The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (44 page)

Over the following weeks Meyer acted out an elaborate charade of sending and receiving coded messages. He told Schelkmann that in order for his leader to consider the request, a detailed organisational plan of the entire local movement would have to be submitted. Schelkmann was reluctant, but agreed to consider offering certain information and a general plan to the leader in person, if certain criteria were satisfied.

A meeting was agreed upon in principle, with the time and place to be set. In the meantime, acting on instructions, Schelkmann brought his staff to the inn, together with their wives or girlfriends. From there they were taken to a safe house in the small town of Dellmensingen, near Ulm. They were fed well, provided with money and even cigarettes, and were asked to remain at the house until the leader, who was said to be on an inspection tour, was available to summon them to a meeting.

‘The SS officers had been taken to the house for psychological reasons. The idea was to brainwash them during the waiting period, deflate them, and create such an aura about the leader, Dr Frundsberg, that when they finally met him, he would be in a position of unchallenged strength and power. Away from their own environment, and isolated, they were entirely dependent on the Grossorganisation. They were also exposed to the seeming efficiency and wealth of the greater and more powerful outfit, and were made to realise they were but a small cog in a much greater machine.’

Every room of the safe house had been bugged, and Michel was able to monitor private conversations, uncover romantic intrigues and draw profiles of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual. The indeterminate waiting period also played on the nerves of the men and put them at a psychological disadvantage.

Another effective device employed to undermine the confidence of the SS officers was the suggestion that their forged credentials put them at grave risk. In reality, the fake documents were masterful, but the doubt had been sown. Hans Meyer drove the SS men one by one to the city hall in Ulm and arranged for new papers to be issued. Schelkmann was provided with identity and army discharge papers in the name of Rolf Heimborg - born in Karlsbad on 1 February 1920 - and Laufer became Gemot Reinemann - born in Breslau on 20 January 1921. The provision of legal, official documents worked in two ways: the men were deeply impressed by the influence of the Grossorganisation, which had contacts even within government offices, and the new papers allowed CIC to keep tabs on every individual in the group.

When Michel judged that his various psychological games had done their work, he arranged for the men to be taken to the meeting. Without advance warning, motorbikes pulled up in front of the safe house in Dellmensingen late on a wet and windy night. Schelkmann and four of his men were told they were finally being taken to a secret rendezvous to meet Dr Frundsberg, RSHA commander of the Grossorganisation.

The night had been chosen for its bad weather. The cold rain soaked the men on the back of the motorbikes, lowered their morale and made them less observant. The bikes pulled up beside two cars on a deserted road, one of which had the bonnet open and appeared to have broken down. The password ‘Gustav’ was given; the reply ‘Adolf’ received. The SS officers were split into two groups and ordered to be blindfolded. They objected at first, but were told that they must comply for security reasons as they were not yet members of the organisation. Once inducted, the blindfolds would no longer be needed. They consented to the procedure, were transferred to the cars and driven into the night.

‘Counter-intelligence is partly a branch of show business. The scenario called for imagination, and throughout the trip my team had to make it seem that they were not just a handful of men but a giant military organisation. I employed about thirty people in the charade and their performance was geared to stimulate the SS officers’ imagination through the auditory senses, heightened as a result of being blindfolded. I calculated correctly that these men were so disciplined they would not dream of removing their blindfolds without being ordered to do so. The cars were driven in circles so that a small group of agents was able to double and triple their roles. All along the route the cars were stopped and passwords exchanged. The five roadblocks were in fact just one encountered again and again. What sounded like the movement of trucks and equipment increased further the illusion of size and strength.’

The
coup de théâtre
was the lodge itself, and the formidable figure of the commander of the Grossorganisation, the renowned and much anticipated Dr Frundsberg. ‘Before my men brought the shivering audience in from the cold and wet, they led them in circles through puddles of deep water just for the sport of it, thoroughly wetting their feet. Ted Kraus was hidden in an adjoining room to tape-record the conversation. We had installed agents to record everything. As in any well-staged drama, our actors had memorised their lines and rehearsed their movements before we raised the curtain for our momentous opening night.’

Once inside the lodge and before the commander, Schelkmann attempted to establish his importance by mentioning various SS acquaintances who had been members of RSHA. ‘The names did not catch me by surprise. I was thoroughly familiar with the files of these men and could discuss them with considerable authority.’

Schelkmann’s adjutant, Gerhard Laufer, from Bad Pyrmont - codename Herzog - had been an SS Unterschar-fiihrer and had escaped from a French prisoner-of-war camp. The other two men present at the lodge, twin brothers Siegfried and Johann Weber, had escaped from an SS camp. Siegfried’s role in the group was head of intelligence, while Johann was the head of the organisation for Rheinland-Westfalen. The centre of operations was in Fulda.

There were a couple of difficult moments for Michel at the lodge. He was unprepared when Schelkmann requested that he be made head of intelligence of the Grossorganisation. ‘I had not anticipated this. I could hardly grant the man’s request without bringing him into the organisation, which was obviously impossible. I pointed out the weakness in his operation, which in reality I was forced to admire, and sketched an overall picture of the workings of my own highly advanced but non-existent system. He was speechless with admiration.’

The most dangerous time came when Schelkmann handed Michel the power with the words, ‘What do you order us to do now?’ It was a critical psychological moment, and as Michel hesitated he feared his mask had momentarily slipped and that he had stepped out of character. ‘Oddly, I was not prepared. I had trained myself mentally for everything up to this point. Now, suddenly, for a split second, I was thrown.’ If the flicker of doubt showed, it was not picked up by Schelkmann, who sat eagerly awaiting the new commander’s orders. ‘There were no more discussions, no more questions. Schelkmann expected nothing but orders. And orders were given.’
[194]

Michel and Kraus now sent a report and the recording of the meeting to CIC HQ, which was ready to make immediate arrests. But Michel argued forcefully to hold off until he had made the inspection tour of the various SS units and pulled more people into the net. And in the back of his mind another elaborate concept was formulating: he would employ the SS intelligence officers to work unwittingly for CIC.

He needed to give his new employees something to do while they awaited their formal amalgamation into the Grossorganisation. It had been established that the bomb planted in the de-Nazification court in Stuttgart had been stolen from one of the US ammunition dumps, and Ulm CIC had been given the assignment of surveying the security of all dumps in the area. He decided to turn the job over to the SS organisation as a test of their prowess. Michel, as Dr Frundsberg, explained to his now devoted followers that the survey was important so that they would later be able to penetrate the dumps. A deadline was set.

The SS intelligence operation proved to be more than efficient. At the time of the designated deadline Michel was provided with a detailed report, including accurate maps and a complete inventory of munitions at the various dumps. And as an added bonus, a live American bomb from the US dump at Amstetten was delivered to the lodge and placed on Dr Frundsberg’s desk. It was Michel’s turn to be impressed, and he complimented the men fulsomely on their work. He forwarded the report to CIC HQ, adding only that the entire survey had been conducted by the SS. HQ was thoroughly unnerved. Without giving his superior officers time to gather themselves, he outlined his daring new plan.

‘My mind had been whirling ever since the SS had completed their assignment. Would it not be possible for these men to be used in far more important jobs? There were many Nazi organisations actively working against the Allies. Why not use the advanced skills of SS intelligence to track down war criminals and other wanted persons? They could obviously operate far more effectively than US intelligence for they were beyond suspicion, the real thing.’

He was given grudging permission to go forward with this plan, but took it on himself to release intelligence to Schelkmann gained during his own investigative work. Believing this to be privileged intelligence gleaned from Dr Frundsberg, the SS men went to work.

Things progressed alarmingly well for a number of weeks until there was a hitch. Michel was called at three in the morning by CIC in Fulda and told that five SS Officers had been arrested by the Military Police and were being held in jail. One of them, by the name of Hans Meyer, had insisted the police call CIC. The men had been picked up at a railway station where they had gone to meet a number of Nazi group leaders. These failed to show up, but one of the SS officers recognised three old comrades as they got off the train. He approached them and struck up a conversation in which he dropped broad hints about the nature of the work he was involved in, and wondered if they might be interested. One of the SS men had undergone a change of heart since the end of the war and quietly went to the Military Police on duty at the station. Meyer and his men were promptly arrested.

Michel knew that if he secured their immediate release it would arouse suspicion, so he made contact with Meyer through his ‘shadow’ and outlined a plan in which the agent would initiate an escape with the help of CIC in Fulda. When they were transferred from the local jail to a detention camp their truck was held up by armed men outside the town and the prisoners were freed and bundled into waiting cars. If there had been any vestige of doubt concerning the extent of Dr Frundsberg’s power in the minds of the SS men, it was now eradicated completely. The commander’s reach seemed to know no limits.

Michel also took advantage of the situation to cut his new conscripts further down to size. Dr Frundsberg refused to receive Schelkmann, but raged at him over the phone. He berated him for taking risks and making foolish mistakes, accusing him of endangering the security of the entire organisation. Schelkmann was now entirely submissive, and was issued with a new set of orders to incorporate the small neo-Nazi groups he had listed into the Grossorganisation.

Ted Kraus returned to the United States at the end of the year before the final act of the drama was played out. ‘Towards the end of that year we lost most of our veteran CIC agents, who were irreplaceable,’ Kraus said. ‘They had been an erudite group of people with many skills - lawyers, educators, administrators. They were being demobilised, having put in their time, and were ready to go home. Some of them were replaced by very second-rate people in my opinion, including untrained personnel who did not even speak German. The whole operation began to go downhill.’ Kraus himself was replaced by an officer whose only concern seemed to be horseback riding. He freely admitted knowing nothing about intelligence work and showed no interest in learning about it. He rarely showed up at the Villa Kauderer during the day and left Michel alone to do as he wished.

And within weeks a new regional commander was also appointed to CIC HQ in Stuttgart, and his way of doing things was to prove diametrically opposed to the unorthodox nature of Michel’s methods. The new man was a career soldier, who had been posted to Germany after the end of the war, and was determined to do things by the book. On the commander’s first inspection tour of his realm, he dropped into the Ulm office unannounced. The new officer in charge was out riding, as usual, and Michel was also absent. One of the agents present attempted to put the new commander in the picture: Mike pretty much ran the operation, and everybody else stayed out of his hair or lent a helping hand as needed.

‘Mike?’

‘Captain Mike. Michel Thomas.’

The commander said nothing, but returned to Stuttgart determined to impose military structure and discipline upon an operation that seemed to be on the verge of becoming a rogue outfit. The more he learned about ‘Captain Mike’ - that he ran elaborate, unsupervised sting operations, used Nazis and SS men in intelligence work, sometimes operated in conflict with other CIC offices, had a web of his own informants and was
not even American
- the more the commander became convinced of the need for oversight and control. He assigned a ‘specialist’ from CIC HQ to monitor activities involving the Grossorganisation. Although the new agent spoke fluent German, he lacked imagination and had a wooden quality that made him singularly ill-equipped for a role that demanded lightning reflexes and a talent for improvisation.

‘I was less than receptive to having a newcomer enter the picture at this critical time. I was frightened that the arrival of a new man would endanger the whole operation, particularly someone whose declared approach to intelligence techniques and operational methods was in direct conflict with my own. Moreover, the job called for an actor who could carry his role convincingly, and I felt the new agent fell far short in this department.’