Was General George S. Patton a Victim of an Assassination?

General George S. Patton, Jr., died in a Heidelberg, Germany hospital December 21, 1945 due to complications of a broken neck that he sustained eleven days earlier in a minor automobile accident on Highway 38 near Mannheim, Germany. Immediately after his death rumors of foul play and conspiracy surrounded the circumstances of his accident. The common rumor in Germany at the time was that Patton was assassinated due to his wish to join forces with Germany and attack Russia. Patton had openly admitted that the Allies had defeated "the wrong enemy" and repeatedly praised German industry and the discipline of its people.

A post WWII Nazi revival was also rumored. Some Nazi fanatics envisioned a revival of their socialist party from the reclusive Austrian Alps, complete with SS defenders and Gestapo. However, Eisenhower, upon hearing these rumors, directed Patton to regroup his Third Army and secure the Alpine peaks. Still a few Nazis dreamed that their party's resurgence could be flamed by the sympathetic General Patton. After all, some Nazis must have rationalized, it was Patton who had flatly stated that the Allies had destroyed the "wrong enemy" and that communism was a horrible threat to the world, so it was Patton who could revive the Nazis and storm into Moscow. Though Patton during wartime had promised the men of the Third Army that he was going to Berlin and personally "shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch just like I would a snake," in 1945 Hitler was gone and the fanatics still hoped that the party could be revived.

Patton may have been surrounded in 1945 by Nazi spies. These spies may have been sympathetic to forces that wished to persuade Patton into helping them revitalize the Nazi party. One of these men was Baron von Wangenheim, a former Nazi colonel and Olympian equestrian, who became a daily companion of Patton and kept a small stable of horses for the general. Another man named Brehm became a part of Patton's post-war inner circle; he was later identified as an executive agent of the Sicherheitsdienst, the underground Nazi secret service.

From the day of his death to the present many have asked how a man of Patton's stature could die so commonly and uncharacteristically in an auto accident where both vehicles weren't moving faster than twenty miles per hour. Suspicion was cast on all those who Patton had offended, and there were many - Generals Montgomery, Eisenhower, Bedell Smith, even Presidents Truman and Roosevelt. Ever since the wartime rumor that Nazi General Jodl was planning to assassinate Patton, conspiracy theories ran rampant. These theories were fueled because no official report was ever made of the auto accident and that there was no autopsy. Patton's neurosurgeon, Colonel Spurling, made a post mortem report that is still classified. The senior MP officer on the scene of the accident, Lt. Peter Babalas, found that the accident was trivial but Patton's injury was not. He filed a personal report on the accident that has never been located though Babalas made several attempts to locate it. Books like Blood and Guts is Going Nuts and The Algonquin Project have since speculated that elaborate plots were at hand during the war to end Patton's flamboyant career, and a Hollywood movie, Brass Target, also spun a wild tale of conspiracy.

One of the most intriguing theories that Patton was the target of a plot comes from an ex-U.S. intelligence agent who claimed he was paid to kill Patton. Douglas Bazata started his espionage career in 1926 and continued it for over 50 years in the Marine Corps and OSS. Bazata told 450 guests at the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. on September 25, 1979, that he was solicited by OSS head Bill Donovan to kill Patton for money.[i]

Bazata told the Hilton Hotel audience, "For diverse political reasons, many extremely high-ranking persons hated Patton. I know who killed him. Because I am the one who was hired to do it. Ten thousand dollars. General William Donovan himself, director of the O.S.S, entrusted me with the mission. I set up the accident. Since he didn't die in the accident, he was kept in isolation in the hospital, where he was killed with an injection."[ii]

The story was reported in the Washington Star and The Spotlight magazine.[iii] Bazata claimed he was commissioned to kill Patton in a series of eight meetings with Donovan. The Washington Star reported that Bazata's interview was analyzed by a Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), a polygraph machine that measures stress in the voice, and reported that Bazata is telling the truth. Bazata said he was paid a total of $10,800 on two occasions by Donovan. He accepted the money and told Donovan that he would kill Patton, but in reality had no intention of trying. He said he worked with Donovan on the surface only because he feared for his life if he didn't. Soon after he was paid, Bazata was confronted by a confident and told that he too had been contracted to kill Patton. Who had hired the other man, Bazata never knew. Why Donovan wanted Patton dead was unclear to Bazata. Donovan could have been the only instigator, or been the mouthpiece for another individual or group.

Bazata claims he knew Patton personally and warned him of the plot. In 1944, Bazata said he was involved in a plot to stop Patton's uncontrollable assault toward Germany. The military command couldn't control him so Bazata claims he surreptitiously stopped the assault between Bisancon and Belfort, France. Though he didn't elaborate how he could perform such a daunting feat saying only that he used a "trick," it is known that Patton was plagued with mysterious supply problems throughout his campaign. Bazata was paid $800 by Donovan for this mission.

On the day of the accident, December 9, 1945, Patton was in command of the Fifteenth U.S. Army, a force that had been assigned to write the official history of the American campaign in Europe from June 6, 1944 to May 8, 1945. About 7 a.m. the morning of the accident, Private First Class Horace Woodring, Patton's driver, was ordered to prepare the General's 1938 Cadillac Model 75 limousine for a hunting trip. The hunting party consisted of Patton, Woodring, and General Hap Gay in the limo and Sgt. Meeks and a hunting dog that followed in a truck. They left Bad Nauheim, Germany between seven and eight in the morning. Patton decided to inspect some ancient ruins on the way and after he did he moved from the back seat to the front to dry his feet. This was one of several times Patton changed seats in the limo. Biographer Ladislas Farago believes that these series of coincidences made Patton's movements and intentions impossible to monitor, thus ruling out any kind of plot.

At 11:45 a.m., after stopping at a checkpoint and then moving to the back of the limo again, the limo stopped at a railroad crossing on Route 38 to let a long freight train pass. Woodring moved past the track and hadn't reached twenty miles an hour when a GMC truck, traveling the same speed, turned quickly into the limo and smashed the right front fender. Patton was thrown forward and upward; his head hit either the railing above the driver's seat or the glass partition between the front and back of the car. He immediately felt numbness in his arms and was quickly evacuated to the Heidelburg hospital.

Later Bazata's confident detailed how he had made the assassination look like an accident. Bazata freely admits that agents in his line of work are prone to exaggeration. His confident claimed that when Patton was inspecting the ruins on the 9th of December he fixed a window in the car so that it would not completely close. The truck that collided with the limo was supposedly completely innocent of the plot. The truck was forced into the path of the limo by another truck that was waiting for the opportunity. The second truck was part of the plot. The accident was of a minor nature and Bazata believes could not have inflicted the kind of whiplash that Patton received. Bazata's confident claims that a special weapon made in Czechoslovakia was used to strike Patton in the head. The weapon was designed to propel seemingly innocuous objects like metal or rocks at terrific force. This weapon, fired at about 10 yards away, allegedly caused the severe head wound and broke Patton's neck. Patton was unsure what had caused the severe whiplash believing that he hit his head on the limo's clock.

Patton's health gradually improved and he was scheduled to travel back to the U.S. on the 22nd when he died unexpectedly on the 21st. Bazata again claims conspiracy. Bazata's confident told him that Patton was given a refined form of cyanide that can cause or appear to cause embolisms and heart failure. This kind of cyanide can take up to 48 hours to work. When the plotters saw that Patton would likely live they were forced to use the poison.

It seems unlikely that the plotters would go to such lengths when Patton was obviously incapacitated for the rest of his life and no real threat militarily or politically to anyone. The entire plot that Bazata's confident told him seems too fantastic at face value, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that Patton had made many enemies during his career, both Triple Axis and Allies that wished him out of the field of play. Donovan allegedly asked Bazata to kill Patton while he was under Roosevelt (1943) and Truman (1945). Donovan worked closely with the presidents but there is nothing to lead us to believe that Roosevelt or Truman ordered Donovan to hatch such a plot. Bazata believes that his confident was not working for Donovan. When Patton died Donovan supposedly congratulated Bazata on his job, apparently thinking Bazata had done it. Bazata's confident never told him who had hired him.

It is no wonder that Patton was quoted in July 1945 as saying, "The more I see of people the more I regret that I survived the war."

Sources:

Farago, Ladislas. Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, Westholme Publishing, New York, 2005.

Leopold, Chris. Blood and Guts is Going Nuts, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1977.

Frederick, Nolan. The Algonquin Project, Morrow, New York, 1974.

[i] The Troubleshooters.com http://www.thetroubleshooters.com/br/br060.html

[ii] http://www.rense.com/general63/patton.htm

[iii] Ibid.