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American military authorities have opened a formal war crimes file against an SS officer accused of ordering the execution of an unarmed Catholic chaplain in a snowbound ravine near Sauerlautern, Germany, on December 23, 1944 — a killing that has now triggered a direct confrontation between one of the war’s most feared commanders and the … Read more

OPPENHEIM, Germany — In the predawn darkness of March 23, 1945, six battalions of American infantry stood on the eastern bank of the Rhine River, having crossed Adolf Hitler’s most sacred natural barrier without firing a single artillery shell, and the news that reached Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower within hours would trigger one … Read more

American forces have captured the devastated industrial city of Kassel after a brutal five-day battle that pitted General George S. Patton’s advancing Third Army against a desperate last stand of Germany’s most feared armored vehicles, including a handful of factory-fresh King Tiger tanks crewed largely by teenage boys who had never seen combat. The confrontation, … Read more

MUNICH — In a requisitioned German military barracks outside Munich on May 9, 1945, the day after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, a formal ceremony meant to symbolize the transfer of power to Allied forces erupted into one of the most explosive confrontations of the entire occupation when 41 of 53 high-ranking Wehrmacht officers rendered the … Read more

THURINGIA, Germany — The mark of a woman’s spit was still wet on the four-star insignia of his helmet when Gen. George S. Patton Jr. issued the order that would haunt the German elite of this shattered region for generations and that the U. S. Army high command would spend decades trying to erase from … Read more