The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (60 page)

Lt. Colonel Hugh Foster, who has spent five years researching the liberation of Dachau, was quoted in the article as saying that Michel’s account differs from other eyewitness accounts and National Archive records. But it appears the reporter never told Foster of the supporting documentation and photos, and said that Michel claimed to have gone to Dachau by tank, and entered the camp with Sparks’s 157th infantry. Michel had made no such claims, and I had emailed Rivenburg to say so.

From the outset Foster had ‘cautioned’ Rivenburg of the official definition of ‘liberator.’ ‘The Army gives divisions “liberation credit” if any element of that division passed through or near a concentration camp within forty-eight hours of its occupation by US Forces.’
[281]

When subsequently shown Michel’s documentation, Foster said he had no doubt that he was at the camp on the day of liberation - the best evidence being the arrest of Emil Mahl, Hangman of Dachau, two days after the liberation.
[282]
‘Because the only information about who Mahl was had to come from the concentration camp.’
[283]
Handwriting expert Dr Timothy Armistead declared that the handwriting on Emil Mahl’s original statement in Michel’s possession was consistent with that on the prisoner’s later statement presented as evidence by the prosecution at Dachau in November 1945.
[284]
A log of Mahl’s correspondence while in prison at Landsberg also proves he wrote to Michel via the
Stars & Stripes
forces’ newspaper.

Peter Mustardo, a photo expert recommended by the New York Museum of Photography, examined Michel’s Dachau negatives and photos. His expert opinion was that they were consistent with negatives and photos from the period of 1945.
[285]
Large blown-up prints were made from the negatives and sent to Barbara Distel, head of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Museum. She and her staff examined the photos and formed the opinion that they could only have been taken on the day of liberation, or at most a day or so later. The museum’s staff of photo archivists had never seen twenty of the twenty-eight photos and therefore concluded that Michel must have taken them as he had the negatives. When later informed that Michel also had negatives for at least three of the eight photos in the Dachau Museum archives, Curator Distel said that he must have taken those as well, because they had never been able to discover the name of the original photographer, and possessed no negatives.
[286]

Michel had also shown Rivenburg originals of the ten typed reports of the interrogation of four crematorium workers at Dachau. One is signed Eugen Seybold, who was photographed by Michel along with another crematorium worker dragging corpses and pushing them into a crematorium oven. Curator Distel, in accord with a number of other historical sources, confirmed that Seybold was one of the crematorium workers at the time of the liberation of Dachau.

The question of Michel’s CIC status should have been settled definitively by the ED documents shown to the
Los Angeles Times,
and the statements made by Ted Kraus. However, other CIC colleagues were found to make sworn statements for the court case. Walter Wimer, who served with Michel in the 45th CIC Detachment, confirmed Michel’s status with the corps. ‘Michel Thomas worked in the capacity of a CIC agent, and the uniform he is pictured in, with the US insignia on each side of the collar and on the cap, was worn by full-fledged Agents, not civilian employees. We did have French officers who worked with our unit, from the Deuxième Bureau, but they wore French uniforms. Mr Thomas was sent out on missions, by our commanding officers, in the same capacity and with the same duties and powers as the other Agents of our unit. The 45th Detachment consisted of fewer than twenty men. There were only six German speakers in total.’
[287]

The widow of Frederick White, another CIC agent who served with Michel, provided a photograph of the men together. (Agent White had been given a set of Michel’s Dachau photographs. On the back of one, a picture of the corpse of a young man lying face down, he had written: ‘Looks as though the kid cried himself to death.’)
[288]

Questions over Michel’s service with the Thunderbirds were decisively answered when he was invited to a reunion of the 45th Division in Oklahoma City, where he was reunited with his former comrades-in-arms. Henry Teichmann, who he had not seen for 58 years, greeted him warmly, and more than a hundred Thunderbird veterans have since written to the
Los Angeles Times
deploring the paper’s treatment of Michel. One, Bedford Groves, had served in combat with Michel in both the 180th regiment and the Counter Intelligence Corps, and remembered how he undertook the workload of three agents.
[289]

The article also attempted to demonstrate that Michel did not discover the Nazi Party membership file. It quotes an account by Stefan Heym, a writer who worked as a journalist for the US Army before becoming a committed Communist and settling in East Germany. Heym’s account was not so much about the discovery of the file in May, about which he only knew what he was told by the mill owner, but of the announcement of the discovery at a press conference the following October. He wrote a lengthy, fictional account of the discovery in the form of a satire of the Americans; his non-fictional account is highly unreliable.

George Leaman, who wrote an official history of the Nazi files for the Berlin Document Centre, was asked by Rivenburg to compare Stefan Heym’s account and Michel’s. He declared that the former was ‘on the mark’.
[290]
But when contacted after publication of the article, Leaman admitted that he had not read Heym’s account for at least eight years, and was unaware of recent archival discoveries. These clearly state that the file was discovered in early May by Michel’s 45th CIC unit. A report written on 20 May records ClC having ‘been advised’ of sixty-eight thousand kilos of documents at the mill, going there, posting guards, and informing the authorities.
[291]

Rivenburg chose to ignore an account published in his own newspaper, which quoted the mill owner remarking on the arrival of ‘an American GF in early May 1945.’
[292]
Also ignored were the documents taken from the mill which remain in Michel’s possession. These include an original letter written by Himmler to a Dr Ludwig Dittmar; court case filed by Goering against Julius Streicher concerning the employment of a Jew on the anti-Semitic Der Sturmer, which mentions Streicher’s sexual abuse of young boys; a lithograph of the hanging of Court Jew Suss in Stuttgart in 1737; an album of watercolours given by Himmler to Hitler’s adjutant, Julius Schaub, commemorating the SS campaign in Greece; and a Nazi propaganda recording. It is accepted fact that official and court documents of this kind were found at the mill.

The undisputed authority on the Berlin Document Centre is Robert Wolfe, senior archivist for thirty-five years at the National Archives for captured German and European war crimes records and post-war occupation records. He unreservedly accepts Michel’s account after an examination of the documents. A Purple Heart veteran, combat infantry officer from the war, and press censor and military government official during the post-war occupation, he also knows the reality behind the paper.

Wolfe was not only senior archivist at the National Archives, but also the consultant to the State Department for the Berlin Document Centre for thirty-four years. In that capacity he wrote official reports on the history of the records, including an account of their discovery and capture at the paper mill at Freimann, the Munich suburb. ‘Michel Thomas’s most important contribution to history and justice is unquestionably his discovery, identification, and preservation of the Nazi Party and related records awaiting pulping at the Josef Wirth Papier-Pappe-Wellpappenfabrik (paper-cardboard-corrugated paper mill). Those records were the most important documentation of the war. If they had been pulped in that paper mill, we would not have been able to prove, in spite of the deniers, that the Holocaust or other victimisations occurred. Whatever success the victors had in the punishment of war criminals and the denazification of Germany was based in considerable part on the possession and access to these personnel records of the Nazi Party and its subordinate formations and organisations, discovered, identified and reported by CIC Agent Thomas. If anyone of us could make such a contribution in our lifetime, it would be enough.’
[293]

The section in the article questioning Michel in regard to Klaus Barbie relied on the account of the debacle over the trial described in this book, but was heavily and unfairly edited. Again, no mention was made of a Resistance document, written in 1944 and verified by the French government, of Michel’s arrest and escape from the Gestapo in 1943 at the time of Barbie’s raid on UGIF (Union Général des Israelites de France). Rivenburg claimed to have spoken to Serge Klarsfeld, but the lawyer denied he had ever been contacted. The article quoted
Le Monde
as saying at the time of the trial that Michel had ‘a taste for make-believe’. This was a mistranslation of
‘A une manière de s’exprimer, a un goût trop prononcé de paraître, de multiplier les détails’
. An accurate translation of this would be: ‘A way of expressing himself, a taste for showing-off, and for over indulgence in detail.’
[294]

The article even challenged Michel’s account of playing a boule slot machine in the foyer of the Monte Carlo casino in 1941. ‘Casino officials, after consulting their archives and various experts, say the type of slot machine Thomas describes “to our knowledge was never in Monte Carlo”.’ Contrary to the reported opinion of these unnamed ‘archivists and experts’, the Historical Department of the Société des Bains de Mer - the company that owns and runs the Monte Carlo casino - provided a copy of the annual agreement between the casino and the maker of the boule slot machine from the beginning of September 1940 to the end of August 1941 - the exact period that Michel describes playing such a machine.
[295]

In regard to Michel’s language courses, the paper implied that they were no better than other intensive courses, could not be replicated, and essentially consisted of nothing more than a traditional technique re-packaged. ‘Although vague on details, Thomas says his approach is to create excitement in students... He doesn’t want to reveal his methods for fear his ideas will be stolen or distorted.’ Far from being vague on details, or refusing to reveal the method, the language recordings are available in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and widely sold in both the USA and Great Britain. (In Britain, where Michel has become something of a minor celebrity through his courses, he consistently occupied fourteen of the top fifteen language audio titles, selling hundreds of thousands of units.)
[296]

Jackie Kearns, the headmistress of a British school experimenting with Michel’s method, was quoted as saying it was merely an old technique brilliantly re-packaged. She denies saying any such thing, and insists she was misquoted and misunderstood. Michel had taught a number of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds French for four days at her school, and their grades instantly rose from Cs and Ds to Bs and Cs. Her real assessment of Michel’s technique - ‘Outstanding!’ - was buried at the very end of the article.

The
Los Angeles Times
’ attack on Michel Thomas has forced him to spend close to a million dollars in an attempt to be heard before a court of law, and preserve his good name. The paper chose not to defend the veracity of the article, but their constitutional right to publish it. Their lawyers did not seek expert opinion, but adopted a strategy to stop the case getting to court, and responded to the suit by employing a legal mechanism to have the case dismissed.

The so-called Anti-SLAPP Statute was supposed to provide a means to expose and dismiss at an early stage worthless actions filed for the purpose of chilling ‘the valid exercise of the constitutional rights of freedom of speech’. It had been introduced by the legislature to protect tenants’ associations, environmental groups and individual activists against large corporate developers with deep pockets. The corporations had used litigation to stifle protest by bringing libel actions against people who made statements in public meetings. The original purpose of the statute had been stood on its head as a media conglomerate with unlimited resources used it in an attempt to stifle the lone voice of an individual. The bully
Los Angeles Times
was crying victim, a rich irony.

The burden of proof was now shifted to Michel to establish a ‘reasonable probability’ that he would prevail in the claim, or he would not even be allowed to go to court. A wealth of sworn declarations from people of impeccable academic qualifications had been presented to the court. Expert opinion supported by a mass of new evidence was unequivocal that Michel had been telling the truth.

Despite this, the court found against Michel. Alex Kline stood in the back of the courtroom as the first judgement was handed down. ‘The slick-suited lawyers from the
Times
looked very pleased with themselves. Rivenburg grinned and gloated. It was a depressing spectacle - I felt sick, actually physically nauseous. It seemed such an obvious and grievous wrong that Michel was to be denied the opportunity of restoring his honour, and was not even to be allowed his day in court to prove before a jury that he was not a liar.’