The Marriage Petition: The Nebraska Farm Boy Who Saved an Army of Women With a Choice, Not a Shot

Near Aken in April 1945, Private Thomas Weatherbe Faced 128 Armed German Nurses. He Didn’t Fire a Weapon. He Showed Mercy, Earning a Pledge of Love That Became a Legend.

WALDENBACH, GERMANY / APRIL 19, 1945 – The Third Reich was dying. The Red Army was advancing relentlessly from the East, and American and British forces were closing in from the West. Hitler’s promised thousand-year empire was collapsing into rubble and ash after barely twelve years. In the chaos of this final catastrophe, the Nazi regime made a desperate, cynical decision: they would use German women as a human shield.

The brutality of the Eastern Front had shown every German soldier the grim fate awaiting their sisters, mothers, and daughters in Soviet hands. To prevent capture by the Soviets, the regime issued an order: all female military personnel were to be moved to the rapidly collapsing front lines near the town of Hybrun to face the Western Allies. The command was simple: hold the sector at all costs.

Greta Steiner, a 23-year-old nurse with blonde hair and pale blue eyes, was one of 128 women—nurses, telephone operators, and clerks—loaded onto transport trucks and driven toward the front. She and the others had no weapons training, no combat experience. They were medical professionals, yet they were being sent to act as human meat, commanded by an officer, Major Dieter Hoffman, to hold a position that could not be held, simply to buy time for the Wehrmacht to escape. Their final instruction was clear: they should kill themselves rather than surrender to the Americans.

This was the fatal flaw built into the Nazi regime’s final strategy: sending 128 untrained women to a slaughter they didn’t understand, led by an officer who already knew the 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.

The Logic of the Farm Boy

Thomas Weatherbe was 21 years old, a farm boy from Nebraska. Drafted into the American army in 1944, he was part of the Fifth Infantry Division, advancing deep into Germany by April 1945. Thomas came from a family of farmers, men who understood the land, hard work, and the principle that sometimes the only way to solve an impossible problem was to think differently. His father had taught him that the measure of a man wasn’t his strength or rank, but his willingness to do the right thing when no one was watching.

On April 19th, Thomas’s company was ordered to advance on the small village of Waldenbach as part of a routine clearing operation. German resistance was sporadic, and no one expected any trouble.

But when the first shots rang out, something felt wrong. The gunfire was coming from defensive positions set up for a serious assault, yet the fire was poorly coordinated and erratic. Thomas, a rifleman, asked his sergeant why they were assaulting head-on into prepared positions when they could flank the village.

Thomas and three other soldiers were ordered to circle to the north. As Thomas moved through the outskirts of Waldenbach, he noted the sporadic, amateurish firing. He 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 saw the unbelievable: the soldiers manning the defensive positions weren’t soldiers. They were women. Young women in Wehrmacht uniforms, many terrified, trying to operate machine guns and rifles they clearly didn’t understand.

This wasn’t a military position. This was a nightmare.

The Decision That Defined Humanity

From their vantage point, Thomas realized the horrific truth: these 128 women were being used as cannon fodder, as human shields. If he called in the assault as ordered—if his company attacked this position with proper military precision—these women would all die pointlessly.

In that moment, Thomas made a decision that would echo through the rest of his life, an act 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 and called his company commander.

“Sir, we have the German position surrounded. They’re not combat troops. They’re women, medical personnel. I can clear this without casualties.”

A long pause stretched over the line. “Are you certain?” the commander asked.

“Yes, sir. If we attack head-on, we’ll massacre them. They’re not soldiers; they’re people being forced into a position where they have to die.”

The commander made a decision just as extraordinary as Thomas’s: “Do what you can to avoid unnecessary casualties, Weatherbe. But that position needs to be taken.”

The Surrender of Mercy

Thomas hung up the phone. “We’re going to do this without firing a shot,” he announced to his squad.

He stood up and walked forward, his rifle lowered, his hands conspicuously empty.

When the German women saw the American soldiers advancing without weapons drawn, they panicked. Some raised their rifles. Thomas started shouting in German, a language he had learned partially from his German immigrant grandmother: “Do not fire! We do not want to fight you! We have come to help you!”

The women, steeped in propaganda, were utterly confused. What kind of trick was this?

Greta Steiner, the nurse, was watching this surreal scene unfold. She made her own decision that matched Thomas’s: she stood up from her position, unarmed, and walked toward the American soldiers. She was terrified, but she remembered something her mother had told her: 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 stopped. He placed his rifle completely on the ground. 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 in German: “Are you going to kill us?”

“No,” Thomas replied, understanding her meaning. “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.”

Word spread quickly. The Americans were offering safe passage. 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 stopped an entire army without firing a weapon.

The Marriage Petition: Gratitude Made Public

Thomas was credited in his official report with securing the surrender of 128 German prisoners of war without incurring any casualties. He was recommended for promotion. But he was most concerned with the women he had saved, now held in a processing camp.

He learned that the women had made a collective decision: they wanted to thank him in a way that would commemorate what he had done. They petitioned the American military authorities, asking for one day when all 128 could meet with him to formally express their gratitude. General Benjamin Hutchkins, moved by the unique request, approved the ceremony.

On June 15th, 1945, less than two months after the surrender at Waldenbach, a special ceremony was organized. When Thomas arrived, he found all 128 women standing in formation. As he walked toward them, they began to chant: “Danka! Danka! Danka!”

It was a German folk tradition—a collective chanting of thanks to someone who had saved their community. The sound of 128 voices, all expressing gratitude for the gift of life, was overwhelming.

The women then stepped forward one by one to shake his hand, smiling and crying. Finally, they did something unforgettable: they began to sing a German folk song about peace, hope, and redemption.

The ceremony concluded with the presentation of a document, signed by all 128 women, written in careful English. It read:

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 Weatherbe 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…

…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. It captured the imagination of the American public, a powerful statement that the farm boy who chose mercy was so extraordinary that 128 women had collectively offered him their future.

The Legacy of Not Fighting

Thomas Weatherbe became a symbol of war conducted with humanity. He returned to Nebraska, eventually married an American woman named Catherine, and had four children. He never saw what he did as extraordinary, maintaining that it was simply the logical choice: killing people who weren’t soldiers would have been meaningless violence.

Over the years, he received hundreds of letters. Greta Steiner wrote to him after returning to Germany, finding work, marrying a German civilian, and having a daughter named Sophia. She told Thomas that she had explained to Sophia that she hadn’t married him in the traditional sense, but in a deeper one:

“…She 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.”

In 1946, the American Legion organized a reunion in Munich. Thomas, hesitant but encouraged by his mother, traveled to Germany. Over 200 women attended the gathering. Thomas stood before them and delivered a speech that encapsulated the true meaning of Waldenbach:

“I was taught that being a man meant being strong, 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… The moment you forget the humanity of the people you are fighting… that is the moment you have already lost something more important than any battle. You have lost yourself.”

Thomas Weatherbe passed away in 1992, but the legacy of the Marriage Petition lives on. Historians estimate that his decision prevented not just the deaths of 128 women, but the deaths of their potential children and grandchildren, extending the impact of mercy into multiple generations.

The story of Thomas Weatherbe and the women of Waldenbach is a profound reminder that the greatest strength a person can possess is the ability to choose not to kill when you have the power to do so. He won his war not by pulling the trigger, but by refusing to—proving that even in the midst of crisis, the option to lay down your weapon and extend your hand in peace is always available.