In late April 1945, an intelligence report reached George Patton’s headquarters. East of his lines, there was a camp holding 2,000 prisoners, and the SS officer in charge had orders to murder all of them before the Americans showed up. The report even gave his name: Carl Drestle.
Patton went through it twice and asked how quickly a column could get there. Then he dictated a warning to the SS man personally: Keep those people alive or I will come for you. He had it broadcast where the SS would pick it up. Hours later, American tanks rolled through the gate to find the guards gone and the prisoners still breathing.
That story is making the rounds on YouTube right now. It never happened. There was no ultimatum. Nobody raced a clock. And there was no Carl Drestle.
The only Dressel who turns up in the camp records is Fritz Drestle, a prisoner murdered at Dachau in May 1933, whose death the SS filed as a suicide. The only real name in that story belongs to a victim.
Here is why that should bother you. Even if you have never shared a history video in your life, every invented detail is one somebody can knock down. And the people who want the camps knocked down altogether need little more than that.
Eisenhower saw it coming. Three days after walking through his first camp, he wrote to General Marshall that he had gone in on purpose so that if anyone ever brushed it off as propaganda, he could say what he had seen with his own eyes.
There is also a sentence Patton wrote in September 1945. We will get to it. But first, April.
On April 12, 1945, the three most powerful American soldiers in Europe — Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton — had one day set aside. The schedule looked easy. Morning: a salt mine at Merkers, where the 90th Infantry Division had found something the whole army was talking about. Afternoon: a small camp near Gotha that Patton’s men had overrun eight days earlier. Night: Patton’s headquarters.
The gold was supposed to be the story. They dropped about 2,100 feet in a lift hanging from one cable. Patton glanced up and remarked that if it snapped, promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated. Eisenhower told him to knock it off until they were back above ground.
At the bottom was a bank vault inside a mountain. The first count logged 8,198 gold bars and 2.76 billion Reichsmarks in paper. Bradley told Patton that back when soldiers kept their loot, he would have been the richest man in the world. Stacked in with everything else were 18 bags and 189 suitcases, trunks, and boxes deposited by the SS. On a morning full of gold bars, it was easy to walk past luggage.
Ohrdruf was a subcamp of Buchenwald. The SS set it up the previous November so prisoners could lay railway track for a communication center that never got finished. When the Fourth Armored and 89th Infantry Divisions arrived on April 4, almost everyone who could still walk had been marched off toward Buchenwald. Many who could not had been shot.
An army cameraman was waiting when the generals’ small plane came down. You can still watch that reel. Patton climbed out first. Eisenhower followed and peeled off his coat.
Inside the wire, a man in a scarf presented himself as a survivor and offered to show them around. He was very talkative. He walked them to the gallows, then to the whipping table. He is in the footage, too, standing with the officers.
Then they reached the shed. Eisenhower would describe a room with 20 or 30 naked men piled inside, starved to death. Patton’s own diary puts it closer to 40. Patton would not go in. He told Eisenhower he would be sick if he did.
He was sick anyway. At some point on that tour, the commander of the Third Army walked off behind a building and threw up. Eisenhower’s naval aide, Harry Butcher, noted in his diary that his own boss did not.
Past the shed there was a pit, and over it a grill the SS had built from narrow-gauge railway track laid across brick. They poured pitch over the bodies to make them burn. The prisoners who were left told Patton about 3,000 men had died there since New Year’s Day.
A soldier from the 87th Infantry Division who came through Ohrdruf in those same days remembered baskets he took for pebbles. They were teeth, gold fillings still in them.
Gold like that did not stay in the camps. The SS collected it, boxed it, and deposited it with the Reichsbank. The same kind of SS deposit those three generals had walked past in the mine that morning. The vault and the baskets were two ends of one system.
Before he left, Eisenhower ordered every unit not on the front line to come through Ohrdruf so the American soldier would know, as he put it, what he was fighting against.
That night, all three generals stayed under Patton’s roof. It was near midnight before Patton lay down, and he noticed his watch had stopped, so he switched on the BBC to get the time. Instead, he heard that Franklin Roosevelt was dead.
That same day, he had written to his wife, Beatrice: “I love war and responsibility and excitement.” By midnight, he had seen what the war had been hiding, and his commander in chief was gone. Later, he told her that all of them had prayed Ohrdruf would be the first and last concentration camp they would ever see. Then three words: no such luck.
Rewind four days to Sunday, April 8. Two messages left Buchenwald, the main camp.
The first went out over the air. Gwidon Damazyn, a Polish engineer and a prisoner since March 1941, had helped build a shortwave transmitter and hide it inside the camp. At noon, the underground used it to tap out a call for help in Morse code aimed at the Americans closing in.
The second left in a wooden crate. Prisoner number 9093, Eugen Kogon, had himself packed inside one labeled so it passed the gate unchecked. From a hiding place in Weimar, he forged a letter to the commandant, Hermann Pister. Cease. Cease immediately. He signed it as a British officer, Major James MacLeod.
That letter is in the National Archives in Washington today. Remember the ultimatum to a camp commandant from the start of this story? There was one. A prisoner wrote it.
Two messages left Buchenwald that Sunday. Neither came from Patton, and neither stopped the marches. About 28,000 prisoners were driven onto the roads, and estimates of how many died run from a third to about half.
April 11. Around 10 in the morning, Pister told the camp’s senior prisoner the SS was pulling out. By noon, they were gone. The underground handed out weapons it had hidden. Around 3, prisoners put a ladder to the gate building, climbed in, and raised a white flag.
What makes this unusual is not that the Americans liberated Buchenwald. It is that by the time the first Americans walked in, the prisoners had already taken it.
That afternoon, Captain Frederick Keffer of the Sixth Armored Division pulled up in an armored car. The inmates grabbed him by the arms and legs and threw him into the air until he was too dizzy to stand it. Two army investigators who came through that evening expected a heap of corpses. They found about 1,500 prisoners standing guard with German weapons.
On April 15, Patton wrote to Eisenhower. They had found another camp four miles north of Weimar, only much worse. A normal population of 25,000 dying at about a hundred a day. He was going on the report of two officers who had gone up the day before, and he had already told the press to go right in as much as they could.
Then, almost in passing, a line about Ohrdruf. That talkative survivor in the scarf? A Russian prisoner recognized him as one of the guards. The prisoner beat his brains out with a rock.
That same day, Patton went up to see Buchenwald for himself. He wrote that the survivors looked like mummies that could barely move and that they seemed to be of the same level of intelligence.
Patton already knew what to do about Weimar. He had picked up the idea at Ohrdruf, where Colonel Hayden Sears of the Fourth Armored had walked a few dozen leading citizens through the camp. The next morning, Ohrdruf’s Nazi mayor and his wife were found hanged.
Patton’s version would be bigger. He ordered about a thousand people from Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, up the hill to the camp. At 2 in the afternoon on April 16, they set out with American military police walking beside them.
His plan was simple. Make them look, and they will have to own it. What he got was tears. A British reporter watched women weep from one barracks to the next. Some fainted and could not go on. And Margaret Bourke-White, photographing for Life, kept hearing the same words: We didn’t know.
Eugen Kogon, the man in the crate, later answered that. There was not a German, he wrote, who did not know the camps existed, and not one who thought they were sanatoriums.
An army photographer caught the townspeople on their walk, and on April 18, that picture ran in the London Times. It was the first image of Buchenwald to appear in print. The 10th Corps history later put the crowd at 2,000. The reporter on the road counted a thousand.
Now, the heart of that viral story — someone racing to reach prisoners before the SS kills them — did happen. Just not to Patton.
May 1945, Upper Austria. Louis Hafliger, a Swiss Red Cross delegate and a bank clerk from Zurich in normal life, heard from an SS officer that the retreating guards planned to blow up the Mauthausen camp with its prisoners inside. He had a car painted white and flew a Red Cross flag on it. On May 5, he drove out to find the Americans.
He found 23 men from the 11th Armored Division under Staff Sergeant Albert Kosak, who bluffed the Germans into believing he spoke for his commanding general. Gusen and Mauthausen were free that day. Hafliger’s bank fired him for acting on his own. The Red Cross reprimanded him and did not clear his name until 1990.
Patton’s army, not Patton.
By late summer, the war in Europe was over and Patton was military governor of Bavaria. Thousands of Jewish survivors were still living in camps, many in the striped clothes they were liberated in. A presidential envoy, Earl Harrison, reported that the Americans seemed to be treating them much as the Nazis did, minus the killing.
On September 15, 1945, Patton answered that in his diary. Harrison and people like him, he wrote, believe a displaced person is a human being. Patton disagreed and said this goes especially for the Jews, who are lower than animals.
Go back to Buchenwald for a second. That line about the survivors’ intelligence was written in April. The contempt did not show up in September. It had been riding along the whole time.
The man who could not step into a shed at Ohrdruf and the man who wrote that entry are the same man five months apart. The record will not let you keep one and lose the other.
A week later, he told reporters the Nazi question was like a fight between Democrats and Republicans.
On November 29, 1945, the army’s film of the camps, Ohrdruf included, played in the courtroom at Nuremberg. Eisenhower had walked into Ohrdruf to be ready for the day someone called it propaganda. That day came. It is still coming.
The answer was never a better story. It is the paper. Patton’s letter in the Eisenhower Library. His diary. A photograph of a thousand people walking up a hill.
A made-up Carl Dressel honors no one who was in those camps. Fritz Drestle was real.