April 12th, 1945. A wooden shed in central Germany. Behind that shed, out of sight of the cameras, out of sight of his own staff, out of sight of the two other generals who have just walked into that shed without him, a 59-year-old American commander is on his knees in the mud. He is vomiting into the grass.
He wears three stars on each shoulder. He has commanded armies from North Africa to the Rhine. His men call him Old Blood and Guts. If your father or your uncle or your grandfather served in Europe in the spring of 1945, he may have written home about what the American army found that April. This is what he saw.
This is what it cost him. And this is the story of what one general did about it before he betrayed everything he learned. The date, the place, the reason. This is the story of how a man like Patton was broken in less than 30 minutes. It is the story of a camp called Ohrdruf. It is the story of what the American army found there.
And it is the story of what one general decided to do about it. A decision that would force an entire nation to look at itself. A decision that would end with a mayor and his wife hanging from the rafters of their own home. A decision that 6 months later, Patton himself would betray. Before we begin, a correction.
You may have heard that Patton took German prisoners to Dachau. He did not. Dachau was not liberated by Patton’s army. That belongs to the men of the 7th Army, the 42nd Rainbow Division, and the 45th Thunderbird Division on April 29th, 1945. The camp Patton actually saw, the camp that made him vomit, the camp where American policy toward the German people was born, was not Dachau.
It was Ohrdruf, and the truth is worse than the legend. To understand what happened behind that shed, you have to understand the man walking toward it. George Smith Patton Jr. was 59 old in the spring of 1945. He had commanded troops in North Africa. He had driven the Germans out of Sicily. He believed sincerely and without embarrassment that he had lived previous lives as a Roman soldier and as a Napoleonic officer.
He carried an ivory-handled revolver on his hip. He cursed constantly. He wrote poetry. He read the Bible. He was also the general who, in August 1943, walked into a field hospital in Sicily, found two American soldiers suffering from what we now call combat fatigue, and slapped them. He called one of them a coward.
He threatened to shoot him. When the story broke, Eisenhower nearly ended his career. Patton was pulled out of the front lines for almost a year. He was humiliated. He was silent. He was for a while useless. They brought him back for one reason. He was the best pursuit commander in the American army.
When the German line broke in the summer of 1944, Patton’s Third Army raced across France faster than any army had moved since the invention of the internal combustion engine. He crossed the Rhine in March 1945. He drove east. He captured a salt mine at Merkers containing most of the gold reserves of the Reichsbank. His tanks were moving through Thuringia so quickly that supply trucks could not keep up. His men were exhausted.
His men were filthy. His men were, by every measurement of the war, winning. And then, on April 4th, 1945, a scout unit from the Fourth Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division came to a wire fence outside a town in central Germany called Ohrdruf. The wire was cut. The gate was open. The guards were gone.
What the guards had left behind was something the American army had no vocabulary to describe. One of the men who walked through that gate was a private, 19 years old, from Kansas. His name was Charles Payne. He would live to see his great nephew, a boy named Barack Obama, become president of the United States 64 years later. But on that morning, on April 4th, 1945, he was a 19-year-old rifleman staring at a scene his brain refused to process.
Bodies in the yard, bodies against the fence, bodies stacked like firewood along the railway tracks, some of them charred, some of them still recognizable as human. In the corner of the compound, a shed. Inside the shed, 30 more bodies sprinkled with white lime powder to hide the smell. The official operations report of the Third Army that day used a single sentence.
Battle-hardened veterans who had seen death many times before gazed silently at the Nazi slaughterhouse. Death on the battlefield was something they could comprehend. This was beyond their imagination. The word slaughterhouse in a United States Army field report. “That is not a metaphor,” a colonel writes, “if he can find any other word.
” There was no other word. The commanders of the two divisions arrived by noon. The 89th Infantry Commander, Brigadier General Joseph Cutrona, the Fourth Armored Commander, Major General Thomas Finlay. Both men had seen the Battle of the Bulge. Both had walked past frozen corpses in the Ardennes. Neither had seen anything like this.
They sent an urgent request up the chain of command. Someone from Third Army headquarters needed to come now. Patton arrived at 3:30 in the afternoon. He walked through the gate the same way his soldiers had. He saw the yard. He saw the bodies. Within 30 minutes, according to the official record of the Army Historical Foundation, Old Blood and Guts had vomited.
The nickname was still on the shoulder patch. The stomach could not hold it up. He sent word back to Supreme Headquarters. He told them, in effect, “You have come and see this. You will not believe me if I only describe it. Eight days later, on April 12th, 1945, three men in olive green stepped out of a staff car at the gate of Ohrdruf.
General Dwight David Eisenhower, 54 years old, supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe. General Omar Nelson Bradley, 52 years old, commander of the American 12th Army Group, quiet, methodical, the soldier the enlisted men trusted more than any other. And Patton, standing between them, already knowing what was inside the wire, a surviving prisoner led them through the compound.
Bodies still lay on the ground. A burned-out pyre in the yard revealed the charred bones of prisoners the SS had tried to destroy in the last hours before the Americans arrived. Other survivors demonstrated the torture methods the guards had used. Whipping posts, hanging beams, iron rings driven into wooden walls.
And then they came to the shed. 30 bodies inside, lime powder, flies. Eisenhower entered. Bradley entered. Patton stopped at the door. He turned away. He would not go in. He had already vomited once at this camp. He knew he would vomit again. He would not do it in front of a supreme commander of Allied Forces.
He would not do it in front of a photographer. He walked past the shed, out of sight of the doorway, and he waited. Inside the shed, Eisenhower looked at the bodies for a long time. He said very little. He came out. He stood in the yard. And then, in front of the officers who had come with him, in front of the reporters he had personally ordered to fly in from London and New York and Washington, he said the sentence that would define the moral memory of the Second World War.
We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against. That evening, Eisenhower sent a cable to General George Marshall in Washington. The cable ordered congressmen, senators, editors, publishers, the entire political and press establishment of the United States and Great Britain to be flown to Germany immediately at the expense of the war department so that they could see for themselves what had been found in the camps.
He wrote that he was giving the order because he already suspected, correctly, that someone someday would say that this had never happened. He was building the evidence file for a trial that had not yet been organized in a city called Nuremberg. Patton stood at his side while Eisenhower dictated. Patton nodded.
Patton agreed. Patton, that afternoon of April 12th, 1945, was a man converted. He would carry that conversion for exactly 36 days. Because here is the second thing you need to know about George Patton, and it is the reason this video will not end the way you think. The general who vomited behind the shed at Ohrdruf, the general who could not speak for hours afterward, the general who signed the order to force 1,200 civilians of the city of Weimar to walk through the corpses of Buchenwald, was also the general who, in September of
that same year, would write in his private diary that Jewish survivors of those same camps were, quote, lower than animals. The same hand, the same man, the same year. That is the story we are about to tell. It begins in the dust and the lime powder and the wire of a small camp in Thuringia. It ends in a car crash outside Mannheim on a cold December morning.
Between those two points, we will follow the American army as it walks into the machinery of German genocide and tries to decide what a democracy is supposed to do next. We will watch dinner-jacketed mayors hang themselves from their own rafters. We will watch American soldiers sicken past the point of discipline, line SS guards against a coal yard wall and open fire.
We will watch a general who forced Germany to look in the mirror refused to prosecute his own men for a war crime. And we will watch him in the last months of his life become something none of the men who walked into Ohrdruf with him would recognize. But first, we go back to the wire. Because on the night of April 12th, 1945, after Eisenhower and Bradley had returned to their headquarters, after the reporters had filed their first cables home, after the photographers had loaded their film, the mayor of the nearby town of Ohrdruf was ordered to
tour the camp the following day, April 13th, along with his wife. Whatever they saw inside that wire, whatever the Third Army soldiers made them look at, made them touch, made them count, was enough that by sunrise on April 14th, the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife were both dead. Hanging from the beams of their own home.
The note beside them, according to a detail passed down through the unit histories of the Third Army, but never confirmed in the official record, said seven words. We did not know, but we knew. The forced witnessing of the German people had begun. To understand the note left beside the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife, you have to go back four days.
Not to Ohrdruf, to another camp 40 miles to the north on a hill above the German city of Weimar. A camp the SS called Buchenwald. Buchenwald was not a small camp. It was not hidden. It had operated for nearly eight years within walking distance of one of the cultural capitals of Europe, the city of Goethe, the city of Schiller, the city where the German constitution of 1919 had been written.
The people of Weimar had watched trains go up the hill for eight years. They had watched trucks come down. They had smelled the smoke. On April 8th, 1945, four days before Patton stood behind that shed, the prisoners inside Buchenwald knew the Americans were close. They also knew the SS had orders to kill them all before the Americans arrived.
Somewhere in the camp, in a barracks the guards had never searched, an underground committee of political prisoners had hidden a shortwave radio transmitter. They powered it up. They tapped out a message in Morse code, in Russian, in English, in German. The message was three words repeated. To the allies, to the allies.
This is Buchenwald concentration camp SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us. The message was received. It was passed up the chain of command. It reached Patton’s Third Army by nightfall. And on the morning of April 11th, 1945, the tanks of the 6th Armored Division rolled up the hill above Weimar and pushed through the gate of Buchenwald.
21,000 prisoners were still alive inside the wire. Many of them weighed less than 70 lb. They could not stand. They could not walk. When the tank crews climbed out of their vehicles and saw what was in the barracks, some of them, grown men, professional soldiers who had fought their way from Normandy to Central Germany, sat down in the dirt and cried.
The corpses in Buchenwald were not stacked in a shed. They were stacked in a courtyard behind the crematorium, in a pile the height of a house. The 6th Armored had liberated their fourth German camp of the war by that point. Not one of them had prepared them for the pile behind the crematorium. When Buchenwald was 3 miles from Weimar, a 30-minute walk down a paved road, 5 days later, on April 16th, 1945, General Patton gave an order.
It was one of the coldest orders of the European war. It was addressed to the American military government now occupying the city of Weimar. It read in effect that no fewer than 1,000 adult citizens of the city of Weimar, chosen at random from the civilian population, would be assembled the following morning, escorted by American soldiers, and marched 3 miles up the hill to Buchenwald.
They would be shown every barracks. They would be shown the crematorium. They would be shown the pile. The final count, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was over 1,200 civilians. Men in suits, women in Sunday dresses, elderly citizens who had lived in Weimar their entire lives.
They were marched in a long silent column up the same road the trains had traveled for 8 years. The photographs of that day exist. You can look at them. They are in the National Archives, courtesy of a physician named Colonel Frank Stinchfield, who was there. In one photograph, the civilians are lined up along a fence looking in.
Their faces are difficult to read at first. Some are covering their mouths. Some are staring at the ground. Some are looking straight at the camera with an expression that is not shame. It is annoyance. That is the first thing that has to be said, because it is the first thing the American soldiers noticed. Not every German civilian walked out of Buchenwald a changed person.
Some of them walked in laughing. Some of them said the corpses were a trick, that the Americans had brought the bodies in on trucks, that this was propaganda. American soldiers who were there wrote in letters home that they had to physically force some of the civilians to look at the pile. One woman, according to a soldier from the 6th Armored, kept insisting the whole thing was staged until an American sergeant took her by the wrist and made her touch the arm of one of the dead.
She did not laugh after that, but she also did not speak. That was the shape of the reckoning. It was not universal. It was not clean. Some walked out of Buchenwald sobbing so hard they could not stand. Some walked out cold. Some walked out angry, not at the SS, not at Hitler, but at the Americans for making them see it.
The forced witnessing that Eisenhower had ordered, that Patton was enforcing, was a policy built on a hope. The hope was that seeing would produce understanding. What the Third Army learned in the third week of April 1945 was that seeing produced whatever the person inside had brought with them. The mayor of Ohrdruf brought guilt, and he hanged himself in his own house.
Some of the citizens of Weimar brought contempt. And they walked home and made dinner. That is the truth the source material of this era does not always tell. It is a harder truth than the legend, but it is the one that matters, because it is the one that answers the question the entire war was asked to answer. What are human beings actually, when the evidence is placed in front of their eyes? Some are the mayor of Ohrdruf.
Some are the woman at the fence. And that is not the last twist of this chapter, because the American army was about to discover something even harder than the woman at the fence. The American army was about to discover what forced witnessing does to the witness. On April 29th, 1945, 13 days after the civilians of Weimar walked up the hill to Buchenwald, two American infantry divisions were closing on a small town in Bavaria, 13 miles northwest of Munich.
The town was called Dachau. They were not from Patton’s Third Army. They were from the Seventh Army under Lieutenant General Alexander Patch. The lead units were the 42nd Infantry Division, known as the Rainbow Division, and the 45th Infantry Division, known as the Thunderbird. Between them, they had been fighting almost continuously since landing in southern France the previous summer.
They were exhausted. They were angry. They were, by the last week of April 1945, past the point where discipline could be assumed. They knew there was a camp near the town. They did not know what was inside it. What was inside it was 32,000 human beings, most of them slowly starving, and behind the main camp, sitting on a rail siding, 39 boxcars.
The boxcars had been sent from Buchenwald 3 weeks earlier, packed with 3,000 prisoners the SS did not want the Americans to find. The train had wandered across southern Germany for 21 days, unable to reach any destination because the Allied bombing had destroyed the rail junctions. When the [snorts] American scouts approached the siding on the morning of April 29th, the smell reached them before the sight did.
They opened the first car. 2,000 of the 3,000 prisoners on that train were dead. The corpses filled the cars. The corpses had fallen out of the cars. The corpses lay along the tracks in the position they had died, some of them still holding the wire of the car door in their fingers. The lead battalion of the 45th Infantry, the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment, was commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel named Felix Sparks.
He was 28 years old. He was from Arizona. He had already been wounded four times in the war. He had lost, by his own later account, most of the men he had trained with. When he saw the boxcars, according to the testimony he gave to the Inspector General 6 weeks later, he stopped being able to think in complete sentences.
His men pushed through the wire and into the main camp. The prisoners inside surged toward them. Some collapsed at their feet. Some tried to kiss their boots. In the far corner of the camp, a group of SS guards, some of them Waffen SS, some of them Hungarian conscripts pressed into service in the final weeks of the war, threw down their weapons and put up their hands.
The SS Untersturmführer left in charge of the camp, a young officer named Heinrich Wickert, walked forward with a white flag. He formally surrendered the camp to Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42nd Division, who had arrived from a different direction. Wickert’s surrender was accepted at approximately 2:30 in the afternoon.
Wickert was dead by 3:00. He was not the only one. In a coal yard on the west side of the camp, an executive officer of Company Y, a Cherokee lieutenant named Jack Bushyhead, 32 years old, born on the Cherokee Reservation in Oklahoma, ordered the SS prisoners separated from the Wehrmacht prisoners. The SS men were lined up against a brick wall.
A machine gun was set up in front of the wall. And the machine gun opened fire. Later investigation conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker of the Inspector General’s Office would count 17 SS bodies in the coal yard, another 17 at Tower B, and an unknown further number killed by American soldiers and by surviving prisoners across the camp that afternoon.
The best modern estimate published by the German historian Jürgen Zarusky in 1997 is that between 25 and 50 SS personnel were killed after they had surrendered. That is the definition of a war crime under the same Geneva Convention the German prisoners in Patton’s own camps had been citing five months earlier.
The men who committed it were American infantrymen. The men who committed it had that same morning walked past 2,000 corpses in a rail car. That is the twist the legend of forced witnessing does not tell you. Eisenhower’s policy, Patton’s enforcement, the great moral education of the German people at the corpse pile of Buchenwald, was based on a premise.
The premise was that when a human being is forced to see evil, the human being will be improved by the seeing. At Dachau on April 29th, 1945, the men doing the seeing were Americans, and what the seeing produced in them in the first hour was not moral education. It was murder. Colonel Whittaker’s investigation was completed on June 8th, 1945. Its recommendation was direct.
The evidence, in the opinion of the Judge Advocate of Seventh Army, would sustain a charge of murder against Lieutenant Walsh, Lieutenant Bushyhead, Technical Sergeant Wells, and Private Pruitt. The recommendation was that they be tried by general court-martial for murder. The recommendation was forwarded up the chain of command.
It reached the desk of the officer who now had jurisdiction over the case, the officer who had recently been appointed military governor of Bavaria. The officer who, 7 weeks earlier, had stood at the gate of Ohrdruf and watched Eisenhower dictate a cable about building the record of Nazi atrocity for history.
That officer was General George S. Patton, and in the same summer of 1945, in the same office, with the same hand that had signed the order to force 1,200 civilians to walk up the hill to Buchenwald, General Patton took the Whittaker report, read it, and dismissed the charges. No court-martial was convened.
No American soldier was tried for what happened in the coal yard at Dachau. The witnesses were never cross-examined. The record was sealed. It would not be declassified for almost half a century. The men who ran the machine gun went home. The men who ordered the machine gun went home, and the general who had stood behind a shed at Ohrdruf, the general who had told the mayor’s wife to look, the general who had built the case for Nuremberg, sat at his desk in Bad Tölz in the summer of 1945 and started to change.
The record of that change is not a rumor. It is not a slander. It is a diary, his own. Kept in his own hand. And when we open the pages of that diary and read what General George Smith Patton Jr. wrote about the survivors of the camps he had liberated 6 months after he vomited behind that shed, we will meet a man none of the soldiers of the Third Army would have recognized on April 12th, 1945.
That is where we go next. The office was in a town called Bad Tölz in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, about 30 miles south of Munich. A stone building with tall windows, a desk, a leather blotter, a telephone, and by the middle of May 1945, a nameplate on the door that read military governor, Bavaria. The war in Europe was over.
Germany had surrendered on May 8th. The concentration camps had been liberated. The pile behind the crematorium at Buchenwald had been photographed, filmed, cataloged, and shipped in reels of Signal Corps 16-mm footage to a courtroom being prepared in the city of Nuremberg. The forced witnessing was over. The reckoning was beginning.
And the man in the office mess at Bad Tölz was the same man who had stood at the gate of Ohrdruf on April 12th, 36 days earlier, and given the order that would end with the mayor and his wife hanging from their own rafters. But something in him was already turning. The first sign was administrative. Patton had been appointed military governor of Bavaria, in part because Eisenhower needed a commander who could impose order on a shattered region of nearly 10 million people, most of whom had been loyal to the National Socialist
regime for 12 years. Patton took the job seriously. He wanted order. He wanted the trains running. He wanted the water on. He wanted the police organized. And to do all of that quickly, he made a decision that Eisenhower had specifically forbidden. He kept the Nazis in office. The formal Allied policy was denazification.
It required every German civil servant with a record of Nazi Party membership to be removed from public office, screened, and either cleared or prosecuted before returning to work. It was a slow policy. It was a painful policy. It emptied the ministries of Bavaria of most of their trained staff overnight. Patton did not have time for it.
In the first 6 weeks of his governorship, he quietly ordered his subordinates to leave former party members in place if they were competent. He said in a press conference on September 22nd, 1945, that the Nazi Party question in Germany was, in his own words, comparable to the argument between Democrats and Republicans in the United States.
He said this to reporters, in public, with a microphone. The story reached Eisenhower within 24 hours, but that was not the diary entry. The diary entry came earlier, September 15th, 1945, in his own hand, preserved in the Patton papers at the Library of Congress. A private notebook the general believed no one would read until after his death.
He was writing about the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps. Displaced persons they were now called, or DPs. There were hundreds of thousands of them still in Bavaria, still in the camps the Germans had built for them, because there was nowhere else for them to go. Palestine was closed.
The United States was closed. Their homes in Poland and Ukraine had been burned or taken. They were, in the summer of 1945, wards of the United States Army. And the United States Army in Bavaria was commanded by George Patton. The sentence he wrote in his private diary on September 15th, 1945 reads as follows. Others believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.
Read it again. Lower than animals. This is the same hand, the same fountain pen, the same man who had stood behind a shed at Ohrdruf 5 months earlier and vomited into the grass because he could not bear the sight of the 30 bodies inside. The bodies inside that shed included many Jewish prisoners, the same category of human being he would call 156 days later lower than animals.
This is the twist the honest history of the Second World War has to tell, and it is the twist the legend of General Patton usually does not. Witnessing does not save. Witnessing does not automatically transform the human being who does the witnessing. Patton had seen the camps. Patton had broken.
Patton had built the record, and Patton had walked out of the summer of 1945 with the same prejudices he had walked into it with. Perhaps sharpened, perhaps hardened, but not changed. Eisenhower had seen him coming. On September 28th, 1945, Eisenhower summoned Patton to a personal meeting. What was said between them has not been fully recorded.
What is known is that on that same day orders were cut removing General George S. Patton Jr. from command of the Third United States Army and from his position as military governor of Bavaria. He was reassigned to command of a small paper unit called the 15th Army, which existed mostly to write the historical record of the European campaign.
It was for a man like Patton a coffin with a desk in it. He accepted the reassignment. He wrote a bitter letter to his wife. He drove to his new headquarters, and on December 9th, 1945 on a country road near Käfertal on the outskirts of Mannheim, on the way to a pheasant hunt he did not particularly want to attend, the 1938 Cadillac he was riding in struck the side of a 2 and 1/2 ton army truck making a left turn across the road.
The impact was low speed. The other passengers walked away. Patton was thrown forward. His neck struck the metal partition behind the driver. He was paralyzed from the neck down. He lay in a military hospital in Heidelberg for 12 days. He knew he would not recover. He knew he would not walk again. He knew, because he had told the doctors, that a soldier was not meant to end this way.
On December 21st, 1945, at approximately quarter past 5:00 in the afternoon, a blood clot moved into his lung. General George Smith Patton, Jr. 60 years old, died of a pulmonary embolism. His wife Beatrice was at his side. He was buried 3 days later, at his own request, in the American military cemetery at Ham, in Luxembourg, alongside the enlisted men of the Third Army who had fallen in the Battle of the Bulge.
His grave marker is identical to theirs. No stars, no rank, a name, a date, a cross. And that could be the end of the story. But it is not the end of the story, because there is one more thing to say, and it is the hardest thing. Three men walked through the gate of Ohrdruf on April 12th, 1945. Bradley, Patton, Eisenhower.
Three men, same day, same evidence. Same corpses, same shed. Bradley went home to become a five-star general and the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wrote a memoir. In it, he described the tour of Ohrdruf honestly, without exaggeration, without ornament. He became, for the American public of the 1950s, the model of the citizen soldier.
He died in 1981 at the age of 88, having spent the last decades of his life speaking, quietly and without cameras, at commemorations of the war. Eisenhower went home and in 1952 was elected the 34th president of the United States. He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Central High School.
He warned the country in his farewell address on January 17th, 1961 of the danger of what he called the military-industrial complex. Whatever else you make of his presidency, this cannot be denied. The man who wrote the cable at Ohrdruf on the night of April 12th, 1945, the man who ordered the reporters flown in to build the record, the man who understood before anyone else in the American army that the evidence of what had happened in Germany would one day be denied, spent the rest of his life acting on what he had seen.
And Patton, the third man, the only one of the three who could not stay inside the shed, the man who broke behind it, the man who signed the order that hanged the mayor of Ohrdruf, wrote in his diary that the survivors of those same camps were lower than animals, protected the American soldiers who murdered SS prisoners at Dachau, and died in a hospital bed in Heidelberg without recanting any of it.
Three men, same gate, same day, three different endings. This is the answer to the question this war ended with. Not who won, not how many died, but what human beings become when they are finally made to look. Some, like the mayor of Ohrdruf, cannot bear the weight and go home to their afters. Some, like the citizens of Weimar who called the corpses a trick, refuse to see what is directly in front of them until a sergeant takes their wrist and forces the hand down onto the arm of the dead.
Some, like Omar Bradley, carry the memory quietly for the rest of their lives and become the moral spine of a generation. Some, like Dwight Eisenhower, use what they saw to shape a country for the next 15 years. And some, like George Patton, see everything, break behind the shed, vomit, sign the orders, build the record, save the evidence for the trial at Nuremberg, and still 6 months later sit down at a desk in Bavaria and write in a private notebook that the survivors are not really human at all.
Witnessing does not save. Witnessing only creates the possibility of being saved. What the human being does with the seeing is the human being’s own decision. It is the hardest labor a person can be asked to perform because it requires him to accept that the story he has told himself about who he is, about his country, about the other person may be wrong.
Some do that work. Some cannot. Some do half of it and then, in a quiet office in Bavaria in the last September of his life, walk back to the prejudice they were born with. That is the story of the American army in Germany in April 1945. That is the story of Ohrdruf, of Buchenwald, of Weimar, of Dachau, of the coal yard, of the shed, of the note beside the mayor and his wife.
We did not know, but we knew. Seven words left on a table beside two bodies, written by a German civilian in the last hours of his life. But those seven words are not only the epitaph of the mayor of Ohrdruf, they are the epitaph of every human being who has ever been shown the truth and then had to decide what to do with it.
The [snorts] evidence has been placed in front of your eyes. The question is the same one Eisenhower asked in a cable to Washington on the night of April 12th, 1945. Now that you have seen it, what will you do?
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
