdruf.
April 12, 1945, ten in the morning. A small town in Thuringia called Ohrdruf. The wind carried a smell that no soldier who lived through that day would ever forget. It was not the smell of battle. Battle has its own smell, and men who had marched across Europe knew it well. This was different — sweeter and heavier, and it clung to the uniform in a way that no washing could remove.
Three American generals stepped out of their staff cars at the gate of what had been, until eight days earlier, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp system.
The first was Dwight David Eisenhower, 54 years old, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. His face was carefully composed. He had come because he wanted to see it with his own eyes, and because he already understood that the world would one day try to forget, and he did not intend to let it.
The second was Omar Nelson Bradley, 52, commander of the 12th United States Army Group. He said almost nothing. Bradley was a quiet man in a war of loud men, and what he saw that morning would remain with him until the day he died.
The third was George Smith Patton Jr., 59 years old, four stars on his shoulder, ivory-gripped revolvers on his hips, commander of the Third United States Army. He was the loudest of the three. He was the most theatrical.
He was the man who had slapped two shell-shocked soldiers in Sicily two years earlier and nearly ended his own career doing it. He was the man who prayed for weather and got it, who cursed like a longshoreman and quoted scripture in the same breath, who believed in the private chambers of his own strange mind that he had lived before as a Roman legionnaire and a soldier of Napoleon.
He was also the man who, within the next thirty minutes, would walk behind a shed at Ohrdruf and be violently sick.
They entered the camp. There were bodies in the yard — not one, not ten. Bodies stacked in patterns, arranged the way cordwood is arranged for a winter fire. Some had not yet been buried.
The SS guards had shot the last of the prisoners eight days earlier before running east toward what they hoped would be safety. The prisoners were shot because they were too weak to be marched away, and because the guards did not want witnesses.
There are witnesses now. Eisenhower walked the length of the yard with his jaw set. He ordered every American soldier in the vicinity who was not on active duty to come and look. He ordered photographers. He ordered film crews.
He sent a cable to Washington and to London and asked for congressmen and members of parliament to be flown to Ohrdruf so that they could see what he had seen.
Bradley stood beside a pile of corpses and did not move for a long time. Patton walked toward the shed.
He was the general of an armored army. He had commanded the fastest and most aggressive campaign of maneuver warfare in the history of the United States. He had seen men blown apart by artillery and burned alive in tanks. He had walked battlefields where the dead lay so thick you could not step between them.
But this was different, and he knew it was different, and his body knew it before his mind did. He went behind the shed, vomited, wiped his mouth, walked back out, and did not speak of it.
Later that night, in the journal he kept in his own careful handwriting, he described what he saw as one of the most appalling sights he had ever witnessed.
That evening, the mayor of the nearby town of Ohrdruf and his wife were ordered to tour the camp along with the local civilian population. They saw everything. They walked between the same piles the generals walked between. And that night, in their own home, the mayor and his wife hanged themselves.
This is the world into which General George Patton walked in the last spring of the last year of the war in Europe. And the war, for Patton, was not over. The war for Patton was only about to change its shape.
He was born on November 11, 1885, in San Gabriel, California, into a family of southern gentry that had transplanted itself west. His grandfather had been a Confederate colonel killed at the Third Battle of Winchester in 1864.
His family filled his childhood with stories of that war, and of Napoleon, and of the Caesars. He grew up believing that a man's purpose was to lead other men in battle, and that death in combat was not a tragedy but a fulfillment.
He struggled with reading. He may have had what modern doctors would call dyslexia. He compensated by memorizing enormous passages of military history, studying the campaigns of Alexander and Hannibal and Marlborough until he could recite them in the dark.
He entered the Virginia Military Institute, then West Point, where it took him five years to graduate because of his difficulty with mathematics. He competed in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics in the modern pentathlon, an event designed to test the skills of a military courier, and finished fifth.
He would have finished higher, but the judges ruled that one of his pistol shots had missed the target. He insisted until the end of his life that the shot had passed through a hole made by an earlier bullet.
He chased Pancho Villa in Mexico under General John Pershing in 1916. He commanded the first American tank unit in the First World War and was wounded leading it in the Meuse-Argonne.
Between the wars, he wrote poetry, sailed his own boat, played polo, and read continuously. He kept a journal in the same steady hand he had used since boyhood.
He believed in reincarnation. He wrote poems about it. He wrote lines describing himself as a soldier who had fought in the legions of Rome, in the armies of Napoleon, on fields he had never seen with the eyes of this life but somehow remembered anyway.
He was not embarrassed by any of this. He believed it the way other men believed in their own names.
He carried two revolvers. The Colt was a single-action army revolver, .45 caliber, with ivory grips carved with his initials. The Smith & Wesson was a .357 Magnum, also ivory-gripped, worn on rarer occasions. He hated being told the grips were pearl. Pearl, he said, was for pimps.
He wore riding breeches and polished boots long after the rest of the army had moved to trousers and leggings. He wanted to be seen. He wanted to be remembered.
And in 1943 in Sicily, he almost threw all of it away.
He walked into a field hospital and found a soldier who had no visible wound. The soldier told him his nerves could not take it anymore. Patton called him a coward and slapped him across the face with his glove. A week later, in another hospital, he did it again to another man.
Eisenhower, informed of what had happened, made him apologize publicly to every unit in his army and nearly relieved him from command. Patton kept his command, but something in him understood from that moment on that the war would forgive a great deal in a winning general and almost nothing in a losing one.
He had to keep winning. And he did.
He led the Third United States Army from the beaches of Normandy across France in the summer of 1944 at a speed that startled his own supply officers. In December, when the Germans launched their last great offensive in the Ardennes, Patton pivoted three divisions 90 degrees in winter weather and drove them north to relieve the encircled town of Bastogne — an operation most of his fellow generals considered impossible until he did it.
In March of 1945, he crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim. The next day he stopped his jeep on the bridge and urinated into the river, because he had said months earlier that he would, and he was a man who kept the promises he made to himself.
By April he was deep inside Germany, and the war was ending, and something inside him was already beginning to turn.
Because here is the thing about George Patton that most of the histories miss, or soften, or leave for the footnotes. He admired the Germans. He admired them as soldiers. He admired their discipline, their tactical craft, their ability to conduct a defensive retreat that punished every mile of Allied advance.
In his private journals and in his letters home to his wife Beatrice, he wrote things that would have shocked the American public if they had ever been printed. He wrote that the German soldier was in many respects the finest fighting man in Europe. He wrote that the Prussian military tradition was the tradition from which all modern armies had learned.
He wrote more than once that he found the professionalism of a captured Wehrmacht officer more congenial to his own temperament than the conduct of certain of his allies.
This is not a rumor. This is not an invention of a hostile biographer. This is what he wrote in his own hand, in journals that his family gave to the historian Martin Blumenson and that were published in 1974.
He was the loudest anti-German general in the American army. He was also, in the privacy of his own mind, the American general who understood the German soldier best and who found in that soldier something he recognized. That contradiction is not a flaw in the story. That contradiction is the story.
By late April of 1945, the Third United States Army had taken more prisoners than any other formation in the war. By the time of the German surrender on May 8, the number would exceed 1.4 million men.
They arrived in columns that stretched for miles. They arrived on foot, on carts, on farm wagons. They arrived in uniforms that still bore the insignia of the Wehrmacht, of the Luftwaffe, of the Waffen SS, of every branch of the collapsing German war machine.
Where do you put them? The Geneva Convention has answers to this question. It requires food, shelter, medical care, and treatment consistent with the standards of one's own troops. But the Geneva Convention was written for a war between states. And the war that was ending was not that kind of war.
The state that made these soldiers was disintegrating. There would soon be no German government to receive them home. There would soon be no German army from which they were sent.
Eisenhower, faced with numbers no army had ever handled, created a new legal category. He called them disarmed enemy forces. As disarmed enemy forces rather than prisoners of war, they were outside the protections of Geneva, and their rations could be and were cut below what Geneva would require.
This decision would be debated for decades. Some of the debate would be serious and some of it dishonest. But for now, understand only this: in the last week of April 1945, in the American zone of southern Germany, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were in cages. And the man responsible for a great many of those cages was George Patton.
Inside the cages, something interesting was happening. The German soldiers were still soldiers. They still formed up by rank. They still took orders from their captured officers. In some camps, in the barbed-wire compounds set aside for the Waffen SS, the prisoners still kept their old discipline.
And in the private moments when the American guards were not looking, some of them still greeted each other with the stiff right arm and the two syllables that had become, for twelve years, the required greeting of the German state: Heil Hitler.
The greeting had officially been abolished. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, in the strange twilight government that existed for three weeks after Hitler's suicide, had ordered it discontinued in what was left of the German armed forces. But orders from a government that no longer exists are not obeyed with much enthusiasm.
And in the SS compounds, especially among men who had signed a personal oath to Adolf Hitler and who did not believe that his death released them from it, the arms still went up.
American guards reported it. Counter Intelligence Corps officers filed memos about it. The reports moved up the chain. They landed eventually on the desk of George Patton.
He was now the military governor of Bavaria. He was now responsible for a captured population of 9 million German civilians, 1.9 million displaced persons, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, and an entire regional administration that had to be either rebuilt from nothing or rebuilt using the same men who ran it under Hitler.
He was going to make choices in the next four months that would end his career. He was going to make choices that historians would still be arguing about eighty years later. And the first of those choices began with a very simple question: what do you do with a defeated enemy who refuses in his heart to accept that he has been defeated?
There is one more thing to know before we go further. It has to be said now, because it will matter later, and because a story about General Patton that does not include it is not an honest story.
He had a temper that he could not always control. In August of 1943, in Sicily, in the hospital tents at Nicosia and San Stefano, he lost that temper twice and struck two American soldiers who were suffering from what would later be understood as combat trauma.
He called them cowards. He waved a pistol. He accused them of shaming the uniform. He was, in those moments, a man who did not see suffering that did not look like his own.
Eisenhower forgave him because he needed him. The American public forgave him because he won battles. The soldiers he had struck lived out their lives in ordinary obscurity. One of them, decades later, said he did not blame the general, that the general had been under strain.
But the incident tells us something we will need in the months to come. When George Patton looked at a broken man, he did not always see a man. Sometimes he saw a failure of discipline. Sometimes he saw an offense against the standard he held for himself. And when he saw those things, his hand did not always wait for his judgment.
Now imagine that man — that temperament, that history — standing in front of a captured SS officer who has just raised his right arm and said the two words Patton had spent the last three years of his life trying to erase from the earth. Imagine what he might do.
We do not have to imagine. He wrote it down.
May 14, 1945. Six days after the German surrender, six days into a peace that did not yet feel like peace, George Patton took up his new post as the military governor of Bavaria.
His headquarters was in the town of Bad Tölz, in the foothills of the Alps, in a complex of stone buildings that had been, until a few weeks earlier, an SS officer training school. The irony was not lost on him.
He walked the corridors where young men had been taught to serve Adolf Hitler. He set up his desk in a room where their instructors had lectured them on racial theory and the strategic vision of the führer. The building smelled of pine and old cigarette smoke. Outside the windows, the mountains were still capped with snow.
Bavaria was his now. Nine million German civilians. 1.9 million displaced persons scattered across the countryside in schools, in barns, in former labor camps, in whatever roof could be found for them. Roads shattered by bombing, rail lines cut, bridges dropped into rivers, electricity intermittent, water uncertain, and winter — though far away in the calendar — already visible on the mountaintops.
And two orders from Washington that would define everything he did in the next four months.
The first order was called Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067. It had been signed in April of 1945, and it laid out in the flat prose of American bureaucracy what the occupation of Germany was supposed to accomplish.
Germany was to be treated not as a liberated country but as a defeated enemy. Its economy was to be held to a subsistence level. Its people were to understand that they had brought this fate upon themselves. And every person who held any position of significance in the Nazi party, in the SS, in the security services, or in any of the affiliated organizations was to be removed from any position of authority.
The word for this process was denazification. It sounded on paper like a simple thing. It was not a simple thing.
Because the Nazi party had 8.5 million members by the end of the war. Because for twelve years, if you were a school teacher in a German town, you were expected to join the party or find another line of work. If you were a doctor, a lawyer, a railway inspector, a postal supervisor, a factory foreman, a village clerk, the same expectation applied.
Some men had joined because they believed. Some had joined because they were afraid. Some had joined because their careers required it and they had children to feed.
To an American captain arriving in a Bavarian village in May of 1945, the paperwork looked the same in every case. Nazi party member since 1937. Nazi party member since 1933. Nazi party member since the beginning.
If you sacked every one of them, no train would move. No hospital would open. No school would teach. No court would sit. And Bavaria needed all of those things by the end of the summer, or people would starve in the winter.
Patton understood this immediately. He was not a subtle political thinker, but he was a practical man, and he had been raised on farms and in horse country, and he knew what it took to keep a functioning place functioning.
On May 28, 1945, he appointed Fritz Schäffer as the minister president of Bavaria. Schäffer was 57, a Catholic conservative, a lawyer, a former leader of the Bavarian People's Party, which the Nazis had abolished in 1933. He had been arrested by the Gestapo. He had spent time in Dachau. He was, by any reasonable measure, a man the Nazis had persecuted.
But Schäffer, once installed, needed staff. He needed clerks and prosecutors and administrators. And Bavaria had been run for twelve years by the Nazi state, and every man with experience in running Bavaria had at some point filled out a party membership form.
Schäffer kept those men — many of them. He argued that he had no choice. Patton, when the reports came in, agreed with him. This decision, made quietly in an office in Munich in the last days of May, would end Patton's career by the end of September. He did not know it yet.
Sepp Dietrich surrendered to American soldiers on May 8, 1945. He was 52 years old. He was one of the highest-ranking officers of the Waffen SS, an Obergruppenführer — the SS equivalent of a full general. He had commanded the Sixth SS Panzer Army in the Ardennes offensive the previous winter.
He was one of Adolf Hitler's earliest and most loyal followers, a man who had been with the party since the 1920s, who had commanded Hitler's personal bodyguard regiment, whose men had committed some of the worst atrocities of the war on the Eastern Front and in Belgium.
American soldiers took him at Kitzstein in Austria, near the German border. He was dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, not an SS one, because by May of 1945 the SS uniform was a death sentence in many places. Even Dietrich understood this.
He was polite. He was professional. He asked about his wife. He did not raise his arm, and he did not say the two words — at least not where the Americans could see him.
He was one of thousands. By the middle of May, the prisoner of war population in Patton's zone was enormous. The Moosburg camp, Stalag 7A, which the Third Army had liberated on April 29, now held captured Germans instead of Allied airmen. New enclosures were being built at Bad Aibling. The columns of gray-uniformed men kept coming.
And inside those enclosures, the reports kept arriving on the desks of Counter Intelligence Corps officers. In compound after compound, the German officers were still organizing their men by rank. They were still holding formations. They were still, in the SS enclosures particularly, running what amounted to a shadow discipline of their own.
Prisoners considered to have shown weakness, or to have cooperated too readily with the Americans, were punished by their fellow prisoners in unofficial tribunals. And in the mornings before roll call, in the corners of the camps, the reports continued to arrive. The arms continued to go up. The two syllables, forbidden now, still moved on lips that would not let them go.
The Americans saw it. The Americans heard about it. And the Americans were furious.
Patton issued orders. All prisoners in Third Army custody were to render the standard military salute when a flag of the United States was present. Any prisoner observed rendering the Hitler salute was to be assigned to labor details. SS prisoners were to be segregated from Wehrmacht prisoners and held under closer guard. Officers who continued to organize their men along old chain-of-command lines were to be moved to separate enclosures and stripped of the informal authority they had retained.
He was not gentle about it. In his journal, he wrote about the SS prisoners with a contempt that is almost surprising in its intensity. He called them the men who ran the camps he had seen at Ohrdruf.
Whatever admiration he had for the German soldier as a category, he did not extend it to the men in the black uniforms and the death's-head insignia. Those men, in his private mind, were outside the fraternity of soldiers altogether.
He wanted the arm down. He wanted the flag saluted. He wanted the discipline of the American army imposed on every cage in his zone. And in this, he was entirely within the mainstream of American military opinion in the summer of 1945.
It is what he did next that was not.
There was another problem, and it was worse than the one with the SS men in the cages: the displaced persons.
By June of 1945, there were somewhere between six and seven million displaced persons in occupied Germany. They were the survivors of the Nazi camps, the forced laborers brought from the east, the refugees from every corner of the collapsed Reich. They were Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Yugoslav, Italian, French, Dutch, Belgian.
And a portion of them — a portion that carried a moral weight far beyond its numbers — were Jewish.
The Jewish survivors were a fraction of what they once were. Whole families were gone. Whole towns were gone. Whole languages were, in a real sense, gone. What was left was a population of people who had survived the unsurvivable, and who were now living, in the summer of 1945, in camps run by the American army in southern Germany.
Some of these camps had been Nazi concentration camps. Some had been forced-labor barracks. Some were former SS training facilities. Feldafing, on Lake Starnberg, had been a Hitler Youth school. Landsberg, west of Munich, held survivors in the barracks of a former Wehrmacht garrison town. Föhrenwald, near Wolfratshausen, had housed workers for a munitions plant.
They were in Patton's zone. They were there for his responsibility. And in the summer of 1945, they were not being taken care of well.
The conditions were grim. The food was insufficient. The medical care was thin. The clothing was often still the striped uniforms of the camps, because no one was issuing new clothes. Some survivors were guarded, in effect, by American soldiers who treated them with the suspicion of a garrison force keeping a lid on a restless population. In some camps, former Nazis in the surrounding countryside ate better than the Jews who had survived their genocide.
President Harry Truman heard about this in Washington. And in June of 1945, he did something quiet and important and consequential. He asked a man named Earl G. Harrison to go to Europe and look.
Earl Harrison was 46 years old. He was a lawyer, a former commissioner of immigration and naturalization, the American representative to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He was a serious man, unshowy, methodical. He was not a soldier, and he was not looking for a war with the army.
He arrived in Europe in July. He visited camp after camp in the American zone. He talked to survivors. He inspected the barracks. He looked at the food. He watched the medical lines. He took notes.
And in August of 1945, he submitted his report to President Truman. The report was short. It was not decorated. It was not written for the newspapers. It was written for the man in the White House.
And it said, in one sentence that would echo for the rest of the century, that the American army was treating the Jewish survivors in effect as the Nazis had treated them. Not with the same murderous intent, not with the same industrial cruelty, but with the same indifference to their humanity, the same willingness to leave them in barbed-wire compounds in their old uniforms, the same failure to recognize that these were not simply displaced persons but a specific population that had come out of a specific hell and required specific care.
Truman read the report. He sent it to Eisenhower. Eisenhower read it, understood immediately what had happened, and went to Bavaria himself.
On September 29, 1945, he arrived at Feldafing. He walked through the camp with George Patton at his side.
Patton was not happy. His journal from those days shows a man who resented the report, who did not accept its premises, who wrote about the displaced persons in language that is difficult to read now and was difficult to read then. He did not believe the survivors were being mistreated. He did not believe they deserved the special treatment the report recommended.
His private views about the Jewish survivors in his own zone are in the historical record that his own family preserved and made public. They are ugly. This has to be said, and it has to be said plainly, because a story about George Patton that leaves this out is not a story. It is a monument.
He was a brilliant soldier. He was a physically brave man. He liberated a subcamp of Buchenwald and he wept, in his own way, at what he saw there. And he also, six months later, wrote about the survivors of that same system in language that would not have been out of place in the mouths of the men who had built it. Both things are true. Both things are in the record. Both things are him.
Eisenhower gave him a direct order. Conditions in the displaced persons camps would improve. The uniforms would be replaced. The rations would increase. The camps would be reorganized so that survivors were not guarded but assisted.
Patton complied. He was a soldier, and he took an order, and he saw to it that the order was carried out. But something had broken between him and the Supreme Commander that would not be repaired.
While all of this was happening, Patton was thinking about a different war. He had been thinking about it since May.
The war in his mind was not really over. It was only paused, because to the east of the American zone stood the Red Army. And the Red Army was not going home. It was settling in.
It was stripping the industrial equipment out of eastern Germany and shipping it to the Soviet Union. It was installing governments in Poland, in Hungary, in Romania, in Bulgaria, in Czechoslovakia, in Yugoslavia. It was doing all of this while the American army demobilized and went home.
Patton, in Bad Tölz, watched this happen, and he did not accept it. He began to write in his journal and in his letters to Beatrice a set of arguments that are astonishing to read.
He argued that the Americans should not have stopped at the Elbe. They should have pushed on. They should have driven the Red Army back to its own borders. He argued that Poland must not be abandoned to Stalin, that the political settlement being negotiated at Potsdam was a betrayal of the men who had died to reach Berlin.
And most extraordinarily, he argued that the German army — the Wehrmacht — should not be disbanded. It should be reconstituted. Its officers should be released from the prisoner-of-war cages and placed at the head of their old divisions. Those divisions should be re-equipped with American weapons, and they should stand shoulder to shoulder with the American army in a common front against the Soviet Union.
He wrote this in his journal on September 8, 1945. He suggested it in a more careful form in a conversation with General Joseph McNarney. He mentioned it in letters to trusted correspondents.
The commander of the American army in Bavaria was proposing, less than four months after the end of the Second World War, that the United States rearm the losing side of that war and use it to fight a new one.
He was not entirely wrong about the future. He was not entirely wrong about the intentions of Joseph Stalin. He was not entirely wrong about the fate of Eastern Europe. He was not entirely wrong about the eventual necessity of a Western military alliance that would include a rearmed Germany.
He was only wrong about the year. He was proposing in 1945 what the United States government would officially adopt in 1955.
But there was no room, in 1945, for a general who was proposing this. The war had just ended. Americans were burying their sons. The alliance with the Soviet Union, however cynical it may have been, was still the alliance that won the war. And to attack it publicly was to attack the entire moral architecture of victory.
Patton did not care. He had never been a man who trimmed his opinions to fit the political weather. He was not going to start now.
September 22, 1945. A room in the headquarters at Bad Tölz. Journalists had gathered. There were correspondents from the New York Herald Tribune, from the Chicago Daily News, from the New York Times, from wire services and small papers and everything in between.
The war was over. The stories were winding down. But there were still headlines to be found in the American zone of Germany. And one of them, they suspected, was going to walk into this room in the next few minutes.
Patton walked in. He was in a bad mood. He had been in a bad mood for weeks. The Harrison report had been public knowledge. The pressure from Frankfurt had been constant. The reporters had been sniffing around Bavaria for weeks, filing stories about former Nazis retained in office, about denazification more honored in the breach than the observance, about a military governor who did not seem to be governing along the lines Washington had laid down.
The questions started. Why were so many former Nazi party members still in positions of authority in Bavaria?
Patton had an answer to this. He had thought about it. He had, in fact, thought about it more carefully than his critics would later give him credit for. And what he said in front of the journalists was that most of the people who joined the Nazi party joined it the way an American might join the Republican or Democratic party.
It was, he said, the party that was in power. It was the party you joined if you wanted to keep your job. It did not mean, for most of them, that they had believed anything in particular. It only meant that they had wanted to remain school teachers or postal clerks or railway inspectors.
He was, in a limited way, correct. The historian Robert Gellately, working in German archives half a century later, would document exactly how party membership functioned as a career necessity for millions of Germans who did not share the ideology.
Many joined because it was expected. Many joined because refusing to join would have marked them as suspect. Many joined without believing anything at all, in the way that men in many societies join organizations they are indifferent to because the alternative is a closed door.
Patton was describing something real. But he was describing it in a room full of American journalists in September of 1945. Five months after Ohrdruf. Five months after Dachau. Six weeks after Hiroshima. In the middle of a summer during which the American public had learned the full scale of what the Nazi party had done.
And in that room, in that month, to compare Nazi party membership to Republican or Democratic party membership was not analysis. It was a match dropped in a gasoline can.
His exact phrasing, recorded by the stenographer that afternoon, was that the Nazi thing was just like a Democratic-Republican election fight. The words went out on the wires that night.
The reporters took their notes. They filed their stories that night. By the next morning, the headlines were in every major American newspaper. Patton compares Nazis to Democrats and Republicans. Patton defends retention of Nazis in government. Patton says most Nazis joined for career reasons.
The White House saw the papers. The War Department saw the papers. Eisenhower, in Frankfurt, saw the papers. And Eisenhower — who had covered for Patton after Sicily, who had kept him on through every scrape and every scandal, who had stood between him and the American press for nearly three years — understood that this time there was no cover to be given.
The summons came on September 28. Patton drove to Frankfurt. He was met by Eisenhower and by General Walter Bedell Smith, the chief of staff of the Supreme Headquarters, a hard man who had been the one carrying the messages Eisenhower did not want to deliver in person.
The meeting was described later by Bradley, by Patton's aide Hobart Gay, and by Patton himself in his journal. Eisenhower was calm. He was not shouting. He did not need to shout.
He told Patton that he would be relieved of command of the Third United States Army and of the military governorship of Bavaria. He would be reassigned to command of the 15th United States Army.
The 15th Army was not really an army. It was a small headquarters staff whose function was to write the official history of the American campaign in Europe. It had no troops in the field. It had no operational role. It was a paper command, and both men in the room knew it.
Patton took the news the way he took most news. He argued. He defended himself. He pointed to his record. He pointed to the practical impossibility of running Bavaria while sacking every man with a party card. He pointed to the Soviet threat that he believed was being ignored.
Eisenhower listened. Eisenhower did not change his mind. They parted civilly — two American generals who had been through Africa and Sicily and Normandy and the Rhine together, two men who had quarreled and forgiven and quarreled again for nearly four years, two men who understood each other well enough to know that this was the end of something.
Patton drove back to Bad Tölz. On October 7, 1945, he stood in front of the staff of the Third Army and read a short farewell. He told them that all good things come to an end.
He turned over command to Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott, a competent and dependable officer who would do the job with less drama and less brilliance and, for that reason, more success.
He got into his car and drove north to a small resort town called Bad Nauheim, where the 15th Army had its paper headquarters. The war was over. The occupation was beginning. And the man who had led the fastest and most aggressive advance in American military history was now the commander of a filing cabinet.
He wrote letters to Beatrice. He told her he was coming home for Christmas. He told her he intended, once he was home, to speak plainly to the American public about what he had seen and what he believed. He did not say whether he would seek public office. He did not need to. Everyone around him understood what a Patton return to the United States would mean.
Before he went, he had planned one last outing: a hunting trip, pheasant in the fields near Mannheim, on a Sunday morning in early December. His chief of staff, Hobart Gay, would go with him. His driver would be a young private named Horace Woodring, 19 years old, from Kentucky.
The date was set: December 9, 1945. A Sunday morning in the Rhineland. The sky was gray the way German skies are gray in December — low and even and without character. The temperature was just above freezing. The roads were wet from an overnight rain.
At the 15th Army headquarters in Bad Nauheim, General George Patton dressed for a day in the field. He wore a heavy overcoat over his uniform. He carried a shotgun in a leather case. Beside him was Major General Hobart Gay, 51 years old, his chief of staff, a man who had been at his side through Africa and Sicily and France and Germany — one of the small handful of men in the world Patton considered a true friend.
The car was a 1938 Cadillac Series 75, a big pre-war limousine requisitioned from a German civilian for the use of senior American officers. The driver was Private First Class Horace Woodring, 19 years old, from Kentucky, quiet and careful behind the wheel. Behind them, a jeep followed with the hunting dogs and a soldier assigned to handle them.
The plan was simple. Drive south toward Mannheim. Hunt pheasant in the fields along the Rhine. Return to Bad Nauheim by evening. Fly to Paris in a few days. Board a ship. Sail for home.
Patton had been telling Beatrice, in letters that grew longer and more personal as the weeks passed, that he was looking forward to seeing her. He had been telling his aides that once he was back in the United States, he would speak his mind. He would say what he thought about the Soviet Union, about the future of Germany, about the direction of American policy in Europe. He would, in his own words, tell the truth.
Whether that would have meant retirement, or a lecture tour, or a run for Congress, or something stranger and larger that his mind was already circling but had not yet named, no one will ever know. Because the day did not go as planned.
The car moved south on the road that runs from Bad Nauheim through Frankfurt and on toward Mannheim. It was not a fast trip. The roads were broken in places from the war. Rubble had been pushed to the shoulders but not cleared. American military vehicles passed in both directions, gray and olive shapes moving through the gray morning.
Just before noon, near the town of Käfertal on the northern outskirts of Mannheim, the Cadillac approached a rail crossing. There was a two-and-a-half-ton GMC truck stopped on the opposite side of the road — a big cargo truck of the American Quartermaster Corps. The driver was Private First Class Robert L. Thompson.
Thompson decided to turn left. He turned across the path of the Cadillac. There was no time for anything.
Woodring braked. The Cadillac struck the truck at the corner of its right rear quarter at a speed later estimated at around 30 kilometers per hour, 20 miles per hour. The kind of speed at which a modern automobile would deploy an airbag and its passengers would walk away rubbing their necks.
But this was 1945. There were no airbags. There were no seat belts. The dashboard of the Cadillac was heavy pre-war steel and glass, and the space between the rear seat and that dashboard was small.
Woodring was thrown forward. He was not badly hurt. Gay, sitting on the rear seat beside Patton, braced himself instinctively at the moment of impact. He was not badly hurt either. He would walk away from the wreck with bruises.
Patton, sitting on the same rear seat, did not brace. He was looking at the truck. He was thrown forward hard. The top of his head struck the metal frame of the partition that divides the rear compartment from the front seat, or the corner of the roof above the windshield. The precise geometry has been debated in the accounts.
What is not debated is what happened to his neck. He suffered a fracture and dislocation of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He was conscious. He could speak. The first words he said, when Gay recovered his own bearings and asked how he was, were quiet and characteristic. He said he could not move. He said he thought he was paralyzed. He said, after a moment, that this was a hell of a way to die.
The ambulance took 45 minutes to arrive. It carried him to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg, an American military medical facility housed in what had been until recently a German army medical complex. He was taken up to a private room on the second floor.
The commanding officer of the hospital was notified. The chief of neurosurgery for the European theater, Colonel Roy Glenwood Spurling, was sent for from Frankfurt. Word traveled up the chain of command. By evening, Eisenhower knew. By evening, Washington knew. By evening, Beatrice knew, in a bedroom in a house in Massachusetts, and she began to pack a bag for a flight she had been dreading for 35 years of marriage.
Spurling arrived. He examined the general. He confirmed what the first doctors had already concluded. The spinal cord was not severed, but it was severely damaged. Traction was applied to the skull with a device called Crutchfield tongs — small metal hooks inserted into the bone to hold the neck in alignment.
Patton was placed in a specialized bed. He could not move his arms or his legs. He could breathe, but not deeply. He could speak, though softly. He was entirely dependent on the men and women in white uniforms who moved quietly around him.
Beatrice arrived on December 11, 48 hours after the accident. She had flown from the United States on a military aircraft arranged personally by the War Department. She walked into the room and saw her husband, and she did not weep — at least not where he could see her.
She sat by the bed. She read to him, and when her voice tired, others read in her place. Passages from a translation of Xenophon's Anabasis, a book he had loved since he was a boy, about 10,000 Greek soldiers marching home from a lost war in Persia.
He was lucid. He knew what had happened to him. He knew what was likely to happen next. There were conversations in that room that no historian will ever fully recover, because they belong to a husband and a wife of 35 years, and because the door was closed, and because Beatrice Patton, until the end of her own life, did not repeat them.
But there is one line she recorded afterward. He said it to her in one of those days, looking up from the bed he could not leave. He said that this way of dying was too slow.
For twelve days he lay there. He was visited by Bradley. He was visited by Truscott. He was visited by younger officers who had served under him and who wanted one last time to stand in a room where he could see them.
Eisenhower sent messages. So did General George Marshall from Washington. So did men and women he had never met, from towns across the United States — letters that arrived at the hospital in a small mountain of envelopes, because Americans had been reading the newspapers and they knew that the general who took the Third Army across France was lying paralyzed in a bed in Heidelberg.
His body began to fail in the ways that a paralyzed body of a 59-year-old man in 1945 fails. There were pulmonary problems. There was congestion. There was the slow accumulation, in a system without movement, of the fluids that a moving body clears without thinking.
On the afternoon of December 21, 1945, twelve days after the accident, he seemed to rally. He spoke with Beatrice. He was coherent. He was, in the phrase used by his doctors, comfortable. At approximately 5:50 in the evening, he fell asleep. He did not wake up.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot had formed in the deep veins of his motionless legs, had broken loose, had traveled to his lungs, and had stopped his heart. It is the death of an immobilized man. It is the death of thousands of soldiers who lie too long in hospital beds. It is a common death, an unremarkable death, a death without honor or drama or meaning.
George Smith Patton Jr., four-star general of the United States Army, commander of the Third Army from Normandy to the Elbe, was dead at 59 years of age.
There would be, in the decades that followed, a small industry devoted to the proposition that this was not an accident. A former officer of the Office of Strategic Services named Douglas Bazata would claim in the 1970s that he was hired to kill Patton. A book would be written in 2008 drawing on his account, arguing that the crash was staged and that a poison was administered in the hospital.
The book would find its readers. The serious historians would not agree. Carlo D'Este, whose biography of Patton runs to over a thousand pages, examined every document and every witness statement and every medical record and concluded that the accident was an accident. Stanley Hirshson reached the same conclusion. Ladislas Farago, who wrote the earlier account, found no evidence of anything but a slow, ordinary vehicular collision and its slow, ordinary consequences.
And this, in a strange way, is the real ending of the story. Because a man like Patton — a man who had ridden into the guns of the Meuse-Argonne, who had walked upright through the shellfire of Cassino, who had crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge under a sky full of fighters — was not killed by an assassin. He was not killed in battle. He was not killed by any of the enemies whose photographs he had studied in the campaigns of his own imagination.
He was killed by a truck driver making a left turn at 20 miles an hour. The universe, if the universe was watching, did not grant him the death he had spent his whole life preparing for. It gave him instead the death of an ordinary traveler on an ordinary road on an ordinary Sunday morning in Germany. That is not a conspiracy. That is something much older and much harder to name.
He had said many times that he wished to be buried with his men. The army honored the wish.
On December 24, 1945, a small funeral service was held at the Christuskirche in Heidelberg, the Church of Christ, a Protestant church whose stone walls had survived the bombing of the city. Beatrice was there. Gay was there. The chaplain of the Third Army was there. So were representatives of every unit that had served under him, come from across the American zone.
On December 25, Christmas Day, he was buried at the American Military Cemetery at Hamm in Luxembourg. The cemetery held, and holds, the graves of 5,070 American soldiers, most of them killed in the Ardennes offensive of the winter before, most of them men of the Third Army who had died to break the German assault and hold Bastogne. It was, of all the American cemeteries in Europe, the cemetery of Patton's men. He was placed among them.
In the years that followed, so many visitors came to see his grave, walking off the paths, wearing down the grass around a single marker in a sea of markers, that the cemetery authorities decided to move him. His grave was relocated to a spot at the head of the field, at the front of the ranks, alone in a small clearing at the top of the slope.
When you visit Hamm today, you see it the way it was arranged then. The general stands, in the imagination and in the geometry of the ground, in front of his soldiers, facing them, as if he is still their commander and they are still on parade.
Beatrice never remarried. She survived him by seven years. She lived quietly at their home in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and she rode her horses in the fields she had loved since girlhood. On September 30, 1953, while riding, she suffered a ruptured aortic aneurysm and died.
Her body was cremated. Her ashes were carried to Luxembourg. And in a small ceremony that no one much publicized, they were buried at Hamm at the foot of her husband's grave, so that they would rest together in the ground of a war that had made him famous and had killed him.
The questions, of course, remain, because a life like this one does not resolve into a single verdict. And any storyteller who pretends otherwise is lying to you.
He was a brilliant field commander. He led the fastest sustained advance in the history of the United States Army. He relieved Bastogne. He crossed the Rhine ahead of every other Allied army.
He was, in his private beliefs, a man of prejudices that are difficult to read now. His journals contain passages about the Jewish survivors in the displaced persons camps of Bavaria that no honest historian can pretend do not exist. He treated those survivors, for a time, in ways that led a lawyer named Earl Harrison to write a report that reached the desk of the president of the United States. Eisenhower had to order him to change course. He complied, but he did not agree.
He walked into Ohrdruf on the 12th of April, 1945, and what he saw there broke something in him that he never spoke of directly again. He ordered the cameras, the film crews, the witnesses. He understood, before most men did, that the evidence had to be preserved. That is on the record. That happened.
And he also, four months later, gave a press conference in Bad Tölz at which he compared membership in the Nazi party to membership in the Democratic or Republican party of the United States. He was, in a narrow sociological sense, describing something that was true of millions of ordinary Germans. He was, in the political and moral sense of that summer, saying something that could not be said, and that ended his career.
He believed, from May of 1945 forward, that the Soviet Union would become the principal adversary of the United States. He believed the German army should not be dissolved but reformed and used against the Red Army in a war that would come. He was written off as a warmonger, a reactionary, a man who could not accept peace.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in April of 1949. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded in May of 1949. The Bundeswehr, the new army of West Germany, was created in November of 1955, staffed at its senior levels by former officers of the Wehrmacht, integrated into the command structure of NATO, and pointed in every plan and every exercise at the same Soviet enemy Patton had named ten years earlier.
He did not live to see any of it. He had been dead for four years when NATO was born, for nine years when the Bundeswehr was raised, for a full decade when the Western military architecture he had sketched in a private journal in a former SS building in Bavaria took the form he had predicted.
Whether that makes him a prophet, or a man who happened to guess right about one large thing while being wrong about many smaller ones, honest people will disagree.
What is not in question is that on a wet Sunday in December of 1945, on a road outside Mannheim, a truck driver turned left and a Cadillac struck it at 20 miles an hour, and the loudest general of the American army fell silent in the back seat, and a life that had contained Ohrdruf and Bad Tölz and Bastogne and the Rhine came to rest in a bed in Heidelberg and then in the ground at Hamm, in front of his soldiers, where he had always said he wanted to be.
He wrote, in one of the last entries of his journal, a line that his biographers have quoted often and never quite explained. He wrote that all good things must come to an end. He was speaking of his command. He was speaking, perhaps, of more than that.