Ohrdruf was a grisly adjunct, they would later realize, to the nearby infamous Buchenwald, and one of the first Nazi death camps the Americans had liberated. Patton himself had thrown up after a visit to Ohrdruf.
w
The CIC, secretive and powerful, was charged with thwarting spies and sabotage against U.S. Army forces and projects, investigating traitors, and, right after the war in Europe, primarily hunting and arresting fleeing Nazi war criminals who seemed to be everywhere in Germany. Its agents were trained military soldiers, linguists, and men with high IQs with special investigative skills and talents, physical and mental—“G-men in Khakis,” the press would later call them.
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They had powers of arrest, detention, and even execution, if they felt it warranted.
The job was always dangerous. Just months previous, Skubik had lost several men while attempting to arrest a Nazi bigwig who agreed to surrender at his house. But the house was booby-trapped. While the team went inside to wait, Skubik was out back,
pistol in hand, reconnoitering when he heard the awful explosion. Luck, God, and destiny had saved him, he would later tell his kids. They cornered the Nazi later and when they were about to arrest him, he tried to bribe them with diamonds to let him get away. Skubik had to pull his gun on a colleague to prevent him from accepting. It galled him that even CIC agents were susceptible.
Since entering Germany with Patton until the country’s capitulation in early May, his 89
th
detachment had investigated seventy-one towns, interrogated 17,000 Germans and made seven hundred arrests.
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He himself had made over thirty arrests, which included six spies and seventeen Gestapo agents. The work—even after the surrender and his transfer to the larger 970
th
Detachment—was always grim. Immediate post-war Germany was a hell of ruin and degradation. They worked amidst the threats of brutal war criminals; conflicting, often violent aims of the different occupying powers; millions of displaced persons needing almost everything; prostitution of all kinds—including children—and rampant, crime-breeding black marketeering, an out-of-control enterprise that corrupted many in Occupied Germany. Players could make a fortune. He had experienced tough times growing up in Canton, Ohio, but nothing like this—people digging holes in rubble to live in, eating garbage, selling their bodies for cigarettes which became almost the dominant currency. He had seen mothers whose cheeks were bitten off by raping, vengeful Russians. And they were the lucky ones. Often the Russians murdered their rape victims.
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He had witnessed terrible suicides by desperate men who figured they would be hanged after arrest—like Hitler’s brother-in-law, Martin Hammitzch, who put a bullet in his temple as Skubik and the arrest team arrived.
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His sleep was still haunted by the screams of a horribly maimed American he had thought dead and accidentally stepped on as he ran fearfully through a house during a live battle.
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He hated the war.
He hated Germany.
And now this former SS corporal in front of him, stubborn and verbally stumbling—a pawn of the true local culprits, he suspected—was refusing to reveal who had given him the order to torch Schluechtern’s only synagogue. Schluechtern was a centuries-old German village just inside the American Occupation Zone to which his three-man team
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had retreated when the Russians had kicked them out of Zwickau on July 1. Zwickau, in eastern Germany flanking the Mulde River, was now part of the Russian Occupation Zone, a dangerous place his job sometimes took him secretly. Though Skubik was a Catholic, he grieved for the Jews of Schluechtern—a measly 400 of them who had been ravaged by the village’s Nazi bullies, some beaten and murdered,
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the rest shipped to the camps and probably now exterminated. Not a Jew had returned. Not one! The synagogue was still standing but gutted. He was not going to let this guy shield the ones responsible.
He was determined to get an answer.
The former SS corporal was “a small fellow. . . a vicious animal,” said Skubik.
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His name, it turns out, was Adam Nieman, confirmed Christa Krucker, a Schluechtern resident who investigated for me. He was a recognized dimwit and, in her opinion, Skubik was aware of that, which probably added to his frustration. Whatever the case, Nieman had confessed to torching the synagogue on “Kristallnacht,” the infamous two nights in early November 1938 when Nazis all over Germany attacked Jews and destroyed their property. Kristallnacht meant “night of the broken glass” and is generally considered to have been the beginning of the Holocaust. Nieman had also confessed, according to Skubik, to raping two Jewish women and killing several Jewish men.
He felt big with the uniform on, he told Skubik, who spoke German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian. Skubik had interrogated over fifty locals himself and believed him. Nieman said he used gasoline to start the fire. “Just following orders,” he said. But he would not reveal from whom.
“I kept telling him he would have to answer to God for his crimes and he said he didn’t believe in God. But apparently the mention of God affected him. He showed fear in his face. He literally turned blue which upset me. So I sent him out into the lobby where he could compose himself.”
What happened next was unexpected. The little ex-corporal asked to go to the toilet. Apparently he had a concealed penknife. Once the door closed, he started slitting his wrists. A guard in the hallway heard a sound—a “cry,” says Skubik
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—and opened the bathroom door. Nieman came running out, blood spewing. A former Schluechtern resident, Frank Theubert, who, as a little boy, was there that day, says Nieman was shouting, “I’ll kill either you or myself.” Skubik, in the midst of another interrogation down the hall, heard the commotion and gave chase along with others. Theubert, arriving to be with his mother who worked at the mansion the CIC had requisitioned, writes, “I saw a man sneaking out....Seconds later I saw office staff storming up the apple orchard hill [behind the mansion] in pursuit of their escapee.” Neiman “continued to stab himself,” said Skubik. “He finally collapsed in a geyser of blood... gave the final kick... and died.” Theubert: “Today, more than sixty years later, the sight of this blood-covered man as I approached them is still vividly in my memory.”
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The memory stayed with Skubik too, haunting him for years—part of a larger, nightmare mosaic of later death threats and experiences that at first, he wrote, he mostly blocked out of his mind,
and then which returned in fragmented pieces causing extreme anxiety until he finally purged them with a series of acts including, it appears, returning to Eastern Europe in 1978 and writing a book about what must be considered the most important issue he dealt with in that chaotic time: General Patton’s death. Prior to his death in 1996, he self-published
The Murder of General Patton.
The title describes how he believed General Patton died—by assassination—and is based on his own personal investigations made while an intelligence agent serving for and near Patton in Germany during and up to the time the legendary general died.
The book’s forward begins: “It is my intention to explain the circumstances which lead me to believe: [1]
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that General George Smith Patton, Jr., was murdered; [2] that the [car] accident which took place on December 9, 1945 was set up by the Soviet NKVD (
Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del
) in collusion with the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services); [3] that Patton died at the Heidelberg Military Hospital on December 21 at the hands of an assassin.” On page ninety-seven of the book, after taking issue with historians whom he believes have “bought the official line”—that Patton’s death was an accident—he writes, “However historians do research, they are not trained investigators. As a trained Counter Intelligence Agent I have no doubt that General George S. Patton, Jr. was murdered.”
Like OSS agent Bazata, CIC agent Skubik implicates not only OSS, but its chief, “Wild Bill” Donovan.
Stating that certain names may be changed—either by design or his faulty memory—Skubik’s witness begins, ultimately, when he was an infant. The slightly built blond never knew his Austrian-born birth parents.
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He was found in a basket left on the steps of a Ukrainian Catholic Church in Philadelphia in 1916
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where he was raised by nuns until he was seven when he was adopted by a
Ukrainian family in Canton. As a child, he spoke only Ukrainian. While his adopted father, a steelworker, was respected, his mother, who ran the household, was mean, according to Skubik’s children—adults today who supplied me with his book—and made him work long hours hawking newspapers. She imposed a daily money quota. He had a tough time because his English was bad. But wiry and nervy, he became a street tough with a reputation for having punishing fists. That toughness led to his eventually joining CIC as an intelligence agent. However, without his Ukrainian upbringing, he probably would not have been able to learn about the alleged Patton plot.
Because of his Slavic language background, he was given special duty by CIC to cultivate Ukrainian and other Eastern European sources. It was while doing that, he writes, that he first heard of the plot. He was meeting clandestinely with Stepan Bandera, a famous Ukrainian nationalist leader. They were in Munich, Germany, reputed to have been the birthplace of Nazism and one of the chief cities under American occupation. It was May 16, 1945, just days after the war in Europe had ended. Bandera, a controversial and enigmatic figure on the run at that time, was there with his many bodyguards. Eventually, Britain and America would use Bandera and his Ukrainians as infiltrators and saboteurs in the Cold War against Russia.
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How exactly Skubik had contacted the revolutionary and arranged the meeting is not explained in Skubik’s book, but, “he told me that the Soviet High Command had been ordered by Marshal Stalin to kill U.S. Army General George Patton.”
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Bandera, who himself would be murdered by a Soviet assassin in Munich in 1958,
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was being sought at that time by both the Russians and the U.S., who mostly wanted to help the Soviets catch him. Born in 1909, he had been brought up in a patriotic
family. His father was an outspoken Ukrainian cleric, many of whom were political. Ukraine, in its Western reaches, was a vast and agriculturally rich area of European Russia bordering Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Although it had long been part of Imperial Russia, and then the Soviet Union, most of its people did not consider themselves Russians. Their loyalty was to Ukraine, and, in fact, the area had been independent and a separate country not only in earlier centuries but briefly during World War I until swallowed up again by the communist revolution. Bandera, early in his life had been involved in nationalistic struggles against Poland and the USSR, both of which wanted to dominate Ukrainians. He became a guerilla leader and thinker, fighting for an independent Ukraine. And in the 1930s, after being sent to prison for the alleged assassination of a Polish leader, he had risen to head one of the main Ukrainian revolutionary groups—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or “OUN”—fighting especially the Soviets.
As war clouds had grown over Europe in the late 1930s, he sought help against the Soviet Union from the Nazis who finally aided him once they broke their alliance with Moscow and attacked Russia in 1941. But when he demanded Ukrainian independence in return, the Nazis had thrown him in a succession of prisons, including Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, and he was not freed until 1944 when the Germans became desperate for Ukrainian help. But by that time, the Germans were losing the war and could not enforce their demands. Once freed, Bandera, seeing his best chance ever for Ukrainian independence, attacked both the Nazis and the Soviets, both of whose armies were in the Ukraine fighting each other. There are allegations that Bandera, a small, unimposing man, was nonetheless a ruthless fighter and killed Jews as well as Nazis and Russians. While Ukrainians did
serve with the Nazis, some as brutal guards in Nazi concentration camps, Bandera’s part remains a puzzle, as does that of the OUN. Other Ukrainian groups may have been the culprits who sparked the allegations. First and foremost, Bandera was a nationalist fighting to free Ukraine from the communists. When the Allies won the war, Bandera had been branded a bandit by the Russians upon whom his guerillas had inflicted serious damage. Because the Soviets were among the Allied victors, the U.S. also was supposed to consider Bandera a fugitive.
But Soviet concerns were not Skubik’s. He had already clashed enough with the Red Army to want to avoid them. Bandera, on the other hand, was the kind of high-level source the CIC agent’s background and languages enabled him to exploit, which was his job, and he took advantage of the opportunity. Bandera, he writes, had spies in the Soviet Union and told him that Patton had incurred Stalin’s “wrath”—and thus had been marked for assassination—when he indicated his intentions to fight the Russians, first in Berlin, where he wanted to confront them but was not allowed by General Eisenhower, and then in Czechoslovakia where his armies, rebuffed from taking Berlin, had been sent instead at the end of the war. “His incursion into Czechoslovakia infuriated Marshall Stalin,” Skubik wrote Bandera told him. “How dare [Patton] interfere with the Soviet geopolitical plans for a greater Soviet Union”—which included making Czechoslovakia a puppet buffer. But Eisenhower, unaware of the Russian objection, had at first given Patton “permission to take all of Czechoslovakia,” adds Skubik. It was a done deal and Patton was looking forward to it. “On May 4, 1945, Patton’s Third Army along with the Fifth Corps under General [Courtney] Hodges rapidly advanced against the Germans and were at the approaches to Prague where they met the Soviet forces [coming from the East].” Patton, with the
largest army he had ever commanded—a virtual juggernaut—“was fully prepared to push the Soviet troops out of Czechoslovakia. A few skirmishes ensued in which some Soviet troops were killed or wounded.” But then, writes Skubik, “Eisenhower received a phone call from the Soviet chief of staff, General Alexei Antonov, telling [him] to stop Patton or else.” Eisenhower “feared the consequences” and halted Patton, who was “furious.”
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