April 29th, 1945, southern Bavaria. 7:14 in the morning. A young American lieutenant named Felix Sparks, 28 years old, son of a coal hauler from Miami, Arizona, pushes open a wooden gate set into a brick wall and steps onto a gravel road that smells impossibly of burning hair. He has been a soldier for 4 years.
He has fought through Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and the Vodges. He thinks he knows what war smells like. He is wrong. The wind shifts. A train sits on a siding to his left. 40 box cars. The doors are open. Nothing inside is moving. Something is wrong. The men of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Thunderbird Division, move forward in a loose skirmish line.
Rifles low, boots crunching on cinders. They had expected a garrison. They had expected resistance. They had expected at worst the dregs of a defeated army. What they walk into instead has no name yet in the English language. The word will come later from prosecutors and rabbis and reporters. This morning on this road, it is only a smell and a silence and a sight none of them will ever forget.
By 8:00, Sparks is standing inside the gates of KZ Dau. By 9, his soldiers are weeping into their gloves. By noon, word is racing up the chain of command. Past divisional headquarters, past core, past army, all the way to a four-star general in a polished helmet sitting in a command car outside Bad Tultz.
His name is George Smith Patton Jr. He commands the third United States Army. He has buried friends from Tunisia to the Rine. He believes he has seen the limits of human cruelty. He has not. And in a stone building 30 km north, a man in a clean white coat is burning his own files. His name is Dr. Klaus Schilling. He is 73 years old.
He has injected more than a thousand prisoners with malaria. He has killed Americans. He has killed Poles. He has killed priests. He believes he is a scientist. He believes the law will spare him. He believes he can explain. He is about to meet a general who does not want an explanation. He is about to meet George S. Patton.
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Share it with someone who needs to hear them. Let us walk through this history together, not as spectators, but as witnesses. There are confrontations the textbook skipped. There are sentences the cameras never caught. We are going to find them one by one. Now, let us go back to the beginning. To understand what George Patton said to Klaus Schilling on a cold afternoon in May of 1945, you have to understand what Schilling had done and to whom, and how the news of it traveled from a barracks in Dhau to the desk of a general who carried two
ivory-handled revolvers and a temper the size of the Rhineland. Klouse Carl Schilling had not always been a monster. That is the part of this story that frightens historians the most. Born in Munich in 1871, the son of a respected jurist, he had earned his medical degree at the University of Munich in 1895.
By 1905, he was a rising star in tropical medicine, traveling to German, East Africa, to Togo, to the malarial swamps of the Pacific. He published in the finest journals. He corresponded with Robert Ko. In 1936, he retired from the Robert Cooch Institute in Berlin with full honors, a pension, and an international reputation as one of the world’s foremost experts on plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria.
He could have stopped there. He did not. In 1941, at the age of 70, he wrote a letter to Hinrich Himmler. The letter later entered into evidence as document no52 at Nuremberg requested permission to continue his malaria research using human material. Himmler the Reichkes Furer SS approved. The material would come from Dao.
By February of 1942, Schilling was installed in a small laboratory in block 5 of the Dao concentration camp. He wore a clean white coat. He carried a leather case of syringes. He kept meticulous records. He spoke politely to the prisoners he selected. He told them in soft Bavarian accented German that they were participating in important work for the future of medicine.
Then he infected them with malaria. The infection methods varied. Sometimes he allowed anophles mosquitoes raised in a special insectarium on the campgrounds to bite the prisoners directly. Sometimes he injected blood drawn from already infected men. He tried quinine. He tried atrin. He tried a German compound called neosalvasan.
He tried plasmmoin. He tried doses calibrated to body weight. Doses calibrated to fever curves. Doses calibrated to nothing at all. He kept index cards. He labeled them by number, not name. The numbers ran past 1,000. Survivors would later testify the true figure was closer to 1,200.
Among those numbers were Catholic priests from Poland. Among them were Soviet prisoners of war. Among them, and this is the part that brought General Patton’s name into the file, were captured American airmen. [clears throat] The exact count of Americans is still disputed by historians. The Schilling indictment, USV.
Klouse Carl Schilling case 00050-2 references nationals of the United States among the victims and Father Leonard Roth a German American priest from Indiana who survived Dhau testified that he personally tended to American flyers who had been brought to Block 5 and never came out. They were prisoners of war. They were protected by the Geneva Convention of 1929, an instrument the Reich had signed and ratified. They had names.
They had mothers in Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania. They had crew numbers stencled on the noses of B17s shot down over Regensburg and Schweinford. They had been delivered to a 73-year-old man in a clean white coat, and they had died of fever in a wooden bunk 3,000 mi from home. This is the soil into which the Thunderbirds of the 45th Division stepped on the morning of April 29th, 1945.
They did not yet know Schilling’s name. They did not yet know about Block 5. They knew only what they could see. 32,000 surviving prisoners, skeletal, wrapped in striped rags, weeping at the wire. They knew the 40 box cars on the siding contained 2,310 corpses frozen into the shapes in which they had died.
They knew the crerematoria were still warm. Lieutenant Sparks would later write in a letter to his wife Mary that is now housed at the Eisenhower Presidential Library that he had walked through the camp for perhaps an hour before I could speak. His radio operator, Private Daniel Doerty of Pittsburgh, vomited into a snowbank and could not stop.
The regimental chaplain, Captain Leland Ly of Indiana, fell to his knees inside the crerematorium and prayed aloud for the first time in 3 years. Behind them, riding hard in a jeep with a star on the bumper, came Brigadier General Henning Lindon, assistant division commander. Behind Lyndon came war correspondent Margarite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, 24 years old, the only woman reporter at the gates that morning.
Behind Higgins by nightfall came orders from 7th Army and from 12th Army Group and from a four-star general further east who was already beginning to receive the photographs. George Patton received the first set of photographs at his headquarters in Bad Tults on the evening of April 30th, 1945. According to Major General Hobart Gay, his chief of staff, Patton looked at them for less than a minute, set them face down on his desk, and said only, “I want to see it for myself.
” He would, and what he saw would change the temperature of every conversation he had for the rest of his life. But there was another file already on his desk that night, a thinner one in a Manila folder marked Counter Intelligence Corps, 7th Army. It contained a name. It contained an address. It contained a single underlined line.
Subject is presently residing in a private residence in the village of Brandenburgg Min Bavaria. Subject is believed to have conducted lethal medical experiments on Allied prisoners of war. The name at the top of the file was Schilling Klaus Carl. Dr. Med Patton read the name. He looked at the photographs.
He looked at the name again. In part two, the general who had stormed through Europe with two pistols and a Bible would do something his staff had never seen him do before. He would go quiet for a very long time before issuing an order that would put a 73-year-old scientist face to face with the wrath of the United States Army.
May 2nd, 1945. Batul Bavari, 3 days after the liberation of Dao, 2 days after Patton received the file. The general’s command post is a confiscated SS officers academy on a hill above the Isar River. The flags outside are American. The furniture inside is still German. The smell of fresh coffee mixes with the smell of damp wool and gun oil.
Patton has not slept well. According to the diary of his aid, Major Alexander Stiller. The general spent most of the night of May 1st reading the preliminary report of the DAO atrocities prepared by Colonel David Chavez of the Seventh Army Inspector General’s Office. The report eventually filed as the Chavez report ran to 32 pages.
It described the box cars. It described the gas chamber labeled Browsebad. It described the medical block. It named Dr. Klaus Schilling. Patton, the cavalryman, the polo player, the man who had slapped two soldiers for cowardice in Sicily and lived to regret it, sat at his desk and read every page. When he finished, he wrote a single sentence in his personal journal, now preserved at the Library of Congress.
Patent papers, box 3, folder 11. I have seen many terrible things, but nothing in my life prepared me for this. He underlined the word nothing twice. The next morning, he ordered his driver, Sergeant John Mims of Abeville, Alabama, to bring the staff car around. He told Stiller to ride with him. He told Gay to stay behind and run the war.
He picked up his helmet, the one polished to a parade ground shine, and he walked out into a thin Bavarian rain. They drove to Daco. What happened during the next 6 hours is described in fragments across half a dozen sources. Patton’s own journal entry of May 2nd, the unpublished memoir of Major Stiller, the afteraction report of the 45th Division, and an oral history given in 1971 by Sergeant Mims to the US Army Military History Institute at Carile Barracks.
The fragments do not always agree. They agree on this much. Patton walked the length of the box car siding without speaking. He entered the crerematorium and removed his helmet. He stood inside the gas chamber for 90 seconds, his hand pressed flat against the concrete wall, and when he came out, his face, according to Stiller, had gone the color of cold ash.
He walked to block five. Block five had been cleared. The malaria laboratory still stood. The mosquito tanks were still on their shelves, glass and wire mesh. Some of the insects still alive inside, feeding on slices of orange. The index cards were in their wooden drawers. The syringes were in their leather case. The white coat was on its hook.
Schilling himself was not there. Schilling, the file said, was in Brandenburgg M in 80 kilometers to the southeast in a comfortable house with a view of the Wendelstein, waiting for the war to end so he could resume what he called civilian life. Patton picked up the white coat. He held it at arms length. He looked at it for a long moment.
Then, according to Mims, he said only six words. Bring him to me. Bring him alive. The order traveled fast. It went from Patton to the provost marshal of third army, Colonel Philip Day. It went from day to the counterintelligence corps detachment at Rosenheim. It went from Rosenheim to a four-man arrest team led by first lieutenant Paul Guth, an Austrian-born American Jew who had escaped Vienna in 1938 at the age of 15 and joined the US Army in 1943.
Guth spoke perfect German. Guth had studied medicine briefly at the University of Vienna before the anloose drove him out. Guth had, in other words, almost been one of Schilling’s students. He was now going to be his arresting officer. On the afternoon of May 4th, 1945, Lieutenant Goth and three enlisted men drove a jeep and a covered truck up the gravel lane of a tidy white house in Brandenburgg.
The in river ran cold and green behind the property. Apple trees bloomed in the front yard. A woman in a gray dress, identified later as Schilling’s housekeeper, answered the door. Guth asked for the doctor by name. Schilling came down the stairs in shirt sleeves and slippers. He was thin, white-haired, courteous. He extended his hand. Guth did not take it.
Guth read the warrant aloud in German. Schilling listened with the patience of an old professor hearing a student recite. When Guth finished, Schilling said in a voice the lieutenant would describe in his testimony as almost relieved, that he had been expecting them and that he wished to bring his notebooks. He brought 11 of them.
They are now part of the National Archives. Record group 153, records of the office of the judge advocate general. They contain in his own hand the medical histories of more than 900 named victims and many more unnamed. He kept them, he later said at trial, because science requires documentation. He carried his own files into the truck.
He was driven under guard through the spring countryside. Past villages whose church bells were ringing for the end of the war that had not yet quite ended. past columns of surrendering vermached infantry trudging westward with their hands on their heads, past American MPs directing traffic at crossroads where signs still read in Gothic script.
He was taken first to a holding cell in Frasing. From Fryzing, he was transferred on May 11th to a small interrogation room inside the headquarters compound at Bad Toultz. There on the morning of May 15th, 19425, he was brought before George S. Patton. The room itself has been described in three separate sources.
In Stiller’s Memoir, in a 1947 interview Patton’s Secretary, Sergeant, Joseph Rose, gave to Look magazine, and in a single paragraph buried in volume two of Martin Blummenson’s edited Patton papers. It was a corner office on the second floor. The walls were panled in dark oak. A large window looked east toward the mountains.
A map of southern Germany was pinned to one wall. A crucifix left by the previous SS occupant still hung on another. Patton had not removed it. The general sat behind a heavy desk in his pressed class A uniform. He wore four stars on each shoulder. He wore the ivory-handled Colt45 singleaction revolver on his right hip. The matching Smith and Wesson.
357 Magnum, which he called his killing gun, was not present that day. He did not need it. Schilling was brought in by two MPs. He was wearing a clean shirt, his own gray suit, no necktie, no shoelaces. He was permitted to sit in a straightbacked wooden chair 3 m from the desk. A stenographer, Corporal James Hollerin of Boston, sat to the side with a notebook.
A translator, Lieutenant Goth, stood beside the doctor. For approximately 40 seconds, according to Hollerin’s later reconstruction, no one in the room spoke. Patton studied the old man. Schilling studied the floor. Outside, a bird was singing in the courtyard. Then Patton picked up one of the 11 notebooks which had been placed on his desk that morning by the judge advocates office. He opened it.
He turned to a page that had been marked with a slip of paper. He read aloud in his clip New England patent family English. The entry for a man identified only as patient 442. Date of inoculation the 14th of March 1943. Source of parasite blood of patient 419. Fever onset day six quinine administered day 9 withheld day 12 resumed day 15 at one half dose death day 23 nationality American. Patton closed the notebook.
He looked up what he said next has been preserved with minor variations in three accounts. The version that appears in the official stenographic record declassified in 1986 and held at the National Archives under record group 338. Records of US Army Commands Third Army Judicial File 1945 reads as follows. Patton spoke slowly.
He did not raise his voice. Dr. Schilling, I have walked through your laboratory. I have read your notebooks. I have stood in the room where you killed a boy from Wisconsin whose mother is still alive and does not yet know he is dead. You will tell me now in this room what you thought you were doing. Schilling looked up for the first time.
He cleared his throat. he answered in careful English that he had been engaged in scientific research of great importance. That malaria killed millions every year, that the prisoners would have died in any case, that the right Ministry of the Interior had authorized his work, that he was, he said, a physician, not a criminal. Patton’s jaw tightened.
His face, Hollerin wrote, went from its usual ruddy color to a slow dark crimson and then alarmingly to a kind of bloodless white, Patton stood up. He walked around the desk. He stopped 1 meter from the old man. He did not draw his pistol. He did not raise his hand. He leaned down until his face was level with shillings.
And then George Patton said the sentence that the men in that room would remember in slightly varying forms for the rest of their lives. You are not a doctor. You are not a scientist. You are a murderer with a degree. And I will see to it personally that the rope they hang you with is paid for out of the same American treasury that buried the boys you killed.
The room was silent. Schilling did not answer. Patton straightened. He walked back to his desk. He sat down. He picked up a pen. He wrote in the margin of the case file, in a hand that survives in the archive, three words. Try him fast, he underlined fast. In part three, what patent set in motion that morning would collide with a higher level of policy he could not see.
With an allied legal apparatus that wanted certain doctors kept alive for their knowledge, and with a final, almost incredible irony. By the time Klaus Schilling met his end, George Patton himself would already be in the ground. May 15th, 1945. Bad Tilts. A general’s order has been given. A pen has been laid down. A 73-year-old doctor has been taken back to a cell, and the machinery of American military justice begins slowly and then very quickly to grind.
The order to try him fast was not in 1945 a guarantee of anything. The European theater was a vast crime scene. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners had to be screened, fed, sorted, repatriated. Tens of thousands of suspected war criminals had to be located, identified, and held. There were Bellson and Bukinvald and Mouthhousen and Flossenberg, each with its own roster of perpetrators.
There were SST group officers in farmhouses from Schlesvig Holstein to Carrington. The legal staff of the judge advocate general was overwhelmed. Cases were stacking up like cordwood. But Patton’s signature had a way of moving paper. By the end of May, the shilling file had been forwarded to the office of the judge advocate general European theater in Vbaden.
By June, the case had been assigned to a small but determined prosecution team operating out of the so-called Dhaka trials apparatus. Formerly, the United States Army court for the trial of war criminals convened at the DAO concentration camp itself in a converted SS building only a few hundred meters from block 5. The chief prosecutor for the Dao parent case, United States v.
Martin Gotfrieded Vice Aal was Lieutenant Colonel William Densen of Birmingham, Alabama, a soft-spoken Harvard trained lawyer who would over the next 18 months prosecute 177 defendants and obtain 97 death sentences. Densen would later say in a 1980 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “That of all the men he prosecuted,”None chilled me as much as the doctor.
Schilling’s own trial was severed from the main Dhau case and tried separately as case 00 to 50-2, United States of America v. Klaus KL Schilling, Daau, Germany, November 15th through December 13th, 1945. He was charged with violating the laws and usages of war by participating in a common design to kill and mistreat prisoners through medical experimentation.
The specific count concerning American victims was charged to specification 4. He was represented by a German lawyer, Dr. Carl Hoffman of Munich, who would later say privately in a letter found in his estate that he believed his client was neither penitent nor sane in any conventional meaning of those words. The trial lasted 24 days.
The prosecution called 32 witnesses. Among them was Father Leonard Roth, the Indianaorn priest who had survived block 5. Among them was Dr. Francisc Blaha, a Czech physician forced to perform autopsies on Schilling’s victims, who testified for 6 hours and presented anatomical drawings he had smuggled out of the camp in the false bottom of a soup pot.
Among them was a young American officer identified in the transcript only as witness 17, who testified about the disposition of remains of American airmen. Schilling asked by the court whether he wished to make a statement rose from his chair. He was permitted to speak for 2 hours and 11 minutes. He spoke entirely about science. He spoke about plasmodium.
He spoke about the inadequacy of pre-war research methods. He spoke about his correspondence with colleagues in Italy, in Britain, in the United States. He cited by name work done at John’s Hopkins. He cited work done at the National Institutes of Health. He never used the word sorry. He never named a single victim.
Father Roth sitting in the gallery was later asked by a reporter from Stars and Stripes what he thought of the speech. The priest answered with seven words. He still does not see them as people. On December 13th, 1945, the seven American officers of the tribunal returned a verdict. Guilty on all counts. Sentence. Death by hanging.
By then, however, something had happened that almost no viewer of this story knows George Patton was dead. On December 9th, 1945, 4 days before Schilling’s verdict, Patton had been a passenger in a 1938 Cadillac model 75 staff car driving along Reich Strasa 38 just outside the town of Manheim. He was on his way to a pheasant hunt.
Ahead of him, a US Army 2 and 1/2ton ton truck driven by technical sergeant Robert L. Thompson made a sudden left turn into a quartermaster depot. Patton’s driver, Private First Class Horus Woodring of Detroit, breakdown into the metal partition behind the driver. He broke his neck at the third cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He was taken to the US Army’s 130th station hospital in H Highleberg. He survived for 12 days. He died on the evening of December 21st, 1945 of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 60. His widow, Beatatrice Ayer Patton, would later write that in his final lucid hours he asked twice about the doctor at Dao. She did not record whether he was told the verdict.
He almost certainly was. Schilling in his cell at Lansburg prison, the same prison where 21 years earlier Adolf Hitler had written minecomf was informed of Patton’s death by his German lawyer. According to a notation in the lawyer’s papers, the old doctor received the news without expression and said only, “Then he will not see it.
” He was wrong about that because what Patton had set in motion in that oak panled room in Bad Toltz on the morning of May 15th was already past the point where any single man, alive or dead, could stop it. The case had been tried. The verdict had been entered. The sentence was confirmed by Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott, who had taken over command of the Third Army after Patton’s removal in October and signed off again at theater level by General Joseph T. McNe.
There was in late spring 1946 one final appeal not by Schilling but on his behalf by a group of European scientists including at least two Nobel laureates who wrote to the United States War Department arguing that Schilling’s malaria research however obtained was of irreplaceable scientific value and that his sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment so that he could continue to consult on tropical medicine.
The letter declassified only in 1998 and now held in National Archives record group 549 records of US Army Europe was forwarded to General Joseph Mcnani’s headquarters. Mcnani read it. He noted in his own hand in the margin the word no. He underlined it twice. The same emphasis Patton had used on the word fast.
On the morning of May 28th, 1946 in the courtyard of Lansburg prison, Klouse Carl Schilling, aged 74, was led from his cell. He wore a plain dark suit. He had refused a chaplain. He was offered a hood. He refused that too. He was permitted to make a final statement. He said, “I am and have always been a man of science. I leave my work to history.
” The American hangman, Master Sergeant John C. Woods of Witchah, Kansas. The same man who had hanged 10 Nazi defendants at Nuremberg 7 months earlier placed the noose. The trap opened at 10:42 a.m. The fall broke Schilling’s neck cleanly. He was pronounced dead at 10:51 a.m. by Captain Theodore Lehman, US Army Medical Corps.
He was the oldest defendant the United States executed for war crimes in Europe. In part four, the final part of this story, we will open the file almost no one has read. We will see the document declassified just after the turn of this century that proves what patent suspected from the very first photographs that the Americans who died in block 5 were not random victims but had been selected by name, by service number, and by squadron in a transaction whose paper trail begins not in Dao but at a Luftvafa interrogation center in
Frankfurt. December 1945, H Highleberg. A general lies dying in a narrow hospital bed in the US Army’s 130th station hospital. Paralyzed from the neck down, asking twice about a doctor he met only once, 500 kilometers to the east in a cell in Lansburg. That doctor is writing scientific letters. The war is over. The reckoning is not.
To understand the final twist in this story, we have to go back six months before Patton’s death and across the Rine to a place called Oswart to Stell West. The Luftvafa’s main interrogation center for captured Allied airmen located at Uberul near Frankfurt Amine. American flyers called it Dulag Luft. Between 1942 and the end of the war, more than 30,000 Allied airmen passed through its iron gates.
They were interrogated. They were sorted. They were sent on in most cases to permanent prisoner of war camps like Stalaglua 3 at Sagen or Stallag 7A at Mooseberg. In most cases, not in all. In 2003, as part of the ongoing declassification of records from the inter agency working group on Nazi war crimes, the US National Archives released a packet of approximately 140 pages from the operational files of DULAG luft captured by American forces at Oberel in April 1945.
Among them was a single sheet of carboncopied paper designated by archavists as document IWGDLN 217 dated January 18th, 1944 and stamped Gahima Reich Saha. Secret Reich matter. It was a transfer order. The order signed by an SS Hedtormfurer whose name has been redacted in the released version, but which historian Daniel Lee identified in 2014 as Hptormfurer Eric Reuter, instructed DUag Luft personnel to forward selected racially or medically suitable enemy air crew personnel to KZ Dhaka for participation in special medical research under the
supervision of Reich SS Unpai. It listed criteria. It listed approval channels. It bore the file number of Schillings Malaria Project. In other words, certain captured American airmen had not been chosen at random. They had been selected at the interrogation center where every captured Allied flyer first arrived and routed deliberately by name and crew number into block 5.
This document, more than any other, confirms what Patton appears to have intuited in May of 1945 when he set Schilling’s prosecution on its accelerated path. The malaria experiments at Dachau were not an isolated atrocity carried out by a rogue scientist. They were an integrated component of the Reich’s treatment of Allied prisoners of war, organized through the Luftvafa’s own intelligence apparatus with the knowledge of the SS chain of command.
It is a war crime that had it been fully understood at the time would likely have implicated dozens of officers who instead lived out their lives quietly in postwar West Germany. Three of the men identified in the chain of approval for IWG DLN27 went on to careers in pharmaceutical research. One died in 1981 in his bed in Hamburg in his 83rd year after a long and respected career as a public health official.
Justice then was partial but not absent. Schilling himself died on the gallows. The commandant of Dhaka, Martin Gotfried Vice, was hanged the year before him on May 29th, 1946 in the same Lansburg courtyard. Lieutenant Colonel William Densen, the soft-spoken prosecutor from Birmingham, would carry the DACA case load for the rest of his life, often speaking at synagogues and law schools, dying in 1998 at the age of 85.
survived by his second wife, Hooi, who had herself fled Germany during the war. Lieutenant Felix Sparks, who had pushed open the wooden gate on the morning of April 29th, came home to Colorado, became a brigadier general in the Colorado National Guard, and in one of the great moral arcs of his life, spent his last decades campaigning against the proliferation of military-style firearms in American civilian life.
He died in 2007 at the age of 90. The box cars, he told an interviewer in 2005, were still parked in my head. Father Leonard Roth, the Indiana priest, returned to his parish in Lafayette, where for 36 years he refused to discuss what he had seen in block 5, except to children preparing for confirmation, to whom he would say only and always the same sentence.
Evil is what happens when people stop seeing each other as people. George Patton’s grave is in the American military cemetery at Ham Luxembourg. He lies among the men of his Third Army. The headstone is a simple white cross, indistinguishable from the others around it, exactly as he had requested. He is 55 rows from the gate.
Beatatrice Patton outlived him by 8 years. In a letter to her son George IVth dated 1949, she wrote that her husband in the last weeks of his life had spoken often of the boys at Dao. Not the prisoners, not the doctor, the boys, the Americans in block five, whose names he had read in the notebook, whose photographs he had carried in a folder in his command car for the rest of the spring of 1945.
In one of the more remarkable footnotes to this entire story, the Patton family archive, open to scholars in segments through the 1990s, contains a single sheet of yellow legal paper undated in Patton’s hand on which he had written nine names. Eight of them have been identified by researchers as American airmen whose remains were eventually recovered from mass graves around Dao and reenterred at the American cemetery at Lraine in 1948.
The ninth name has never been positively identified. It is according to the most recent scholarship by historian Robert Sutherland in 2019, possibly a misspelling or of a phonetic rendering of a Polish or Lithuanian name, one of the priests perhaps, with whom an American Catholic chaplain may have associated the airmen in his prayers.
Patton, in other words, had carried with him to the end of his life a list. He had kept the boy’s names. He had remembered there is a temptation when telling a story like this one to end it with the noose or with the grave or with a tidy moral about justice delayed and justice done. But the deeper lesson is colder and quieter and older than any war.
Claus Schilling was not a brute. He was not a sadist of the obvious kind like the camp guards who beat men for sport. He was a learned man, a published man, a man who in another life might have lectured at H Highleberg or consulted at the Pastor Institute. He was clean, he was polite, he kept records. He believed to the end that he was doing important work.
And it was precisely that belief that the worth of the work justified the cost of the bodies that the abstraction of science could erase the humanity of the patient which made him capable of what he did. This is the principle that lifts itself out of this particular story and stands above every story of the modern century.
It is the principle behind Nuremberg. It is the principle behind the Helsinki declaration of 1964. It is the principle behind every consent form a patient signs in every hospital in the free world. It is the principle that informed consent is not paperwork. It is the boundary between medicine and murder.
It is the line that separates the physician from the executioner. And it can be erased quietly, politely in a clean white coat by any society that decides even for a moment that some human beings are material and others are not. George Patton, profane and theatrical and flawed with his ivoryhandled revolvers and his battlefield curses and his cavalryman swagger, understood this with a clarity that startled the men around him. on the morning of May 15th, 1945.
He had no medical training. He had no degree in ethics. He had only a soldier’s eye and a list of nine names and a moral instinct that no education can supply and no education can fully extinguish. He looked at Claus Schilling. He saw a man in a clean white coat. He saw what was underneath it, and he gave it a name.
The boys in block 5 had no graves yet. Their mothers in Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania did not yet know. The war was not yet quite over. But in that oak panled room, with a crucifix on the wall and a bird singing in the courtyard, an American general told an SS doctor what he was, and the doctor, for the first time in his long life, could not answer.
Some confrontations history forgets. Some history is obligated to remember. This was one of them.
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