Why Patton Returned the Iron Cross to the SS Commander Before the Firing Squad Was Ready

[00:00:00]The aid didn't know what to do with it.

[00:00:02]That's the first thing to understand.

[00:00:04]Captain Thomas Alderton, 30 years old from Charlottesville, Virginia, had been Patton's aid for 7 months, and in those seven months he had seen Patton do things that surprised him and things that angered him, and things that he understood only in retrospect. but he had never seen Patton pick up a German decoration, wrap it in a handkerchief, and tell him to bring it to the condemned man's cell before 6:00 a.m.

[00:00:30]He stood in the doorway of Patton's quarters for a moment after the instruction was given. Then he said, "Sir, am I to give it to him or leave it with the guard?" Patton said without looking up from his desk. Put it in his hand. Alderton drove to the holding facility in the dark. It was April 29th, 1945.

[00:00:53]The war in Europe had six days left in it, though nobody in that jeep knew that yet. What Alderton knew was the name on the order he was carrying, and the decoration wrapped in the handkerchief on the seat beside him, and those two things together were the whole weight of the drive. The man in the cell was SS Brigade Furer Carl Verer Shod, 53 years old, born in Dresden. in the SS since 1931.

[00:01:21]Knights cross with oak leaves and swords. 14 years of decorated service, including three years on the Eastern Front, commanding a Vafan SS division through some of the worst fighting in the history of organized violence. The kind of officer who in another context, in another institution, in another war, would have been studied in militarymies.

[00:01:45]And the reason he was in a cell in a third army holding facility on the morning of April 29th, 1945, waiting for what was going to happen at 6:00 a.m. was not his eastern front service. It was what he had done in the village of Rousingan on April 18th, 1945, 11 days before.

[00:02:07]11 days was all the distance between the thing and its consequence.

[00:02:13]If this story matters to you, subscribe.

[00:02:16]Now, here's the thing about Carl Wernern Shade that made the handkerchief complicated. He was not a simple man. He was not a cartoon. He was not the SS officer of a 100 films and television programs, the cold bureaucrat, the ideological fanatic, the man who had never felt anything. He was something harder to process. He had spent 14 years being extraordinarily good at an institution that did extraordinary evil.

[00:02:46]And within that institution he had, by documented account, by the accounts of the men who served under him on the Eastern Front, by the accounts of prisoners who passed through his custody, by the account of a Red Cross inspector who visited his divisional holding area in December of 1943.

[00:03:04]He had maintained a consistent and documented adherence to the laws of armed conflict. His prisoners had been treated according to the Geneva Convention. His unit had not committed the systematic atrocities that defined much of the Vafan SS's Eastern Front record. The Red Cross inspector's December 1943 report specifically named his division as a compliance example in a sector where compliance was the exception.

[00:03:31]That was the file. That was who Shade had been for 14 years. And then Rousingan happened. Let me back up for a second. The village of Rousingan is a small settlement in the Rhineland Paladin, approximately 40 km southwest of Mites. In April of 1945, it was in the path of Third Army's advance.

[00:03:54]Shada's unit, what was left of it, a depleted divisional remnant of approximately 600 men with inadequate fuel, ammunition, and transport, had been falling back through the region since the Rine crossings. The unit had been fighting continuous rear guard actions for 3 weeks. The men were exhausted. The supply situation was critical. The command structure above Shada had effectively ceased to function. He was by the second week of April operating without coherent orders from any higher formation, making his own decisions about withdrawal routes and the treatment of the territory he was passing through. On April 18th, 1945, as Sha's unit was moving through Rousen, contact was made with a third army advance element, a company of the 11th armor division moving through from the west. In the engagement that followed, one of Shad's rear guard platoon was overrun. Four members of the platoon were taken prisoner by the American company. They were American prisoners, captured soldiers of the German unit. Standard procedure.

[00:05:01]The American company commander, a captain named Harold Vance, who had been fighting since Normandy and who ran a tight unit by all accounts, directed the four prisoners to the company's rear where they were to be processed and held per standard procedure. What happened in the next 40 minutes is documented in two places. in the Captain Vance's afteraction report and in the testimony of the company Sergeant Major, a staff sergeant named Robert Ingram, 25 years old from Birmingham, Alabama, who was the senior NCO present during the subsequent events and who filed a supplemental statement to Third Army's judge advocate general section on April 21st. 40 minutes after the prisoners were taken, Sha's unit made contact with the American company again, not from the direction of withdrawal, from the east.

[00:05:51]Shade had turned his unit around. Not to counterattack, the military situation made a counterattack pointless, and the subsequent investigation confirmed that Shade's tactical intention was not to retake the position. His tactical intention was specifically to recover the four prisoners.

[00:06:10]What happened instead was a second engagement in which the company sustained casualties and in which in the chaos of the contact the four German prisoners who had been held at the company's rear were killed not executed killed in the fighting. The distinction mattered legally and Sha's defense at the subsequent tribunal would make significant use of it. But here's what happened after that second engagement.

[00:06:36]Shade's unit withdrew again. this time carrying six American prisoners they had taken in the second contact. Those six men, their names are in the Third Army records, all six were not brought to a prisoner processing facility. They were not registered with the Red Cross. They were not transferred to a rear area holding compound. They were held by Sha's unit for 3 days as it continued its withdrawal through the Rhineland Palatinate.

[00:07:04]And at the end of those three days, when Sha's unit was captured by elements of the 11th armored on April 21st, the six American prisoners were not with the unit. Five of the six were found the following day in a field 4 km east of Rousingan by a Graves registration team.

[00:07:23]Their condition was consistent in the Graves registration reports clinical language with having been killed at close range.

[00:07:31]The sixth was Private First Class Dennis Merl Hooper, 22 years old from Amarillo, Texas. Hooper was not among the five. He was not found at all. His status in the official Army records was listed as missing in action as of April 25th, 1945, when the search of the area was completed without finding him. His mother, Ruth Hooper, received the missing in action notification on May 15th, 1945, one week after Germany surrendered. She had received a letter from Dennis 2 weeks before his capture, in which he told her the war was almost over and he'd be home by summer. And this is where the story turns. Because what Patton read in the Jag report about Rousen was not only the five dead and the one missing. What he read in the specific detail of the afteraction report and Ingram's supplemental statement was the gap between who Shod had been for 14 years and what he had ordered in Rousen.

[00:08:37]The Red Cross inspector's December 1943 report was in the file. The Eastern Front compliance record was in the file.

[00:08:46]Everything that documented who Shod had been before Rousen was in the file beside everything that documented what he had done in Rousen.

[00:08:55]Patton read both. He read the whole file.

[00:08:59]Think about that for a second. Most of the cases that came through third army's J A section in the spring of 1945 were straightforward in a specific way.

[00:09:09]not simple, not without moral weight, but straightforward in the sense that the perpetrator was consistent. The pattern of behavior before and after matched. The man who did the thing in April was the same man who had done similar things in Belgium and Poland and the Soviet Union.

[00:09:28]The record was coherent. The picture assembled. Shades file was different.

[00:09:34]Shades file showed a man who had maintained a consistent standard for 14 years and then violated it catastrophically at the end in the final weeks when the institution he had served was collapsing around him and the operational reality had stripped away every structure that had previously governed his decisions. Patton's J A officer, Colonel Frederick Ren, the same Ren who had built the Ashaffenburg case and the Vertsburg Ledger case, brought the file to Patton on April 24th. Ren had spent 3 days on the cross referencing, the same methodical approach he brought to every case. His summary delivered with the file noted the 14-year compliance record and the Rousen violation in the same paragraph.

[00:10:21]He did not editorialize.

[00:10:23]He presented it the way Ren presented everything. The evidence is the evidence and here is what it shows.

[00:10:31]Patton read the file that evening. He did not speak to Ren during the reading.

[00:10:36]When he finished, he asked two questions. The first was, "Where is Hooper?" Ren said they didn't know.

[00:10:44]Patton said, "Keep looking." The second question Patton asked was not a question. He said, "The five men have to be answered for, set the tribunal." Shod was tried before a Third Army field tribunal on April 27th, 1945.

[00:11:02]The tribunal ran one day. The charges covered the deaths of the five Americans in the field east of Rousenan, and the illegal holding of prisoners during the 3-day withdrawal. The defense argued that the deaths occurred in the context of a fluid combat situation and that command authority over the specific events was unclear given the breakdown of the higher command structure. The tribunal found Shod guilty. The sentence was death.

[00:11:31]See, what most folks don't realize is that Patton's role at this point procedurally was to review the tribunal's finding and the sentence, not to retry the case. to review. He had the authority to confirm the sentence, reduce it, or in extraordinary circumstances, set it aside. He had 48 hours to do that review. He used 46 of them. Bear with me because what happened in those 46 hours is what the handkerchief is about. Patton read the tribunal transcript, all of it. He read the defense's presentation of the 14-year compliance record. He read the prosecution's response which correctly noted that the compliance record was not a defense against the specific acts at Rousingan. He read Ingram supplemental statement again. He read the Graves registration report again. He read the Red Cross inspector's 1943 report which was attached as defense exhibit rather than prosecution evidence. He read Shod's own statement to the tribunal which was brief and which took responsibility for the command decisions that led to what happened in the field east of Rousingan without explaining them or offering the mitigating context that his defense attorneys had constructed for him. That statement shade's own statement is three paragraphs. It is in the national archives. The third paragraph says in translation from the German that the decisions made during the withdrawal were his decisions made under his authority and that the consequences of those decisions were his to bear. It says nothing about the 14 years. It says nothing about Rousingan being different from everything that came before. It just says these were my decisions and the consequences are mine. Dead serious.

[00:13:26]three paragraphs taking the whole thing.

[00:13:28]On the evening of April 28th, Patton confirmed the sentence. He signed the confirmation at 9:14 p.m. The execution was scheduled for 6:00 a.m. on April 29th.

[00:13:41]And then according to Alderton's account written in 1952 and held in the VMI special collections, Patton sat at his desk for approximately an hour after signing the confirmation, not reading, not working, just sitting. The same kind of sitting that Alderton had seen before, and that he had learned by this point meant that Patton was doing something internal that did not require the desk to be doing anything in particular. At 10:23 p.m., Patton called Alderton in. He had the Iron Cross, specifically one of the decorations from Sha's uniform that had been cataloged as part of the prisoner intake process and was in the facility's evidence holding on the desk in front of him.

[00:14:26][clears throat] He picked it up. He placed it on the handkerchief. He folded the handkerchief. and he told Alderton to bring it to Shade Cell and put it in his hand before 6:00 a.m.

[00:14:39]Alderton said, "Yes, sir." He drove to the facility in the dark. Here's the part that didn't make it into the official report. When Alderton arrived at the cell, the guard on duty was a corporal named James Puit, no relation to the Dallas Puit from the Vertzsburg courtyard, 23 years old, from Columbus, Ohio.

[00:15:00]Puit led Alderton into the cell block.

[00:15:03]Shade was awake. He was sitting on the edge of his cot. 53 years old, in the gray prison clothes of a Third Army holding facility, the Knight's cross and the oak leaves and the swords all gone.

[00:15:16]Those were in a separate evidence holding, not the iron cross that Alderton was carrying. and Shade was sitting on the edge of his cot in prison clothes, looking at the wall opposite him with the expression that a man has when he has read the clock enough times and knows what the clock means and has stopped reading the clock. Alderton went in. He unfolded the handkerchief. He placed the iron cross in Shade's hand.

[00:15:41]Shade looked at it. He turned it over once. He looked at Alderton. He said in German. Alderton didn't speak German, but Corporal Puit did. and Puit translated it immediately and Alderton wrote it down when he got back to the jeep. He said, "Who authorized this?"

[00:16:00]Alderton said, "The general."

[00:16:03]Sheay didn't say anything after that. He closed his hand around the iron cross and put his hand in his lap and looked back at the wall and Alderton left.

[00:16:13]What's hard to swallow is what Alderton wrote in his 1952 account about the drive back. He wrote that he didn't understand what the general had done until somewhere around the midpoint of the drive when he was on a dark road in Germany at approximately 2:00 in the morning and he had the time to sit with it. He wrote that what he eventually understood was that the iron cross was not a gift. It was not mercy. It was not patent softening a verdict he had just signed and confirmed.

[00:16:44]It was a statement about the 14 years and about Rousenjen. About the difference between who you are for 14 years and what you do at the end about the fact that the 14 years were real.

[00:16:58]They were documented. They were witnessed they mattered and that they couldn't cancel Rousen and that nothing could. And that the execution was the answer to Rousenjen.

[00:17:10]But the Iron Cross was the acknowledgement that the 14 years had happened. Alderton wrote, "I think he was saying both things at once. I have never been entirely sure I understood it correctly, but I think that's what he was saying." Now, what happened to Dennis Hooper? Because this story doesn't end at 6:00 a.m. on April 29th, 1945, even though that's when Sha's part of it ended. Dennis Merl Hooper, 22 years old from Amarillo, Texas, was listed as missing in action until July of 1945 when a German civilian, a farmer named Albert Becker, who lived near the village of Rousingan, came forward to the American military government administration in his district and reported that he knew where the sixth American soldier from the April incident had been buried.

[00:18:02]Becker said he had watched three members of Shod's unit bury the soldier in a field approximately 7 km east of Rousingan on April 20th, 1945.

[00:18:14]He had not come forward in April because the fighting was still ongoing. He came forward in July because the Occupation Administration had issued a general notice requesting information about missing Allied personnel and because Becker had a conscience and had been carrying what he knew since April. A Graves registration team went to the location Becker described on July 14th, 1945.

[00:18:39]They found Dennis Hooper. He was brought back to the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg on July 19th, 1945.

[00:18:48]He was 22 years old. He had told his mother, Ruth, the war was almost over and he'd be home by summer. He had been right about the war being almost over.

[00:18:59]He was home by July, not the way he meant.

[00:19:05]Ruth Hooper received the update to her son's status on August 3rd, 1945.

[00:19:11]Missing in action changed to killed in action. Date of death established as on or about April 20th, 1945.

[00:19:20]The notification letter was formal, clinical. It contained none of the Albert Becker detail, none of the field 7 km east of Rousen, none of the July 14th recovery date. Ruth had been waiting since May 15th. She waited until August 3rd. Then she knew. Fast forward to the postwar documentation. The Third Army J A file on the Ringan case, Shod's tribunal, the sentence, the confirmation, and Alderton's delivery of the Iron Cross is in the National Archives in the Third Army records collection. The Iron Cross is not in the file. There is no documentation of what happened to it after Alderton placed it in Shod's hand. It is not among the items cataloged from the holding facility after the execution.

[00:20:12]It is not in the evidence inventory. It is simply not in the record anymore.

[00:20:18]Which means either it was buried with Shod or it was kept by someone in the facility or it was lost in the administrative processing of a military apparatus that was winding down the biggest war in human history.

[00:20:33]What the archive contains is Alderton's account. the file and one line in the execution confirmation document noting that the sentence was carried out at 604 on April 29th, 1945. 604, 4 minutes late. That's how precise the record is. Now, here's what I want to bring you back to. Patton signed the confirmation at 9:14 p.m. and sat at his desk for an hour. Then, he called Alderton. Then Alderton drove in the dark with an iron cross in a handkerchief and put it in the hand of a man who had 14 years of documented compliance and 11 days of documented catastrophe.

[00:21:16]The filing of both of those things in the record, the compliance and the catastrophe, is what made the handkerchief possible. You can't give someone their iron cross back in this context if there's no record of the 14 years. The 14 years are what make the gesture meaningful instead of cruel.

[00:21:36]Without the 14 years, the Iron Cross is mockery. With the 14 years, it is something that Alderton, on a dark road in Germany at 2 in the morning, spent the drive trying to understand and eventually described as saying both things at once. Both things. The 14 years mattered, and Russing still had to be answered for, and there is no way to say both of those things simultaneously in words.

[00:22:04]But you can say them simultaneously with a handkerchief and an iron cross and a drive to a cell in the dark. The confirmation document is in the National Archives. The signature is legible. The time is legible. The Alderton account is in the VMI special collections, donated in 1952, available since then. Dennis Hooper's graves registration record is in a separate archive, the Army's burial records, transferred to the National Archives in the 1980s.

[00:22:38]Albert Becker's statement, the one that told the Army where to find Hooper, is in the military government administrative records from the Reinland Palatinet District, also in the National Archives.

[00:22:50]four separate archives, four separate pieces of a story that only makes complete sense when they are all in the same room. And in one of those archives, in the third army records collection, there is a oneline notation in the execution confirmation document that says the sentence was carried out at 6:04 on April 29th, 1945.

[00:23:13]4 minutes late. The Iron Cross is not mentioned. The handkerchief is not mentioned. The drive in the dark is not mentioned. Alderton's account of what Shod said, who authorized this is not mentioned. None of it is in the official record. The official record says 604 and nothing else. The rest of it is in a VMI archive in Lexington, Virginia, in the account of a captain from Charlottesville, who drove in the dark and spent the drive trying to understand what a general had done with a handkerchief and an iron cross, and eventually wrote down that he thought Patton was saying both things at once, and that he had never been entirely sure he understood it correctly.

[00:24:00]Subscribe. These men earned at least that