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Play MovieThe Third Army, Patton and Interrogations
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Did you personally interrogate Goering?
No. I didn't want to personally interrogate him. A Greek captain interrogated him and gave him champagne, and we let that be known and they broke this Greek captain. He had no business serving champagne to Goering when he came in.
Did you have the opportunity to interrogate Baldur von Schirach ?
Yes, I interrogated Baldur von Schirach. I interrogated the entire German staff as you can see in the book with their pictures. I showed them the pictures that I took in Buchenwald so that they could see what was done by the Germans. They were all prisoners.
Why didn't you want to be the one?
It wasn't my field. I was not in Gestapo. A friend of mine was in Gestapo. He warned Mrs. von Kohler. He said, "tomorrow, you're going to be interviewed by our most severe interviewer." She came with all perfumed with silk stockings and she tried a big décolleté. She was very apprehensive; she didn't know what I was going to do to her. She was sent to me because of Romania. Very few people had been in Romania and the American army, and so they gave me—Mrs. Von Kohler was assigned to me as a prisoner. But for other things like Gestapo, there were specialists that would speak to her about the Gestapo and what she knew about it. Other interrogators had other specialties.
What was the most significant piece of information that you picked up as an interrogator that you passed on?
I had one prisoner who told me that the head of the SD—that was the Sicherheitsdienst, the chief of police in Prague, German-imposed chief of police—was walking around in a village at the border, and I took him with me in the Jeep and then we captured the man, and I took him into camp. I was very excited to have found him. Himmler had just killed himself. I don't know if you know enough about the war, but the high officials had cyanide pills in their mouths, so that if they were captured and they wanted to, they could bite on the pill and die. That's what Himmler did. When I captured this guy and I opened up his jaw, he says, "I don't have the courage to use the pill." He knew why I was doing it. This man, under false papers—the prisoner had told me that he was walking around in plain clothes, in this village. When I captured him and brought him in, I forgot to sign him in. Because if we had 500 prisoners, they were all signed into a book.
I had about five days or so to interrogate him, and my phone rang and they said, "Your points are up and you can go home." Here I was with this enormous guy, and I knew that we were not going do—as Americans—very much to him, in the long run. So I called up the Czechs and it was right at the border. In five minutes they were there, and I gave them over to them. I said, "Here, my gift to you." They took him away, they probably strung him up on the first tree that—I don't know. I never heard what happened to him, but I got rid of him because I had not registered him in. I could let him go because he wasn't missing. That was really my own personal revenge—my own personal war on the Germans. They took away the guy, and were very happy and thanked me a lot. That was the end of it. It was at the time that it was all very free. The war had just ended, and these prisoners, we had them by the thousands. In the end, many of them were reinstated by the American occupation government.
In Iraq, we didn't do this. In Germany, we used the Germans. They administrated right away the country. Here in Iraq, we didn't do that and look what happened. We are not a nation that is able to take revenge, we are very kind people, very friendly, and we are not looking to harm anybody. When this feeling of American indulgence into—there was no feeling of revenge in the American army, including the highest professionals. General Patton had a German girlfriend in the end, that was really his undoing. None of you have asked me ever what happened to him.
What happened to General Patton?
You didn't ask. I was surprised that nobody asked me, "Well how did it end with General Patton?" General Patton had confiscated one of those castles. The castle had a lady in it, a Baroness, and he became very influenced by this woman. She told him that the Russians are terrible people, and he believed her. When he met up in Leipzig with the Russian officers, he was very nasty to them. He in fact wanted to go right on to Moscow. Of course all of us were very upset about that because we wanted to go home, but he wanted to go on to Moscow, and he lost the command of the Third Army. General Eisenhower was forced actually to relieve him and he became a general of a Twelfth Army group, which had no soldiers in it, was just a paper army. He sat in his car—I will show you the picture of his car—and a driver saw this, and he was called "'Blood and Guts'—his guts and our blood." The driver drove into his car purposely as an accident and killed him. That's how he ended.
Who drove into his car purposely?
An American soldier. But he defended himself that it was an accident. He didn't know; he could see that it was the General's car, it was very clear.
Were you around then?
Yeah. We were in Germany and this happened in Austria.
Could you explain what the Third Army was?
Third Army was the army that belonged to General Patton. If you go and get the book, I have a whole book on the Third Army. It's lying there.
What was unique about the Third Army?
The Third Army was unique because it won the war. The Third Army was the center army and General Patton was the head of that army. The Seventh Army was in the south of us, the First Army was in the North of us. The First Army was next to the British in the invasion. The Seventh Army was below us, was in the south of Europe and they had French soldiers in it as I told you last time. The Third Army was renowned for his success in Bastogne. When everybody wanted to retreat, Patton said, "I don't retreat." And he went ahead, and the Battle of the Bulge was the last battle that the Germans put together as a resistance, and then the whole thing collapsed. The Third Army was really the army that was most famous in that war.
Did you have a certain amount of pride as being part of the Third Army?
Oh, yes! I can show you our shield. I have it also there. We would have a shield on our sleeve that we were Third Army.
I'm curious as to how you moved up in ranks from a French teacher, to the secretary of the camp, to General Patton's personal interrogator. How did that happen so quickly?
It doesn't happen so quickly; it went one after the other. As I told you, the Camp Ritchie was dissolved because of the article that appeared in the Washington Merry-Go-Round by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen. Robert Allen was afterwards my colonel.
This might be an amusing story to you. One night after hours we were all sitting in Trier, T-R-I-E-R, it's a city on the Rhine. There was a knock on our door and in walked a German captain with an American officer who brought him in. He says, "He wants to speak to General Patton." One of our boys went outside, put on a helmet and came back in and said, "I'm General Patton. What is it you want?" He says, "I brought you the Remagen Bridge. Now the Remagen Bridge was a bridge over the Rhine we had just arrived at, and we were very much afraid that the Germans would blow it up. Well, he said that he had bribed all the Germans that had the bombs around the bridge, the engineers, and that he would like his freedom and against that he would give us the bridge. We really let General Patton know that here's this man, and indeed they gave us the bridge.
That's not known very much. People tell all kinds of stories about that Remagen Bridge but actually it was a German officer who gave it to us. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know if he did get his freedom. We didn't pursue that, probably not. But he was a German who helped us, really, and we crossed the bridge without the loss of one soldier. That is how we invaded Germany. With regard to this Remagen Bridge, Colonel Allen went down to look at the bridge and saw that—really, the man—he was a chief of staff of Patton, and he was the only one who could drink Patton under the table because he was as good a drinker as Patton was. He had the nerve to follow a German who was on a bicycle and who gestured to them. He went right into an ambush and they hurt him, they hurt his arm, and he had the entire American code in his pocket.
When General Patton heard that his friend had been captured, he immediately put a regiment into that spot and we took him back. The Germans were just about to operate, amputate his arm. They didn't know that the code was in the pocket of his pants because they operated on the arm and Colonel Allen immediately was captured back. We thought Patton would kill him. But Patton was very generous and went to his bed side and did not hold it against him that he had forced us actually to capture him back. It's one of those stories that you'll never read in any paper. Very quickly he learned with his other arm to write again. He was a journalist, Robert Allen. He suddenly wrote with his left hand.
About the German officer that helped you capture the bridge, do you think in your opinion, did he help you that way to avoid being punished himself? Or because he wanted Germany to lose the war?
I guess he saw that the Germans had lost the war anyhow, and he figured he might as well buy his freedom that way.
Did you interact with any high ranking, or even low ranking, German soldiers who seemed as though they felt as though what they had been fighting for was wrong?
Very few. They always said that they obeyed orders. Very few had—sometimes you could discuss with an intelligent one. You could tell him, and he would say, "Yes ,sir, we are wrong," or something like that. But very rare. The Germans were—when you spoke to them about guilt, they would say, "We are not guilty. We just followed orders." That's the German, all the way up—the only guilty one was Hitler in the end. Every German said that he only followed orders.
