What Patton Said When an SS Officer’s Wife Demanded American Protection From Russian Troops

She was the wife of an SS Obersturmbannführer. She wanted American protection from Soviet forces that Third Army intelligence had estimated were approximately 60 miles to the east and moving west. If you’re enjoying this story so far, don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe.

 Drop a comment telling me where in the world you’re watching from. I love hearing from you. The document she carried confirmed what she had said. Her husband’s name, rank, and organizational assignment were recorded on it with the bureaucratic precision the SS applied to its own paperwork. The corporal at the gate made a phone call. The duty lieutenant made two more.

By the time the case reached Patton’s chief of staff, it had accumulated a file that included a background report on the husband and a summary of Third Army procedures for processing German civilian displaced persons. The husband, whose name was Werner Hartmann, had been assigned to an SS administrative unit responsible for the logistics of prisoner transfers between facilities in the General Government, the German-occupied territory of Central Poland, from 1942 through early 1945, his units captured records documented

the movement of several hundred thousand people between camps and transit facilities. Hartmann had not yet been placed on the major war crimes lists that Allied investigators were compiling, not because his role was considered minor, but because the scale of the documentation was large enough that men at his level of direct administrative involvement had not been individually named in every case.

The wife knew none of this, or said she knew none of it, which amounted to the same thing for the purposes of what she was asking. She had two children, ages seven and four. She had a housekeeper who had worked for the family since before the war. She had heard what Soviet soldiers had done in Eastern Germany, in Pomerania and Silesia, in the areas the Red Army swept through in January and February of 1945.

 She had made a calculation and walked 3 miles. The information about Soviet behavior in Eastern Germany had been arriving at Patton’s headquarters in reports and personal testimonies since winter. German civilians crossing into American-held territory territory brought accounts that were consistent across dozens of individual statements.

Soviet soldiers advancing through a country whose army had spent four years killing Soviet people in enormous numbers were not conducting themselves with restraint. The reports documented looting, the burning of farmsteads, and violence against women, rendered in the clinical language of military intelligence that did nothing to reduce what was being described.

 Patton had read these reports and formed views about them that he expressed with characteristic directness. His diary entries from this period are explicit on the matter. He believed the Soviet advance through German civilian areas represented something American policy was not adequately confronting, and he said so to multiple people, including several who wished he would stop.

 His superiors’ position was that the Soviet Union was an ally, that the Yalta Conference in February of 1945 had divided Germany into occupation zones, and that those zones were to be respected. Patton’s position, stated without diplomatic softening, was that this framework would produce consequences nobody in Washington seemed prepared to face.

He had been saying variations of this since the fall of 1944, when the shape of the post-war settlement became legible to anyone willing to look at it directly. These were not views that advanced his career. He held them anyway. The Hartmann case arrived at his headquarters on a Thursday afternoon. Patton read the file.

 He asked his intelligence officer whether the information about the husband’s unit was confirmed. It was confirmed to the standard of available documentation, which was substantial. He asked whether the woman had been in contact with Hartmann since his unit dispersed in March. There was no evidence of contact, and by available indicators, Hartmann had either been captured by another Allied unit, gone underground, or was dead.

Then Patton sat with the file. His chief of staff, General Hobart Gay, was present and estimated the silence at about 10 minutes. Gay had been with Patton long enough to read the pauses as well as the statements. What made this case different from a standard checkpoint decision was the combination of factors it held simultaneously.

The woman was the wife of an SS officer who had participated in an administrative capacity in the machinery that had killed people in the numbers Patton’s army had been documenting since crossing the German border. She was also a German civilian who had not herself been charged, who had two children, and who was requesting protection from something Patton’s own intelligence described as genuinely dangerous.

The framework governing what he could formally authorize was the Yalta agreement, which he had stated publicly was a mistake. He could not issue what she had asked for in the form she had asked for it. A formal American military certification extending jurisdiction over a specific German civilian household was not within his unilateral authority to grant.

 He was aware of this. He told Gay to bring him the Third Army’s current written procedures for processing displaced German civilians at checkpoints. Gay produced the document. Patton read it. He noted that the procedures applied to German civilians regardless of occupation or prior affiliations and that nothing in the document excluded a civilian on the basis of her spouse’s military record.

 He told Gay the procedures were to be followed. The woman and her household were to be processed as civilian displaced persons under the existing framework. And he wanted to know whether checkpoint procedures along the Third Army’s Eastern boundary were being applied consistently because he had questions about that.

 Then he said something that Gay recorded in his notes as delivered with the precision of a formal order, though it was not one. He said that whatever Werner Hartmann had done, and his phrasing made clear he had formed a view about what Hartmann had done, the children at that farmhouse were 7 and 4 years old. The legal accounting for the people who had run the system was going to be conducted through a process and that process existed precisely to make the distinctions that a checkpoint officer could not make.

 He was not going to use a 7-year-old to express his feelings about the SS. He also said that if Soviet forces reaching the Third Army’s Eastern boundary were conducting themselves the way his reports described, then the United States Army had an obligation to conduct itself differently. The difference between what the SS had built and what a disciplined army was supposed to do was exactly that.

 A disciplined army protected civilians, including civilians it had every reason to despise. He said this was the standard he held his army to and that he intended to hold it. What he did not say, and what his staff understood without being told, was that he was drawing a line between two things that the chaos of 1945 had a tendency to blur.

The line between what a person had done and what their family was, and the line between an army that administered justice and an army that simply administered. The woman’s name was recorded in Third Army processing documents as Alisa Hartmann. She and her two children and the housekeeper were transferred to the civilian displaced persons facility that Third Army had established in a requisition school building on the eastern edge of Straubing.

 The facility was not comfortable. It had been a school a month earlier and retained the quality of a space converted quickly and without adequate resources. The bedding was army issue, two blankets per person. The food was military ration supplemented by local procurement, which in Bavaria in late April of 1945 meant whatever could be found in a region that had been feeding a war machine for 6 years and had very little remaining.

By every account of the German civilians who passed through such facilities, it was an immeasurable improvement on the alternative. The memo Patton dictated about checkpoint procedures went out the following morning to all Third Army boundary units. It covered two pages. The first reinstated existing procedures and emphasized consistent application.

The second contained a passage that his chief of staff later described as the clearest articulation he had heard Patton give of what the army was there to do in the occupation period. Patton wrote that American forces had spent four years fighting for something more specific than the defeat of Germany. They had fought for the idea that certain things were not done to people regardless of who those people were or what their governments had done.

He wrote that maintaining that standard in the aftermath of victory, when it would be easy and perhaps understandable to apply it selectively, was the thing that separated what America had fought for from what it had fought against. He wrote this without sentiment and without elevated language, which was the way Patton wrote when he meant something.

 Werner Hartmann was captured in June of 1945 by a military police unit at a checkpoint in the American zone of Austria. He had been traveling with forged documents identifying him as a civilian engineer from Linz. The documents were good enough to pass casual inspection and not good enough to survive the scrutiny Allied intelligence was by then applying to anyone traveling through Austrian checkpoints without a documented civilian history.

He was transferred to the war crimes processing facility at Dachau, the same facility the Third Army had liberated in late April. The Dachau trials, a series of American military tribunal proceedings running from 1945 through 1948, prosecuted several hundred SS personnel for crimes committed in the camps and in the administrative system supporting them.

Hartmann’s case was referred to investigators working through the prisoner transfer records his unit had maintained. What happened to Elisa Hartmann in the months following her arrival at the displaced persons facility is not recorded with the specificity that military operational records preserve. She was there, and then the occupation administration absorbed her into the machinery of the denazification process, the housing allocation system, and the emergency welfare apparatus that Allied forces had to construct simultaneously

with occupying a country of 60 million people. The pattern of which she was one example, however, is documented clearly. By the summer of 1945, approximately 12 million Germans were in flight or displacement moving through or toward American and British zones from the eastern areas under Soviet administration.

Among them were the families of SS officers in numbers the Allied administration had not fully anticipated and for which no specific protocol existed. The Yalta Agreement had established occupation zones. It had not resolved what to do with the domestic arrangements of a system that had employed hundreds of thousands of people in the machinery of terror and then collapsed in four months.

Patton was watching all of this. He was watching with the attention of a man who had spent a year arguing that the framework being used to understand the post-war situation was wrong and who was now watching the evidence accumulate in his intelligence reports and his own observations every time his staff met with civilians crossing from the Soviet zone.

His statements in the months after the German surrender became progressively more direct and more problematic for his superiors. In August of 1945, at a conference with his senior staff, he described Soviet behavior in Eastern Germany in terms he later reproduced in his diary with what reads as satisfaction that he had stated them plainly.

He said that the United States was treating its late enemies with more consideration than its nominal allies were treating the German civilian population and that anyone who had read the intelligence reports coming out of the Soviet zone understood precisely what this meant. In September of that year, he gave a press conference in Munich that ended his command.

 Asked about denazification, which required removing former Nazi party members from administrative positions, he said that it seemed to him comparable to removing either Republicans or Democrats from office in America. The comment was catastrophic. The reporters understood exactly what had been said and what it implied and by the following morning it had reached Washington in a form that produced a response from Eisenhower leaving no ambiguity about the consequences.

Patton’s own account, written in the aftermath, was that he was making an administrative point about the practicality of removing everyone who had held party membership from every position of governmental function in a country whose bureaucracy had required party membership for advancement. He was not defending Nazism or reducing what it had done.

He had walked through Ohrdruf. He had ordered German civilians from nearby towns brought to see what was inside it. He did not require explanation about what the Nazi system had been. But the remark, whatever its intent, gave people who had been looking for a reason to act the reason they needed. Three weeks later, in October of 1945, Patton was relieved of command of the Third Army.

 He was assigned to the 15th Army, which was not a combat force, but a historical research unit tasked with compiling the operational record of the European war. It was an assignment that everyone involved understood as a removal that preserved the form of a posting. He died on December 21st of 1945, 11 days after a low-speed automobile collision on a road outside Mannheim.

The vehicle he was riding in was struck by a military truck making a turn. No one else in either vehicle was seriously injured. Patton suffered a cervical spine fracture and died of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure while hospitalized in Heidelberg. He had been telling people he intended to return to the United States, retire from the military, and enter politics.

He was 60 years old. The circumstances of the accident have generated speculation in the decades since. The low speed, the singular fatality, the timing. Serious researchers have noted these questions and the available evidence does not resolve them to the satisfaction of everyone who has examined it closely.

What is documented is that he died in Germany, in a country he had helped liberate, on a road he had no specific reason to be on, and that his death ended any political future he might have pursued and any further public statements he might have made about the Soviet question his superiors had spent the previous year trying to contain.

Elisa Hartmann and her children are not traceable through the available historical records beyond the summer of 1945. This is not unusual. The occupation administration processed of people through systems that preserved some categories of information and not others. She had no independent historical significance, which meant that what happened to her life afterward was absorbed into the aggregate statistics of post-war displacement and reconstruction.

 Werner Hartmann’s case went through the Dachau tribunal process. The specific outcome is not among the records widely cited in the historical literature on those proceedings, which documented hundreds of cases with varying degrees of completeness. What the records of comparable cases document is that SS administrative officers whose units were involved in the prisoner transfer system faced a range of outcomes, from acquittal on evidentiary grounds to sentences that were later reduced during the clemency reviews of the early 1950s, when the

Cold War had shifted the political calculus around prosecution of German military personnel. The question that the situation at the Straubing checkpoint raised, the question Patton’s response illuminated, was one of the genuinely difficult ones of the occupation period. An army that had spent four years fighting for certain principles could not selectively apply those principles without compromising them.

 Patton understood this, and his response to the Hartmann case was an expression of that understanding. He despised what Werner Hartmann’s unit had done. He said so in terms his chief of staff recorded, and he processed Elisa Hartmann as a displaced civilian because she was one, and because the alternative was to let the hatred of what her husband had done govern decisions about a 7-year-old child, which was not a standard he was willing to adopt.

 He also understood, with the clarity that marked his thinking about the Soviet question throughout this period, that the conduct he was holding his army to was not the conduct of the forces advancing from the east. He held his army to that standard partly from principle and partly, one suspects from reading his diary entries of this period, from a cold anger at the demonstration that two different conceptions of what an army was for had produced two very different realities on the ground in Germany.

The records he left behind, the memo on checkpoint procedures, the diary entries, the staff accounts, describe a man trying to hold a complicated position in the most complicated situation he had ever operated in, and doing it with the same directness he brought to everything else. He was not diplomatic about it.

 He was not subtle about it. He said what he thought and did what he believed was right, and left it to other people to manage the consequences, which was how he had always operated, and which was, in the end, what made him impossible to keep in a position that required something else. What the woman at the checkpoint received was the protection she had asked for, delivered through a mechanism that gave her no special status, and no formal certification, and no acknowledgement that her request had reached anyone of particular authority.

She received it because the procedures said she was entitled to it, and because a general who had walked through Ohrdruf and read the Soviet intelligence reports had decided that the standard he held his army to applied to everyone at his checkpoints, regardless of what he thought of their husbands.

 There is a temptation, when looking back at the Second World War from the distance of decades, to imagine that the men who fought it and the men who occupied Germany after it operated on some clearer moral plane than the one available to ordinary people. That they saw the situation in front of them with a kind of clarity that the rest of us, working with our smaller problems, do not possess.

This is mostly wrong. The men running the occupation had the same instruments of judgment that anyone has: their training, their experience, the assumptions they had absorbed without examining them, and whatever capacity for thought they could bring to bear on the particular case sitting on a particular desk on a particular afternoon.

Patton’s instruments were not extraordinary. He was a cavalry officer who had spent his life in the army. He had read more military history than most of his colleagues and less moral philosophy than almost any of them. He was capable of cruelty and he was capable of pettiness and there are episodes in his record where he showed both.

 What he was not on that particular Thursday was a man who confused the people in front of him with the war he had just finished fighting. The war was over. The woman at the checkpoint had not started it. The two children had not built the camps. The file on his desk concerned the husband, the father, the SS officer and the file would be processed through the channels that existed for processing such files.

The woman and the children would be processed through different channels because they were different people and because the army patent served or the army patent thought he served, which is not always the same thing, drew that line on purpose. The decision took perhaps 4 minutes. He signed the document, handed it back to his chief of staff and moved on to the next file in the stack.

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