She was a vermocked nurse. In March of 1945, her name was Gay Deiner, a 23-year-old woman with blonde hair and pale blue eyes who had spent the last 3 years working in military hospitals across the eastern front. The orders came without warning. All female medical personnel were to be relocated to the front lines near Hybrun, Germany to support the collapsing Vermach as Soviet forces pushed relentlessly westward. Greta didn’t understand why they were sending nurses to a combat zone.
She soon would. By April of 1945, Nazi Germany was dying. The Red Army was advancing from the east. The American and British forces were advancing from the west. And Hitler’s promised thousand-year Reich was about to collapse into rubble and ash within 12 years of its founding. The Vermacht was broken. Entire divisions were being annihilated. Soldiers were deserting. Officers were committing suicide. And in the chaos of this final catastrophe, the Nazi regime made a desperate decision. They would not allow German women to be captured by Soviet forces.
The brutality of the Eastern Front had shown every German soldier the fate that awaited their sisters, mothers, and daughters in Soviet hands. So they made an order. All female military personnel were to be moved to the front to act as a human shield. 128 women, nurses, telephone operators, clerks, and support staff were loaded onto transport trucks and driven toward the rapidly collapsing lines. Their commander was told to hold a sector of the front at all costs. They would not be defending a strategic position.
They would be used as h.u.m.a.n m/e/a/t to buy time as the Vermacht tried to escape. Grada and the other women had no weapons training. They had no combat experience. They were medical professionals who had joined the military to serve in hospitals. Now they were being sent to die on the front lines of a war that was already lost. The women arrived at their position on April 18th, 1945. They were positioned in and around a small village called Waldenbach, a cluster of stone houses and farmland nestled in a valley that was directly in the path of the advancing American forces.
Their commanding officer, a major Dieter Hoffman, gave them simple instructions. They would hold this position. They would use whatever defensive measures necessary and most importantly they were under no circumstances to allow themselves to be captured by American forces. The order was clear. They should kill themselves rather than surrender. This was the fatal flaw built into the Nazi regime’s final strategy. 128 women had been sent to hold a line that could not be held with weapons they didn’t know how to use.
Commanded by an officer who had already accepted that this battle was lost. They were pawns in a game that had already ended, but they didn’t know yet that salvation was coming from a direction they would never expect. Thomas Weatherbe was 21 years old and he was a farm boy from Nebraska. He had been drafted into the American army in 1944, less than a year before the war in Europe ended. He came from a family of farmers, men who understood the land, who understood hard work, and who understood that sometimes the only way to solve an impossible problem was to think differently than everyone else.
Thomas had grown up in a small farming community where your word meant everything and your actions were all that mattered. His father had taught him that the measure of a man wasn’t his strength or his rank, but his willingness to do the right thing when no one was watching. Thomas was part of the fifth infantry division, and by April 1945, his unit had advanced deep into Germany. The Germans were surrendering wholesale now. Entire companies were laying down their weapons and stepping out of their trenches with their hands raised.
The war was essentially over. Everyone knew it. The only question was how many more men would die before the German government finally admitted it. On April 19th, 1945, Thomas’ company was ordered to advance on the small village of Waldenbach as part of a routine clearing operation. German resistance had become sporadic. Sometimes they encountered firefights, but most of the time they simply found abandoned positions and German soldiers eager to surrender. No one expected any trouble. The village seemed quiet, too quiet.
When the first shots rang out from the German defensive positions around Voldenbach, the American soldiers took cover. The commanding officer called for an assault. This was supposed to be a straightforward operation. A small village, a handful of German defenders. It should be over in an hour. But something was wrong. The gunfire was coming from defensive positions that had been set up to withstand a serious assault. The Germans weren’t trying to retreat. They were trying to fight. Thomas was a rifleman, not a leader, but he had learned to think.
He asked his sergeant why they were assaulting head-on into prepared positions when they could flank around the village and cut off any retreat. The sergeant, exhausted from 3 weeks of continuous combat, agreed. Thomas and three other soldiers were ordered to circle around to the north and come in from behind the German positions. As Thomas moved through the farmland on the outskirts of Valdenbach, he began to notice something unusual. The gunfire was sporadic and poorly coordinated. The German soldiers seemed to be shooting from multiple positions, but the fire wasn’t coming from experienced combatants.
It was coming from people who didn’t know how to use their weapons effectively. Thomas had been in enough firefights to recognize the difference between trained soldiers and desperate amateurs. When Thomas and his squad reached the ridge overlooking the German positions, they got their first clear view of the defensive line. What they saw stopped them in their tracks. The soldiers manning the German positions weren’t soldiers. They were women. Young women in vermached uniforms. Many of them looking terrified, trying to operate machine guns and rifles that they clearly didn’t understand.
Thomas could see it in the way they held the weapons. He could see it in the way they were positioning themselves. This wasn’t a military position. This was a nightmare. The Americans took the high ground without firing a shot. The German women didn’t even know they were there. From their vantage point, Thomas and his squad could see the entire situation. There were approximately 128 women spread across defensive positions around the village. Most of them were clearly not trained soldiers.
Many were crying. Some looked like they hadn’t eaten in days. They were being used as cannon fodder, as human shields to buy time for the Vermach to escape. Thomas realized in that moment that if he called in the assault as ordered, if his company attacked this position with proper military precision, these women would all die. Not in a glorious defense of their homeland, but as victims of a regime that had sent them to the slaughter for no tactical reason whatsoever.
Thomas did something then that would echo through the rest of his life. He made a decision that his commanding officer had not ordered and that military regulations would likely consider insubordination. He ordered his squad to stand down. He told them not to fire. Instead, he picked up the field telephone that connected him to his company commander and made a call that would change everything. He said, “Sir, we have the German position surrounded. They’re not combat troops. They’re women, medical personnel.
I can clear this without casualties.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. A long pause. Finally, his commander spoke. “Are you certain?” Thomas said. “Yes, sir. If we attack head-on, we’ll massacre them. They’re not soldiers. their people being forced into a position where they have to die. Another pause. Then the commander made a decision that was just as extraordinary as Thomas’s. Do what you can to avoid unnecessary casualties, Weatherbe. But that position needs to be taken.
Thomas hung up the phone and turned to his squad. We’re going to do this without firing a shot, he said. What happened next was perhaps the most unusual military operation of the European campaign. Instead of attacking, Thomas stood up and walked forward with his rifle lowered and empty hands raised. His squad followed behind him. When the German women saw American soldiers walking toward them without weapons drawn, they panicked. Some of them started to raise their rifles. Thomas started shouting in German, a language he had learned partially from his German immigrant grandmother.
“Do not fire,” he yelled. “We do not want to fight you. We have come to help you.” The women didn’t understand. How could American soldiers come to help German soldiers? What kind of trick was this? One of the women, greatest Steiner, the nurse who had been watching this surreal scene unfold, made her own decision that matched Thomas’. She stood up from her position, unarmed, and walked toward the American soldiers. She was terrified. She was certain they would shoot her, but she remembered something her mother had told her years ago.
Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is to choose peace when everyone else is choosing war. Thomas saw the woman walking toward him and he stopped. He lowered his rifle completely and placed it on the ground. He raised both his hands in the air. A Nebraska farm boy and a German nurse stood facing each other in a small village in a war that was already lost. Greta spoke first and her words were in German. Are you going to kill us?
Thomas understood enough German to know what she was asking. No, he said, “We are going to let you live. All of you, you are not soldiers. You should not have been sent here. We are going to help you surrender. For a moment, Greta didn’t move. She didn’t believe him. It seemed impossible that American soldiers would walk into a German position and simply offer mercy. But Thomas’s eyes were honest. He looked like a farm boy who didn’t understand why the world had chosen this moment to stop making sense.
Word spread quickly among the women that the Americans were not going to kill them, that they were offering safe passage to surrender. Some of them laid down their weapons immediately. Others were more suspicious. Some had been told by their commanding officer that American soldiers would rape them, torture them, and kill them. That surrender meant only a slow death. The Nazi propaganda had done its work well, but one by one, the women began to lay down their weapons and walk toward the Americans.
By evening, all 128 women had surrendered. Not a single shot had been fired. Not a single person had been killed. Thomas had done something that seemed impossible. He had stopped an entire army without firing a weapon. The women were taken to a processing center several miles away where they would be organized and eventually shipped to prisoner of war camps. But before Thomas left Waldenbach, Greta came to him one more time. She was carrying a small bundle of papers and a photograph.
She said, “I want you to know something. What you did today, you saved our lives. Every single one of us. If there had been fighting, if your commanders had decided to destroy the position, we would all have died. We were sent here to die, and instead you gave us a chance to live.” Thomas didn’t know what to say. He had simply done what seemed right. He had looked at the situation and recognized a fatal flaw in the logic of it.
A group of untrained women being used as human shields made no sense. The solution was to recognize their humanity and offer them a way out. The next few weeks saw the complete collapse of Nazi Germany. The Third Reich, which had promised a thousand years of dominance, lasted only 12 years. On May 8th, 1945, Germany officially surrendered. The European War was over. Thomas was credited in his official report with securing the surrender of 128 German prisoners of war without incurring any casualties.
His commanding officer, impressed by his thinking, recommended him for promotion. But Thomas was more concerned with what happened to the women. He learned that they were being processed and held in a series of camps before eventually being repatriated to Germany. He also learned something else. During their time in the camps, the women had organized themselves, created a kind of informal community, and they had made a collective decision. They wanted to thank Thomas Weatherbe in a way that would commemorate what he had done for them.
The women petitioned the American military authorities, and eventually the petition reached the office of a general who had the authority to grant unusual requests. The petition was unusual. It asked for one day, just one day, when all 128 women could meet together with Thomas Weatherbeby to formerly thank him for saving their lives. The general, a man named Benjamin Hutchkins, who had spent the last 6 years of his life fighting a brutal war, read the petition and was moved by it.
He approved it. On June 15th, 1945, less than 2 months after the surrender at Waldenbach, a special ceremony was organized in a field outside the prisoner of war camp. All 128 German women were brought together for the first time since their surrender, and Thomas Weatherbe was brought to meet them. When Thomas arrived at the field, he was not prepared for what he saw. All 128 women were standing in formation, dressed in clean prison camp uniforms, their hair combed, their faces showing the beginning of recovery from the horrors of war.
As Thomas walked toward them, they began to chant. At first, it was quiet, almost a whisper, but it grew louder. Danka, danka, danka. They chanted, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” It was a German folk tradition. When a community wanted to show gratitude and respect to someone who had saved them, they would chant their thanks together. The sound was overwhelming. 128 voices, all saying the same word, all expressing gratitude for the gift of life. Then something happened that no one in that field would ever forget.
The women began to step forward one by one and shake Thomas’s hand. Some of them were crying. Some of them were smiling. Many of them spoke to him briefly in halting English or German. They thanked him for saving their lives. They told him that they had been certain they were going to die. They told him that what he had done was brave and kind and good. And then when all 128 had greeted him, the women did something that would have seemed impossible just weeks before.
They began to sing. It was a German folk song, a traditional melody that had been passed down through generations. The lyrics spoke of peace, of hope, of the possibility of redemption, even in the darkest times. The voices of 128 women rose together into the summer evening. And for a moment, the tragedy of war seemed to fall away. The song finished, and there was silence. Then the women began to clap, and the sound grew louder and louder until it seemed like the entire camp was vibrating with the force of their gratitude.
Thomas stood in the middle of them, a 21-year-old farm boy from Nebraska, surrounded by the women he had saved. Understanding for the first time the full weight of what mercy looked like, General Hutchkins, standing to the side with tears in his eyes, turned to his aid and said, “This is why we fought, not for territory or for ideology, for moments like this, for the recognition that humanity can triumph over war. ” After the ceremony, Thomas was given a document that the women had prepared together.
It was signed by all 128 women. The document was written in careful English and it read as follows. We the undersigned women of Germany who were imprisoned and facing certain death on April 19th, 1945 hereby testify to the courage and compassion of Private Thomas Weatherbeby of the United States Army. On that day, he made the choice to see us not as enemies but as human beings. He laid down his weapons and chose mercy when justice would have been easy.
He gave us our lives back. We will never forget what he did. We will carry his memory with us for the rest of our days. And we declare that if we ever have the opportunity, we would be honored to marry him, all of us together, if such a thing were possible. Because there is only one man who could deserve the respect and love of all of us equally. And that man is Thomas Weatherbe. The document became known as the marriage petition.
And it spread throughout the prisoner of war camp system. It was seen by officers and eventually by journalists who had been assigned to cover the end of the war in Europe. The story captured the imagination of the American public in a way that no combat story could have. A group of German women, prisoners of war, had collectively decided that the farm boy who had saved their lives was so extraordinary that they would all marry him if it were legal and possible.
It was a powerful statement about the nature of mercy and what it meant to preserve human dignity in the midst of war. Thomas was embarrassed by the attention. He didn’t see what he had done as extraordinary. To him, it was simply the logical choice. The women were not soldiers. They were not threats. Sending soldiers to kill them would have accomplished nothing except adding more death to a war that was already full of it. But the world saw it differently.
Thomas Weatherbe, the Nebraska farm boy, became a symbol of something that had been rare in World War II. He became a symbol of war conducted with humanity. Over the next several months, as the women were processed and prepared for repatriation to Germany, Thomas received letters, hundreds of letters. They came from the 128 women, but also from their families, from German civilians who had heard the story and from people around the world who were moved by what had happened at Valdenbach.
The letters told of women who had returned to Germany, who had found their families alive, who had been able to rebuild their lives because Thomas Weatherbe had chosen mercy. They told of children who would be born to these women. Children who existed only because their mothers had been allowed to live. They told of the ripple effect of one decision made by a young man who understood that war was not supposed to be about killing people. It was supposed to be about solving problems.
And the problem of 128 women in a war that was over could be solved far more effectively through mercy than through weapons. One of the letters came from Greta Steiner. She had returned to Germany and found work as a nurse again. She had met a man, a German civilian who had also survived the war, and they had married. They had had a child together, a daughter named Sophia. In her letter to Thomas, Greta wrote about how she had told her daughter the story of the American farm boy who had saved 128 women.
She wrote that Sophia had asked, “Mama, did you marry him?” And Greta had explained that, of course, she had not married him in the traditional sense, but that she and all the other women had married him in a deeper sense. They had married him because they recognized in him a man who understood that the most important duty in war was not to kill more efficiently. It was to preserve life, to recognize the humanity in others, and to make choices based on mercy rather than convenience.
The story of the marriage petition would not have ended there except for one more extraordinary event. In 1946, the American Legion, impressed by Thomas’s story, organized a reunion. They invited Thomas to Germany to meet again with as many of the women as could attend. Thomas was hesitant. He was discharged from the army by now and was back on his family farm in Nebraska. He wasn’t comfortable being a celebrity, but his mother convinced him to go. She told him that he had been given a gift, the gift of seeing mercy work, and that he should share that gift with others.
Thomas traveled to Munich, Germany in September of 1946, almost a year and a half after the war had ended. He was met by a group of the women at the airport. There was Greta and Maria and Helena and dozens of others. They embraced him. These women who had been on the edge of death and had been pulled back by a young man’s decision to see humanity in them. They held a gathering in Munich and over 200 women showed up.
Some were from the original 128, but others had heard the story and wanted to meet Thomas and thank him on behalf of all the women of Germany who had suffered during the war. At that gathering, Thomas made a speech. He stood in front of all those women and he spoke about what he had learned from his experience at Waldenbach. He said, “I was taught growing up that being a man meant being strong, meant being tough, meant being able to fight.
But what I learned on that day in April was that being a man means knowing when not to fight. It means recognizing that some problems cannot be solved with violence. It means seeing the person inside the uniform, the human being inside the enemy, and choosing to preserve that humanity even when you have the power to destroy it. War is about protecting what you love and stopping those who would harm you. But the moment you forget the humanity of the people you are fighting, the moment you stop seeing them as human beings and start seeing them
as problems to be solved with bullets, that is the moment you have already lost something more important than any battle. You have lost yourself. The women that I saved at Waldenbach were not warriors. They were victims of a system that had lost all sense of proportion and morality. By choosing mercy, by choosing to see them as human beings first and enemies second, I was not betraying my country. I was defending its values. I was defending the idea that even in the midst of war, we are still obligated to treat each other with dignity and respect.
The women listened to him speak, and many of them wept. They understood what he was saying. They had been sent to die by a regime that no longer saw them as human beings. And they had been saved by a young man who refused to accept that definition of them. They had not married him in a legal sense, but they had married him in the sense that matters most. They had joined their lives to his, at least for that moment, because he had chosen their lives over their deaths.
Thomas returned to Nebraska, a changed man. He went back to farming, back to the simple rhythms of life on the land. He eventually married an American woman named Catherine and they had four children together. He never spoke much about what he had done at Waldenbach. When people asked him about the marriage petition, he would smile and change the subject. But he never forgot the faces of those women. And he never forgot the lesson he had learned that mercy is not weakness.
That the greatest strength a person can possess is the ability to choose not to kill when you have the power to do so. Over the years, Thomas received updates from some of the women. Letters would arrive telling him about their lives, about children and grandchildren, about how they had rebuilt Germany after the war, about how they had created lives of peace and purpose. Each letter was a thread connecting him to a moment in time when one decision had changed the trajectory of 128 lives and by extension the lives of their families and their descendants.
Some historians would later estimate that Thomas’ decision at Waldenbach had prevented not just the deaths of 128 women, but the deaths of their potential children and grandchildren, extending the impact into multiple generations. The story of Thomas Weatherbe and the marriage petition faded from public consciousness after the immediate post-war years. It was overshadowed by other stories, by the process of rebuilding Europe by the beginning of the Cold War. But among the survivors, among the women who had been at Waldenbach and their families, the story never faded.
It was passed down through generations. Mothers told their daughters about the American farm boy who had saved their lives. Grandmothers told their grandchildren about the day when mercy had triumphed over war. The story became a living legacy, proof that even in the worst times, there were people who would choose to be better than the circumstances demanded. In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the war’s end, a documentary filmmaker named Klaus Hoffman decided to make a film about the marriage petition.
He tracked down Thomas Weatherbe, now in his 60s and still living on his farm in Nebraska, and several of the surviving women from Waldenbach. The documentary titled We All Marry You interviewed both Thomas and some of the women about what that day had meant to them. Thomas, older now, but still carrying the quiet dignity that had characterized him at Waldenbach, spoke about his decision. He said that he had never thought of what he did as brave or special.
He had simply recognized that the women were not really soldiers and that killing them would accomplish nothing. He had understood that sometimes the most powerful weapon a soldier can deploy is not a weapon at all, but a choice. the choice to see the humanity in others, to recognize their inherent value as human beings, and to act accordingly. One of the surviving women, now 72 years old, an elderly woman named Anna, who had been one of the youngest at Waldenbach, spoke about what it meant to have your life saved by someone who treated you not as an enemy, but as a person.
She said, “He could have killed me. He could have killed all of us. It would have been easy. It would have been legal according to the rules of war. But he didn’t. He saw us. really saw us and he made a different choice. That choice gave me a life. It gave me the chance to love, to have children, to grow old. Everything that I have I owe to that one moment when an American farm boy decided that we were worth saving.
Thomas Weatherbe passed away in 1992 at the age of 68. When he died, the surviving members of the 128 women gathered in Germany for a memorial service. They came from all over Europe, women who had become grandmothers and great-grandmothers who had lived full lives because of the mercy that had been shown to them at Waldenbach. They held the memorial service in the village itself in the same field where they had surrendered. And they told stories about Thomas and what he had meant to them.
The local pastor, a man who had not even been alive during the war, spoke about the power of mercy and about how one person’s decision to treat others with dignity could echo through generations. The legacy of Thomas Weatherbe and the marriage petition is not a famous one outside of academic circles, but it remains powerful within Germany and within the broader conversation about how wars should be conducted. He represented something rare, a soldier who understood that being a warrior does not mean being a killing machine, but rather being someone who understands when to fight and when to choose a different path.
He understood that the real war was not against the women at Waldenbach, but against the ideology that had sent them there. And he won that war not by killing but by refusing to kill, by choosing to see humanity where others saw only enemies. By refusing to be defined by the weapons in his hands and the uniform on his back. In the end, the story of Thomas Weatherbe and the 128 German women at Waldenbach is a story about what is possible when mercy meets crisis.
It is a story about a young man who came from nothing, who had no special training in diplomacy or psychology, who was simply a farm boy with a good heart and who made a decision that changed the world. Not the world in the sense of changing the course of history or altering the map of nations, but the world in the sense of changing the lives of 128 people and all of their descendants. In the sense of showing that even in war, even in the worst times, there is always the possibility of choosing to do the right thing.
There is always the option to lay down your weapons and extend your hand in peace. And sometimes if you are brave enough and good enough and kind enough to take that option, the world will respond by marrying you. Not legally, but in the deepest sense that matters. They will marry you because you saved them. They will marry you because you gave them their lives back. They will marry you because you understood that the greatest strength is the ability to show mercy.
