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

by Christopher Robbins

  The smell of corrupted bodies was overpowering. ‘When we entered the camp the first thing visible was the source of the odour: a small mountain of decaying bodies. Nearby stood another mountain of discarded clothes and shoes. Thousands of men, women and children stood at the wire, gaunt and unwashed, and tried to express their joy over liberation. GIs just stood on the other side of the wire staring at them in shock. Even though I had fought the Nazis for more than five years and had seen them at what I thought was their worst, Dachau stunned me. It was gut-wrenching. It is one thing to know, another to experience.’

  The first concern of the military was to find the SS troops who resisted the advance. Many had changed out of their uniforms into civilian clothes in an attempt to escape in the confusion, although inmates were quick to point them out. ‘The GIs shot a number of them on the spot. Technically, as they were out of uniform, these summary executions could probably be justified by the rules of war. Actually, the treachery of the fake surrender signal that led to casualties, plus outrage over camp conditions, provoked the retribution. Even in retrospect the action does not strike me as harsh, and I can’t say I was upset.’

  SS prisoners were herded into a coal yard, lined up and told to keep their hands above their heads. When they saw a GI load a belt of ammo into a machine gun they panicked and bolted. The machine gun opened fire and seventeen were killed. An officer rushed to the machine-gunner and grabbed him by the collar, pulled out his .45 and fired it into the air to attract attention. The machine-gunner began to shake and weep. Another sixteen SS men rousted from a guard tower were also shot down. It was becoming difficult to control the men as hardened combat troops exploded under the strain.[142]

  Michel took photographs: of the dead bodies of paunchy SS soldiers in their civilian clothes; of the heap of naked corpses discarded like so much rubbish; of the mountain of old clothes awaiting its grim sorting; of the half-burned bodies in the ovens of the crematorium; of the Brausebad (showers) that was really a gas chamber; of a coloured mural of the SS riding pigs; and of a notice painted on the wall: REINLICHKEIT IST GOTTLICHKEIT - Cleanliness is Godliness.

  The world has viewed similar images many times since the war, and they have never lost the power to sicken and shock, but on the day of liberation none of those present had seen such things. It was a vision of twentieth-century inhumanity on such a scale that the senses were overwhelmed. Michel took pictures simply because he thought no description in words could ever convey the scale and systematic nature of the horror. And also because he feared the outside world would refuse to believe it. His friend, Michael Nelken, had committed suicide when his pre-war account of Dachau had not been believed. And in those days conditions had been nothing like this.

  Altogether there were thirty-three thousand survivors in Dachau, two thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine of whom were Jews. Nine thousand captives had died in the previous three months, a further fourteen thousand over the winter. Even after the liberation, thousands more died, too far gone from starvation or sickness to be helped. As Michel walked through the camp he examined the railcars full of emaciated bodies, the last death transport of the war from Buchenwald. The German guards had locked the men, women and children inside the freight cars without food or water, and they slowly starved. When the despair of some of the survivors became too loud, or efforts were made to break out, the guards shot randomly into the cars. One survivor, who was found under a pile of the dead, stood on his match-stick legs and wept as he later told a female journalist, ‘Everyone is dead. No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’[143]

  Another journalist who witnessed the corpses in the train described them as piled up like branches of cut-down trees, and those at the crematorium looking like a heap of crooked logs ready for some infernal fire.[144] The American Army forced Dachau civilians from the town to bury the dead, a task that continued for days. Michel went into the town to find the mayor and local officials and had them brought to the camp with their wives. All of them claimed to have been entirely ignorant of what had happened within its walls. ‘Not know?’ Michel shouted, turning on them in contempt. ‘Mention the name Dachau to the Hottentots and they know!’

  Among the prisoners Michel interrogated Emil Mahl, the man in charge of the crematorium and the camp’s hangman, who referred to himself as Capo.[145] Mahl’s account of life in Dachau, related without remorse or any sense of guilt, drew a picture of a world that even Michel could scarcely imagine, despite his own experiences in camps. The banality of the lengthy confession, with its quotidian detail, described a routine of casual barbarity. After many hours of interrogation Michel handed Mahl a block of rough paper and a pencil, and told him to write down his confession. The hangman covered six pages on both sides in a neat, even script. ‘Executions and hangings took place in the crematorium at least two days a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursday...’[146]

  Mahl was originally a common criminal who had been sent to Dachau in October 1940, where he served a year and a half of his sentence. In the inverted value system of the camp world, common criminals enjoyed preferential treatment and privileges. After a period of illness he tried for months to be given a job that provided extra and better food, and was assigned to work with a squad in Munich to remove debris after Allied bombing raids. Later, he was successful in landing a more prestigious job in the camp crematorium, obtained through the influence and special recommendation of two men working there who were about to be released and drafted into the German Army.

  At first Mahl found the work and food rations satisfactory because he ‘only’ had to cremate corpses. However, the arrival of a new camp commander brought extra responsibilities. ‘It changed, and I had to help carry out each execution.’ He became the right-hand man to SS Sergeant Theo Bongartz, who soon entrusted him to become an executioner in his own right. The SS sergeant executed inmates by shooting them. Although Mahl was a willing volunteer, he was not allowed a weapon because he was an inmate, so he became a specialist in hanging. Both men were paid a bonus after every execution: a pint of schnapps, five cigarettes and a sausage. There would often be a drinking party following the executions, hosted by the sergeant and regularly attended by the camp adjutant and doctor. ‘Sometimes it was a real drinking orgy, where the camp adjutant Otto played a big role... he threw over the table and smashed dishes and glasses.’

  In addition to his duties at the crematorium, Mahl was assigned one day a week as hangman to the Gestapo in Munich. This work involved driving with SS men to any town near Munich where an execution was to take place. He hanged the victims in the presence of Dr Lobkuchner, chief of Gestapo in Munich, who never failed to show up with a couple of his officers to witness the spectacle. ‘After it was done, I always had to sit down in the corner of an inn to eat my meal while they were drinking with the mayor, the town doctor or local party leaders.’ A week rarely passed in which the Gestapo did not call on Mahl’s specialist talents.

  Later, the Gestapo took over one of the rooms of the crematorium for the interrogation of prisoners brought from Munich. Mahl was often called to give assistance, usually in the form of liberal administration of the lash. ‘At each interrogation they were beating the prisoners with rawhide whips,’ Mahl wrote. He added without irony that he found this ‘deplorable’, although he dutifully carried out his orders. ‘At the last interrogation by the Munich Gestapo there were about six or eight prisoners... I had to hang them with the help of Sergeant Bongartz.’

  Hanging by this time had become such a routine that Mahl was sometimes honestly unable to remember the exact number he had been called upon to execute. Six or eight - the death of two men a session, more or less, no longer left an impression. Michel had asked during the initial interrogation how many people Mahl thought he had executed during his years as hangman. ‘It took him quite a while to reach an approximate figure, which he arrived at only by counting the average during t
he weeks, months and years of his activity.’

  The written confession conveys the sense of pride that Mahl took in his work. He recalled an incident where an inmate was taken to the crematorium for hanging at a time when both he and the sergeant happened to be away. As the hanging had to be done immediately, two workers in the crematorium - described as ‘non-specialists’ - carried it out. Mahl wrote, as if affronted by such amateurism, ‘I learned later the men suffered very much.’

  One incident in Mahl’s account was a glimpse of the fate that might have been Michel’s own. The hangman described the arrival of a large rail transport - which later became known as the Phantom Train - of two thousand prisoners from southern France in July or August of 1944. The transport had originally left Toulouse - after the D-Day landing and the liberation of Paris - and been shunted across France from one city to another for a total of five weeks. ‘Five hundred of them were already dead because they had not received any water... It was evident to me that they were intentionally deprived of water in order to be exterminated... It was gruesome when this transport arrived, because the corpses were lying in one car for three or four weeks already. The smell of it carried for miles... In cremating these five hundred corpses, we had to burn for six days, day and night.’

  Eugen Seybold, one of the men who worked in the crematorium under Mahl, added his own details to the account. He remembered the sealed train and seven cattle cars stacked with bodies. He estimated they had been dead for weeks as most were dark blue, and some were black and already decomposed beyond recognition. Twelve Russian officers, prisoners in Dachau, were ordered to unload the cars. They went about their work in gas masks. ‘We who worked in the crematorium were obliged to undress these corpses,’ Seybold said. ‘Four men worked for two days on this grisly job and then the cremation started. There was a stack of bodies five feet high filling the hall and antechamber to the crematorium.’ An additional forty to fifty corpses of inmates who had died from starvation or typhus were brought to the crematorium every day, and as Mahl had already reported, the men of the detail worked in shifts, day and night for a week. It was assembly-line cremation.

  August 1944 had been a hard month for the work detail at Dachau. Seybold wrote that ninety Russian officers were taken to the courtyard of the crematorium, where Mahl ordered them to strip. ‘Sergeant Bongartz stood in front of the door with his pistol in hand. While the victims were preparing to die, these men (the adjutant, Bongartz and Mahl) were chatting, laughing and smoking - as if they were out to have fun.’

  The first group of Russians was then marched to the place of execution, a freshly dug ditch crossed by wooden planks. The men were ordered to kneel, which they did, except for a general who refused to die on his knees and remained standing. Shots were fired from four pistols and bodies tumbled into the ditch. The general was shot twice through the neck and fell, but did not die. The remainder of the Russians were taken to the place of execution in groups of ten and gunned down. Mahl ‘noticed that there were thirty to forty still living a little. We reported it to Sergeant Bongartz and to the doctor, whereupon they shot some of them again so that they should be dead. However, many of them lying underneath died after three or four hours.’

  The crematorium detail was ordered to take the bodies away five at a time. ‘We had to load them on the hand cart and take them to the crematorium,’ Seybold wrote. ‘We unload. Seven men are still alive. They are groaning. We are called again, and have to hurry, hurry - always on to the next load. Sweat breaks out on me. My arms and feet get cramped from always pulling, loading and unloading. I am trembling in all my body.’

  When one of the Russian officers who had been shot but not killed stood up in the crematorium, Mahl yelled at him in a rage, ‘Damn dog! Lie down. Otherwise, I’ll knock you down.’ Seybold wrote of the three Russian officers who were still alive: ‘When we brought the first men into the crematorium, one of them raised himself from the floor and stared at me. The brain came out of his forehead, then he collapsed. He still lived for four hours.’ Seybold asked if he could give the men the coup de grace. Mahl snapped, ‘These dogs will perish by themselves.’

  Mahl’s account, horrible as it is, adopts the bland, matter-of-fact tone of a man forced to perform unspeakable acts to survive. But the testimony of the four inmates who worked under him, all interviewed separately by Michel, drew a different picture. Their written statements describe Capo as ‘the all powerful in the crematorium, loyal servant and handyman of the Gestapo... mean to the inmates who worked under him... Even his superior, SS Sergeant Bongartz, came under his influence. Whatever Mahl said and suggested was considered an order... In his delusion of grandeur, he threatened that he would hang all of us inmates who worked with him...This mass murderer is cruel, nauseating and a coward... in brief, sadistic, beastly and bloodthirsty... he is the inventor and constructor of the gallows in the crematorium. That was his creation - and that’s also where he should end.’ None of the men forced to work with Mahl had a single redeeming thing to say on his behalf. Their accounts depict a low creature who never displayed a glimmer of humanity or a moment’s compassion.[147]

  Michel collated the various confessions and written testimony, attached the photographs, and sent them - and the person of Emil Mahl - over to the army war crime prosecutors. Appropriately, the trials were held in Dachau. Mahl was sentenced to death, although Michel had not heard the last of him.

  A different level of human depravity, intellectually superior but morally more corrupt, was displayed by doctors at the camp who had used inmates in medical experiments. In order to find out how long an aviator could go without oxygen, the strongest and healthiest of the inmates were locked in pressure chambers which then had the oxygen pumped out. The process was filmed. It took a man a hard fifteen minutes to die, and after eight hundred deaths the doctors concluded that no one could survive above thirty-six thousand feet without oxygen. In another experiment inmates were stood in vats of sea water up to their necks. It took six hundred deaths to deduce that the human body can exist for two and a half hours in water eight degrees below zero.

  Eleven thousand Dachau prisoners were inoculated with tertiary malaria, and while the fever killed off the weak, no immunisation was found. SS surgeons performed castration operations on Jews and gypsies, and sterilised foreigners accused of having sexual relations with German women. One thousand Catholic priests from Poland had streptococcus germs injected in their upper legs between muscle and bone, causing large abscesses and fever. There were thirty-one deaths after months of ceaseless pain when experimental operations performed on advanced cases failed.[148]

  As Michel interrogated survivors, and moved about the hellish world of Dachau, surrounded by corpses and ghosts, a terrible dread enveloped him. Nothing short of a series of miracles had kept him alive in the camps, and he knew that for his family to survive they would need to have been similarly blessed.

  The Thunderbirds moved on to take Munich, described by Eisenhower as ‘the cradle of the beast’, which fell with surprisingly little Résistance. But furious combat would have come as a relief to Michel after the horrors of the camp. He now worked around the clock in a state of such profound psychological shock that he felt no emotion whatsoever.

  Among the blizzard of intelligence reports that overwhelmed CIC at this time was one of an SS convoy of covered trucks that was thought to have come from Berlin, heading south from Munich. Michel’s best agent, Fritz Spanheimer, reported that it was disguised as non-military but had SS troops with it, and that it had stopped just outside the city at a large paper mill.[149] ‘I originally suspected it contained gold or treasure of some sort and took a jeep and drove to the paper mill. When I got there I saw mountains - I mean mountains - of documents. The SS just dumped everything, ordered it to be shredded, and fled.’ Michel walked around and saw there were official government documents of every sort, and while there was no actual treasure, Michel had stumbled upon pure gold.

  One of the
mountains was made up of stacks of wooden filing cabinets. Michel pulled out a file to see what it contained and found original Nazi Party member profiles, complete with photos. ‘I immediately understood how important these were, and their significance. Although at the time I had no idea of the scope of the find.’ In fact there proved to be forty tons of them, or almost eleven million cards accounting for ninety-five per cent of the entire Nazi Party membership. The order to pulp them had been made because a fire of such magnitude would have attracted attention.[150]

  He clambered over the mountain of paper, sifting and sorting through what he thought might be important, and spent hours putting together an impressive collection of document samples. He arranged for troops to guard the paper mill day and night. ‘I took the samples to the military government and told them I had it under guard. It was now their job to proceed as it did not come under my jurisdiction. They said they would take care of it, but they didn’t.’

  The officer did not seem to attach much importance to the find and never bothered to visit the site. ‘Although I tried to insist, nothing happened.’ Time passed, and Michel became increasingly frustrated and annoyed. ‘Then I did something that I would never usually do. I leaked its existence to the press. It was picked up, and only then did the military government take action.’ The documents were moved under guard to the Army Document Centre in Munich.

  The Nazi Party membership records became the jewel in the crown of what was to become known as the Berlin Document Centre, the American Army’s collection of German official papers, later taken over by the State Department. These included six hundred thousand files on officers and enlisted men and women of SS units; racial purity files on two hundred and fifty thousand SS officers; the records of three hundred thousand Storm Troopers; files on party members’ disciplinary infractions; loyalty files on teachers, doctors, policemen, musicians and entertainers; citizenship records of ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled in countries conquered by Hitler; and records of Jews and other Germans stripped of their citizenship. Over the next six months twenty-four freight trains averaging more than twenty-five cars each moved documents to Berlin, including one thousand four hundred tons of documents from more than a dozen Reich ministries, and four hundred and fifty tons of Wehrmacht casualty files. They were housed in underground warehouses once used by the SS to tap telephones. The party membership records were of the highest importance for the future de-Nazification programme and the search for war criminals now launched by the Allies.[151]