General George S. Patton Jr. ordered the execution of a German infantry commander by firing squad at precisely 6 a.
m. on April 23, 1945, bypassing the Nuremberg tribunal process entirely, according to a handwritten pencil order preserved in the Virginia Military Institute archives and a 64-page Third Army investigative file held by the National Archives.
The order was written at 11:47 p. m. on April 22, 1945, in Patton’s own hand, on a single sheet of standard army notepad paper.
It was not typed. It was not on official letterhead. It contained four sentences.
The final sentence specified the hour: 6 a. m. , not sunrise, not dawn.
The prisoner was General der Infanterie Maximilian Otto Harris, 56 years old, a career officer who had commanded infantry formations since the First World War and had been decorated three dozen times, including the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. He was executed in the yard of the Aschaffenburg Military Police Facility before the day had fully formed.
The order was delivered by Captain Warren Lyall, 32, of Knoxville, Tennessee, who read it once, folded it, placed it in his breast pocket, and drove through the dark to the military police section holding the prisoner. The MP captain on duty read it twice and asked if it was confirmed. Lyall said yes.
This was not a battlefield summary execution. It was the culmination of three weeks of documented investigation by the Third Army Judge Advocate General Section, led by Colonel Frederick Ren, 50, of Richmond, Virginia, a former attorney who had been instructed by Patton to build a case that would hold.
The case centered on a cellar beneath a requisitioned commercial building on the Dullberg Strasse in Aschaffenburg, a city on the Main River 40 kilometers southeast of Frankfurt. In early April 1945, Aschaffenburg was the site of one of the final fanatical German defensive stands of the war, a nine-day holdout ordered by local Nazi Party leadership against the direct wishes of Wehrmacht operational command.
When the city fell on April 3, 1945, American infantry forces moving through the streets found a cellar door locked from the outside. A locked door from the outside means something different than a locked door from the inside. The sergeant who found it noted it in his report.
Something on the other side was making a sound.
Inside, investigators found 14 American prisoners of war, all infantry, ages 19 to 26. They had been held for an estimated five to seven days. The injuries documented by Third Army medical officers were not consistent with combat.
The JAG report described them as evidence of systematic mistreatment under deliberate direction.
Four of the 14 did not survive to be transferred to a field hospital. They were PFC Raymond Ellsworth Tatum, 20, of Spartanburg, South Carolina; Private Gerald Francis Nolan, 19, of South Boston, Massachusetts; Corporal David Alan Reyes, 22, of Albuquerque, New Mexico; and PFC Thomas Hugh Waller, 21, of Lexington, Kentucky.
All four had been captured during street fighting in Aschaffenburg in late March. All four had identification on them when found. All four had written home within the preceding month.
Waller had written to his mother, Lois, two weeks before his capture that the weather had gotten warmer and that he figured the war would be over by summer. He said he was doing fine. He told her not to worry.
The connection to Harris was not circumstantial. The building had been his divisional headquarters. Captured administrative records identified his staff officers by name.
The cellar had been used as a holding facility for American prisoners under an order bearing the signature of Harris’s headquarters adjutant, Oberleutnant Klaus Brandt, 41.
Brandt was captured during the city’s fall. In a formal JAG interview on April 8, he confirmed under oath that the holding facility had been established under general divisional authority and that access to and conditions in the facility had been known to and not countermanded by the divisional commander. The statement took him four hours to make.
The third and most powerful piece of evidence came from a survivor. PFC Calvin James Odum, 20, of Monroe, Louisiana, had been held in the cellar for six days. He was transferred to a field hospital on April 3 and spent 11 days recovering before Lieutenant Gerald Peele, 27, of Dayton, Ohio, sat beside his bed with a notepad.
Odum said yes. He gave the statement lying in his hospital bed. It took three hours.
Peele filled 19 pages. He had to stop twice because Odum needed to stop, but Odum always said to keep going. When Colonel Ren read the transcript, he made a two-word notation at the top of page one: “Sufficient basis.”
Ren had been building toward a field tribunal authorization under Article of War 92, not a Nuremberg referral. The two paths were legally distinct. Nuremberg was for the senior leadership of the Nazi state.
A field tribunal allowed a theater commander to convene proceedings for crimes committed against his own forces.
It was not a summary procedure. It required a case, documentation, and an evidentiary standard that Ren had been told to meet and had met. It allowed for a sentence of death to be carried out within the theater under the authority of the theater commander without waiting for the machinery of Nuremberg.
Patton read the full 64-page report starting at approximately 8 p. m. on April 22.
He read all of it before meeting with Ren at 9 p. m. He did not speak during the 40-minute meeting except to ask three questions.
The first was whether the identification of Harris as the responsible commander was supported by the record. Ren said yes.
The second was whether the documentation of the acts themselves was supported by independent corroboration beyond Odum’s account. Ren said yes. The third was not a question.
According to Ren’s personal account written in 1948 and donated to the VMI archives in 1972, Patton said: “These four men are dead and 37 more are walking the ground above where they were held because of specific decisions made by a specific man. Nuremberg takes 18 months and gives him a platform. I won’t give him a platform.”
After the meeting, Patton did not immediately write the order. He returned to his quarters and sat at his desk for approximately 45 minutes alone. His aide, Captain James Doyle, was in the adjoining room.
He heard nothing. No conversation, no dictation, no phone calls. Just silence.
Then the scratch of a pencil. Then the order handed to Captain Lyall at 11:47 p. m.
The order was delivered to the MP section at approximately midnight. The MP captain signed the receipt copy and placed it in his duty log. Harris was sleeping when the guard detail informed him at 5:30 a.
m. of what was going to happen in 30 minutes.
He said nothing that the guards recorded. He dressed in the uniform he had been captured in, the Knight’s Cross still at his throat. He had been sleeping in an American holding facility for 19 days.
He had 19 days to think about what the Americans knew and what they were going to do with it.
At 6 a. m. on April 23, 1945, General der Infanterie Maximilian Otto Harris was executed by firing squad.
There was no official report that used the word “executed.” The official documentation in Third Army records describes him as having died in custody. Cause of death was listed as a consequence of summary field proceedings under military authority.
The language was careful. Ren wrote it himself. He was a former attorney from Richmond, Virginia, and he knew how to write something that was accurate, sufficient, and not more than it needed to be.
The 64-page case file is in the National Archives. The pencil order is in the VMI archives with Ren’s 1948 account.
Harris was not a committed Nazi ideologue in the way the Nuremberg defendants were. He was something in some ways worse: a professional military man who had made specific operational decisions about how to use human beings in his care, with the cold efficiency of a man who understood exactly what he was authorizing.
The CIC had documented three prior incidents in the 64 pages. One in Belgium in 1940 involving 19 British prisoners held for 11 days, of whom 12 survived. One in the Soviet Union in 1942 involving 41 Soviet soldiers whose status shifted from “held” to “resolved” without transfer documentation, transport orders, or death records.
One in France in 1944, documented through testimony from Staff Sergeant Roy Ellis Mercer, 23, of Flagstaff, Arizona, a surviving American airman who had been held in a facility connected to Harris’s corps command before escaping during a German withdrawal in August 1944.
Ren included these not as primary charges but as pattern evidence demonstrating that what happened in the Aschaffenburg cellar was not an aberration. It was a practice. It was something Harris did.
The pattern evidence was documented from captured records and survivor testimony, assembled with the specificity that holds up in a formal proceeding.
At the bottom of the receipt copy, under the MP captain’s signature, someone wrote four words in different ink, apparently added later, possibly in the same hour. The four words were: “For Raymond Gerald David Thomas.” The names of the four dead Americans, abbreviated in grief by a hand that history has not identified.
Calvin James Odum went home to Monroe, Louisiana, in the fall of 1945. He worked at a hardware store for 31 years. He died in 1988.
His 19 pages are in a box in the National Archives. The pencil indentations from Peele’s notepad no longer exist in the original. What exists is the typewritten transcription produced on April 14, 1945.
Clean, typed, clinical. The voice in it is still Odum’s. You can still hear Monroe, Louisiana in the syntax, in the way he organizes what happened.
In the specific way a 20-year-old from the South tells the truth when someone finally gives him a notepad and asks.
The pencil Patton used is still in the VMI archives. The lead mark on the paper has held. Eighty years of archival storage, and the words are still legible.
The time still says 6 a. m. The date still says April 22.
The name is still there.
And at the bottom of a military police duty log in the National Archives, in ink that is different from the surrounding text and in handwriting that nobody has officially identified, four men who never made it out of a cellar on the Dullberg Strasse still have someone speaking for them.
Raymond Ellsworth Tatum. Gerald Francis Nolan. David Alan Reyes.
Thomas Hugh Waller. Those are the reason the pencil moved at 11:47 at night. Those are the reason the time on the order said 6 a.
m. and not “send to Nuremberg,” and not “refer to the appropriate tribunal,” and not any of the other things that a man in Patton’s position could have written and defended.
Patton had read 64 pages. He had read Odum’s 19. He had sat in his quarters for 45 minutes.
Then he had written four sentences in pencil and handed them to a captain from Knoxville, Tennessee. That was the end of it. The case file remains open to researchers.
The record, in its clinical and precise language, still speaks.