Third Army headquarters confirmed late Monday that Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
personally confronted an SS commander holding 2,000 prisoners at a camp outside Schwarzenburg, Germany, and secured their release without firing a shot, in an extraordinary episode that underscores the scale of the humanitarian crisis confronting American forces in the final weeks of the European war.
The confrontation, which took place on the afternoon of April 8, 1945, saw the Third Army commander drive into territory still controlled by SS forces to deliver a direct ultimatum to Oberführer Klaus Richter, the camp’s commanding officer, who had refused a formal surrender demand and threatened consequences for the prisoners if American troops attempted a forced entry.
According to intelligence reports reviewed at Third Army headquarters, Richter had remained at the facility when American units made contact with its outer perimeter the previous evening, an anomaly in the closing weeks of the war when most SS personnel were fleeing westward ahead of advancing Allied forces.
The unit commander on the scene had transmitted a standard demand for surrender specifying terms and a timeline. Richter’s response, described in official correspondence as carefully understated, stated that he was prepared to discuss the situation but would not release the prisoners to American custody and warned that any assault would have consequences for the detainees.
Patton read the report twice before asking three questions of his intelligence officer: how many SS personnel were inside the facility, what the physical layout offered in terms of tactical options, and what Richter’s documented record showed. The answers returned within the hour: approximately 120 SS troops, a layout that made forced entry feasible but hazardous to prisoners in the opening phase of any assault, and a record showing Richter had served in the camp system since 1936.
Patton informed his staff he would go himself. His security detail objected forcefully, presenting the operational case against a Third Army commander placing himself in direct contact with an SS officer who had already demonstrated willingness to use 2,000 lives as a negotiating instrument.
Patton listened to every objection, then told his staff that none of them changed his decision. He said that what was happening inside the facility while they debated operational parameters was happening to 2,000 people who did not have the luxury of that discussion, and that the question of what he was willing to risk personally was not one he was prepared to answer cautiously.
He drove to Schwarzenburg that afternoon with a small staff and security element, requesting a meeting with Richter under a flag of truce. The response came back within 20 minutes. Richter would meet.
The two men met in a room of the facility’s administrative building. Richter, a tall man in his late 40s wearing full SS uniform, conducted himself with the precise formality of a man who believed the situation contained negotiating room. He was not visibly frightened.
Patton sat down and said he would speak plainly and expected the same in return. He told Richter he had read his record before driving to the facility and wanted him to understand that before either of them said another word.
Richter said he was prepared to discuss transferring the facility under conditions protecting his personnel from summary proceedings and guaranteeing their treatment as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Patton told him he had misunderstood the nature of the conversation. He said this was not a negotiation. Richter had one decision available: whether he would release the prisoners within the hour or whether Patton would take them.
The only thing the conversation would determine was which of those two things happened.
When Richter referenced his earlier threat regarding the consequences of a forced entry, Patton said he had read it. He then said he wanted Richter to understand what it meant to make that threat to him specifically, with the war three weeks from its conclusion and the full weight of what the Third Army had accomplished in the previous 11 months behind every word.
Patton said that if a single prisoner was harmed as a result of any action or order by Richter or his personnel, he would make it his personal mission to ensure Richter answered for every individual harm with the full weight of the American military justice system and the coming war crimes proceedings.
He said documentation teams had been collecting evidence on the camp system for weeks and that Richter’s file would be part of those proceedings regardless of what happened in the next hour. But what happened in the next hour would determine what that file contained about the last decision Richter made as commander of this facility.
Patton told Richter he could add to that file the fact that he had released 2,000 prisoners when he had the option to do otherwise. Or he could add something else. The choice was Richter’s, it was the last meaningful choice he would make, and he had 50 minutes.
Then Patton said one more thing. He asked Richter to look at him directly. He said the 2,000 people in the facility behind them were people.
He said it simply, without rhetorical elaboration. Whatever Richter had been told about them, or had told himself, or had used as justification, the 2,000 people behind them were people in every sense the word contained. This was not a debatable point.
Patton said he was stating it as a fact Richter would carry with him regardless of what happened in the next 50 minutes, and that carrying it was the minimum the situation required of him as a human being, whatever it would require of him as a defendant in the proceedings that were coming.
Richter was quiet for a long moment. Patton stood, said he would be outside, and expected Richter’s decision in 50 minutes. He walked out into the pale April sunlight.
His aide later said Patton stood there for perhaps three minutes, his expression not that of a man calculating operational contingencies but of a man who had said everything he came to say and was waiting to learn whether it had been enough.
At 37 minutes, Richter sent word that he was prepared to transfer the facility.
The transfer was conducted over the following two hours with the operational precision Patton’s units brought to everything they did. SS personnel were disarmed and taken into custody. Medical teams positioned outside the perimeter moved in and began immediate intervention.
Documentation teams began their work.
Patton walked through the facility after the transfer was complete. He walked slowly and without speaking, his expression, his aide said, the same one seen at Ohrdruf. He stopped at several points and spoke to prisoners through his interpreter, asking their names, where they were from, how long they had been held.
He listened with focused attention.
One prisoner, held in the camp system for two years, asked who he was. Patton gave his name and rank. The prisoner said they had heard of Patton, that fragments of information moved through the prisoner population, and that one thing they had heard was that there was an American general who moved fast and did not stop, and that wherever he went the war moved with him.
Patton said he was sorry it had taken him this long to get here. The prisoner looked at him and said something Patton recorded in his journal that evening with the precision of a man preserving something he did not want to lose to the imprecision of memory.
The prisoner said: “He is here now.”
Patton wrote that evening that he had said and done many things in his career he was uncertain about, decisions he had questioned in retrospect or that carried consequences he had not fully anticipated. He wrote that the decision to drive to Schwarzenburg and sit across a table from Richter was not one of those things.
He wrote that it was among the decisions he was most completely certain about, and that the certainty was not that of a man who had won an argument but of a man who had done the specific thing the specific situation required and had been fortunate enough to have it be enough.
He wrote that the prisoner’s words were the words he was going to carry. He is here now. He wrote that he hoped it was true of him in more than the literal sense.
He wrote that he hoped being here now, present completely in the specific situation the specific moment required, was something he had achieved in that room with Richter and in the facility afterward with the people whose names he had asked and listened to.
He wrote that he was going to keep trying to be here now for whatever the war had left and whatever came after it. He wrote that it was the least he could do.
The release at Schwarzenburg stands among the final humanitarian actions of Patton’s command in Europe. The Third Army’s documentation of camp atrocities would later serve as core evidence in the war crimes proceedings at Nuremberg. Richter was taken into custody and his file entered into the evidentiary record.