The reporters wanted to know why the appointed minister president of Bavaria, Fritz Schaeffer, was still in office since he was corrupt. [General George S.] Patton responded that the appointed officials did what they were told from the U.S. command or they were removed. The questions then turned to why there were still [Fascists] in the government. Patton stated that all top [Fascists] had been purged, though there were probably many other lower [Fascists] who eventually would be removed. Then he said,

suppose that AMERICA had lost the war and the conquering nation started the removal of persons in power. Denazification would be like removing all the Republicans or all the Democrats who were in office, who had held office or were quasi Democrats or Republicans and that would take some time.¹⁴⁴

He went on to say that Germany needed to be put back on its feet to save the U.S. taxpayers money and keep the Germans from starving and the displaced persons from freezing.¹⁴⁵ The press conference ended, and Patton confided to his diary, “I will probably make the front page, but frankly, do not give a damn.”¹⁴⁶

The next day’s headline in the New York Times read, “Patton Belittles Denazification; Holds Rebuilding More lmportant.”¹⁴⁷ Its author, Raymond Daniell, stated that Patton’s remarks were important “not only because he is head of the Military Government of Bavaria, but because some of the views he expressed in the occupation policy toward Nazis appeared to be in conflict with the ideas laid down in the Potsdam Declaration and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s directives.”

Raymond Daniell quoted Patton saying that “this Nazi thing is just like a Democratic and Republican election fight” and “[d]o you want a lot of Communists?”¹⁴⁸ Finally, Raymond Daniell wrote that the views expressed by Patton and others below him were little different “from those expressed from the beginning by German apologists.”¹⁴⁹

General Patton apparently did not consider the NSDAP to be an especially criminal organization, which would explain why he made this analogy; he intended no disrespect. After all, Patton was not a Native American, or a Korean, or a Vietnamese person, or an Iraqi, or a Palestinian, or any of the other millions of victims of U.S. capitalism, in which case the analogy would be perfectly easy to understand.

I believe that it would be an exaggeration to call Gen. Patton a fascist… but only a slight one, because we have good reasons to suspect that he was, at minimum, sympathetic to the Fascists. There is a rumor that Gen. Patton said ‘We’ve defeated the wrong enemy’ in 1945, but even if he never said those exact words, we can see that they accurately summarize what he thought during that year. Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 181–2:

Looking back at that era, an American war veteran later echoed this sentiment:

We were aware that the Russians had taken enormous losses on the eastern front, that they really had broken the back of the German army. We would have been in for infinitely worse casualties and misery had it not been for them. We were well disposed toward them. I remember saying if we happen to link up with ’em, I wouldn’t hesitate to kiss ’em. I didn’t hear any anti‐Russian talk. I think we were realistic enough to know that if we were going to fight them, we would come out second best […] In the final campaign down through Bavaria, we were in Patton’s army. Patton said we ought to keep going [to Moscow]. To me, that was an unthinkable idea. The Russians would have slaughtered us […] I don’t think the rank of the GIs had any stomach for fighting the Russians. We were informed enough through press and newsreels to know about Stalingrad.⁹

[…]

In a telephone conversation with General Joseph T. McNarney, Eisenhower’s deputy, General Patton reportedly made this statement:

We are going to have to fight them [the Soviets] sooner or later […] Why not do it now while our army is intact and the damn Russians can have their hindends kicked back into Russia in three months? We can do it ourselves easily with the help of the German troops we have, if we just arm them and take them with us; they hate the bastards. In ten days I can have enough incidents happen to have us at war with those sons of [insert slur here] and make it look like their fault. So much so that we will be completely justified in attacking them […]¹²

Patton was not the only American leader who saw things that way. The American historians Russell D. Buhite and William Christopher Hamel emphasize that many other military and political leaders “had begun to consider preventive war [against the USSR] in 1945.”¹³

Here is a summary of a letter that he typed in 1945:

Patton seems to respond to a combative press conference that took place just two weeks prior in which Patton was blamed for the appalling living conditions at many camps for Displaced Persons, many of whom were Jews.

As a result of this press conference, General Eisenhower reportedly ordered Patton to improve the camps under his area of command and to attend a Yom Kippur service.

The letter, all but confirming the poor conditions of the Displaced Persons camps, reads: “So far as the Jews are concerned, they do not want to be placed in comfortable buildings. They actually prefer to live as many to a room as possible. They have no conception of sanitation, hygiene or decency and are, as you know, the same sub‐human types that we saw in the internment camps.”

The letter also refers to the people of the Soviet Union as “the degenerate descendants of Genghis Khan” and says the envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness in Europe “passes beyond belief.”

Unfortunately, that was not all that he had to say about Jews:

“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,” Patton wrote. He complained of how the Jews in one camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” would defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy “locusts,” and he told of taking his commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to tour a makeshift synagogue set up to commemorate the holy day of Yom Kippur.

“We entered the synagogue, which was packed with the greatest stinking mass of humanity I have ever seen,” Patton wrote. “Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marveled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act.”

Other evidence emerged revealing not only Patton’s disdain for the Jews in the camps, but an odd admiration for the [Axis] prisoners of war under his watch.

Under Patton, [Axis] prisoners were not only bunked at times with Jewish survivors, but were even allowed to hold positions of authority, despite orders from Eisenhower to “de‐Nazify” the camps. “Listen,” Patton told one of his officers of the [Fascists], “if you need these men, keep them and don’t worry about anything else.”

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Gen. Patton, like many of the other white gentiles who fought for the Western Allies, did not see defeating the Axis as a heroic, altruistic quest to rescue millions of innocents from oppression. It was a job that they had to get done, nothing else.