The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (39 page)

It amused Kraus that, although they all wore uniforms without rank or insignia, people referred to Michel as ‘Captain Mike’. ‘His presence suggested he was an important person. He had a lot of autonomy simply because he knew more about Germany than anyone else in the unit. Plus a forceful personality. Someone like that just takes charge. He went his own way and had his own informants I didn’t know about. I didn’t always know what he was doing, and must admit that I had very little control over him.’ It took a while for the men to get to know and trust one another. ‘Here was this individual who didn’t say very much and was hard to draw into conversation,’ Kraus remembered. ‘I found out slowly that his entire family had disappeared, and that he had been tortured and imprisoned in France. Mike had a lot of crosses to bear while we were in Germany together.’ Gradually, the men became close and developed a strong friendship that was to last all their lives.

‘Because of his languages, culture, knowledge and German background, he would conduct most of the interrogations. He certainly got my attention by his techniques. He was a real pro and knew how to draw a person out. He seemed to know instinctively whether a person was trying to put one over on us or was lying and being deceitful. He would frame his questions in a particular way to catch the person offguard. He was
extremely
skilful. He knew the right questions and had a theatrical touch that got things out of people most interrogators would never have got close to. Most of the time he was very quiet and carried out the interrogations in a low voice, but he got what he wanted. But there were many instances, when he felt people were distorting the truth, that his anger came out. He could get very angry. He could be very intimidating - very intimidating - because it was in such contrast to his normally cool, mild demeanour. Yes, he could get very angry, but he never got physical. Never. Not ever.’ Leo Marks, an acknowledged cryptographer of genius who ran the British Special Operations Executive that worked with the French Résistance, added: ‘It is almost technically impossible to lie to Michel Thomas. He may not detect what the truth is, but he will know when he is not being given it.’
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Michel soon set up his own trademark ‘organisation within an organisation’ in Ulm, recruiting and paying his own informants. ‘The occupation authorities reinstituted the Reichsmark as the official currency soon after the end of hostilities. My “wallpaper money” came in useful.’ He still had a suitcase full of high-denomination bills liberated from Aschaffenburg and believed he could use it to more effect than the government. Even so, the Reichsmark had little value, and cigarettes were the true hard currency of the time.

Around two hundred scientists who moved from the Russian zone had settled in Heidenheim, which came under the jurisdiction of Ulm CIC. Michel went regularly to the town to carry out interrogations for Paperclip, aimed at categorising scientists in terms of quality and importance, and investigate their personal histories for any evidence of Nazi Party activity or war crimes. ‘This meant that even people with Nazi pasts might be useful, if they were important enough, and should be sent up the line. But I understood very clearly from written instructions that immigration was out of the question. I thought these people would go to the United States for two months at the most for expert debriefings. They lied to us, and it was a betrayal.’ He did not discover the truth for many years.

One of Michel’s most important informants in Ulm was Hans Joohs, a German who had been a leader in the Hitler Youth. Aged nineteen when war broke out, Joohs was drafted into the First Alpine Division early in 1941 and sent to the Russian front, headed for the Caucasus. He was wounded in a Russian tank attack in the Ukraine, lost an arm and was sent back to hospital in Germany. He was discharged from the army in 1945 and attended university in Munich. At the end of the war Joohs made his way to his home city of Neu-Ulm, across the Danube from Ulm. ‘I moved with my bicycle and it took a day because the German Army was blocking the road. It was a mess. An unbelievable mess. I found the two cities destroyed and had to recognise that everything we had was gone. My folks’ house, all the homes of my relatives, everything. It was very tough to see that.’

Joohs, who spoke reasonable English, was desperate for work and found his way to Michel’s office. The German authorities had told him he was only eligible for manual labour, because of his background, and with only one arm he was doomed to starvation. Michel listened to Joohs’s story and felt that he was sincere in his repudiation of Nazism, a process that had begun on the day he was wounded. ‘I believed every word he said.’
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Michel found Joohs a job at the refugee camp in Ulm situated in a large army barracks, the Rienlesberg Raserne. Built of brick at the end of the nineteenth century, the huge complex had survived the bombing and now housed thousands of refugees in primitive conditions. Trains arrived from the east every day - from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and even Russia - bringing back desperate Germans and others who had either fled or been expelled from those countries, every one of whom had to be screened.
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Joohs worked as an interpreter, liaising between the camp administration and the military authorities.

‘Due to the fact that I was one of the very few who spoke English, and perhaps because my nationalistic past was apparently not as hopeless as many others, I began to work with CIC,’ Joohs said. He knew Michel only as ‘Mike’. ‘I never knew his last name or his real name. My first impression was that he was a clean-cut American officer. I had no idea he was not American. He did not speak very much and seemed very introvert. He did not ask many questions at first, but they were precise and to the point. I wouldn’t say he was friendly, which I understood as I learned more about the crimes of my country, but he was a well-mannered gentleman.’

The camp had a rapid turnover. Ordinary soldiers remained about two weeks and then returned home, while those who came from the east stayed longer until they were assigned to villages where local farmers were compelled to give the refugees shelter. ‘I gave Mike information about the new arrivals who came into the camp, where they came from, how long they stayed and what sort of people they were,’ Joohs said. There would be periodic raids on the barracks when people were arrested. ‘I would be informed twelve hours beforehand and my responsibility would be to show the MPs where the suspects were sheltered. I remember one raid when twenty-five males were arrested and later tried before a military court.’

*

One day two French counter-intelligence officers from the Securite Militaire came to see Michel at his office in Ulm with an interesting story. A survivor from Ebensee concentration camp, in Austria, had been shot by the SS and left for dead but had ended up in hospital in the French zone. His condition deteriorated, and when he knew he was on the point of death he asked to see someone in authority to pass on important information.

More than thirty thousand slave labourers at the camp in Ebensee had quarried stone from tunnels that went deep into the mountains. As the American Army had neared at the end of the war, the SS ordered all the prisoners into one of the tunnels. The plan was to block the entrance and detonate explosives packed inside to bury them alive. But for the first time since the prisoners’ arrest, the proximity of the American Army allowed them to believe they might survive the war. They refused to move. The SS guards were uncertain how to respond to the mass rebellion. Many of the guards had already been replaced with ethnic Germans who were less dedicated and reliable in their fanaticism, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of people so close to the end of the war was impractical and unwise.
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The survivor in the hospital told the French intelligence officers that just before the very end of the war an SS detachment had driven into the compound and ordered a group of Jewish prisoners to carry a number of large chests into one of the three main tunnels. Each of these split into a labyrinth of smaller, subsidiary tunnels, and the prisoners carried the containers to the end of one. The chests, loaded with gold and jewellery looted from the inmates of various camps, were stacked on top of one another. The prisoners were then ordered to seal the tunnel entrance with rocks. When they had completed their work an SS guard raised his pistol and shot them. The man who survived had been left for dead but was taken to hospital, where he helped the French agents draw a map of the whereabouts of the chests in the tunnel. And then he died.

‘The intelligence officers called me in Ulm and wanted to talk to me because Ebensee had ended up in the American zone and they couldn’t do anything about it. And they said they were prepared to lead us to the loot. In exchange they wanted a reward which seemed to me very little. They had an idea for a business and wanted two American trucks in exchange for all those chests, and only after everything had been retrieved. There were thousands of trucks available after the war.’

Michel wrote a report recommending positive action. CIC officers arrived from regional HQ in Goppingen and, together with Ted Kraus and the Frenchmen, they all made a trip to Ebensee. The camp was now full of Jewish DPs and Michel discovered something that enraged him. Immediately after liberation the Americans had converted Ebensee into an internment camp for captured SS men. The new prisoners objected to conditions, citing the Geneva Convention, and virtually ransacked the camp in a violent rebellion. The authorities responded by moving them out of Ebensee and placing them in a camp with better conditions. Their place was taken by survivors from the death camps. ‘It was not good enough for the SS, but it was good enough for the Jewish survivors.’

Accompanied by the Frenchmen, Michel and the Counter Intelligence officers from HQ went into the tunnels. Everything fitted the dying man’s description, although it was understood that the French agents would not reveal the exact location until the authorities agreed to the deal. Michel had also added his own recommendation that the gold and jewellery looted from the camps should be handed over to Jewish charity organisations and not be appropriated by the army or government.

‘The visit convinced all of us of the truth of the French agents’ story. We got the answer from HQ in Frankfurt a couple of days later. It was negative. No deal was to be made with the Frenchmen. No reason was given. And that was that. Perhaps the authorities felt it was not worth bothering to go to all that trouble just to give the proceeds away. I never found out what happened to it, whether the French got the loot or the Germans. Or whether it was just left in the tunnel. It created an anger within me that has never gone away.’

Throughout this time the whole of the American Army and CIC in Germany had been searching for SS Major Gustav Knittel, one of the officers from Kampfgruppe Peiper, of the 1st Panzer Division, wanted for the murder of unarmed American POWs and Belgian civilians during the Battle of the Bulge - the Malmédy Massacre. A war crimes tribunal would charge officers and men of SS Kampfgruppe Peiper with the murder of a total of three hundred and fifty American POWs over ten days at twelve different locations along their line of march. One hundred and twenty-eight Belgian civilians were also shot down in cold blood.
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The original SHAEF - Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force - file on the Malmédy Massacre contained only a bare statement of the facts and the names of forty-two members of Kampfgruppe Peiper. The investigation had been put into the hands of a young major from the Quartermaster Corps who did not speak German and who had no investigative experience. He wandered from camp to camp, accompanied by an interpreter, with his list of wanted men, only to be told, ‘Hell, we don’t know who we’ve got here.’

But a thousand men from Kampfgruppe Peiper were eventually tracked down, including its commander, Joachim Peiper himself. Newly arrived American interrogators dutifully warned the prisoners against saying anything that might be incriminating, so the SS men said nothing. And the fact that they had been imprisoned together allowed them ample time to construct and compare alibis. Finally, a total of five hundred suspects - almost as many men as actually survived from the original group - were moved to a new building at Schwabisch Hall prison, where they could be isolated and properly interrogated. However, Gustav Knittel had not been captured and was not among them.
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Out of the total force of five thousand, eight hundred men who had started the attack in the Battle of the Bulge with Kampfgruppe Peiper, including Knittel’s fifteen-hundred-man Schnell (Fast) Group, five thousand lost their lives. Knittel was known to be among the survivors who had managed to return to Germany, but all attempts to find him had failed. ‘Everybody was looking for Knittel, including the British. In September Frankfurt called me because of my track record in finding and arresting war criminals. Nobody knew where he was - he seemed to have disappeared into thin air.’

*

The mass killing had begun, not actually at the town of Malmédy that gave the massacre its name, but a few miles south at a crossroads known as Baugnetz. The Americans called it Five Points, as five roads converged there. It was a dreary spot with only a few houses, a farm and a single café, named after its Belgian owner, Madame Adele Bodarwe. At lunchtime on 17 December 1944 an American convoy of thirty-three jeeps and trucks drove south from Malmédy and made its way up the hill to the crossroads. The column comprised one hundred and forty men of the lightly armed Battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion, known in American military parlance as a ‘sound and flash’ unit with the mission to locate enemy artillery positions.