Foreign News: Patton & the Devil

General George S. Patton Jr. had kept mum for quite a while. It was unlike him. Last week, in Bavaria, where he is U.S. military governor, he broke the irksome silence, brandished his riding crop and informed the press: “Well, I’ll tell you. This Nazi thing. It’s just like a Democratic-Republican election fight.”

The fact that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had just instituted an investigation of Bavaria’s Nazified German bureaucracy did not seem to cut much ice with Georgie Patton. In his opinion, too much fuss was being made about denazification. Said Patton: “I’m not trying to be King of Bavaria.”

He hated Nazis as much as anyone else, he said. But one of the first things he had learned about military government was that “the outs are coming around saying that the ins are Nazis. . . . More than half of the German people were Nazis and you’d be in a hell of a fix if you tried to remove all Party members.” Most Nazis had merely been forced into the Party, anyway, he said, or had joined it because it was a good thing at the time.

Patton’s ideas on how to run Germany were shared by many of his subordinate officers. The ideas: 1) restore normal conditions to prevent anarchy; 2) get German industry back into shape so that the U.S. taxpayer will not have to foot the bill; 3) show the Germans “what grand fellows we are.”

Said Patton in his best grand-fellow manner: “To get things going, we’ve got to compromise with the devil a little bit,”