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

by Christopher Robbins

  Dr Frundsberg hesitated, and seemed to give the proposal serious thought. In his reply he pointed out weaknesses in the group’s intelligence apparatus, while outlining the workings of the highly developed intelligence structure of the Grossorganisation. He intimated that the leader had much to learn. The circumstances of defeat and occupation required different techniques and expertise to those used in time of open war.

  After listening closely to Dr Frundsberg, the leader pulled himself up in his chair and said he had made an important decision. He agreed to place the group under the new command, and to co-operate with the commander to the utmost of his ability. He asked in a crisp, military tone: ‘Und was befehlen Sie uns jetzt zu tun?’ - What do you order us to do now?

  Dr Frundsberg hesitated once again, and his concentration seemed to wander momentarily. But his bullying, autocratic manner returned almost immediately as he rattled off a list of clipped commands. First of all, he demanded that all activities of the SS underground cease instantly. Secondly, only orders issued directly from him were to be carried out. Thirdly, the leader was to instruct all the groups under him to prepare for an inspection. As the orders were given the SS man wrote them down, adding his own rider: failure to obey this order is punishable by death.

  Dr Frundsberg rose abruptly and marched from the room without another word. His departure announced the end of the meeting. Once again the men allowed themselves to be blindfolded and led back to the cars that had brought them. The return journey repeated the rituals enacted on the trip out, with the same random stops and exchange of passwords.

  The curtness of the commands, the peremptory treatment and the severity of Dr Frundsberg at the lodge did not disturb the SS men. Indeed, the opposite was true. The harsh encounter had bolstered their confidence. To men who had spent their adult lives in an authoritarian hierarchy that demanded blind obedience, the experience had been almost religious in nature. It was a taste of old times. Somewhere, at least, the Nazi flame continued to burn bright. The men had been given a focus for their uncoordinated activities and the motivation necessary to refresh their floundering morale. And, most important of all, they had discovered an impressive leader of the old school whose confidence and authority remained unshaken. They had found a strong man to take them forward, the head of an organisation with the will and means to continue the fight.

  When they were arrested months later, the SS officers refused at first to believe the outrageous prosecution claims that Dr Frundsberg was neither a Nazi nor even a German, but a United States Counter Intelligence officer named Michel Thomas.[154]

  Immediately after the war Germany and Austria were split into four zones to be militarily occupied and administered by each of the Allies: America, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France. As the armies of the various countries moved into position in their allotted territories, and the zones became reality rather than lines on a map, there was an enormous migration of people from one zone to another. Seven million ethnic Germans fled Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Russian zone to escape the Soviets. The intelligence fall-out was overwhelming. The post-war mission of US Counter Intelligence was to protect the American zone - which included southern and eastern Germany to the Czech and Austrian borders -against espionage, sabotage and subversion. This embraced the automatic arrest policy of the Nazis, the capture and interrogation of war criminals, and the apprehension and debriefing of important German scientists and intelligence agents. It was a tall order to fulfil in the ruins of post-war Germany, and the matter was complicated by competing US government agencies that pursued contradictory policies. In addition, intrigue and deceit among supposed Allies capped the universal administrative chaos.

  The Allies could not even agree on the form the new Germany should take. The Americans wanted to reduce Germany to a broken agricultural state without a real economy, while the Europeans foresaw the disastrous financial burden this would impose on the entire continent. The British, virtually bankrupted by the war, found it difficult from the outset to find the money to subsidise their zone - eighty million pounds in the first year. In order to be able to divert wheat to Germany, the new Labour government introduced bread rationing, something that had not even been in force in the war. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, was working to turn the zone it controlled - East Germany - into a totalitarian prison state.

  The occupation authorities were theoretically committed to eradicating Nazism root and branch from the country, which meant cleansing schools, universities, city halls and newspapers of party members. In reality the policy was a recipe for chaos. It condemned tens of thousands of people to internment without hearings and at first denied party members any employment except manual labour. The de-Nazification policy created an unworkable world with rules described by the officials involved as ‘systematic and meticulous imbecility’ enacted by officers who were ‘politically ignorant and morally indifferent’.[155]

  The American Department of War estimated that it needed a minimum of ten thousand permanent American personnel to have any hope of success with de-Nazification. By the end of 1945 there was a staff of only two hundred designated to the task, and a third of those were German nationals. The policy to root out Nazis failed utterly, and by the autumn of 1946, out of a total of almost forty-two thousand cases compiled by de-Nazification tribunals, only one hundred and sixteen Germans were considered major offenders.[156]

  In many towns the records had been destroyed, and ardent Nazis simply moved back into power. The Allies themselves knowingly appointed Nazi Party members, or sympathisers, as the mayors of Hamburg, Wuppertal, Bremen, Hanover, Kiel and many other smaller towns. Agencies of the US government, including the army, State Department, and later the newly formed CIA and air force, all created clandestine programmes to allow known Nazis who were deemed useful into the United States. Hard-headed realists, who were able to accept that a country that had been Nazi since 1933 could scarcely be expected to operate without employing numerous party members, still drew a line when it came to war criminals. But it was crossed repeatedly, and a form of Realpolitik was adopted by the Allies that was nakedly amoral.

  Surrounded by chaos and unaware of the dark political forces playing themselves out elsewhere, Michel plunged into post-war intelligence work in Munich, eager to hunt down Nazis. ‘I was in a sea full of fish to be caught.’

  The CIC Munich office was established in a German government building on Ludwigstrasse, and one of the larger rooms on the ground floor was used as a reception area for arrested suspects. As the men were interrogated and processed, they were predictably vociferous in their denials of any involvement with either the Gestapo in particular or the Nazi Party in general. Michel employed a Gestapo officer with long service as his right-hand man to help discover the truth. ‘He had originally been an official with the Kriminalpolizei and was then transferred to the Gestapo. He was not a bad guy and insisted that he had always worked inside the office and never gone out on raids or been involved in torture. I believed him. I thought he would be more useful to me than inside an internment camp, so instead of processing him, which was my official duty, I offered him a job.’

  The man was given an office next to Michel’s and put to work typing profiles on Gestapo officials to be arrested, and provided lists of likely aliases and possible addresses. He was allowed to go home to his wife and family at night. ‘I felt he earned his freedom.’ And every morning he would be placed in the reception area posing as another prisoner, where he would mingle and chat to fellow suspects until it was his time to be interrogated. ‘And then he would come in to me and tell me who was there. It worked very well. It gave me a weapon which was taken as uncanny insight and prescience by the men who sat before me lying for their lives.’[157]

  Counter Intelligence at this time was receiving a welter of reports on post-war undercover organisations dedicated to preserving Nazi ideals. One, the Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen - known by its initials, ODESSA - was created with the mi
ssion of re-establishing conditions favourable for the rebirth of Nazi power. In reality it was little more than a well-funded bureau that helped party members and war criminals obtain false identities and escape the country. However, in this it was highly successful. ODESSA smuggled hundreds of millions of dollars out of Germany, via Switzerland, primarily to Argentina. It arranged for the escape of thousands of wanted Nazis out of Germany to the Middle East and South America, especially Argentina. A CIC team, led by Michel, raided the organisation’s HQ in Munich only weeks after the end of the war. The office yielded five members, who were arrested, and all the paraphernalia for forging documents. Michel kept a printer’s counterfeit die-stamp of the papal seal as a souvenir.[158]

  Another well-publicised group was the Werewolves, which supposedly had access to stockpiled weapons hidden in the Tyrol enabling Nazi guerrilla fighters to wage war against the occupation armies. ‘The Werewolves were the brainchildren of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Maybe that’s why in practice the outfit proved to be a lot of media bark with no bite.’[159] There was also a group that attracted considerable CIC interest at the time called Red Lilac, but eventually proved to be little more than a band of freebooters set on personal enrichment. ‘Although these cabals never managed to mount a serious threat on their own, they numbered thousands of men with access to weapons and funds, trained in sabotage, espionage and assassination. These men were drifting back into society taking innocuous jobs as car mechanics and cooks. If they could have been welded into a cohesive, well-directed force they could have frustrated attempts to reconstitute the liberated countries as democracies.’

  The more experience Michel accumulated with captured German officers, and later with high-ranking Nazi officials, the more contempt he developed for them. ‘Most exhibited in their attitude something subservient and despicable. They revealed a leadership made up of low people and rejects. Practically all of them were easily cowed during interrogation, ready and willing to give away their friends. Most volunteered to betray colleagues. There were few who showed any rectitude. What was lacking completely was any sense of dignity. This was hardly surprising. If they didn’t recognise human dignity in others, why should they have it themselves? There wasn’t a trace of it.’

  The willing betrayals and automatic denials of party membership became routine. One exception stood out. Michel interrogated an SS officer who not only refused to give information but also proudly stated that he remained an enthusiastic Nazi. Automatically, Michel offered the man his hand. ‘It was a relief after all the evasions and lies to meet a single man who said he was a Nazi. Someone who was prepared to take the consequences for his beliefs. So I reached out and shook that Nazi’s hand.’

  In the midst of the war, retribution for Nazi crimes had been declared by Winston Churchill to be among the major purposes of the war, but the complexities of peace introduced a harsh Realpolitik. ‘Revenge is, of all satisfaction, the most costly and long drawn out; retributive persecution is of all policies the most pernicious,’ Churchill declared after the war, modifying his earlier position. ‘Our policy... should henceforth be to draw the sponge across the crimes and horrors of the past, hard as that may be, and look for the sake of our salvation towards the future. There can be no revival of Europe without the active and loyal aid of all the German tribes.’[160]

  There was no war crimes policy at first in either Washington or London, and when one finally emerged the necessary machinery was not in place to implement it. In the US, the War Department assumed responsibility for punishing war crimes and pressed the Intelligence Division to carry out the task. This fell to the CIC, the only section empowered to arrest war criminals, and at first the job did not seem too onerous as at the time of the D-Day landing there were only sixty-eight names on the wanted list.[161] However, public outrage generated by the murder of unarmed American POWs during the Battle of the Bulge - the Malmédy Massacre - led directly to a commitment to an international war crimes trial. Malmédy was the greatest crime committed against Americans during the entire war.

  The list of wanted men mushroomed. The Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects - which went by its acronym CROWCASS - became the world’s biggest list of possible war criminals with eight million cross-indexed names. Created by General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, its aim was to foster international co-operation in finding and prosecuting war criminals. The registry was broken down into three lists: (1) wanted men; (2) prisoners already in custody; (3) the names of all internees and the camps they were held in. Scotland Yard and FBI experts joined forces with the French in Paris, on Rue Mathurias, where an army of three hundred clerks was put to work punching information into an IBM card-index machine. Forms had been sent out to all internment camps to be returned with every internee’s photo and fingerprints. The cards flooded back at the rate of forty thousand a day, overwhelming a workforce that was only able to process a fraction of that number.

  People on the lists had also changed identities, while fingerprinting proved an exercise in futility as there were no prints on record for the wanted men. On top of this, the Russians were not part of CROWCASS - which excluded thirty-five per cent of all POWs - while camps under British jurisdiction were not even returning their forms. The British officer who headed CROWCASS was eventually forced to admit the list was worthless. In the general chaos, numerous war criminals slipped through the net and were not even questioned, let alone punished.

  Before the war had ended a large number of Displaced Persons seeking repatriation who needed CIC approval, particularly French and Polish speakers, were sent to Michel to be processed. It was dull, form-filling work for the most part and something he delegated as much as possible, but a Belgian, who claimed to have been released from a labour camp and wanted to be repatriated, aroused Michel’s curiosity. Everything about him seemed to be in order, except there was something about the accent that seemed off-key to a highly tuned ear. It was nothing obvious or defined, and might even have been a regional variation unknown to Michel, but it made him suspicious. ‘I remembered, for example, that the Belgians say “septante and octante” whereas the French say “soixante-dix and quatre-vingt” and he seemed unaware of this. It was something that insignificant.

  ‘The DP supplied me with his basic biography: name, date of birth, home town, trade. All seemed in order except the accent continued to bother me. The man was tall and rail-thin with big ears on a narrow face. He told me he was thirty-eight years old, although he looked much younger, which struck me as odd. Most slave labourers quickly appeared older than their chronological age because of the brutal working conditions in the labour camps. He was ragged and dirty enough, and cursed the guards, camp commander and even Hitler with appropriate vigour, but all that could be a piece of theatre to fool me. I studied his hands - they showed none of the inevitable cuts and bruises and calluses of manual labour.’

  Michel chatted casually in French and reminisced about his travels in Belgium before the war. The DP spoke of his brief career as a soldier in 1940 when the German Army swept through the country. ‘The talk meandered for hours - innocuous questions and bland answers.’

  Finally, Michel appeared to be satisfied and the DP moved in his seat, preparing to leave.

  ‘One moment, please,’ Michel said.

  He told him that he knew he was not Belgian, because of inconsistencies in his conversation, and that he believed everything the man said to be a lie. He glared at the ‘Belgian’ and began to fire questions in an aggressive, unfriendly tone, picking away at discrepancies in statements the man had made about his career. The DP seemed to have an answer for everything, but Michel continued to chip away at him for the rest of the night. ‘I did not expect him to give himself away easily. He had been too well coached to fall for simple cat-and-mouse games. But marathon question-and-answer sessions were quite effective.’

  As the night wore on the man began to make small mistakes. Michel ignored these without
comment and let them pile up. Then he painstakingly went back over his line of questioning until the DP grew flustered and confused. He was also exhausted, while Michel displayed the stamina to suggest he could go on for ever. ‘The longer I grilled him the more he realised I was not going to buy the story. He was visibly sagging before my eyes.’

  Michel sat at a table and began to write. Dawn broke, and a grey light filtered into the bleak office. The DP sat slumped in his chair, so worn down and tired that he resembled a different being to the tall, confident man who had swapped nostalgic small talk about pre-war Belgium eighteen hours earlier.

  Michel looked up from his writing and fixed him with a hard stare. ‘There’s only one way you can save yourself. You must tell me everything and then work with me to save Germany.’

  Once again, Michel resorted to the histrionic display of the outraged patriot. ‘Like my piano-playing rocketeer, I knew he burned with nationalist fervour. I counted on that quality as the real hook into him.’ He began to speak in German, which the man affected to have difficulty understanding. Michel trotted out his phoney family antecedents, claiming to be a genuine German patriot who had witnessed the destruction of his beloved country. ‘You are a disgrace to the Fatherland. I am a German to the tips of my toes but you’ve damn near wiped out an entire generation of the finest young blood in Europe, and now to make matters worse you’re engaged in some scheme to make it possible for a few higher-ups to live off the loot they’ve grabbed.’ The harangue continued for an hour until the man was hallucinating from exhaustion. This was exactly the state Michel wanted him in. ‘Look around you,’ he said as he finished his speech, gesturing at the ruined town outside the window. ‘See the glory you’ve brought Germany.’