ERLANGEN, Germany — The collar was still on the table when Lt. Gen. George S.
Patton Jr. walked into the command post, and the twelve names stamped into the metal hanging from it would be read aloud before the sun went down.
The discovery outside Zwickau in late April 1945 has now been confirmed by Third Army records and eyewitness testimony: a captured SS officer, hiding in a farmhouse cellar, had been found with a handmade leather dog collar braided around the neck of his German Shepherd. Threaded onto that collar were twelve American identification tags, taken from the bodies of U. S.
soldiers killed in the Malmedy massacre.
The officer had done everything expected of a fugitive. His rank insignia were gone. His SS collar tabs had been removed.
He wore Wehrmacht trousers and a generic field jacket. His blood-type tattoo, the mark every Waffen SS member carried beneath the left arm, had been partially scratched away with a sharp instrument and covered with a bandage.
He almost disappeared into the mass of surrendering German troops. But no one had thought to hide the dog.
Soldiers of the 90th Infantry Division found the animal tied to a post in the farmhouse kitchen. It was a German Shepherd, roughly three years old, well fed in a manner that suggested its owner had maintained access to rations far above what ordinary soldiers received. The collar was careful work, braided leather, deliberately knotted, and hung with twelve tags stamped with American names, blood types and serial numbers.
Pfc. James Alderton of the 357th Infantry Regiment, 90th Division, later described the moment in a letter to his family. “I didn’t understand at first what I was looking at,” he wrote.
“I counted them. Twelve tags, American names, and I thought, ‘These are men. These were men.
And this animal is wearing them.'”
The dog’s name had been scratched into the back of one tag with a knife point: Sieger. Victory.
The sergeant who found the collar did not speak German. He did not need to. He held it up, looked at the officer, and said one word.
Patton.
Within the hour, the message was at Third Army headquarters. Within two hours, Patton knew.
To understand what happened next, military historians say, requires understanding what Patton already knew. Thirty-two days before the war in Europe ended, at a crossroads outside the Belgian town of Malmedy, an SS officer had made a decision that changed everything.
On Dec. 17, 1944, at 12:45 p. m.
, Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion was moving south in a convoy of thirty vehicles near the Baugnez Crossroads, two miles south of Malmedy. The temperature was 8 degrees Celsius. Freezing fog pressed down on the Ardennes.
The roads were packed ice.
These were not combat troops. They were observers, trained to track the fall of artillery shells with precision instruments. They carried nothing larger than a .
30-caliber machine gun and the sidearms on their belts. They had been told the sector was quiet.
Kampfgruppe Peiper came around a bend from the northeast. SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper commanded the armored spearhead of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler: more than 4,800 soldiers, 72 tanks, 100 half-tracks. He was sixteen hours behind schedule for the Ardennes Offensive and in no mood to manage prisoners.
Within minutes, the lead American vehicles were destroyed. One hundred thirteen men of Battery B threw down their weapons and raised their hands. They were herded into a snow-covered field at the roadside and told to stand.
What happened next had no military justification. A pistol fired from the roadside. Then the machine guns opened up.
Survivor Ted Paluch testified at the Dachau War Crimes Tribunal in 1946. “The officer stood up and fired one shot,” he said. “Then they all opened fire.
I fell and lay still. The man beside me was screaming. I heard the Germans walking among the bodies, shooting anyone who moved.”
When Kampfgruppe Peiper rolled west toward the Meuse River, eighty-four Americans were dead at Baugnez Crossroads. The bodies remained in that Belgian field for twenty-eight days, until American forces retook the ground in January 1945.
When Graves Registration soldiers finally recovered the remains, they documented something in their reports that would later become significant. Many of the bodies were missing their identification tags. Someone had collected them.
Not as intelligence. Not as records. As trophies.
The word Malmedy spread through every unit of the American army in Europe within forty-eight hours. When it reached Patton, he issued an order that his staff put on paper and then immediately wished they hadn’t: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner. They will be shot on sight.”
The order was quietly pulled back. The feeling behind it was not.
By late April 1945, the war was collapsing. On April 25, the 90th Infantry Division had crossed the Mulde River and was pushing through western Saxony at a pace no military planner had projected six months earlier. Towns surrendered before American forces arrived.
White sheets hung from windows. German soldiers emerged from forests in ones and twos, hands already raised.
The SS were harder to find. They knew what was waiting for them. The blood-type tattoo beneath the left arm had become, by 1945, the most dangerous thing a man could carry on his body.
American processing soldiers knew exactly where to look.
The officer found in the cellar outside Zwickau had done everything correctly. He was a former SS Hauptsturmführer, captain’s rank, from a unit that intelligence later confirmed had operated in the Ardennes sector in December 1944. Processing soldiers noted the bandage on his left arm as suspicious, unwrapped it, and found the tattoo beneath had been partially scratched away.
He had tried to remove his own identity. He almost succeeded.
The message reached Patton at 1600 hours. He was at his command post near Erlangen when the report came in. He read it twice.
Then he told his driver to have the vehicle ready.
He arrived as the sun was going down. The collar was on the table. The officer was in the corner.
Patton walked past him without looking. He picked up the collar. He read all twelve names slowly, one by one, aloud.
Sgt. Maj. William Tull recorded in his unit diary: “The general read each name like a roll call, like he was calling them to formation.
When he finished, he set the collar down very carefully and stood with his back to the German for a long moment. Then he turned around.”
Patton handed the collar to the sergeant who had found it. Not to the military police. Not to intelligence.
To the man who had counted twelve tags and understood what he was looking at.
“These men had families,” Patton said. “Find out who they were. Find out if anyone is waiting for them.
And make sure someone sends these home.”
Then he looked at the SS officer and said what two witnesses later recalled in nearly identical words: “You will spend the rest of your life knowing that I read those names and that you are now a number in a file.”
Patton wrote in his diary that night: “Read 12 names today. Men from Ohio and Pennsylvania and somewhere in Georgia. They deserved better.
At least now someone knows their names were read.”
Germany surrendered eight days later. Twelve families received word that summer. Not that their men had survived, but that their identification tags had been found.
For some, it was the first confirmation their sons had been at Malmedy. That they hadn’t simply vanished. That someone had found proof they existed.
Joachim Peiper, whose Kampfgruppe murdered eighty-four Americans at Baugnez Crossroads, was sentenced to death at Dachau in 1946, released in 1956, and killed in France in 1976 when his house was burned down. No one was ever convicted in his death.
The survivors of Malmedy, thirty-two men who played dead and ran into the forest with machine guns behind them, came home and sat in that courtroom and said the names of the men who hadn’t.
Patton died in December 1945. He never came home. He is buried in Luxembourg at the head of a row of his soldiers.
He asked to be placed there.
The collar was evidence. The names on it were not just names. They were the answer to what the Waffen SS believed they already knew.
What does an American soldier cost?
Patton answered. He drove sixty miles. He read twelve names out loud.
He did not rush.