Having immediately recognized the Soviet danger and urged a course of action which would have freed all of eastern Europe from the communist yoke with the expenditure of far less American blood than was spilled in Korea and Vietnam and would have obviated both those later wars not to mention World War III—Patton next came to appreciate the true nature of the people for whom World War II was fought: the Jews.

Most of the Jews swarming over Germany immediately after the war came from Poland and Russia, and Patton found their personal habits shockingly uncivilized.

He was disgusted by their behavior in the camps for Displaced Persons (DP’s) which the Americans built for them and even more disgusted by the way they behaved when they were housed in German hospitals and private homes. He observed with horror that “these people do not understand toilets and refuse to use them except as repositories for tin cans, garbage, and refuse . . . They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring to relieve themselves on the floor.”

He described in his diary one DP camp, “where, although room existed, the Jews were .crowded together to an appalling extent, and in practically every room there was a pile of garbage in one corner which was also used as a latrine. The Jews were only forced to desist from their nastiness and clean up the mess by the threat of the butt ends of rifles. Of course, I know the expression ‘lost tribes of Israel’ applied to the tribes, which disappeared—not to the tribe of Judah from which the current sons of bitches are descended. However, it is my personal opinion that this too is a lost tribe—lost to all decency.”

Patton’s initial impressions of the Jews were not improved when he attended a Jewish religious service at Eisenhower’s insistence. His diary entry for September 17, 1945, reads in part: “This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen. When we got about halfway up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General . . . The smell was so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my lunch as the result of remembering it.”

These experiences and a great many others firmly convinced Patton that the Jews were an especially unsavory variety of creature and hardly deserving of all the official concern the American government was bestowing on them. Another September diary entry, following a demand from Washington that more German housing be turned over to Jews, summed up his feelings:

“Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working. Harrison (a U.S. State Department official) and his associates indicate that they feel German civilians should be removed from houses for the purpose of housing Displaced Persons. There are two errors in this assumption. First, when we remove an individual German we punish an individual German, while the punishment is—not intended for the individual but for the race, Furthermore, it is against my Anglo-Saxon conscience to remove a person from a house, which is a punishment, without due process of law. In the second place, Harrison and his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”

But Patton continued to do what he thought was right, whenever he could. With great reluctance, and only after repeated promptings from Eisenhower, he had thrown German families out of their homes to make room for more than a million Jewish DP’s—part of the famous “six million” who had supposedly been gassed—but he balked when ordered to begin blowing up German factories, in accord with the infamous Morgenthau Plan to destroy Germany’s economic basis forever. In his diary he wrote: “I doubted the expediency of blowing up factories, because the ends for which the factories are being blown up—that is, preventing Germany from preparing for war—can be equally well attained through the destruction of their machinery, while the buildings can be used to house thousands of homeless persons.”

Similarly, he expressed his doubts to his military colleagues about the overwhelming emphasis being placed on the persecution of every German who had formerly been a member of the National Socialist party. In a letter to his wife of September 14, 1945, he said: “I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff . It is not cricket and is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending POW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death.”

Despite his disagreement with official policy, Patton followed the rules laid down by Morgenthau and others back in Washington as closely as his conscience would allow, but he tried to moderate the effect, and this brought him into increasing conflict with Eisenhower and the other politically ambitious generals. In another letter to his wife he commented: “I have been at Frankfurt for a civil government conference. If what we are doing (to the Germans) is ‘Liberty, then give me death.’ I can’t see how Americans can sink so low. It is Semitic, and I am sure of it.”

And in his diary he noted:, “Today we received orders . . . in which we were told to give the Jews special accommodations. If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc? . . . We are also turning over to the French several hundred thousand prisoners of war to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”