December 9th, 1945. A quiet Sunday morning in occupied Germany. General George S. Patton is sitting in the back of his 1938 Cadillac, heading to a pheasant hunt with his chief of staff, General Hobart Gay. The war has been over for 7 months. Tomorrow, Patton is scheduled to fly home to America.

He has plans, big plans. He wants to write his memoirs. He wants to tell the American people the truth about what really happened at the end of the war. He wants to expose what he calls the catastrophic mistakes that handed Eastern Europe to Stalin. But George Patton will never make that flight.

In a few minutes, a 2 and 1/2 ton army truck will suddenly turn into the path of his car. The collision will break his neck. 12 days later, America’s greatest battlefield commander will be dead. He was 60 years old. The official story is simple. A tragic accident, a blood clot, an unlucky end for a man who survived 3 years of combat without a scratch.
But that’s not where this story ends. That’s where the questions begin. Because in the 78 years since Patton’s death, crucial evidence has disappeared. Key witnesses have vanished. Official reports have gone missing. and one man has confessed to being paid to assassinate the general. This is the story of how George Patton really died and why the truth may have been buried with him.The accident happened at 11:45 in the morning on a road near Mannheim. Patton’s driver, 19-year-old Private Horus Woodring, was traveling at about 30 miles per hour when a GMC truck driven by technical sergeant Robert Thompson suddenly turned left directly into their path. Wooding had no time to react. The Cadillac slammed into the truck’s side.

In the impact, Patton was thrown forward. His head struck the partition between the front and back seats. His neck snapped. He fell into General Gay’s lap, unable to move. Rub my fingers, Hap, Patton said. Gay did. Patton felt nothing. Go ahead, work them, Patton ordered. He couldn’t feel a thing. He knew immediately what had happened. I’m paralyzed, he said.

This is a hell of a way to die. Here’s the first strange thing. Patton was the only person injured. Woodring walked away without a scratch. General Gay was shaken but unheard. Even the men in the truck were fine. Only Patton, sitting in the back seat, suffered a catastrophic injury. Here’s the second strange thing.

Within minutes of the accident, high-ranking army officers began arriving at the scene. It was a quiet Sunday morning. The crash happened on an obscure industrial road. Yet somehow, multiple senior officers appeared almost immediately. How did they know? Here’s the third strange thing. The official accident report disappeared.

When investigators tried to locate it years later, they were told it didn’t exist. Lieutenant Peter Babalis, the military police officer who filed the original report, requested a copy decades later. The army told him no such report could be found. And here’s the fourth strange thing. The truck driver, Sergeant Thompson, vanished.

He was reportedly flown to England immediately after the accident for his own protection. 4 days later, he mysteriously reappeared in Germany to give a single interview, then disappeared again. His personnel file is gone. His whereabouts after December 1945 are unknown. Patton was rushed to the 131st Station Hospital in H Highleberg about 12 miles away.

not to the closer hospital in Mannheim. Why the longer drive for a man with a broken neck? No one has ever explained. At the hospital, doctors discovered that Patton had fractured his third cervical vertebrae and dislocated the third and fourth vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

His wife Beatrice flew from Boston to be at his side. If you’re watching this and you find yourself wondering what really happened to Patton, hit that subscribe button. We dig into the stories that history tried to bury. The secrets that someone didn’t want you to know. Drop a comment telling me what you think.

Was this really an accident? I read every single one. For the next 12 days, Patton lay in that hospital bed. Doctors placed him in traction. His condition stabilized. He was alert, talking, even joking with visitors. “Relax, gentlemen,” he told his staff. “I’m in no condition to be a terror now.” Beatatrice read to him every day.

By December 20th, doctors were cautiously optimistic. Patton seemed to be recovering. He might never walk again, but he would live. Then something changed. On December 21st, Patton told a nurse, “I’m going to die today.” At 5:55 that evening, while Beatrice was at dinner, George Patton’s heart stopped. The official cause of death was pulmonary embolism and congestive heart failure.

A blood clot had traveled to his heart. It happened sometimes with paralysis patients. Tragic, but not unusual. Case closed. Except Beatatrice Patton refused to authorize an autopsy. The army requested one. She said no. Some say she was satisfied that everything had been doneto save her husband. Others say she was protecting something.

Without an autopsy, we will never know exactly what killed George Patton. The conspiracy theories began almost immediately. They center on a man named Douglas Bazarta. Bazarta was a decorated World War II veteran. He earned the Navy Cross, four Purple Hearts, and the French Quadigare. He was also an OSS operative, a trained assassin.

In October 1979, Bazarda stood before 450 former OSS agents at a reunion in Washington, DC, and made an extraordinary confession. I know who killed Patton, he said, because I am the one who was hired to do it. $10,000. General William Wild Bill Donovan himself, director of OSS, entrusted me with the mission. I set up the accident.

According to Bazada, the truck collision was staged. As chaos erupted at the crash scene, Bazada fired a low velocity projectile into Patton’s neck using a specialized weapon designed to kill without leaving an obvious bullet wound. The shot was meant to be fatal. It wasn’t. Patton survived. So, a backup plan was activated.

Bazata claimed that an NKVD agent, a Soviet assassin, entered Patton’s hospital room and administered a lethal dose of cyanide designed to cause heart failure and embolism. Untraceable, perfectly timed. Murder disguised as natural causes. Is this true? We don’t know. Bazata maintained his story until his death in 1999.

He was never charged with any crime. His claims have never been proven or definitively disproven. But consider the motives. By December 1945, Patton had become a serious problem for powerful people. He had been openly criticizing the decision to hand Eastern Europe to Stalin. He had called the Soviets a synthesis of all evil.

He had suggested that America should rearm the Germans and drive the Russians back to Moscow while the American army was still intact in Europe. His telephones were being tapped. His movements were monitored. He had been removed from command of Third Army and given a meaningless desk job. And he was planning to go home and tell the American people everything.

Patton had enemies in Washington. He had enemies in Moscow. He had been a thorn in Eisenhower’s side for years. Some historians believe Eisenhower himself wanted Patton silenced, not necessarily killed, but kept quiet. A dead Patton would never write those memoirs. A dead Patton would never testify before Congress.

A dead Patton would never run for political office. A possibility that terrified his rivals. The evidence is circumstantial. The missing reports, the vanished witnesses, the refused autopsy, the deathbed confession of a trained assassin. None of it proves murder, but none of it proves accident either. What we know for certain is this.

George Patton predicted the Cold War before it began. He warned that Stalin would swallow Eastern Europe. He was right. Within 3 years of his death, everything he predicted came true. The Iron Curtain fell exactly where he said it would, and the man who saw it coming, the only Allied general with the courage to say it publicly, died in a car accident the day before he was supposed to fly home.

Some coincidences are hard to accept. In 2008, journalist Robert Wilcox published Target Patn, compiling years of research into the general’s death. His conclusion, something is not right about what we know happened to Patton. The accident and death need further investigation. In 2014, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard reached similar conclusions in Killing Patton, calling for the case to be reopened.

Neither book proves murder, but both demonstrate that the official story has holes you could drive a truck through. George Patton once said, “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived. He lived more than most. He fought in two world wars. He revolutionized armored warfare.

He saved an army at Bastonia. He terrified the Germans so much that Hitler reportedly said, “Patton is the most dangerous man the Allies have.” And then 7 months after the greatest victory of his life, he died in a hospital bed in Germany. Murdered or just unlucky. We may never know. The witnesses are dead. The reports are gone.

The only man who confessed took his secrets to the grave. What remains is questions. And the uneasy feeling that someone somewhere got away with killing America’s greatest general.