They drove to the temporary CIC HQ, set up in an evacuated town nearby. The woman continued her open defiance and left no one in any doubt that she was an unrepentant Nazi. Michel remained silent as he listened to his CIC colleagues question her. The lengthy interrogation produced nothing, except to establish that the woman was not a student but a qualified engineer with a high-level clearance to pursue secret work. She refused to supply either details of her work or the name and location of associates. ‘However hard the interrogators pushed, her attitude never changed. She never answered, and said nothing. Not a word.’
There were no facilities in the combat zone to keep prisoners, or the time and resources to pursue interrogations in depth, so it was decided to send her to the rear. Michel suggested he talk to her alone in a final attempt to break through the steely reserve. His colleagues shrugged sceptically and wished him luck.
The woman was taken to a barely furnished room and left alone to contemplate her fate. Michel then entered, sat down and started talking softly in a coaxing, conspiratorial tone.
‘I want to talk to you alone, away from the others. I think you should understand that if you don’t answer questions here you will be turned over to the Special Interrogation Centre. The people there do not accept silence for answers. They have ways to make a person talk. They use very unpleasant techniques. I’d rather not see you subjected to this.’ There was no response, and she remained haughty as ever. Michel paused. ‘That would not be very pleasant for you... a woman.’ Once again the woman did not seem to react.
The ‘Special Interrogation Centre’ did not exist, but had a sinister ring, and he allowed the woman’s imagination to invent the nature of questioning pursued in such a place. She would have known what went on in Nazi interrogation centres and would have no reason to think the Allies behaved any differently.
‘I’m trying to avoid sending you there,’ Michel continued. ‘Why am I trying to avoid it? Because I understand you.’ He paused for effect. ‘Although you see me in an American uniform, inside is a German. I am German - Ganz und gar ein Deutsche. Entirely and altogether German.’
This was a performance Michel had developed to a fine art over the previous weeks - an appeal from one true German to another. He explained that his mother was from Hamburg and his father from Berlin, and that they had emigrated to America before the war. He offered the helping hand of a German brother, with a connection to the future, to a victim stranded and alone among the ruins of a doomed Nazi state. The war was lost, the Reich at an end, but an eternal Germany remained to be redeemed and rebuilt.
‘Yes, I came here with the United States Army, but not to fight my people or conquer them. I am here to liberate them from tyranny. To liberate them from this insane destruction. What did you do, all of you? To my country! To my people! I came back here and found a destroyed nation. You know the war is lost. Between the Americans and the Russians the country will be squeezed into nothing. Continuing the war only adds to the death and destruction. Worse, the longer the war goes on the greater the danger of the Soviets chewing off more territory, more people. The rockets you developed will be used against you by the Communists.’
The spiel went on and on, aggressive and outraged. And over it hung the threat of the Special Interrogation Centre and its unspoken horrors. The woman continued to say nothing and seemed untouched by fear. ‘I had never seen so much genuine contempt. Such arrogance and defiance. I think she would have withstood torture. I was impressed.’
Nothing seemed likely to move the woman from her implacable position. Michel began to wind down and said simply that if she did not co-operate he would be powerless to prevent her being sent away. No future American interrogator would ever understand her.
At first, there was no reaction. Michel sighed, and prepared to leave.
‘Wait,’ the woman said quietly. She seemed to find it difficult to speak. ‘Maybe you’re right in some of the things you say.’
‘Let’s talk,’ Michel said. ‘Who are you and what is your connection to Peenemiinde? Why don’t you tell me about it? Take your time.’
The words now came in a torrent that was a lament for a political dream destroyed and a country in ruins. Michel listened sympathetically and nodded understandingly as he gently guided the woman into revealing those areas of her life in which he was interested. ‘She told me she was a physicist. That she had worked at Peenemiinde on the V-2 and at other secret plants. She told me about new weapons, the latest missiles that were way beyond the V-2 - faster, more accurate, and more destructive. And that they were fully developed and ready for production. She gave me vague indications of the location where these weapons were under construction.’ At the end of a long session they were both exhausted.
‘I appreciate your co-operation,’ Michel said. He told her that it would no longer be necessary to send her to the interrogation centre and that he would organise a place for her to stay the night. The army always requisitioned a number of abandoned houses in the combat zone for officers’ use, and he now took the woman to one.
A peculiar and delicate atmosphere of trust had developed between them. The deserted house was well-furnished and comfortable, and as the electricity had been cut off, Michel lit a number of candles. ‘To help her settle in I showed her the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, and as I was about to leave she began weeping. I sat down beside her to comfort her and she grabbed me, laying her head on my shoulder. Between sobs she confessed to a terrible sense of having betrayed her country, her friends, her associates. Only because of my sympathy and understanding, she told me, had she turned traitor.’
It was a charged moment: the two of them alone together in the bedroom of a comfortable house in flickering candlelight. The war seemed far away and momentarily unreal. The ‘sympathy and understanding’ had been completely false on Michel’s part, but in the seductive atmosphere of the moment romance swept over him. ‘I felt physical and emotional attraction. She was lovely, and nestling in my arms. It only would have taken my acquiescence and a hug to go further.’
But conscience nagged. The woman had been made vulnerable and amorous only through deceit. ‘First I had undermined her self-discipline by inducing great anxiety about her future. Then I had stripped away her loyalty by presenting myself in a fake pose and turning her nationalism upside down. And certainly her strong attraction to me owed much to the relief she felt on escaping physical and mental pain from the “Special Interrogation Centre” through what she thought was my influence. For my part, while I retained reluctant respect for her initial defiance, I also knew she was truly one of the enemy. I had suffered too much from the Germans to become emotionally involved with one, beautiful and intelligent as she was. I pulled away from her and said good night.’
Back at the CIC offices the next morning, everyone was certain that Michel had slept with the enemy, although Counter Intelligence took a liberal position regarding such things. A strict non-fraternisation order, signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, barred military personnel from mixing with the German population except in a professional capacity. ‘I didn’t try to persuade them it never happened. I doubt if they would have understood my reactions any more than she did. I had been very tempted.’
Among the many prisoners processed by Michel at this time was an SS man concerned about the fate of his dog. The Wehrmacht used dogs in combat and the massive black and white Landseer-Newfoundland had been chosen for its size and strength, and trained against its nature to be an aggressive attack animal. The SS man had grown fond of his ferocious charge and was genuinely disturbed that it might be put down. He held the dog tightly on a short leash and choke chain as it snarled menacingly at anyone who came close.
‘Beautiful dog,’ Michel said approvingly.
As he approached, the animal rose to its feet, pulling against its leash. It seemed to roar like a lion rather than bark, and its fangs were bared behind the quivering Ups of its enormous head. Without thinking, Miche
l moved his clenched fist towards the dog’s open mouth.
‘Nein!’ he commanded. Confused, the Landseer growled uncertainly but obeyed.
‘I’ll take him,’ Michel said, and the SS man handed him the leash.
The dog’s name was Barry, and he proved to be a handful. Although enormous and very strong - books recommend that owners of the breed harness the animal to a small cart as part of the dog’s exercise routine - the Landseer is gentle and friendly by nature. ‘He had been trained to be mean. To go on the attack in battle. He barked and snarled at everyone and had been rewarded for this behaviour. I began to teach him differently. I don’t train animals, I teach them. It took a while, but he slowly began to respond. He accepted me almost immediately, but he was ferocious with other people. I had a German police dog before - Rando, who got killed on the road - and knew the commands and how they were trained. Barry began to accept the people who worked with me and was actually very friendly. But he did not allow people he didn’t know anywhere near him. He proved an effective interrogation aid.’[136]
The Thunderbirds now joined the attack on Nuremberg, the Bavarian city that had hosted the massive, operatic Nazi party rallies in the 1930s. Once a beautiful walled medieval town, it was now reduced to ruins by Allied artillery bombardment and air raids. Three regiments attacking abreast moved into the city and five thousand prisoners were taken on the first day. It was a strange battle with no discernible front line, just shifting urban chaos with Americans in one street and Germans in another, slugging it out.
An American agent from the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), who had lived and worked within the city and radioed intelligence reports to the advancing troops, now found himself trapped. Michel volunteered to get him out. He changed into civilian clothes and was driven by jeep as far into the city as possible. He then slipped into the section occupied by the Germans. ‘The chaotic conditions created by the battle actually made it less difficult than it sounds and I located the OSS agent fairly easily. I moved through the streets as a German civilian, and there was no fighting where I was. I had been given the address and a city plan. I then led the OSS man back to the American lines and made a rendezvous with the jeep.’
Driving back through the section of the city captured by the Americans, they were shot at from a building by German snipers. Bullets ripped into the pavement and ricocheted off walls. The driver pulled into cover while Michel took his carbine and ran towards the building, snapping off a few rounds as he went. ‘In retrospect my action seems foolhardy, but I was still operating on the winner’s luck of a gambler on a hot streak.’
On the ground floor, sheltering behind a window, he spotted four young men. They were attached to one of the home defence units created late in the war and had a girl with them. At the sight of Michel they ran up the stairs to the first floor, leaving the girl behind. Michel caught her and pursued the men, climbing the stairs with the girl in front of him as a human shield. The men had tried to enter the apartments on the first floor, but found all the doors bolted against them. Michel shouted in German that anyone who provided shelter would have their apartments destroyed by the American Army. Trapped at the end of the corridor, the young men threw down their weapons and surrendered.
The soldiers were handcuffed and driven in a truck to HQ. The girl sat in the back of the jeep beside Michel. She told him that she was a singer who had tagged along with her friends and been prepared to fight. At the end of their journey Michel told her that she was free to go. But she was reluctant to leave and said she wanted to be with him. That night, in a flagrant violation of the non-fraternisation order, Michel went to bed with her. ‘I didn’t try to seduce her - she offered herself. I suppose, looking back on it, she had become psychologically dependent on her captor. I remember it mostly because it meant nothing. It was purely physical for both of us. I felt neither intellectual nor emotional conflict about a one-night stand with this particular enemy. I can hardly recall what she looked like - in contrast to the piano-playing rocket engineer, who remains forever etched in my memory.’
After four days’ fighting the city was taken. Men from the Thunderbirds raised the Stars and Stripes in Luitpold Stadium, where Adolf Hitler had once been worshipped by hundreds of thousands of the party faithful.
Amid the triumph Michel received terrible news: Gerard Sachs, his friend and soulmate from Philadelphia, had been killed in combat. ‘This brave man, this hero, who had fought all through Italy and France and Germany, killed so close to the end of the war. In Nuremberg. It was a bitter blow.’
On the road between Nuremberg and Munich stood the town of Dachau and its concentration camp. Small in comparison to the others, the camp was thought to house in excess of thirty thousand people. Rumours about conditions in the various camps and the pitiful state of the survivors had been circulating through the army since the middle of the month. There had been stories about the nature of these places for some time, but battle-weary troops were cynical and wondered if they were not further examples of wartime propaganda. The Soviet Army had overrun and liberated camps in Poland - including Auschwitz - at the end of January, but little information came from that quarter and not much of it was believed.
Then, on 11 April, the 3rd Armored Division reached Nordhausen, on the south of the Harz Mountains, and finally there were American soldiers who were eyewitnesses to the horror. Nearby were the vast caverns carved out of the mountains that housed the underground complex where the giant V-2 rockets were built, and beside them stood Camp Dora, which had once held tens of thousands of slave labourers who serviced the gigantic factory.
As the GIs approached the camp, they were confronted with walking skeletons, stumbling ghostlike along the roads. They were everywhere, shuffling along barely alive in their striped prison garb, or lying sprawled by the side of the road too weak to move. It was often impossible even to tell the sex of the survivors, who seemed to belong to a different species.
The troops then entered the camp itself. There were twenty-three thousand survivors and three thousand unburied bodies rotting inside the buildings. Thirty thousand others had already been exterminated. ‘It was a fabric of moans and whimpers of delirium and outright madness,’ one soldier said. ‘Here and there a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.’[137] The surviving slave labourers were found in a condition ‘almost unrecognisable as human. All were little more than skeletons. The dead lay beside the sick and dying in the same beds; filth and human excrement covered the floors. No attempt had been made to alleviate the disease and gangrene that had spread unchecked among the prisoners.’[138]
At one town on the way south, the Thunderbirds moved forward unexpectedly first thing in the morning, and Michel was forced to leave his things in the deserted house where he had spent the night. He returned late in the afternoon to pick them up and surprised a gang of half a dozen scraggly youths in their late teens going through his belongings. Thinking they were German looters, he unholstered his gun and yelled at them. The youths froze and dropped everything they held on to the floor as he bore down on them brandishing the automatic. Their fear was pitiful, and Michel heard one cry out in anguish, ‘Oy Gottenew!’
The despairing voice shook him to his soul. The terrified boy was saying ‘Oh dear God’ in Yiddish. The young men were not looters but recently liberated inmates from a camp. It was Michel’s first encounter with survivors of the German concentration camps. He holstered his pistol and tried to make amends. ‘Until then I forgot to cry. And still I did not cry, but tears came to my eyes. Tears of shame. It tore me, and still does. An immense hurt - an emotional stab in the eyes. That in my first encounter with Jewish survivors I had threatened and frightened them. It shames me to have shouted at them. To have waved a pistol at them. It shames me still.’
On 15 April Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS war correspondent, broadcast a report about Buchenwald, a camp just outside Weimar. He described the barracks. ‘When I entered, men crowded a
round, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.’ As he walked out into the fresh air of the courtyard, a man fell dead. He visited the part of the camp where the children were kept, some only six years old and all tattooed with a number. ‘The children,’ an old man said. ‘Enemies of the state.’ In the hospital two hundred people had died the previous day and a doctor reeled off the causes of death: ‘Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.’ In a garage Murrow found approximately five hundred bodies stacked neatly like cordwood. Five different men, who had experience of other camps, told him that they were all worse than Buchenwald. The broadcast was deeply disturbing and shocking at the time to those who heard it. There was no way of knowing that the horrors described were only the tip of the iceberg of what would become known as the Holocaust.[139]
The mission to liberate Dachau was assigned to the 5rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment of the Thunderbirds, and Michel attached himself in his capacity as a CIC agent, and steeled himself against the horrors to come. On 29 April 1945, a cold Sunday, two columns of infantry, riding on tanks and armoured bulldozers, moved through the eerily silent town towards the camp itself.[140] As the infantry grew close to the camp they became aware of a sickening stench. One column of troops came across thirty-nine railroad cars in a siding filled with thousands of rotting human corpses. GIs began to throw up. Some broke down and wept, others entered a frozen zone of deep shock, while some exploded into vengeful combat rage. ‘Let’s kill every one of these bastards,’ GIs started yelling. ‘Don’t take any SS alive!’[141]
An SS man wearing Red Cross patches tried to make a break for it and was shot down. Four others, who came out of hiding with their hands in the air, were herded into one of the railcars by an enraged lieutenant, who emptied his pistol into them. The troops were shot at as they entered the main gate of the camp and took cover. They moved forward when they saw a white flag, but SS guards opened fire again. When a second flag appeared, the troops advanced cautiously.
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 24