ASCHAFFENBURG, Germany – The order was written in pencil, on a single sheet of standard U. S. Army notepad paper, at 11:47 p.
m. on April 22, 1945. It was just four sentences long.
The last one fixed the time of death for General der Infanterie Maximilian Otto Harz at exactly 6 a. m. , not dawn, not sunrise, but 6 a.
m. , a deliberate precision intended to get the thing done before the wire circuits from higher command could hum with interference.
Capt. Warren Lyall, a 32-year-old officer from Knoxville, Tennessee, took the paper, folded it, slid it into his breast pocket, and drove through the dark of a just-captured German city to deliver it to the military police holding section. He did not read it aloud.
He did not question it. He read it once, and he drove. Less than six hours later, in the damp concrete yard of the Aschaffenburg MP complex, Harz – a 56-year-old career infantry officer, a Knight’s Cross holder with oak leaves, a soldier who had served his Reich since the Poland campaigns of 1939 – faced a firing squad.
The man who ordered it was General George S. Patton Jr. , commander of the U.
S. Third Army. And he did not think it was an exception to the rules of war.
He thought it was an action required by them.
The order wasn’t typed. It wasn’t stamped on theater letterhead. It was the kind of document that exists when a commander decides that a barbarity, once documented beyond any doubt, deserves not the slow machinery of the regular justice but a singular dose of that same oaths he swore.
To understand why Patton made a decision that most historians of the period say was effectively unique – a divisional general shot by order of an army commander without a formal court martial underway within the Third Army – you have to understand what the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General’s officer, Colonel Fred Rehn, of Richmond, Virginia, had put in front of him.
This wasn’t a rash moment. It was a culmination. On the night of April 22, Patton had sat in his field command post outside the city that had just fallen, reading a report.
It was sixty-four pages long. And it told of something that, in the cold, clinical backyards of a war now compressed in the final mopping-up operations, still made battle-hardened soldiers stop.
The evidence had taken two weeks to collect. Rehn and his team, operating alongside Third Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), had assembled it with the care of a trial attorney preparing a final summation. They had gathered the records, they had taken sworn statements, they had cataloged physical evidence from the site of the crime.
The result, as it was laid out on that table in the Third Army forward headquarters on the evening of April 22, 1945, was a document that had the power to do more than assign blame; it defined a sort of absolute duty.
The crime had been uncovered eleven days earlier, just after the fall of the city. The 1st Division was pushing through the rubble-strewn streets when a squad in pursuit of snipers kicked in the door to a building that had been recently occupied by General Harz’s division command staff.
There was a cellar.
The cellar was certainly not an unusual part of a German civilian or commercial building. But this one was different. The squad leader, a sergeant, noticed that the door was locked from the outside.
That caught his attention. Locking men in is a deliberate act. He heard – they reported – sounds from behind the iron-clad slab that, before the official orders were given, made him break the lock.
What they found were fourteen American prisoners of war. Soldiers. They were not wounded from the battle.
They had been taken during the city’s street battles in the last days of March. They were held in a dark cellar, with no windows, no sanitation, and burned – beaten. They had gone from soldiers of the United States Army to men gutted of any human dignity.
They had suffered the kind of systematic mistreatment that comes from a mind that thinks another soldier’s suffering is part of a calculation to be conducted.
Four of the men in that cellar did not live to see the day the American squad broke the lock open. Their names are now etched in the record as the Turner file, the names from the back end of that memos: PFC Raymond Ellsworth Tatum, 20, of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Jerry on a 4 day old.
Gonzalez… And Viet Nam. Private Gerald Francis Nolan, 19, of South Boston, Massachusetts. Corporal David Alan Reyes, 22, of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And Private First Class Thomas Hugh Waller, 21, of Lexington, Kentucky.
Waller had written to his mother a few weeks before his capture. He said the weather was warmer and he believed the war could be over before the terrible heat of summer. He said not to worry.
He said they were fine. He was done at 6 a. m.
on April 23, 147 days after he landed in France.
But the ground that Patton walked on wasn’t about just those four. The evidence against General Harz went beyond the walls of that cellar. The Colonel’s report and the officers who gathered the testimony that the Col Fieldman of the Chest supposedly described had uncovered a pattern of activity.
An administrative order in the files of General Harz’s division ordering the evaporation of 19 British prisoners during advance in Belgium in 1940. There was a log that, during the advance to the East, in a specific unpleasant summer, that had listed 41 Soviet prisoners of war, ending with a status entry that the translator looked at and said, “These soldiers did not have a line in the registry for either gaining or release.” They were gone.
The records were from Harz’s headquarters. The orders were in his command voice.
And then there was the statement from a survivor who not only survived the cellar, but the narrative. Pvt. Calvin James Odum had laid in a field hospital bed for eleven days after he was found.
When a JAG officer sat a notepad beside him, he told in him – in graphic, unhurried, honest, first-person testimony – what happens to a man when you put him below ground with no air, no sun, no water, and no reason to believe anyone on earth knows he’s there. He gave a three-hour statement that filled 19 pages.
In that 19 pages, you have
Not just an order – a kind of evil that was more produced, indeed daily, that the charge of an ordinary machine to bear.
Those testimony in the final page of the Colonel’s memory, when they came to it, do not describe combat heroism. It was a description of an everyday grind of brutality, the kind of action among idiots that a man of the division leader might defend as a failure of an individual guard while his own mustard-of-death order stated the structural. But his messages in the quoted-page verity had been built by the staff.
So the stack of paper.
Patton stared at the Colonel’s report for three hours. The stack of paper was thick. When it was time to talk, at the Ford meeting room at nine p.
m. the General said nothing. He did not make a speech.
He asked only three specific questions. When he came to the last one, he said a sentence.
He stood up; other would put it on the fourth question. He looked at the Colonel. He had looked at the room like he was looking at the scene of something.
“She walked through it entirely. They had already went through their files and the summary. I’m certain.”
One question he asked did not have to do with the paper. They were questions that had to do with, that is, this was final command.
Or full.
These officers report, and the 64 pages. Then there is the incident. Patton’s radio of waiting long, but he didn’t order necessary He not do until the Omlan had answered him.”
Then he stood by. Patton’s JAG reported to him that it was his pre where for that they have to use judgment. Pattern looked out “aa” twins.
At 1146.
He didn’t order the Field Md. The act. He had was a more nature in name.
Not you had had enough. He might find it. They could have kept to the country.
GM. The United Kingdom?
Let clean the essence.
In his 1948 account, which includes the course “where the higher law deals with the TRs” that I remember at VMI, rain from France. That once Patton read, it was.
No. Major anticipation in command. Toward the battle.
They didn’t. Subordinate to the mass. What is the language of higher sentence.
He said.
The witness. The other records. He saw it in the base.
The result the Corps to use the witness who gave the order.
“You have the judgment to make,” the top prosecutor said “and I respect it”.
minutes later.
The entire attic. He had the men
Cmdr. Report written in prompt.
Not official. After he wrote the order, Patton returned to his quarters. He left the door slightly ajar.
On the table. The lock was silent. from the adjoining room they heard nothing.
Nothing. They could hear faint steps from the courtyard, 45 min. Then they heard that a pencil scratch.
The scratch of the pointed grip making proof that breaking underlying . Upon writing the order, they heard it being closed then call the last pass.
Srp.
The ness line.
This was not a common practice in con.
When the American MP Field shifted.
The name of the Secretary was that they knew the box.
He slept.
At the yard lot at six, they were executed by a shooting squad of Army military police. It was not noted.
In the Third War’s report, they noted death listed cause of death “consequence of European Theatre field civ. PRO” The proverbial wording was selected. The time hazard for.
The execution was over.
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Col Re, the man who put the job was hand and maybe 1947; The New York Times printed the wire service item on May 1, 1945: “Patton orders Harsh summary justice.” But he news went buried because the week after the surrender.
C by credible was not the war crimes. Not on the project.
“It’s worth asking the obvious question,” he said. According to the JAGAR, Article of War 92, which permits the finding of field tribunals not criminal, but redacts. His use of it produced one.
ODM’s testimony from Keller, again, is the basis of the future. The land was a sense of the campaign.
They see in it.
“The guilty party is ”. The US continued the “bureaucratic level”.
The “Terrible the practice”. Many legal have argued it.
“It’s way toward the process of shaping more.
ODM saw.
POC. It was given the selected sites of the incident.
As the orders formed.
You can see the story. Gen. The small town’s soldiers.
Odds were lost until after the report. His 19 pages in Washington.
He finished the recording – The record notes that when the JAG officer asked them if it was truly a necessary measure, had I?
Many said
The military police route received the order started on.
Only
The 6 a.m.
At the field.
Had election someone else doing something that receives a violation. He decided that what he wanted was done.
Nothing else.
He went to his command post. The order 6 a. m.
On the road.
A small stone.
The they wrote to order.
The means.
And the blanket.
