Why Patton Ordered the SS Barracks Burned Before the Official Investigation Was Finished

The smoke was still visible from the road when the investigation officer arrived. He had driven 4 km from the nearest town following directions that a military police sergeant had given him over a field telephone at 6:40 in the morning. And he had driven thinking that this was going to be a routine site assessment.

One of dozens he had conducted since the Third Army advance had started turning up the things that advance armies turn up when they move through territory that has been under SS administration for 3 years. He had a clipboard. He had a camera. He had a trained forensic eye and 8 months of experience cataloging what the SS left behind when they left in a hurry.

He had seen a great deal by April 9th, 1945. He had not seen a barracks like this one. And when he parked his vehicle on the road and walked toward what was left of the structure, the walls still standing, the interior gutted, the roof collapsed inward, the smoke still rising from the beams, he understood, standing at the perimeter of the fire, that what he was looking at was not the investigation he had driven 4 km to conduct.

It was the end of it. The fire had been ordered by Patton. The order had been given at 5:17 in the morning. It was in the radio log maintained by the Third Army Signal Section because every communication in Third Army’s operational network went through the signal section’s log and the signal section logged everything without exception.

The log entry for 5:17 a.m. on April 9th, 1945 reads, “General’s authority, burn it.” Four words. The log entry for the specific building is cross-referenced to the coordinates of the SS administrative barracks at the Dachau subcamp facility outside the town of Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, approximately 40 km north of Munich.

The investigation officer, whose name is on the site assessment report filed that afternoon, is Captain James P. Alderman, 34 years old from Shreveport, Louisiana, who had been doing this work since the summer of 1944, and who wrote in his report, in the specific clipped language of military investigative documentation, that the structure had been rendered uninhabitable and archivally unsalvageable by fire prior to his arrival, and that the order for the fire had been confirmed as having been given at the general’s authority.

He wrote it down. He didn’t editorialize. He confirmed the order and noted the results and filed the report. That’s the kind of officer Alderman was. What the investigation was supposed to be investigating is why this story exists. Hit subscribe. This channel exists to keep stories like this alive. Now, here’s the thing.

The barracks at Pfaffenhofen had been in American hands for approximately 11 hours when the fire was set. The 14th Armored Division’s advance elements had reached the facility at approximately 6:30 in the evening on April 8th. They had secured the outer perimeter, cleared the administrative buildings, assessed the prisoner population, and established medical response for the approximately 412 surviving prisoners in the compound.

The number is in the 14th Armored’s after-action report, 412, down from an intake population that the facility’s own records indicated had been significantly higher in the preceding 8 months. The gap between those two numbers, what went in and what the Americans found still alive, is the specific gap that the investigation had been opened to examine.

But, the barracks, the SS barracks, that was something else. Let me back up for a second because the specific building matters, and why it matters is not what you might expect. The SS barracks at a subcamp facility of this type were not, in most instances, the location of the most significant forensic evidence.

The evidence was usually in the administrative buildings, the files, the ledgers, the transfer logs, the intake records, the kind of documentation that Third Army’s JAG section had been finding and cataloging for months. The barracks were where the guards slept. They contained personal effects, personal correspondence, the ordinary domestic residue of men who had been living at a work and death facility for months or years.

But, Pfaffenhofen was different. And the reason Pfaffenhofen was different is something that Third Army’s advance team found in the first 4 hours of the facility assessment before Patton had been briefed, before the radio communication that produced the 517 log entry. What they found was in the northern barracks building, the senior SS barracks.

The building where the lagerkommandant and his senior staff had their quarters. Picture the scene. A long building, single-story, concrete block construction, eight rooms, the kind of institutional architecture the SS used at every facility of this type, functional, permanent, designed to communicate that whoever lived there was going to be there for a while.

The building had been evacuated hastily. The evidence of hasty evacuation was visible in the rooms, the open drawers, the scattered documents, the personal items that had not been packed because packing takes time, and the Americans had arrived faster than expected. The SS men who had lived in this building had left in a hurry, and they had left things behind.

The things they left behind in the northern barracks at Pfaffenhofen are documented in the preliminary assessment filed by Third Army’s advance forensic team at approximately 10:30 p.m. on April 8th, approximately 7 hours before the fire. The preliminary assessment is in the National Archives in the Third Army records collection, and it has been available there since the records were transferred.

It is written in the specific clinical language of military forensic documentation, which is a language that has been developed for precisely the purpose of describing things that require description without requiring the reader to be unable to finish reading. I am going to describe what the preliminary assessment describes.

I am going to describe it the way the assessment describes it without graphic detail in the specific register that the documentary record supports. And I want you to understand as I do this, that what I’m describing is what Patton was told at 4:40 a.m. on April 9th in a briefing by the advance team’s senior officer, a major named William Carver, 41 years old from Nashville, Tennessee, who had been with the JAG section since 1943, and who was by every account in the record a man who was not given to exaggeration or emotional inflation in

the performance of his professional duties. The northern barracks at Pfaffenhofen contained in the rooms of the lager commandant and two of his senior staff officers a collection of personal items that the assessment describes as trophies. That word, trophies, appears three times in the preliminary assessment.

The assessment describes the items in the clinical language of a forensic inventory, their nature, their number, their specific character as objects that have been deliberately kept and displayed by the men who had lived in those rooms. The assessment notes that the items were of a specific kind that could only have originated from one source, given the facility’s function and its prisoner population.

The assessment notes that several of the items bore markings that confirm their origin beyond reasonable doubt. I’m not going to describe the specific nature of those items in detail. The assessment is in the archive for anyone who needs to know exactly what was found. What I will tell you is the word the assessment uses most consistently to characterize what the items represented as a collection, as evidence of the character and conduct of the men who had kept them.

The word is systematic. Not opportunistic, not aberrant. Systematic. A collection that had been built over time, deliberately, by men who understood what they were doing and had continued doing it. The assessment notes that the collection indicated a pattern of behavior extending over a period of months, and that the pattern was consistent across the quarters of three separate individuals, which the assessment characterized as indicating an institutional rather than an individual pathology.

Systematic, institutional. Those are the words in the assessment, written by a 41-year-old attorney from Nashville, who had seen a great deal since 1943, and who chose those words specifically. Bear with me. Patton was woken at 4:30 a.m. on April 9th. The preliminary assessment had been completed and transmitted to Third Army’s command communication channel at 2:00 a.m.

His aide received it at 2:15. The aide, Captain Edmund Foster, 29 years old from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, made the decision not to wake the general at 2:15 a.m. He made that decision because the assessment was not operationally urgent in the immediate tactical sense. The facility was secured.

The prisoners were receiving medical care. The evidence was in place and was not going anywhere. Foster flagged the assessment as priority and put it at the top of the morning briefing. He woke Patton at 4:30. Patton read the preliminary assessment in approximately 12 minutes. Foster was in the room. He wrote about those 12 minutes in his personal account donated to a Philadelphia Veterans Archive in 1977.

He wrote that the 12 minutes were the quietest 12 minutes he had ever spent in a room with General Patton. He wrote that Patton turned each page with a specific deliberateness of a man who was making himself read something completely rather than allowing himself to stop. He wrote that when Patton put the assessment down, he did not say anything for approximately 45 seconds.

Then he asked two questions. The first was, “Are the items still in the building?” Foster said, “Yes.” The second question was, “Is there anything in those rooms that can’t be documented outside the building?” Foster said he didn’t know. He said the JAG team would need to assess that. Patton said, “Call Carver.

” Major Carver was on the line within 3 minutes. Patton asked him the same question. “Is there anything in those rooms that can’t be documented outside the building. Carver said the items themselves were portable. The assessment had included a photographic record. The photographs existed outside the building. The items could be removed prior to any fire if that was the direction.

Paden said, “Take the photographs and remove any items needed for tribunal purposes.” He paused. He said, “Then burn it.” Carver said, “Sir, the formal investigation is scheduled to begin at 0800.” Paden said, “I know. Burn it before that.” And here’s where it gets ugly. Not because of the fire.

The fire is not the ugly part. The fire is the punctuation. The ugly part is what was in those rooms and what its existence in those rooms tells you about the men who were in them and what they have been doing in the facility they were administering and what they had kept as a record of what they had been doing. Now look, I need to be specific about one thing before I continue because the question of why Paden ordered the fire before the investigation was finished is the question this title asks and the clean answer is he didn’t want the

investigation to be the thing that processed what was in those rooms. He didn’t want a formal forensic team spending three days cataloging those items in the clinical language of investigative procedure. He didn’t want those rooms to be a crime scene that got the crime scene treatment. The measurements, the photography protocols, the documentation forms, the systematic cataloging that would take what was in those rooms and make it legible in the same bureaucratic register that every other piece of evidence got processed in.

He wanted them to not exist anymore. He wanted the fire to be the statement. See, what most folks don’t realize is that the formal investigation, the one that Carver had scheduled to begin at 0800, would have produced a document. A thorough, professional, properly constituted investigative document that would have cataloged what was in those rooms in the specific clinical language of military investigative procedure.

And that document would have been accurate and complete and professionally executed and would have been filed in the Third Army JAG section. And would eventually have gone into the National Archives. And none of that, not the accuracy, not the completeness, not the professional execution, would have been the appropriate response to what was in those rooms.

This is the part that didn’t make it into the official report. What made it into the official report was Alderman’s assessment of the burned site. What didn’t make it in was what Patton said to Foster in the 45 seconds of silence after he put the preliminary assessment down. Foster wrote it in his personal account.

He wrote that in the 45 seconds Patton was looking at the wall. He wrote that when Patton spoke, he said something that Foster characterized as the most specific thing he had ever heard Patton say about the relationship between documentation and justice. He said, and this is Foster’s account, the words as Foster remembered and recorded them, which may not be verbatim, but which Foster believed was accurate.

He said, “Documentation is for things that need to be understood. What’s in that building doesn’t need to be understood. It needs to be gone. Documentation is for things that need to be understood. What’s in that building doesn’t need to be understood. It needs to be gone. And then he picked up the telephone. Fast forward to the Carver briefing.

Because what Major Carver told Patton in the 3-minute phone call is also in the record, not in the radio log, which only captured the burn order, but in Carver’s own after-action statement, which he filed on April 10th, and which is in the Third Army records collection in the National Archives. Carver wrote that before the order to burn was given, Patton asked him one more question.

He asked whether the men who had lived in those rooms had been captured. Carver said the Lagerkommandant, an SS-Hauptsturmführer named Klaus Erwin Dressler, 39 years old from Rostock, had been captured at the facility. Two of the three senior staff officers whose quarters had been in the northern barracks had also been captured.

The third had escaped during the initial German evacuation. Patton said, “Where is Dressler now?” Carver said, “In the MP holding area at the facility.” Patton said, “Keep him there, and burn the building.” What happened to Dressler is in the record. He was tried at the Dachau war crimes trials in 1946. The preliminary assessment photographs, the photographs that Carver’s team had made before the fire, were among the evidence entered at trial.

Dressler was convicted on multiple charges. He was sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out in 1947. The two captured senior staff officers were tried at the same proceedings. Both were convicted. Both received prison sentences. The third officer, the one who had escaped during the evacuation, was never located.

He is listed in the post-war German documentation as unaccounted for. That is the specific administrative category for a man who went into the chaos of the German collapse in May of 1945 and did not come back out in any way that left a record. Now, the prisoners. Because this story has to have people in it, and the 412 survivors at Pfaffenhofen are the people it has.

They are not named in the records in the way that individual narratives allow. They appear in the 14th Armored’s after-action report as a number, 412, and they appear in the Third Army Medical Section’s report as a category requiring specific medical intervention types. And they appear in the Red Cross registration records as individuals, and the individual records are in the archives of the International Tracing Service.

But one of them has a name that is specifically documented in the record in connection with this story. His name was Jakob Menachem Ehrlich. He was 44 years old. He was from Vienna. He had been at Pfaffenhofen for 7 months, transferred from the main Dachau facility in September of 1944. He had been a physician before the war, a general practitioner in the Third District of Vienna, married, two daughters.

The Red Cross registration record for him, completed on April 9th, 1945, the morning of the fire, is in the International Tracing Service archive. Ehrlich survived the war. He eventually reached the United States in 1947. He [snorts] settled in New York. He died in 1979. Before he died, he gave a deposition to a documentation project recording the testimonies of survivors of the Dachau subcamp system.

The deposition is in the YIVO Institute archive in New York. In the deposition, Ehrlich was asked about the morning of April 9th, 1945. He was asked specifically about the fire because by the time of the deposition, the burning of the northern barracks had become known in the documentation of the Faffenhofen facility.

And several former prisoners were being asked about it. He said that he had been in the main compound when the smoke began. He said that one of the American soldiers at the perimeter had told him, in response to his question, that the guards’ quarters were burning. He said that he had watched the smoke for a long time. He said, “I didn’t ask why. I already knew why.

The soldiers didn’t need to explain it to me.” He said, “I thought it was the right thing. I swear to you, that’s what he said.” The physician from Vienna, who had spent 7 months at Faffenhofen, watched the northern barracks burn and said, “I thought it was the right thing.” That deposition is in the evil archive in New York.

Think about that for a second. Now, back to Captain Alderman. Because the investigation officer who drove 4 km and arrived at a smoking ruin did something after he filed his site assessment report that is also in the record. He filed a supplemental memorandum 3 days later on April 12th, addressed to the third Army JAG section chief, requesting guidance on the appropriate documentation of cases in which evidence had been destroyed prior to formal investigation by order of command authority. The response to that

memorandum from the JAG section chief, Colonel Aldridge, is also in the National Archives. It is one paragraph long. It says, in the specific formal language of military legal correspondence, that the destruction of evidence prior to formal investigation by order of command authority requires that the commanding officer’s order be documented in the relevant operational log, that the preliminary documentation completed prior to the destruction be treated as the primary investigative record, and that the tribunal proceedings be

conducted on the basis of the preserved preliminary record. Then it says, the general’s order is so noted and will be reflected in the case record accordingly. That’s the whole response. The general’s order is so noted. The case record was amended. The trial proceeded on the basis of the photographs and the preliminary assessment.

Dresser was convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out. The preliminary assessment and the photographs are in the national archives. The radiolog with the 517 entry is in the national archives. Foster’s personal account is in the Philadelphia Veterans Archive. Erlich’s deposition is in the YIVO archive in New York.

Alderman’s supplemental memorandum and Aldridge’s response are in the national archives. And the Northern Barracks at Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm is ash. It has been ash since 5:40 a.m. on April 9th, 1945, when the fire that was set at Patton’s order burned for the last time. The walls eventually came down.

The site was cleared in the post-war period. There is nothing there now that looks like what was there then. The ash is gone. What was in the rooms is gone. The photographs of what was in the rooms are in the national archives, and they exist because Carver’s team made them before the fire. But the rooms are gone. And the items that were in the rooms are gone.

And the men who kept those items in those rooms were tried and convicted on the basis of the photographs that survived the fire. Which means the fire did not protect them from justice. It just denied the rooms their existence. And somewhere in that specific distinction between what justice required and what existence required is the reason Patton picked up the telephone at 5:17 in the morning and said, “Burn it before the investigation starts.

” Documentation is for things that need to be understood. What’s in that building doesn’t need to be understood. It needs to be gone. Stone cold. That’s what it is. Stone cold and documented and in its specific way, right. Now, here’s what I’ll tell you about the 45 seconds of silence after Patton put the assessment down.

Foster wrote that the silence was not the silence of a man deciding. He wrote that it was the silence of a man who had already decided and was allowing the decision to become settled. He wrote that by the time Patton asked the first question, “Are the items still in the building?” the decision had been made.

The questions were confirmation, not deliberation. He had made the decision while reading. He had made it sometime in those 12 quiet minutes with the preliminary assessment in his hands and the wall across from him and Foster in the room not making a sound. He had made it before he put the assessment down. And when he put it down and the 45 seconds ended and he asked the first question, what he was doing was making sure that what he had decided could be executed without destroying the evidence needed for the trial.

He was making sure the photographs existed. He was making sure the items needed for tribunal purposes could be removed. He was making sure that justice and fire could both happen at the same time. They did both happen at the same time. At 5:17 a.m. on April 9th, 1945, a radio log entry was made that said, “General’s authority, burn it.

” And at 5:40 a.m., the fire was set. And the trial happened in 1946, and the conviction happened, and the execution happened in 1947. Both things at the same time. Jakob Ehrlich watched the smoke from the main compound and said he thought it was the right thing. He was a physician from Vienna, and he had been at Pfaffenhofen for 7 months, and he did not need anyone to explain why the building was burning.

And the record, the photographs, the preliminary assessment, the radio log, the trial transcript, the conviction, the execution. The record says both things. It says what was in those rooms, and it says those rooms don’t exist anymore. It holds both of those things in the same archival collection in the same building in Maryland.

And the building that held what was in those rooms is ash. And that is the right relationship between those two facts. Subscribe. These men earned at least that much.