“German POWs Refused to Work — Patton Stopped Their Rations Until They Did”

April 1945, Bavaria. A prisoner of war processing facility outside the town of Straubing was holding approximately 1,100 German soldiers captured during the Third Army’s advance through southern Germany. The facility had been operational for 2 weeks. Processing had gone smoothly until the second Monday of operations when the prisoner work details, maintenance, latrine clearing, perimeter cleanup were assembled and the prisoners assigned to them refused to move.

Not all of them. The refusal was organized which made it considerably more significant than simple insubordination. A group of former NCOs among the prisoner population had circulated the position during the previous night that performing labor under American military direction constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions provisions on prisoner treatment and that they were within their rights to decline.

The American officer running the facility, a captain named Robert Denning, checked the relevant portions of the convention. The prisoners were technically correct on some points and technically incorrect on others, depending on how narrowly you read the relevant articles. Denning wrote up the situation and requested guidance from the level above him.

The request went up the chain. It reached Patton. He read the summary, set it down, and asked one question. Were the prisoners currently receiving full rations? The answer was yes. Patton said that was the first thing that needed to change. Before we get into what happened next, if you want more untold stories from World War II, hit that subscribe button.

Patton’s instruction to Denning was specific and its reasoning was explicit. Prisoners who refused work assignment would receive reduced rations, not eliminated entirely, which would have violated the convention clearly, but reduced to the minimum caloric level that the convention specified for non-working prisoners, which was a lower standard than what the facility had been providing to all prisoners regardless of their work status.

The reduction would apply to each prisoner individually and would remain in effect for that prisoner until he agreed to work and did work. The instruction was to be explained to the prisoners in German through the facility’s interpreter before the reduction took effect, so that no one could subsequently claim they had not understood what the arrangement was or on what basis it operated.

Robert Denning had been managing the Strobing facility since its establishment 2 weeks earlier, having been assigned to prisoner processing after his previous posting in logistics had ended when the unit he was attached to was reassigned. He was 29 years old, had a law degree from the University of Ohio that he had completed before his induction, and had been applying a version of that training throughout his time in prisoner processing, reading the relevant convention articles carefully and trying to operate the facility in a way that

was both legally defensible and practically functional. The work refusal was the first situation he had encountered that he had not been able to resolve using his own judgment and the guidance available to him at his level, which was why he had sent it up the chain rather than attempting to handle it himself.

He relayed Patton’s instruction to the facility through the interpreter, a private named Horst Weiss who had grown up in Germany and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and whose German was native rather than learned. Weiss translated the instruction to the prisoner NCOs who had organized the refusal, reading it in the precise terms Denning had written out to ensure nothing was lost or softened in translation.

The NCOs who had organized the refusal received it, conferred among themselves for approximately 20 minutes, and maintained their position. The ration reduction went into effect that afternoon. The first prisoners began agreeing to work by the evening of the second day. By the end of the third day, the refusal had collapsed entirely.

Every prisoner who had declined work assignment on Monday morning had returned to the work rotation by Thursday afternoon, including the NCOs who had organized the original position. None of them offered any explanation for the change of position to the guards or to Denning directly. They simply presented themselves for work assignment when the morning detail was assembled and completed their assigned tasks without incident.

Denning’s report to third Army headquarters, submitted at the end of the week, noted that the resolution had required no use of force, no threats of consequence beyond the ration reduction itself, and no escalation of any kind beyond what Patton had specified in his original instruction. The report described the outcome as a complete resolution with full return to the normal work rotation, attributed the resolution to the instruction received from third Army, and made no recommendation regarding any further action.

Patton received a one-paragraph summary of the report. He did not respond to it in writing. His aide noted in a brief administrative log entry that the strafing situation had been resolved and that no further action was required. The legal question that Denning had raised in his original request, whether the convention permitted the ration reduction that Patton had ordered, was examined separately by a third Army legal officer named Captain Howard Ellis, who reviewed the relevant articles several days after the resolution, and wrote a brief memorandum

for the file. Ellis’s conclusion addressed the specific provision the prisoner NCOs had invoked. The relevant convention articles drew a distinction between prisoner labor on projects of direct military necessity, which prisoners could legitimately decline on the grounds that such labor constituted a direct contribution to the war effort of the detaining power, and general camp maintenance and sanitation work, which fell under a different set of provisions that did not extend the same protection.

The latrine clearing, perimeter cleanup, and facility maintenance that the prisoners had been assigned constituted the second category rather than the first. The NCOs who had organized the refusal had invoked the wrong article. Their reading of the convention was technically informed in the sense that they had clearly studied the relevant sections, but practically unsound, in the sense that the section they had cited did not apply to the work they had been asked to do.

Ellis noted in his memorandum that the ration reduction patent had ordered was similarly grounded in a convention provision the prisoners had apparently failed to account for, the article distinguishing ration levels for working and non-working prisoners, and that Patton’s instruction had therefore been legally defensible under the same framework the prisoners had invoked to justify their refusal.

The memo concluded that no convention violation had occurred on either side, that the prisoners had been wrong about their legal standing, and that the resolution was consistent with the treaty obligations of the detaining power. The memo was placed in the facility’s administrative file. It was not distributed further or cited in any subsequent guidance document.

Robert Dennings served out the remainder of the war at the Straubing facility without further incidents of similar significance. He was discharged in the summer of 1945, returned to Ohio, and practiced civil law for 30 years. He wrote about the incident once in a 1968 article for a legal journal focused on international humanitarian law, using it as an illustration of the gap between the letter of treaty provisions and the practical conditions under which they were designed to apply.

He noted that the prisoners who had organized the refusal had been operating with a technically literate but contextually incomplete reading of the convention, and that the resolution of the situation had depended on both sides eventually working from the same text rather than from different sections of it. The NCOs who had organized the refusal were a group of seven men, all former Wehrmacht or SS non-commissioned officers, ranging in age from 24 to 41.

The oldest among them, a former Feldwebel named Ernst Baumann, who had served on the Eastern Front for 3 years before being captured in Bavaria, had been the primary author of the legal interpretation that had circulated among the prisoner population on the Sunday night before the Monday refusal. Baumann had read the relevant convention articles during a period of several days before the refusal working from a copy of the German language text that had been made available to prisoners at the facility as part of standard processing.

He had found the article he believed applied, discussed it with the other NCOs, and concluded that the legal position was sound enough to stake on. It was not a frivolous position. The article Baumann had cited was genuinely relevant to the question of prisoner labor and the language was ambiguous enough in its German rendering that a careful reading in good faith could produce the interpretation he had offered.

What Baumann had not done was read the adjacent articles that qualified the one he had found which specified the distinction between the different categories of prisoner labor and establish the different ration standards that applied to each. The position he had constructed was legally informed in the narrow sense of having identified a real provision of the convention and legally unsound in the broader sense of having read it in isolation from the framework that gave it its specific meaning.

This was the kind of error that a lawyer would catch immediately and that a soldier reading a legal document without legal training might not. Denning, who had the legal training, had recognized the ambiguity when he read the prisoners position and had not been confident enough in his own interpretation to act unilaterally, which was why he had sent the question up the chain.

Patton, who did not have legal training in the formal sense, had recognized something different. Not the legal answer, but the practical one, which was that prisoners who were refusing to work while receiving the same rations as prisoners who were working had been given an arrangement that made refusal costless and that a costless refusal would continue indefinitely regardless of what the convention said.

The ration reduction made the refusal costly. The legal framework that Ellis’s memo subsequently identified made it legitimate. The combination was what ended the situation in 3 days rather than 3 weeks or longer. Baumann was among the prisoners who returned to work on Thursday. He was transferred with the rest of the facility population to a longer-term holding facility in June 1945, was processed through the standard denazification procedures, and was released in 1946.

There is no record of what he made of the legal outcome of the situation he had organized, or whether he ever read the Ellis memo that explained why his reading of the convention had been wrong. The memo was in the administrative file of a facility that was dismantled after the transfer, and its contents were not communicated to the prisoner population.

The 1,100 prisoners at the Straubing facility were processed and transferred in the weeks following Germany’s surrender in May 1945. The work refusal of the second Monday was not recorded in any formal document as a significant disciplinary incident, a riot, or a breakdown in facility operations. It was logged as a resolved administrative matter and filed accordingly.

It was resolved before it became anything larger than that. Private Horst Vice, the interpreter who had translated Patton’s instruction to the prisoners, and who had been the primary communication channel between the facility administration and the prisoner population throughout the 2 weeks of operations, later described the Monday morning refusal in a brief memoir he wrote in the 1970s about his wartime service.

He wrote that the organized quality of the refusal had been immediately apparent to him when the work details were assembled, not because the prisoners who declined were particularly aggressive or vocal, but because the declination was coordinated. The same words, delivered in the same tone, from prisoners who had clearly agreed in advance on what they would say and how they would say it.

He wrote that he had found this more unsettling than a disorganized refusal would have been because organization indicated a decision that had been thought through rather than an impulse that might resolve on its own. He also wrote that when he had translated Patton’s instruction back to Bauman and the other NCOs, he had read it exactly as Denning had written it, without elaboration or softening, and that the period of approximately 20 minutes during which the NCOs conferred after hearing the instruction had been, from where he was

standing, entirely silent. He wrote that he had not been able to tell from the silence whether they were considering changing their position or consolidating it, and that the answer had not become clear until they informed him they were maintaining the refusal, at which point the ration reduction had gone into effect, and the question of what the silence had meant became academic.

What do you think? Was Patton’s response, reducing rations rather than using force, the right approach? Or did it set a precedent that complicated the treatment of prisoners going forward? Let us know in the comments below, and if you want more untold stories from World War II, make sure you subscribe.

“German POWs Refused to Work — Patton Stopped Their Rations Until They Did”

April 1945, Bavaria. A prisoner of war processing facility outside the town of Straubing was holding approximately 1,100 German soldiers captured during the Third Army’s advance through southern Germany. The facility had been operational for 2 weeks. Processing had gone smoothly until the second Monday of operations when the prisoner work details, maintenance, latrine clearing, perimeter cleanup were assembled and the prisoners assigned to them refused to move.

Not all of them. The refusal was organized which made it considerably more significant than simple insubordination. A group of former NCOs among the prisoner population had circulated the position during the previous night that performing labor under American military direction constituted a violation of the Geneva Conventions provisions on prisoner treatment and that they were within their rights to decline.

The American officer running the facility, a captain named Robert Denning, checked the relevant portions of the convention. The prisoners were technically correct on some points and technically incorrect on others, depending on how narrowly you read the relevant articles. Denning wrote up the situation and requested guidance from the level above him.

The request went up the chain. It reached Patton. He read the summary, set it down, and asked one question. Were the prisoners currently receiving full rations? The answer was yes. Patton said that was the first thing that needed to change. Before we get into what happened next, if you want more untold stories from World War II, hit that subscribe button.

Patton’s instruction to Denning was specific and its reasoning was explicit. Prisoners who refused work assignment would receive reduced rations, not eliminated entirely, which would have violated the convention clearly, but reduced to the minimum caloric level that the convention specified for non-working prisoners, which was a lower standard than what the facility had been providing to all prisoners regardless of their work status.

The reduction would apply to each prisoner individually and would remain in effect for that prisoner until he agreed to work and did work. The instruction was to be explained to the prisoners in German through the facility’s interpreter before the reduction took effect, so that no one could subsequently claim they had not understood what the arrangement was or on what basis it operated.

Robert Denning had been managing the Strobing facility since its establishment 2 weeks earlier, having been assigned to prisoner processing after his previous posting in logistics had ended when the unit he was attached to was reassigned. He was 29 years old, had a law degree from the University of Ohio that he had completed before his induction, and had been applying a version of that training throughout his time in prisoner processing, reading the relevant convention articles carefully and trying to operate the facility in a way that

was both legally defensible and practically functional. The work refusal was the first situation he had encountered that he had not been able to resolve using his own judgment and the guidance available to him at his level, which was why he had sent it up the chain rather than attempting to handle it himself.

He relayed Patton’s instruction to the facility through the interpreter, a private named Horst Weiss who had grown up in Germany and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, and whose German was native rather than learned. Weiss translated the instruction to the prisoner NCOs who had organized the refusal, reading it in the precise terms Denning had written out to ensure nothing was lost or softened in translation.

The NCOs who had organized the refusal received it, conferred among themselves for approximately 20 minutes, and maintained their position. The ration reduction went into effect that afternoon. The first prisoners began agreeing to work by the evening of the second day. By the end of the third day, the refusal had collapsed entirely.

Every prisoner who had declined work assignment on Monday morning had returned to the work rotation by Thursday afternoon, including the NCOs who had organized the original position. None of them offered any explanation for the change of position to the guards or to Denning directly. They simply presented themselves for work assignment when the morning detail was assembled and completed their assigned tasks without incident.

Denning’s report to third Army headquarters, submitted at the end of the week, noted that the resolution had required no use of force, no threats of consequence beyond the ration reduction itself, and no escalation of any kind beyond what Patton had specified in his original instruction. The report described the outcome as a complete resolution with full return to the normal work rotation, attributed the resolution to the instruction received from third Army, and made no recommendation regarding any further action.

Patton received a one-paragraph summary of the report. He did not respond to it in writing. His aide noted in a brief administrative log entry that the strafing situation had been resolved and that no further action was required. The legal question that Denning had raised in his original request, whether the convention permitted the ration reduction that Patton had ordered, was examined separately by a third Army legal officer named Captain Howard Ellis, who reviewed the relevant articles several days after the resolution, and wrote a brief memorandum

for the file. Ellis’s conclusion addressed the specific provision the prisoner NCOs had invoked. The relevant convention articles drew a distinction between prisoner labor on projects of direct military necessity, which prisoners could legitimately decline on the grounds that such labor constituted a direct contribution to the war effort of the detaining power, and general camp maintenance and sanitation work, which fell under a different set of provisions that did not extend the same protection.

The latrine clearing, perimeter cleanup, and facility maintenance that the prisoners had been assigned constituted the second category rather than the first. The NCOs who had organized the refusal had invoked the wrong article. Their reading of the convention was technically informed in the sense that they had clearly studied the relevant sections, but practically unsound, in the sense that the section they had cited did not apply to the work they had been asked to do.

Ellis noted in his memorandum that the ration reduction patent had ordered was similarly grounded in a convention provision the prisoners had apparently failed to account for, the article distinguishing ration levels for working and non-working prisoners, and that Patton’s instruction had therefore been legally defensible under the same framework the prisoners had invoked to justify their refusal.

The memo concluded that no convention violation had occurred on either side, that the prisoners had been wrong about their legal standing, and that the resolution was consistent with the treaty obligations of the detaining power. The memo was placed in the facility’s administrative file. It was not distributed further or cited in any subsequent guidance document.

Robert Dennings served out the remainder of the war at the Straubing facility without further incidents of similar significance. He was discharged in the summer of 1945, returned to Ohio, and practiced civil law for 30 years. He wrote about the incident once in a 1968 article for a legal journal focused on international humanitarian law, using it as an illustration of the gap between the letter of treaty provisions and the practical conditions under which they were designed to apply.

He noted that the prisoners who had organized the refusal had been operating with a technically literate but contextually incomplete reading of the convention, and that the resolution of the situation had depended on both sides eventually working from the same text rather than from different sections of it. The NCOs who had organized the refusal were a group of seven men, all former Wehrmacht or SS non-commissioned officers, ranging in age from 24 to 41.

The oldest among them, a former Feldwebel named Ernst Baumann, who had served on the Eastern Front for 3 years before being captured in Bavaria, had been the primary author of the legal interpretation that had circulated among the prisoner population on the Sunday night before the Monday refusal. Baumann had read the relevant convention articles during a period of several days before the refusal working from a copy of the German language text that had been made available to prisoners at the facility as part of standard processing.

He had found the article he believed applied, discussed it with the other NCOs, and concluded that the legal position was sound enough to stake on. It was not a frivolous position. The article Baumann had cited was genuinely relevant to the question of prisoner labor and the language was ambiguous enough in its German rendering that a careful reading in good faith could produce the interpretation he had offered.

What Baumann had not done was read the adjacent articles that qualified the one he had found which specified the distinction between the different categories of prisoner labor and establish the different ration standards that applied to each. The position he had constructed was legally informed in the narrow sense of having identified a real provision of the convention and legally unsound in the broader sense of having read it in isolation from the framework that gave it its specific meaning.

This was the kind of error that a lawyer would catch immediately and that a soldier reading a legal document without legal training might not. Denning, who had the legal training, had recognized the ambiguity when he read the prisoners position and had not been confident enough in his own interpretation to act unilaterally, which was why he had sent the question up the chain.

Patton, who did not have legal training in the formal sense, had recognized something different. Not the legal answer, but the practical one, which was that prisoners who were refusing to work while receiving the same rations as prisoners who were working had been given an arrangement that made refusal costless and that a costless refusal would continue indefinitely regardless of what the convention said.

The ration reduction made the refusal costly. The legal framework that Ellis’s memo subsequently identified made it legitimate. The combination was what ended the situation in 3 days rather than 3 weeks or longer. Baumann was among the prisoners who returned to work on Thursday. He was transferred with the rest of the facility population to a longer-term holding facility in June 1945, was processed through the standard denazification procedures, and was released in 1946.

There is no record of what he made of the legal outcome of the situation he had organized, or whether he ever read the Ellis memo that explained why his reading of the convention had been wrong. The memo was in the administrative file of a facility that was dismantled after the transfer, and its contents were not communicated to the prisoner population.

The 1,100 prisoners at the Straubing facility were processed and transferred in the weeks following Germany’s surrender in May 1945. The work refusal of the second Monday was not recorded in any formal document as a significant disciplinary incident, a riot, or a breakdown in facility operations. It was logged as a resolved administrative matter and filed accordingly.

It was resolved before it became anything larger than that. Private Horst Vice, the interpreter who had translated Patton’s instruction to the prisoners, and who had been the primary communication channel between the facility administration and the prisoner population throughout the 2 weeks of operations, later described the Monday morning refusal in a brief memoir he wrote in the 1970s about his wartime service.

He wrote that the organized quality of the refusal had been immediately apparent to him when the work details were assembled, not because the prisoners who declined were particularly aggressive or vocal, but because the declination was coordinated. The same words, delivered in the same tone, from prisoners who had clearly agreed in advance on what they would say and how they would say it.

He wrote that he had found this more unsettling than a disorganized refusal would have been because organization indicated a decision that had been thought through rather than an impulse that might resolve on its own. He also wrote that when he had translated Patton’s instruction back to Bauman and the other NCOs, he had read it exactly as Denning had written it, without elaboration or softening, and that the period of approximately 20 minutes during which the NCOs conferred after hearing the instruction had been, from where he was

standing, entirely silent. He wrote that he had not been able to tell from the silence whether they were considering changing their position or consolidating it, and that the answer had not become clear until they informed him they were maintaining the refusal, at which point the ration reduction had gone into effect, and the question of what the silence had meant became academic.

What do you think? Was Patton’s response, reducing rations rather than using force, the right approach? Or did it set a precedent that complicated the treatment of prisoners going forward? Let us know in the comments below, and if you want more untold stories from World War II, make sure you subscribe.