A German POW Asked Patton If He Was “the Olympian From Stockholm” — Patton Sat Down Beside Him 

The voice came from the middle of the prisoner group in accented English that was clear enough to carry across the processing yard. Are you the Olympian from Stockholm? Patton stopped walking. His aid stopped. The guards in the near vicinity stopped because when General George S. Patton stopped, the air around him stopped too, and you stopped with it.

 He turned toward the voice. It belonged to a German prisoner, one of several dozen being processed through a forward holding area somewhere in France in the winter of 1944. The man was young, in his late 20s, dirty and cold in the way all prisoners were cold, his uniform the gray green of the vermach.

 He was looking at Patton with the expression of someone who has asked a question they were not entirely sure they had the right to ask and who is now waiting to see what the asking of it cost them. Nobody around them knew what to do with the silence. Patton looked at the prisoner for a long moment. Then he crossed the distance between them and sat down.

What happened in the next several minutes? What a three-star general and a German prisoner of war found to talk about on a cold day in France in the last winter of the war is the piece of this story that takes a second to fully appreciate because the word the prisoner had used was not general. It was not commander.

It was Olympian. And that word reached something in pattern that the war had not reached in years. If you want more untold stories from World War II, hit that subscribe button. Let me back up a second because for this story to land the way it should, you need to know who George Patton was in the summer of 1912, before the war that made him famous and before the career that made him a legend when he was a 26-year-old cavalry officer who had qualified to represent the United States in the first ever Olympic modern

pentathlon in Stockholm, Sweden. The modern pentathlon was new to the Olympic program in 1912. It was in theory the ultimate soldiers athletic test. Five disciplines that would represent the skills a military officer might need on campaign. Pistol shooting, fencing, swimming 300 m, riding an unfamiliar horse over a jumping course, and a 4 kmter cross-country run.

It had been proposed by Pierre Dubertan himself, who believed the ideal all-around athlete was the soldier and who wanted an Olympic event that would prove it. The nations of the world set their best military men and their finest athletes. Germany sent competitors. France sent competitors. Sweden, the host nation, sent competitors favored to win on their own terrain.

 George Patton, 26 years old, West Point graduate, cavalryman, competitive fencer and writer since his youth, arrived in Stockholm to prove something he had been trying to prove about himself since he was old enough to understand that he wanted to prove it, that he was the best. He was not, but he was extraordinarily close.

 The fencing portion he took third place. The cross-country run covering rough terrain in Swedish summer heat. He pushed through with a ferocity that reportedly alarmed the men watching. The riding an unfamiliar horse, a jumping course, the kind of problem a cavalry officer was supposed to eat for breakfast.

 He handled with the precision of someone who had been on horseback since childhood. In swimming and running, he competed at a level that kept him in overall contention. The shooting was where it went wrong, and the shooting was where it went wrong in a way that Patton spent years afterward arguing about. In the target competition, Patton fired his pistol with accuracy he was certain placed him in the upper rankings.

 The scoring did not reflect this. Some holes in his target were being logged as misses, clean, centered holes through the paper that the judges had apparently interpreted as gaps that existed before the target went up, or as evidence that a bullet had passed through a previous hole, rather than as the product of accurate marksmanship.

Patton’s argument, which he made loudly and in detail, and which he was still making decades later whenever the subject came up, was that his grouping was simply too tight. that a marksman of his caliber put bullets through the same hole and that the judges could not distinguish a second clean hit on a centered group from an unperforated section of target.

 Whether he was right is a question the historical record has not fully resolved. What the historical record does show is that Patton finished fifth overall in the first Olympic modern pentathlon. not first, not on the podium, fifth in the world in the event designed to measure the complete soldier athlete. For a man with Patton’s competitive drive and his absolute conviction in his own ability, fifth was not a number he was going to be comfortable with for the rest of his life.

 He carried Stockholm with him. He carried it the way competitive men carry the moments when they were closest to the thing they were certain they deserved and did not quite get. He had fenced on Olympic ground. He had ridden on Olympic ground. He had run through the Swedish countryside until his body told him to stop, and he had not stopped.

 He had competed alongside men from Germany and France and Britain and Sweden, men who would in two years be on opposite sides of the worst war the world had seen to that point. And in that summer of 1912, none of that had been the relevant fact about any of them. The relevant fact was where you placed and what you could do. Now, here’s the thing.

 The man who walked into a French P processing yard in December of 1944 had not thought about Stockholm in the context of the war. The war had its own complete vocabulary that left very little room for athletic competitions from 32 years before. The men around Patton in 1944 knew him as a general. They knew the ivory handled pistols and the voice and the operational record.

 They did not know the 26-year-old who had argued with Olympic judges about bullet holes in paper targets at a competition in Sweden. The German prisoner knew his name was France Ber, 29 years old from Munich. the son of a father named Otto who had worked in German sport administration between the wars and who kept in a study on the second floor of a Munich house the records and periodicals and programs of Olympic competitions going back to the early part of the century.

Burger had grown up in those documents the way other children grew up in novels. He knew the Stockholm results the way a certain kind of person knows things, not because they were required to know them, but because the knowing was a form of respect for what those competitions represented. He had been a competitive fencer at the university level before the war.

 Not world class, but serious, the kind of competitor who understood what it cost to be good at something, and who measured excellence in others the way he measured it in himself. He had been captured 3 days before the processing yard. He was cold and had not eaten adequately and was in the specific exhaustion of a man who has been a soldier long enough that the exhaustion has become structural.

And when the American general moved through the compound, Burgerer looked up from the ground, and something in the bearing of the man, the way he carried himself, some combination of size and posture, and a quality of physical authority, placed a memory, and Burger asked a question before he had finished deciding whether to ask it.

 Picture it, the processing yard, December 1944. the cold of the French winter, the gray of the compounds, the guards and the prisoners, and the administrative machinery of a POW holding area. A general walking through on inspection, a prisoner looking up from the ground, a question asked in accented English that stopped everything within earshot.

Here’s what doesn’t make it into the history books. What the question did to Patton when it landed. The accounts that survive this moment are consistent in their shape. Patton did not answer immediately. He stood for a moment looking at the prisoner who had spoken, and something in his face, not softening exactly, but changing in a way distinct from anything the men around him had seen in a command context indicated that the question had reached something.

 He crossed the distance to where Burger was sitting. He sat down. Stay with me because the conversation that followed is the part that is hardest to reconstruct and most worth the attempt. What Patton confirmed in response to the question was simply yes, he was the Olympian from Stockholm. Fifth place, Modern Pentathlon, 1912.

And then because it was Patton and because Patton did not discuss his athletic record without eventually discussing the shooting, he mentioned the dispute about the target scoring the holes that should have been counted and weren’t. Burger, according to the accounts, already knew about this. He had read it in his father’s collection.

He had read it and as a young man who cared about sport, had found it unjust. And this is where it gets complicated. in the best possible way. Because what Burger offered Patton in that moment, what a German prisoner in a French compound offered the commanding general of the Third Army was the specific thing that Patton had not received in Stockholm in 1912 and had been arguing about ever since.

 the recognition that he was right, that the grouping was too tight, that the judges had made an error, that the man sitting next to him in the compound should have placed higher than fifth. Think about that for a second. A German prisoner in a French P compound in December 1944, telling Patton that he had been robbed at the 1912 Olympics.

 The accounts describe the conversation as lasting somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. They described two men seated beside each other in the compound, the aid at a respectful distance, the guards who had no framework for what they were watching. They described the conversation moving through Stockholm, the events, the terrain of the cross-country run, the quality of the fencing bouts, the specific details of a competition held in a world that no longer existed in the form it had existed in then.

Two men for whom sport had been the most important thing at one point in their lives. talking about Stockholm 1912 across a line that everything in the context of December 1944 insisted should not be crossable. See, what most folks don’t realize is the specific nature of what the question had done.

 Burger had not recognized Patton, the general. He had recognized Patton, the athlete, had reached back past the rank and the campaigns and the reputation of the Third Army and the ivory-handled pistols to something that existed before all of it. To a 26-year-old cavalry officer who had stood on an Olympic field in Sweden in 1912 and given everything he had to five events and finished fifth.

 That was who Burger had spoken to, not the commanding general, the man. and Patton had sat down. France Berger, 29 years old, Munich, Bavaria. He had grown up on a residential street where the house smelled of paper and sport history, the study on the second floor full of the records his father had spent a career collecting.

 He had fenced at the university level with a specific discipline of someone who practiced something because it is worth practicing, not because it is required. He had a mother named Elsa in Munich and a sister named Hilda who had married before the war and he did not know what he would find when he returned to Munich because the bombing had been significant and the information that reached prisoners was partial.

 He was planning in the way prisoners plan without confidence, but because planning keeps the afterward real to find work in sport or physical education, because it was the part of the world he understood best, and because his father had taught him that sport and its administration were legitimate and serious work. He had looked up from the ground in a French compound in December 1944 and seen something in a general’s bearing that placed a name from a record he had read in his father’s study and he had asked the question and the general

had sat down. The compound went back to its business when Patton stood. The aid fell in beside him. The guards returned to the positions that made sense for guards. The prisoners returned to the waiting that defined their days. Burgers remained where he was sitting, in the same cold and the same exhaustion as before, because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.

 But something had changed in the 15 minutes just passed, and the men who had witnessed it from the periphery talked about it later, in the way people talk about moments that do not fit neatly into the categories they are used to. What Burger had given Patton was something the war had not produced and could not produce.

 He had spoken to the 26-year-old who had run through Swedish countryside in 1912 and placed fifth and argued about bullet holes and carried it ever since. He had said, “I know who you are. Not the general, not the campaign, the athlete who was there in Stockholm in the world before this one.” Patton had sat down because that was the only answer that made sense.

 When someone reaches past everything you have become and speaks to who you were at the start, you do not nod and continue the inspection. Was Patton right to sit down beside that German prisoner in a French compound and spend those minutes talking about Stockholm 1912? Some would say no. That a commanding general conducting a P review has no business in personal conversation with an enemy prisoner.

 that the moment, however human, was a confusion of categories that the conduct of a war could not absorb. Others would say exactly the opposite, that what Patton did was the most precisely correct thing a commanding general could do in the presence of a man who had just demonstrated that the people on opposite sides of a war share a world, had always shared a world, and that the laws requiring the decent treatment of prisoners rest on exactly that recognition.

that the man on the other side of the wire is a man and that sometimes it takes a question about an Olympic competition from 32 years ago to make that visible in a way that nothing else can. Let us know in the comments below. And if you want more untold stories from World War II, make sure you subscribe.