“They Are Going to Know Now”: How General Patton Forced a German Town to Walk Through Hell and the Shocking Suicide That Followed

GERMANY, 1945 – The spring of 1945 in Germany was deceptively beautiful. The trees were in bloom, the air was warming, and the end of the war felt imminent. The soldiers of the U.S. 4th Armored Division were racing across the countryside, their spirits high.

But on April 4th, near the quiet, picturesque town of Ohrdruf, they hit a wall.

It wasn’t a defensive line of Panzers or a barricade of rubble. It was a wall of smell. It was a stench so thick, so cloying and violent, that seasoned combat veterans gagged in their jeeps. It smelled like rotting meat, burning hair, and death itself.

General George S. Patton, the legendary commander known as “Old Blood and Guts,” was riding in his command car when the odor hit him. He initially thought it was a chemical plant or a glue factory processing dead horses. He ordered an officer to investigate.

Hours later, the jeep returned. The officer inside was pale, his hands shaking. He looked like a man who had seen the devil. “General,” he reported, his voice trembling, “you have to come see this. You won’t believe it.”

Patton, a man who had spent his life studying war and leading men into battle, thought he had seen everything. He was wrong.

He drove to the site. It was Ohrdruf—a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by the U.S. Army on the Western Front. What Patton found inside those gates would not only change him forever but would lead to one of the most dramatic and controversial acts of justice in the European Theater.

The Horror Behind the Wire

Ohrdruf was not a massive extermination factory like Auschwitz, but it was a slaughterhouse nonetheless. As the American tanks approached, the SS guards fled, but not before trying to hide their crimes. They had machine-gunned prisoners too sick to walk and piled the bodies in a shed, covering them with quicklime to dissolve the flesh.

But they ran out of time.

When Patton walked through the gates, he was greeted by the living dead. Walking skeletons in striped pajamas, men weighing 60 or 70 pounds, stared at the Americans with huge, sunken eyes. They were too weak to cheer. They simply reached out to touch the white stars on the tanks, weeping, needing to verify that their salvation was real.

Patton toured the camp with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. These were the three most powerful men in the American military, responsible for the deaths of thousands of enemy soldiers. They considered themselves hardened warriors.

But Ohrdruf broke them.

Patton, immaculate in his polished helmet and carrying his trademark riding crop, walked to the roll-call square. He saw bodies stacked like cordwood—naked, starved, shot in the back of the neck. He stared at a pile of human remains and whispered, “My God.”

A survivor crawled toward him, trying to kiss his boots. Patton, visibly moved, stepped back and gently helped the man to his feet. Tears welled in the General’s eyes.

Then they found the torture shed. Inside was a whipping block stained dark with old blood and hooks on the walls where men were hung until they suffocated. A prisoner who acted as a guide explained the sadism of the SS guards.

Eisenhower turned pale, looking like a statue. Bradley was rendered speechless. But Patton’s reaction was visceral. He walked behind a shed and vomited. The toughest general in the world was physically sickened by the cruelty he witnessed.

“They Are Going to Know Now”

When Patton returned from behind the shed, the sickness was gone. It was replaced by a cold, terrifying rage. He wasn’t just a general anymore; he was a prosecutor, a judge, and an avenger.

He turned to a young Military Police officer. “Did the people in the town know about this?” he demanded.

“They say they didn’t, General,” the MP replied. “They say they thought it was a prison for criminals.”

Patton laughed—a dark, bitter sound. “They didn’t know? The smell alone covers the whole county. They knew.”

He looked toward the town of Ohrdruf, just two miles away. It was a picture-perfect medieval German town with clean streets and flower boxes in the windows. The contrast between the tidy homes and the hellhole down the road was infuriating.

Patton didn’t wait for permission. He issued an order that would go down in history.

“Go into that town,” he commanded the Provost Marshal. “Find the Burgermeister (Mayor). Find his wife. Find every leading citizen—the bankers, the doctors, the bakers. And bring them here.”

“Sir, what if they refuse?” the MP asked.

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 punishment not found in any military handbook. It was forced witnessing. Patton wanted to shatter their denial. He wanted to rub their noses in the filth they had tacitly supported.

The Tour of Hell

The next morning, Army trucks rumbled into the camp. The citizens of Ohrdruf climbed out, dressed in their Sunday best. Men wore suits and ties; women wore dresses and coats. They looked annoyed. Some held handkerchiefs to their noses, complaining about the smell. They acted affronted, clinging to the arrogance of 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. The chatting stopped. The complaining ceased. The only sound was the wind and the buzzing of flies. They stared at the emaciated corpses—bodies that looked like sticks covered in parchment paper.

One woman fainted. The MPs pushed the group forward. Weiter. Move.

They were led to the whipping block. They were led to the makeshift ovens. They were forced to look into the open, staring eyes of the dead.

Patton watched them like a hawk. He saw the shock turn to horror, and then, crucially, to guilt. Some men began to weep. Women became hysterical. Others simply looked down at their shoes, unable to meet the gaze of the American soldiers.

Deep down, they had always known. They had just chosen not to look.

Patton walked up to the Mayor of Ohrdruf. The man 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.

Turning to his staff, Patton remarked, “See? They are not the Master Race. They are just people who lost their souls.”

The Mayor’s Verdict

The tour lasted two hours. By the end, the citizens of Ohrdruf were broken. Their arrogance had evaporated. Covered in the dust of the camp, with the smell of death clinging to their fine clothes, they were loaded back onto the trucks in silence. They drove back to their clean houses with the flower boxes.

Patton felt satisfied. 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.”

For some, the lesson was too strong.

The Mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife returned to their home. We don’t know what they said to each other that night. Maybe they argued. Maybe they sat in stunned silence. But we know what they did.

The next morning, American soldiers went to the Mayor’s house to issue further orders. They knocked. No answer. They knocked again. Finally, 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, written in German. It was brief but devastating: “We cannot live with this shame.”

When told of the suicide, Patton didn’t offer pity. He nodded grimly. “Well,” he reportedly said, “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.

“Get It All on Record”

The liberation of Ohrdruf did more than just punish a local town. It changed the course of history. General Eisenhower, usually a calm and measured leader, was transformed into a crusader. He realized that the horror he saw was so extreme that future generations might not believe it.

“Get it all on record now,” Eisenhower famously ordered. “Because the day will come when some son of a bitch will say this never happened.”

He ordered every unit nearby to bring cameras. He ordered thousands of American soldiers to tour the camp, just as Patton had ordered the civilians. He wanted his troops to know exactly why they were fighting.

Before Ohrdruf, many GIs thought the war was about maps and territory. After Ohrdruf, they knew they were fighting monsters.

“I will never feel sorry for a German again,” one young soldier wrote in his diary. “I know what we are fighting for now.”

The Legacy of Anger

George S. Patton is often remembered for his tanks, his ivory-handled pistols, and his bombastic speeches. But on that sunny day in April 1945, he wasn’t just a general. He was a human being confronted with pure, unadulterated evil.

His response wasn’t to look away or leave it to the politicians. His response was to grab the evil by the neck and force the world to look at it.

The Mayor of Ohrdruf couldn’t live with what he saw. But thanks to Patton’s rage and Eisenhower’s foresight, the world was forced to remember. The photos taken that day, the films shot by Army cameramen, and the testimony of the soldiers who gagged on the “wall of smell” became the undeniable proof of the Holocaust.

Patton made sure the excuse “we didn’t know” would never work again. He forced the truth into the light, even if he had to do it at gunpoint.