Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Chapter 14

1 While the term concentration camp is widely used to describe the many places where the Nazis tortured and killed their enemies, real and imagined, six facilities (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau) also carried the term extermination camp, because most prisoners were murdered immediately upon their arrival. Auschwitz-Birkenau served the dual purpose of forced labor/extermination camp.

2 Each of the five crematoria at Auschwitz featured a room for gassing victims and ovens for burning the bodies. When the number of bodies became too much for the ovens to handle—as with the deportation of Hungarian Jews from March to November of 1944 following the success of Otto Skorzeny’s Operation Mickey Mouse—the bodies were burned outdoors. A large pit behind Krema V served this purpose.

3 Auschwitz was divided into three sections: the main camp, the extermination camp (Birkenau), and a labor camp four miles away that serviced the IG Farben chemical factory. There were also a number of subcamps in the region.

4 Among the experiments were injecting dye into a child’s eyes to see if the iris’s color could be changed, injecting the bodies with germs and diseases to study the physical reaction, and performing operations without anesthetic. On one occasion, Mengele attempted to create a Siamese twin by sewing the bodies of identical Gypsy children to one another, back to back, and connecting their veins and internal organs. The two girls died a few days later when gangrene set in.

5 Each concentration camp was administered by an SS-Totenkopfverband, or “Death’s Head Unit.” These units, usually clad in black from head to toe, were divided into two groups, one overseeing daily life in the camps and the other responsible for perimeter security. A commandant oversaw the unit and the camps. Guards had complete discretion regarding punishment and brutality, and many of them had come to their new callings after a prewar life of crime. Wounded SS soldiers on the front were often transferred to concentration camp duty to recover from their injuries. Also, the inverse was often true, with SS guards ordered to leave the camp and serve on the front lines if they showed themselves to be soft or unwilling to commit atrocities. Life as an Auschwitz guard was relatively easy, with steady supplies of liquor, illicit sexual relationships with prisoners, and a social life of which soldiers on the front lines could only dream. For this reason, SS guards were more than willing to follow orders, no matter how brutal or morally questionable they might have been. In the chilling words of SS guard Oskar Gr?ning, “The main camp of Auschwitz was like a small town, with its gossiping and chatting. There was a grocery, a canteen, a cinema. There was a theatre with regular performances. And there was a sports club of which I was a member. It was all fun and entertainment, just like a small town.”

6 There were 144 successful escapes from Auschwitz, including that of four prisoners who dressed in SS uniforms and drove out through the main gate in Commandant Rudolf H?ss’s personal automobile. The four were never caught. H?ss, on the other hand, was hanged in 1947 for war crimes. A special gallows was constructed in the heart of Auschwitz for the occasion. It stands there to this day.

7 Josef Mengele went on to be captured by the Americans soon after the war ended, but was released because he’d faked his identity. Mengele then successfully fled Germany to begin a new life in South America, where he was protected by corrupt local authorities in Argentina and Brazil. Ongoing efforts by Israel and West Germany to have him repatriated for trial failed. In 1979, Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming off the coast of Brazil and drowned. He was buried under a false name, but his body’s location was discovered six years later. To this day, the body is stored in the S?o Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine. His story was the basis for the novel The Boys from Brazil.

8 On a normal morning in Auschwitz, a prison orchestra played music near the sign as prisoners marched to work. The rhythm made it easier for them to march in time, which also made it easier for the guards to perform the daily head count.

9 Of those sixty thousand, fifteen thousand died in the death marches just before the arrival of the Soviet army. Some froze due to lack of clothing and shoes, but most were shot when they became unable to continue walking. Their bodies lined the roads leading to the railheads of Loslau and Gleiwitz, where unheated cattle cars awaited them. The trains took them to infamous concentration camps such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald. Many who made the march called it the worst period they spent in Nazi captivity.

10 Roosevelt’s radio address was very specific in informing Americans about the reality of the Holocaust: “In one of the blackest crimes of all history—begun by the Nazis in the day of peace and multiplied by them a hundred times in time of war—the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe goes on unabated every hour. As a result of the events of the last few days hundreds of thousands of Jews who, while living under persecution, have at least found a haven from death in Hungary and the Balkans, are now threatened with annihilation as Hitler’s forces descend more heavily upon these lands. That these innocent people, who have already survived a decade of Hitler’s fury, should perish on the very eve of triumph over the barbarism which their persecution symbolizes, would be a major tragedy. It is therefore fitting that we should again proclaim our determination that none who participate in these acts of savagery shall go unpunished. The United Nations have made it clear that they will pursue the guilty and deliver them up in order that justice be done. That warning applies not only to the leaders but also to their functionaries and subordinates in Germany and in the satellite countries. All who knowingly take part in the deportation of Jews to their death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany are equally guilty with the executioner. All who share the guilt shall share the punishment.”

11 In one of the most famous stories to come out of the Holocaust, Anne Frank was given a blank diary for her thirteenth birthday, which fell just weeks before her family went into hiding in 1942. She went on to chronicle, in great detail, what it was like to mature from childhood into adolescence in such claustrophobic circumstances. The last entry is August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest. Upon his return to Amsterdam after the war, Otto Frank was amazed to discover that the journal had survived. Anne’s insightful comments on the war and her personal relationships were so profound that he sought to have the diary made public. This came to pass in 1950, when it was published in German and French, and then in English in 1952. Though marginally successful at first, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl has since become a classic work on life in Nazi-occupied Germany and the Netherlands, and has spawned a film and stage play. In 1999, Time magazine included Anne Frank in its TIME 100: The Most Important People of the Century list.

12 The Nazi plan to develop an atomic bomb began in January 1939, when German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann found a way to split a uranium atom, thus releasing vast amounts of energy. This was based on the theoretical work already done by the legendary Albert Einstein, who had immigrated to America. After the successful invasion of Poland in September 1939, the German Army Ordnance Office began work on a method of harnessing fission to form a nuclear explosive. There is evidence that the Germans built and tested a nuclear weapon in underground tunnels near the central German town of Ohrdruf. It was on a much smaller scale than the ones detonated by the Americans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the end, even though Hitler waited in vain for the nuclear bomb that he hoped would win the war—or at least allow him to sue for peace on his terms—it did not come to pass. The majority of the scientists who worked on Hitler’s nuclear effort were taken into custody by either the Americans or the Soviets. Rather than being transported to New Mexico to aid the American Manhattan Project, they were transported to a safe house in England. This is where they received news about the use of America’s atomic weapons against Japan. They were allowed to return to postwar Germany in 1946.

13 Hitler’s bunker complex was much more than a simple air-raid shelter. It consisted of two levels: the upper Vorbunker containing a conference room, dining facility, kitchen, water storage room, and bedrooms for support staff, which numbered more than two dozen; and the Führerbunker, located some thirty feet below ground, with lavishly decorated rooms for Hitler and Eva Braun. A large oil painting of his personal hero Frederick the Great covered one wall. The entire complex was beneath a lavish garden, where Hitler emerged most days to walk Blondi.


Chapter 15

1 Joseph Stalin specifically condoned rape as a reward for his soldiers. “People should understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers of blood and death has fun with a woman.” The brutality will become systematic in the final days of the war. In the German city of Dresden, the Russians will gang-rape women in the streets, forcing husbands and fathers to watch. Afterward, the men will be shot. The Russians will claim that the rapes were retribution for atrocities committed during the German invasion of Russia, which does not explain the estimated one hundred thousand rapes in Austria, two hundred thousand in Hungary, and tens of thousands of others in Bulgaria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. To this day, the Putin government in Russia denies that the Russian army committed mass rape, but the evidence contained in various eyewitness accounts is overwhelming.


Chapter 16

1 So much so that Winston Churchill was forced to give a pro-American speech in the British House of Commons to heal the wounds.

2 The Siegfried Line was a four-hundred-mile-long defensive array of eighteen thousand bunkers and interlocking rows of pyramid-shaped concrete antitank obstacles nicknamed “dragon’s teeth.” The Germans referred to it as the Westwall, while the Americans continued to use “Siegfried,” after a similar system of forts dating back to the First World War. Hitler built the Westwall between 1936 and 1938, anticipating by almost a decade the day when some great army—in this case, that of George S. Patton—would attempt to invade the Fatherland.

3 Adolf Hitler also fired the German army’s commander in chief, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, because of the incident. His replacement, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, immediately ordered a series of artillery and rocket strikes on the Remagen Bridge. It was eventually destroyed, on March 17, although not before the Allies had crossed ample men and supplies to the other side to secure the bridgehead. By the time the bridge collapsed into the Rhine, several pontoon bridges had been built across the river near its location, making the loss immaterial to the Allied advance. The bridge has never been rebuilt.

4 Modern-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, northern Italy, and regions of Germany west of the Rhine River.

5 The placing of logs over a muddy road to improve traction.

6 He served two terms in office. His successor was a former U.S. Navy junior officer named John F. Kennedy, who served in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War at the same time as Eisenhower’s running mate, Richard Nixon. Beginning with Eisenhower, every president for the next forty-two years served in World War II.

7 The U.S. Army had several types of temporary bridges that could be constructed quickly to cross a river. A pontoon bridge consisted of several floating barrels upon which steel tread was laid as a decking material. Such bridges could be built within hours. They were highly effective at moving men and matériel across a river, but also highly unstable due to the fact that they rested directly atop the river.

8 The desire to urinate on enemy soil was shared with British prime minister Winston Churchill, who visited Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s lines in early March and made a point of relieving himself on the German homeland. Even as Patton was polluting the Rhine, Churchill was crossing the same river two hundred miles upstream, in Wesel, alongside Montgomery.


Chapter 17

1 Not everyone lived full-time in the bunker. People came and went as if going to work at a regular job. Even Hitler left the bunker to travel through his private tunnel to the Reich Chancellery. The usual contingent comprised soldiers; female secretaries Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge; personal secretary Martin Bormann; SS adjutant Maj. Otto Günsche; maintenance man Johannes Hentschel; veterinarian Fritz Tornow; nurse Erna Flegel; chief steward Arthur Kannenberg; Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell; Hitler’s personal cook, Constanze Manziarly; and chief valet Heinz Linge. Of these, only Morell, Linge, and Manziarly lived in the bunker full-time, because Hitler depended upon them for immediate personal needs. Eva Braun did not move in until mid-April.

2 Frederick’s fortunes took a turn for the better when Britain stepped in as an ally, while Sweden and Russia withdrew their attacks, thus marking the end of the Seven Years’ War. Prussia and Frederick the Great emerged from the conflict as a world power. It was his greatest triumph.


Chapter 18

1 This is not unusual. Truman was in the habit of taking a long daily walk. Very often, he slipped out of the White House unnoticed and walked the five miles to the Marine Corps barracks and back. He believed that it was useless to worry about assassination, because if someone wanted to shoot him, they would find a way, regardless of Secret Service protection. This proved inaccurate on November 1, 1950, when two Puerto Rican nationals tried to sneak into a house where Truman was taking a nap. They were shot and killed by bodyguards. Truman was unharmed.

2 Anna Roosevelt Boettiger was thirty-nine years old, and had recently moved back into the White House while her husband served in the military. The president put her to work, appointing Anna special assistant to the president. In this capacity, she soon learned many of the most well-kept secrets in the White House. It was Anna who had the unfortunate task of informing Eleanor Roosevelt about FDR’s ongoing affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd after the president’s death. It was a number of years before Eleanor forgave Anna for her role in the deception.

3 America would be without a president for two hours and twenty-four minutes. Truman was not sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone until 7:09 that evening. Part of the delay was waiting for Truman’s wife, Bess, and daughter Margaret to travel to the White House. Another was the search for a Bible for the ceremony. Eventually, a cheap Gideon Bible was located in the office of chief usher Howell Crim, who made a point of dusting it before the ceremony.

4 In a ritual that began in 1924 and still continues almost a century later, the BBC emits a series of “pips” at the top of each hour to denote the exact time. This is accomplished through the use of an atomic clock in the basement of the broadcast center. On the surface, this practice might seem to be an inordinate preoccupation with being punctual, but it actually saves lives. The “pips” are important for those sailors at sea who listen in to the BBC to set their watches, because exact time is vital to proper navigation, preventing them from sailing hundreds of miles off course.

5 The majority of the gold had been looted from the various nations conquered by Nazi Germany. Much of this was returned immediately after the war. The remainder was channeled into what was known as the Nazi Persecutee Relief Fund, which aided survivors of the Holocaust. This fund was exhausted in 1998.

6 Eisenhower and Bradley were also deeply disturbed by what they saw. “The smell of death overwhelmed us,” Bradley wrote in his memoirs. “More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been thrown into shallow graves. Others lay in the street where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames. A guard showed us how the blood had congealed in coarse black scabs where the prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food.” Ike’s face “whitened into a mask,” at the sight, in Bradley’s description. Bradley then added, “I was too revolted to speak.”





Chapter 19

1 Joseph Stalin was informed by U.S. ambassador W. Averell Harriman, who made a 4:00 a.m. visit to the Kremlin to deliver the news. A visibly shaken Stalin took Harriman’s hand and held it for nearly a minute as he composed himself. The eternally suspicious Stalin then suggested that FDR’s body be autopsied for signs of food poisoning.

2 The seating capacity was 802, which allowed more than enough room for the entire membership. At Churchill’s insistence, the House of Commons was rebuilt in accordance with its original design between 1948 and 1950.

3 Churchill was a close friend of the distiller Sir Alexander Walker. The prime minister favored hard alcohol, with beer being his least favorite beverage. However, he abhorred drunkenness, and was rarely known to drink to excess. Churchill’s most famous drinking incident occurred just after the war, when the British Labour politician Bessie Braddock accosted him late one night as he left the House of Commons. “Winston, you are drunk. What’s more, you are disgustingly drunk,” she told him. To which Churchill replied, “Bessie, my dear, you are ugly. What’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober, and you shall still be disgustingly ugly.” Churchill borrowed the quote from the 1934 W. C. Fields movie It’s a Gift. It’s worth noting that despite exercising very little, if at all, and drinking so copiously, Churchill inherited a sturdy constitution. Well past his eightieth birthday, he could still boast of a very healthy blood pressure of 140 over 80.


Chapter 20

1 Quoted in statements to Third Army correspondents on May 8, 1945, at his headquarters in Regensburg, Germany.

2 There was great confusion about what was to be done with so many refugees. They had left their homes and farms. It was thought that they should be turned back, sent where they came from, and left to fend for themselves against the Russians, many of whom had been resettled in these very farms and homes. The refugees had no place to go and were unwelcome everywhere.

3 Quoted by Martin Blumenson, Patton’s staff historian for the Third Army.

4 The K-ration was a boxed meal containing breakfast, lunch, or dinner. A full box typically consisted of tinned food, crackers, cigarettes, matches, and dessert.

5 Later in life, Baum will devote himself to the creation of the Israeli state. The Jewish tank commander will also exchange holiday cards with camp commandant von Goeckel. He will become good friends with John Waters, who went on to become a four-star general. However, at the time, he was furious that Patton had risked so much for just one man.

6 The name of the attacker has never been verified, nor has the nationality of the pilot. Although the plane had Polish markings, there were no Polish Spitfires in that part of Germany on April 20.


Chapter 21

1 An estimated eighty thousand Russians died in the Battle of Berlin. Civilian casualties are difficult to place, but it is estimated that between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand citizens of Berlin were killed.

2 Walther Wenck was arrested as a prisoner of war and held by the Americans until 1947. He died in 1982, following an automobile crash. He was eighty-one years old.

3 The liquid form of cyanide. Also known as hydrocyanic acid.

4 A special medallion given to the first one hundred thousand people who joined the Nazi Party. Each was numbered in the order in which the individual became a member. Hitler’s bore the number 1, making his gift to Magda Goebbels a most treasured memento.

5 The Soviets confirmed the identity of the bodies within two weeks but, for years, pretended to know nothing about Hitler’s fate. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Joseph Stalin made a point of pretending that Hitler was alive and on the run. Stalin, a master at creating uncertainty, believed that the ghosts of Nazism would enhance his power.


Chapter 22

1 Priority for going home was based on a system of points accrued by months in service, time in combat, number of children under the age of eighteen, and whether the individual had been awarded a medal such as the Bronze Star or Purple Heart. As for the Third’s job in Germany after the war, days were spent making sure that displaced people did not travel into the American occupation zone, patrolling a “frontier” between the American and Russian lines by erecting signs and barricades to prevent the flow of individuals traveling from east to west, and sealing off Germany to prevent intelligence officials and other high-ranking members of the Nazi Party from escaping the country.

2 The fifty-four-year-old Patterson was a native of Glens Falls, New York, who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery during World War I. He later practiced law and served as a U.S. District Court judge before accepting the position of undersecretary of war when FDR offered it to him in 1940. Patterson became a favorite of Harry Truman, who elevated him to secretary of war on September 27, 1945. Patterson served two years before returning to the law. His firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler still exists in New York City. Patterson died on January 22, 1952, when the plane he was flying in from Buffalo to Newark crashed into a house while trying to land. He was rushing to get home and at the last minute had traded in his rail ticket for the plane ticket.

3 Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, translated as the “People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.”


Chapter 23

1 At the heart of the dispute was the Morgenthau Plan, a strategy to decimate postwar Germany by destroying its industrial strength and forcing the nation to return to its agrarian roots, soon to produce only beer, grain, and textiles. This would unknowingly have played into Russian hands, because by reducing Germany’s industrial output the nation would not be able to attack Russia again.

2 Oppenheimer is quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture.

3 There are some who believe that Robert Oppenheimer, who had known Communist leanings and whose wife was once a member of the Communist Party, was among those providing nuclear secrets to the Russians. In fact, the Soviet spy’s name was Klaus Fuchs.

4 Patton admired the discipline of the German military and the German work ethic.

5 Although Patton was received as a hero when he returned to the United States in the summer of 1945, his affair with Jean Gordon caused considerable animosity between him and his wife. “Beatrice gave me hell,” Patton told his friend Gen. Everett Hughes upon his return to Bavaria. “I’m glad to be in Europe.”

6 Bandera will himself be assassinated by the Russians in 1959, as noted in the Central Intelligence Agency journal Studies in Intelligence 19, no. 3.

7 On May 4, Patton received approval from Dwight Eisenhower to invade Czechoslovakia. At this point in the war, the Third Army comprised eighteen divisions and more than half a million men, making it the largest U.S. force in history. The Third Army swept into western Czechoslovakia, quickly capturing vast regions of the nation and accepting the surrender of thousands of German prisoners who did not want to fall into Russian hands. On May 6, Eisenhower ordered Patton to halt—which he did, albeit very reluctantly. However, elements of the Third Army did not receive the order. In the ancient city of Rokycany, just east of Plze, there was conflict when the American and Russian armies linked up, very nearly starting the new war for which Patton had long argued.

8 The Russians denied the Americans and British access to many of the POW camps they had liberated, and also denied that they held any Allied POWs. Truman, and Roosevelt before him, allegedly knew otherwise, but did not want to create strife with Stalin. Thus it is believed that many American and British soldiers died in Russian captivity because their release was not demanded.


Chapter 24

1 This is a reference to the smooth-talking religious officials whom Jesus of Nazareth condemned for their lies and air of self-importance, noting that their acts and their beliefs differed greatly.

2 The source of this innuendo is Harry Truman, speaking to a biographer in 1974. Marshall’s reasons were as much personal as political. It was widely held that Eisenhower had a great political future after the war, but Americans did not look kindly on candidates who were divorced—particularly one who left his wife for a foreigner several years younger. Marshall, in effect, believed he was saving Eisenhower from making a great mistake.

3 Raymond Daniell of the Chicago Daily News would later attempt to apologize to Beatrice Patton for his part in this scheme, and for his anti-Patton bias. She refused to accept his apology.

4 Named for Joseph Stalin. In the Cyrillic alphabet, IS is the close equivalent to his initials.