The pencil marks on the single sheet of standard Army memorandum paper have faded into a ghostly gray after eight decades, but the words remain legible, preserved in the climate-controlled archives of the Virginia Military Institute. The handwriting is unmistakably Patton’s—sharp, angular, impatient. The timestamp reads 11:47 p.
m. , April 22, 1945. The order consists of four sentences.
The final sentence specifies the time: 6:00 a. m. , not sunrise, not dawn, but precisely 6:00 a.
m. , the kind of precision one uses when ensuring a task is completed before daylight allows anyone in higher command to place a telephone call.
General der Infanterie Maximilian Otto Harries never saw the sunrise on April 23, 1945. He was 56 years old, a career infantry officer who had led formations since the First World War, holder of more than thirty decorations including the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and a man known throughout the Wehrmacht for what his fellow officers called offensive effectiveness in pursuit operations—the specialized military term for what Harries did in Poland in 1939, in Belgium and France in 1940, in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1943, and on the western approaches to Germany during the eighteen months preceding the war’s end.
Offensive effectiveness in pursuit operations. Sit with that phrase for a moment, because when you understand what it meant on the ground, you will understand precisely why Patton wrote four sentences in pencil at 11:47 p. m.
and specified 6:00 a. m. This was not a summary field execution.
Patton was not shooting from the hip, acting on instinct, or doing something in a moment of rage for which he would later answer. What happened on the night of April 22, 1945, was the fruit of three weeks of documentation, a 64-page investigation report prepared by the Third Army’s Judge Advocate section, two sworn statements taken under formal oath, physical evidence recovered from a site outside the town of Aschaffenburg that Third Army counterintelligence spent eleven days cataloging, and a 40-minute meeting at an advanced command post between Patton and his Judge Advocate officer, Colonel Frederick Renn, 50 years old, from Richmond, Virginia, at approximately 9:00 p. m.
on the night of April 22.
Renn had been building the case since the first week of April, and he had been doing so with extraordinary care, following Patton’s instruction when the first reports arrived that it be built cohesively. And the case was indeed cohesive. Let me step back, because to understand the 64 pages, you must understand the contents of the Aschaffenburg report.
Aschaffenburg is a city on the Main River, 40 kilometers southeast of Frankfurt. In early April 1945, the city witnessed one of the last fierce German defensive battles of the war, a battle of resistance ordered by the local Nazi Party leadership against the wishes of the operational command of the Wehrmacht army, which assessed the defensive position as militarily untenable and recommended withdrawal.
The resistance lasted nine days, cost the civilian population of Aschaffenburg hundreds of dead, and inflicted heavy casualties on the Third Army in street fighting. When the city fell on April 3, 1945, American forces sweeping through the city found something that street fighting and civilian deaths did not fully explain: a cellar. The cellar was located beneath a requisitioned commercial building on Dalbergstrasse, used by the headquarters staff of Harries’ division during the final weeks of the Aschaffenburg defenses.
The building was evacuated in the final hours before the city fell, with the German staff taking what they could carry. They burned what they could burn, but they did not get to everything.
The cellar door was locked from the outside, which is the first thing that drew the attention of the American infantry platoon that breached the building on the afternoon of April 3. A door locked from the outside means something different than a door locked from the inside. The sergeant who found the door noted it in his report, because he was the type who took notes, and because the door was locked from the outside, and because something was making a sound from the other side.
They opened the door, and what they found is the reason this story exists. I ask for your patience, as I will be careful here as the record requires. I will not describe what was in that cellar in a way that transforms it from documentation into something else.
What I will tell you is what the investigation record tells you, in the language it uses, which is precise and objective language, and perhaps worse than any more graphic description.
The cellar held 14 American prisoners of war, all infantrymen, ranging in age from 19 to 26. They had been held in the cellar for between five and seven days before the Americans found them, based on the medical examination conducted by Third Army medical officers who arrived within two hours of discovery. The medical examination covered their physical condition, the duration of their captivity, and the nature of the injuries they sustained.
The injuries were not consistent with combat wounds. They were documented in the medical examination in terms that the U. S.
Army report later described, in its own medical language, as evidence of systematic mistreatment by deliberate direction. Four of the fourteen prisoners did not survive to be transported to a field hospital.
They were Private Raymond Ellsworth Tatum, 20, from Spartanburg, South Carolina; Private Gerald Francis Nolan, 19, from South Boston, Massachusetts; Corporal David Alan Reyes, 22, from Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Private Thomas Hugh Waller, 21, from Lexington, Kentucky. All four had been captured during the street fighting in Aschaffenburg in late March. All four had identification documents on them when found.
All four had written home during the previous month. Waller wrote to his mother, Louise, two weeks before his capture, telling her the weather had turned warmer and that he expected the war to be over by summer. He said he was fine and asked her not to worry.
Think about that for a moment.
Now, to the Harries connection. This is the part of the story that Colonel Renn spent three weeks proving with a precision that would withstand formal proceedings. And the connection he established was not circumstantial.
The building on Dalbergstrasse was Harries’ command post. The names of the staff officers who worked from that building were identified through captured administrative records. According to those administrative records, the cellar was used as a holding facility for American prisoners captured during the Aschaffenburg street fighting.
The order authorizing the use of the cellar as a holding facility bore the signature of one of Harries’ headquarters staff officers, a senior colonel named Klaus Brandt, 41 years old, who was captured during the fall of the city, and who confirmed during a formal interview with the Judge Advocate on April 8 that the holding facility had been established under the division’s general authority, and that access to the facility and its conditions were known to the division commander and not objected to by him.
Brandt took four hours to make that statement. He made it because Renn possessed the administrative records, the physical evidence, and the medical evaluation, and because Brandt had apparently concluded that cooperation was the best option available to him, given the severity of what Renn was holding. Brandt’s statement was the second nail in the case.
The first nail was the administrative records themselves. The third nail, which sealed the case, came from a survivor. His name was Private First Class Calvin James Odom, 20 years old, from Monroe, Louisiana.
He had been held in the cellar for six days. He was captured during the street fighting on March 29. He was transported to the field hospital on April 3, the afternoon of the discovery, and spent the next eleven days in the hospital before a Judge Advocate officer named Lieutenant Gerald Bell, 27, from Dayton, Ohio, sat down beside him with a notebook and asked if he would be willing to give a statement.
Odom said yes.
He gave his statement lying in his hospital bed. It took three hours. Lieutenant Bell filled 19 pages.
He had to stop twice because Odom needed to stop, but Odom always urged him to continue, so Bell continued. At the end of three hours, there were 19 pages in Bell’s handwriting covering six days spent in a cellar on Dalbergstrasse with a level of detail, dated and named, that Colonel Renn, when he read it, wrote a note at the top of the first page. The note was two words.
He wrote: “Sufficient basis.” Sufficient basis. That is what a former lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, used to describe 19 pages written by a 20-year-old from Monroe, Louisiana, who had been held in a cellar for six days and was still insisting on continuing.
What most people miss is that Renn was seeking authorization for a field court-martial, not referral to the Nuremberg trials. The two paths are legally distinct. The Nuremberg trials were conducted by the Allied powers for the Nazi state’s leadership and its apparatus.
A field court-martial authorized under Article 92 of the Articles of War and the laws of armed conflict, as applied to specific documented acts against held military prisoners, was a proceeding that a theater commander could convene under his own authority to address crimes committed against his forces. It was not a summary proceeding; it required a case, documentation, and an evidentiary standard, the standard Renn was asked to meet, and which he met. This allowed for execution of a death sentence within the theater of operations under theater commander authority, without waiting for Nuremberg procedures to try a general who, in the spring of 1945, was one of hundreds of German officers held by the Americans on war crimes charges.
Patton was the theater commander. And here is the crux. Not because of what Patton did, but because of what the 64-page report contained, which made what Patton did the only conclusion a man of his character could reach.
Odom’s 19 pages were pages 61 through 79. They came after the administrative evidence, after the medical evaluation, after Brandt’s statement. They came last because Renn had built the report the way a trial lawyer builds a closing argument.
You build until you reach your strongest point. And you make your strongest point the last thing the reader reads. What Odom described in those 19 pages, in his own words, in the idiom of a 20-year-old from Louisiana, without the objectivity or the language of the medical evaluation, is what happened in that cellar.
He did not describe it for dramatic effect; he described it because Bell asked him what happened, and he told the truth. As young men from Monroe, Louisiana, do when asked to give their testimony.
Patton began reading the report at approximately 8:00 p. m. on April 22, and read all 64 pages before his meeting with Renn at 9:00.
He spoke during the 40-minute meeting only to ask three questions. The first question: “Does the record support the identification of Harries as the responsible commander?” Renn answered in the affirmative.
The second question: “Do the documents support the acts themselves with independent evidence beyond the Odom account?” Renn answered in the affirmative as well. The third question, which Patton asked, was not a question but a statement he made at the end of the meeting after Renn answered the second question, as Patton said.
According to Renn’s personal account, written in 1948 and donated to the Virginia Military Institute archives in 1972, “Those four men died, and 37 others lay on the ground above the place where they were held because of specific decisions made by a specific man. Nuremberg would give him a platform for 18 months. I will not give him a platform.”
That was the entire explanation. That was it.
And here is where the story turns, because what happened in the hour between the end of the meeting and the writing of the order is something Renn documented, and it has been available in the Virginia Military Institute archives for 50 years, and almost no one has read it. After the meeting, Patton did not write the order immediately. He returned to his quarters.
He sat at his desk in his field headquarters for approximately 45 minutes alone. His aide, a captain named James Doyle, not the Francis Doyle from previous episodes, a different man, was in the next room. He heard nothing from Patton’s room for 45 minutes.
No conversation, no dictation, no phone calls. Just the silence of a man sitting at his desk, a 64-page report before him, the specific weight of four dead Americans and 37 survivors, and a general who, but for those decisions, would have received a platform at Nuremberg, defense counsel, and possibly decades of legal proceedings. 45 minutes of silence, then the sound of a pencil moving across paper, then the order delivered to Captain Lee at 11:47.
Now, Harries, because he deserves to be part of this story as a real person, not just a function. He was not a committed Nazi ideologue like the Nuremberg defendants. He was worse in some ways.
He was a professional military man who made specific operational decisions about how to use the human beings under his care. And he made those decisions with the cold competence of a man who fully understood what he was authorizing and believed the circumstances justified that authorization. He had been doing it since Poland in 1939.
The Aschaffenburg cellar was not his first instance of treating American or Allied prisoners as variables in an operational equation rather than as human beings with protections. The CIC documented three prior incidents in the 64 pages. An incident in Belgium in 1940 involving British prisoners.
An incident in the Soviet Union in 1942 involving Soviet prisoners. An incident in France in 1944 involving American airmen. These three incidents are documented from captured records and survivor testimony, which Renn included not as primary charges but as pattern evidence demonstrating that what happened in the Aschaffenburg cellar was not an anomaly but a deliberate practice.
This is what Harries did. What is difficult to believe is the way the prior incidents were documented. The Belgium 1940 incident: a captured German administrative order, signed by one of the division’s commanders, directing that British prisoners captured in a specific engagement be held without notification to the Red Cross until an operational need assessment was completed.
19 British soldiers were held for 11 days; 12 survived. The Soviet Union 1942 incident: a series of entries in what the CIC described as a division operations log covering a three-week period in the summer of 1942 during which the status of Soviet prisoners at a specific location changed from “held” to “disposed of” without any transfer documentation, movement order, or death record. 41 Soviet soldiers.
The France 1944 incident: testimony from a surviving American airman, Staff Sergeant Roy Ellis Mercer, 23, from Flagstaff, Arizona, who was held in a facility under Harries’ command in France before escaping during a German withdrawal in August 1944, and who gave a statement to Third Army CIC in September 1944, which statement was on file when Renn began building his case, and which statement connects directly to the Aschaffenburg evidence.
Read that number again. 12 survivors in Belgium, 41 Soviet soldiers disposed of, then Aschaffenburg. Captain Lee drove through the darkness, the order in his breast pocket.
He delivered it to the military police section at approximately midnight. The duty MP commander read it. He read it twice.
He asked Lee if this was confirmed. Lee confirmed. The MP commander signed the receipt copy and placed it in his duty log.
Then he went to the holding cell and informed the guards of the order. Harries was asleep when the guards informed him at 5:30 a. m.
what would occur in 30 minutes. He did not speak a single word that the guards recorded. He dressed in his uniform, the uniform in which he had been captured, with the Knight’s Cross still hanging at his neck.
He was 56 years old. He had been sleeping in an American holding facility for 19 days. He had 19 days to think about what the Americans knew and what they would do with him.
At 6:00 a. m. on April 23, 1945, General der Infanterie Maximilian Otto Harries was executed by firing squad in the yard of the Aschaffenburg military police station.
This is the part that was not included in the official report. There was no official report, no document that used the word “executed.” The official records of Harries’ death in World War III describe Army records listing his death while in custody on April 23, 1945.
The cause of death is listed as the result of summary field proceedings under military authority. The language is precise, because Renn wrote it himself. He was a former lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, and he knew how to write with precision and clarity, without excess.
The 64-page case file is in the National Archives. The pencil order is in the Virginia Military Institute archives with Renn’s 1948 account. The cellar door on Dalbergstrasse was replaced at some point during post-war reconstruction, and the building itself was damaged in later demolition work, but the street still exists.
A copy of the order is in the MP duty log that was transferred to the National Archives with the rest of the Third Army records. At the bottom of the receipt copy, below the MP commander’s signature, someone unknown wrote four words in different ink, added apparently later, perhaps in the same hour. The four words were addressed to Raymond Gerald David Thomas.
Let me say that again, slower, for the record.
To Raymond Gerald, David Thomas. Calvin James Odom returned home to Monroe, Louisiana, in the fall of 1945. He worked in a hardware store for 31 years.
He died in 1988. His 19 pages are in a box at the National Archives. The pencil marks of his words, the words Bell wrote on the notebook beside the hospital bed.
Those words no longer exist in the original. What remains is the typed transcript of Bell’s handwriting produced by Renn’s section on April 14, 1945. A clean, typed, precise copy.
And yet Odom’s voice is still present in it. You can still hear Monroe, Louisiana, in the sentence structure, in the way he tells the story. In that specific way, a 20-year-old Southerner tells the truth when someone finally hands him a notebook and asks him about the four names on the receipt copy.
Raymond Ellsworth Tatum, Gerald Francis Nolan, David Alan Reyes, Thomas Hugh Waller. Those are the reason the pencil moved at 11:47 p. m.
Those are the reason the time on the order was 6:00 a. m. , and not Nuremberg, and not a referral to the court, and not any of the other things a man in Patton’s position could have written and defended, which would have taken 18 months and given Harries a platform.
Patton read 64 pages. He read 19 pages of Odom’s account. He sat in his room for 45 minutes, then wrote four sentences in pencil and handed them to a captain from Knoxville, Tennessee, and that was the end of it.
The pencil is still in the Virginia Military Institute archives. The graphite trace remains on the paper. 80 years of archival storage, and the words are still legible.
The time still reads 6:00 a. m. The date still reads April 22.
The name is still there. And at the bottom of the MP duty log in the National Archives, in ink different from the surrounding text and in a hand that has never been officially identified, someone still speaks for four men who never came out of a cellar on Dalbergstrasse. Subscribe.
They deserved at least that much.