What Patton Made German Civilians Do When He Found the First Camp…
April 4th, 1945. The Allied armies were racing across Germany. The weather was warm. The trees were blooming. It felt like spring. But as the jeeps of the US Fourth Armored Division drove down a quiet country road near the town of Gotha, they hit a wall. Not a wall of concrete, but a wall of smell. It was a stench so thick, so overpowering that soldiers gagged. It smelled like rotting meat, like burning hair, like hell itself.
General George S. Patton was riding in his command car. He sniffed the air. He thought it was a chemical factory or maybe a glue factory processing dead horses. He called his officers. What is that smell? Find out what it is. A few hours later, a jeep raced back to headquarters. The officer inside was pale, shaking. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He reported to Patton. General, you have to come see this. You won’t believe it.
Patton, always curious, drove to the site. It was a place called Ordruff. It was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the US Army on the Western Front. What Patton saw inside those gates changed him forever. The man known as Old Blood and Guts, the man who loved war, the man who had seen thousands of dead bodies on the battlefield, walked behind a shed and physically vomited. But after the sickness came the rage. A cold, terrifying rage.
He didn’t just want to liberate the prisoners. He wanted justice. He looked at the clean, tidy town nearby. He looked at the German civilians looking out of their windows, pretending nothing was happening. And he gave an order that made history. Round them up. Bring the mayor. Bring his wife. Bring the baker. Bring the butcher. They say they didn’t know. Well, they are going to know now. This is the story of the liberation of Ordruff. The day George Patton forced a German town to walk through hell at gunpoint.
and the tragic shocking suicide that Walking Through Hell: Eisenhower & Patton followed. To understand Patton’s rage, we have to see what he saw. Ordruff wasn’t a massive death camp like Awitz. It was a sub camp of Buginvald, but it was a horror show. When the American tanks of the fourth armored division rolled up to the barbed wire fences, the SSRs had already fled. But before they ran, they tried to clean up the evidence. They machine gunned the prisoners who were too sick to walk.
They piled the bodies in a shed. They covered them with quick lime to dissolve the flesh. But they ran out of time. When the American soldiers entered the gate, they were greeted by walking skeletons, men in striped pajamas, weighing 60 or 70 lb. Their eyes were huge in their sunken faces. The prisoners didn’t cheer. They were too weak. They just touched the American tanks, weeping, touching the white stars on the armor to make sure they were real.
General Walton Walker, one of Patton’s toughest commanders, called Patton. General, come immediately. Patton arrived with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight Eisenhower. These were the three most powerful men in the American army. They had sent millions of men to die. They thought they were hardened warriors. They were wrong. Patton walked through the gates. His face was grim. He carried his riding crop. His helmet was polished. He looked like a conqueror. But as he walked deeper into the camp, his posture changed.
He saw the Abel plots, the roll call square. There were bodies stacked like cordwood. 20, 30, 40. Naked, starved, shot in the back of the neck. Patton walked up to one of the piles, he stared at it. My god. A survivor, a skeleton of a man, crawled up to Patton. He tried to kiss Patton’s boots. Patton stepped back gently. He helped the man stand up. He had tears in his eyes. Then they found the torture shed. Inside Patton’s Rage: “They Knew.” there was a whipping block.
The wood was stained dark with old blood. There were hooks on the wall where men were hung by their necks until they suffocated. The camp guide, a prisoner who spoke English, explained how the SS guards would beat men to death for fun. Eisenhower’s face went white. He looked like a statue. Bradley was silent. He couldn’t speak. But Patton, Patton was vibrating with anger. He walked to the back of the shed. His aids saw his shoulders heaving. The toughest general in the world was sick to his stomach.
When he came back, his voice was different. It wasn’t the voice of a general. It was the voice of a prosecutor. He turned to a young American MP, military police. Did the people in the town know about this? The MP replied, “They say they didn’t, General. They say they thought it was a prison for criminals.” Patton laughed. A dark, bitter laugh. They didn’t know. The smell alone covers the whole county. They knew. Patton didn’t wait for Eisenhower’s permission.
He took charge. He called the Provost Marshall, the chief of police for the army. He pointed his writing crop toward the town of Ordruff. It was a beautiful medieval German town. Clean streets, flower boxes in the windows, just 2 miles away from the pile of corpses. Patton issues his order. Go into that town, find the Burgermeister, the mayor, find his wife, find every leading citizen, the bankers, the doctors, and bring them here. The MP asked, “Sir, what if they refuse?” Patton touched the ivory handle of his revolver.
“They won’t refuse. Use trucks. Use bayonets if you have to, but every single one of them is going to tour this camp. today. It was a form of punishment that wasn’t in any rulebook. It was forced witnessing. Patton wanted to destroy their denial. He wanted to rub their noses in the The Order: Round Up the Civilians filth they had supported. The next morning, the trucks arrived at the camp gates. The citizens of Ordruff climbed out. They were dressed in their Sunday best.
Men in suits and ties, women in dresses and coats. They looked annoyed. They looked offended. Some were complaining about the smell. Some were holding handkerchiefs to their noses. They still acted arrogant. They were Germans. They were the master race. Why were they being dragged to this dirty place? Patton ordered the MPs to form a line. March them through, he said. Don’t let them look away. If they close their eyes, poke them with a rifle butt. Make them look.
The tour began. The civilians were led to the first pile of bodies. They stopped. The chatting stopped. The complaining stopped. There was only the sound of the wind and the buzzing of flies. They stared at the emaciated corpses, bodies that looked like sticks covered in parchment paper. Some of the civilians gasped. One woman fainted, but the MPs pushed them forward. Vita, move. They were led to the whipping block. They were led to the ovens where bodies were burned.
They were forced to look into the open eyes of the dead. Patton watched them like a hawk. He wanted to see their reaction. At first they looked shocked. Then they looked horrified. But then Patton noticed something else. Guilt. Some of the men started crying. Some of the women were hysterical. But some just looked down at their shoes. They knew. Deep down they had always known. They just chose not to look. Patton walked up to the mayor of Ordruff.
The mayor was trembling. Patton looked him in the eye. You knew, didn’t you? The mayor didn’t answer. He just shook his head, tears streaming down his face. The Parade of Shame (Forced Tour) Patton turned to his staff. See, they are not the master race. They are just people who lost their souls. The tour lasted for 2 hours. By the end of it, the citizens of Ordrif were broken. Their arrogance was gone. They were covered in the dust of the camp.
The smell of death was stuck in their clothes. They were loaded back onto the trucks. Silent, they drove back to their clean houses with the flower boxes. Patton felt satisfied. He had delivered justice. He wrote to his wife that night. I have never felt so angry, but I believe we taught them a lesson they will never forget. But the lesson was too strong for some. The mayor of Ordruff and his wife went home. They entered their house.
They sat down in their living room. Maybe they talked about what they saw. Maybe they sat in silence. We don’t know what they said, but we know what they did. The next morning, American soldiers went to the mayor’s house to give him further orders. They knocked on the door. No answer. They knocked again. They kicked the door open. Inside, they found the mayor and his wife dead. They had slit their own wrists. Beside them was a note.
It was written in German. It didn’t say much, but it said enough. We cannot live with this shame. When Patton was told about the suicide, he didn’t show pity. He nodded grimly. Well, that is two less Nazis we have to feed. It sounds cruel, but Patton had seen the bodies of the innocent. He had no tears left for the guilty. The liberation of Ordruff didn’t just affect Patton. It changed Dwight Eisenhower forever. Eisenhower was usually a calm man, but after seeing Ordruff, he became a crusader.
He realized that people in the future might deny this happened. He realized that people would say it was propaganda. So Eisenhower issued a command to every unit nearby. Bring cameras. Bring reporters. Photograph everything. Film everything. He famously said, “Get it all on record now because the day will come when some son of a [ __ ] will say this never happened.” He ordered every American soldier in the area, thousands of them, to tour the camp. He wanted his boys to know why they were fighting, why their friends had died.
Before Ordruff, many American soldiers thought the war was just about politics, territory, maps. After Ordroof, they knew it was about good versus evil. One young GI wrote in his diary, “I will never feel sorry for a German again, I know what we are fighting for now. We are fighting monsters.” The Mayor’s Suicide Or was small compared to camps like Bukinwalt or Dah, but it was the first. It was the camp that woke the world up. Because of Patton’s anger and his order to march the civilians through the gates, the veil of secrecy was ripped away.
The German people could no longer say vhaban. We didn’t know. Patton made sure they knew. This event hardened the American attitude toward Germany. The friendly occupation ended. The dennazification began. Patton, often criticized for being too soft on former Nazis later in the war, was actually the one who exposed their crimes most brutally in the beginning. George S. Patton is remembered for his tanks, for his ivory pistols, for his speeches about blood and guts. But on that sunny day in April 1945, he wasn’t a general.
He was a human being confronted with pure evil. And his response wasn’t to look away. His response was to grab the evil by the neck and force the world to look at it. The mayor of Ordroof couldn’t live with what he saw. But thanks to Patton, the world will never be able to forget it. Patton was right. Today, there are still people who deny these things happened. Eisenhower warned us about them. By watching this video, you are keeping the truth alive.
