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

by Christopher Robbins

  A German agent now took over - one of Michel’s trusted informants who had been in the police - and arranged discreet, round-the-clock surveillance of the family house. A tense period of expectation followed, but as time passed and Knittel still did not appear it seemed that they had been fed a false lead. ‘Then, on the fifth of January, late at night, I got a report that his wife had left the house. She was followed to a remote area of the town where she disappeared in the dark. There were only three isolated houses in the vicinity and it was reasonable to presume she had gone into one of them, but we could not be certain.’ Further action posed a dilemma: to move on the houses but fail to capture Knittel would alert both man and wife. ‘I was following a hunch. I had no evidence that either Knittel or his wife were in any of the houses. It was a risk. I fought with myself whether to act or not, and followed my gut reaction and decided to strike.’

  Michel and Ted Kraus called in a group of forty American troops and drove to the spot where Knittel’s wife had last been seen. The soldiers were told nothing about their mission, and Michel facetiously said to one that there had been a report of somebody stealing a pram. They were divided into four groups: one secured a perimeter around all the properties, while each of the other three was assigned a house. The troops were ordered to hold everyone they found and search each building from top to bottom.

  ‘I led a squad into one house and we quickly assembled everyone in the living room with guards over them. Frau Knittel was there, but not her husband.’ Michel climbed the stairs to the first floor, kicking open bedroom doors, searching under beds and inside wardrobes. He climbed a ladder into the attic. In the gloom beneath the eaves he made out a crouched man, very much the worse for wear, hiding in a corner. Michel ordered him to stand and clasp his hands behind his head. The man was unarmed and his papers identified him as Hans Jagomast, an agricultural labourer. Demobilisation documents stated that he had formerly been a corporal in the Wehrmacht. His head was shaved, his cheeks were bloated and he looked nothing at all like SS Major Gustav Knittel. ‘It looked like he had been through hard times,’ Ted Kraus said. ‘He hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks and was quite surprised that he had finally been caught. He admitted nothing and denied ever having been in the SS.’[181] The man said he had panicked when American soldiers had entered the house and that was the reason he had tried to hide.

  Michel went carefully through his wallet and found a photograph of a woman, on the back of which was an inscription: FÜR GUSTEL, ALLES LIEBE - to Gustel, with love. Michel recognised the woman as Frau Knittel; Gustel was a form of endearment for Gustav. ‘So, Gustel,’ Michel said, ‘you changed your name to Hans Jagomast. But it’s Gustav, isn’t it - Gustav Knittel?’

  Knittel said nothing.

  ‘You’ve done a good job to make yourself unrecognisable,’ Michel continued. ‘Take off your shirt and raise your arms!’

  The standard SS tattoo denoting blood group was found under the left arm. Knittel sullenly admitted his real identity and said that the house they were at, number nineteen Blaicher Haag, belonged to his aunt’s husband, Alfred Schiebel.[182]

  As Knittel was brought out of the house under arrest, the commander of the American troops lounged against a wall, smoking a cigarette. He asked nonchalantly, ‘So now can you tell us who this joker is we’re freezing our arses off for in the middle of the night?’

  Kraus told him they had picked up somebody important - Knittel, the SS officer suspected of murdering unarmed American prisoners at Malmédy. The American soldier’s easy manner evaporated, and for a moment he looked stunned. He turned his head towards the wall and began to sob. Later, he explained that his best friend had been one of those shot at the crossroads.

  There was a fear that the prisoner’s life might be in danger once word spread among the GIs that he was wanted in connection with the Malmédy Massacre. Feelings ran very high against Knittel among the American troops, so Michel arranged to put him in a secure cell guarded by men he could trust.

  ‘How could you hope to stay free?’ Michel asked. ‘Everyone is looking for you after this terrible crime.’

  The surrender of Germany had devastated him, Knittel said, and he felt the end of the world had come. At first he had no wish to carry on but, ironically, the will to live came from the sight of Jewish survivors. Unaware that Michel was a Jew, Knittel said, ‘At the end of the war I was shocked to see a Jew in the street still alive. I thought that these accursed people would have been finally wiped out for ever. How was it possible that any were still alive and free? When I saw that the Jews had managed to avoid extinction, that gave me hope. I said to myself, “If those dumb Jews can survive, I can survive. I’m at least as smart as any damn Jew.”’

  Michel said nothing.

  Once in jail, Knittel seemed to take pleasure in reasserting himself as an SS major. He spoke repeatedly of his amazement at having been caught. He had been so careful, changing his identity and appearance, working quietly on a farm with no outside contact with anyone. ‘It was the only time I ever came out of my hiding place,’ he said. ‘For a few hours at midnight. You know, I was absolutely sure I would never be caught. Never! NEVER!’ Curiosity about how he had been trapped began to obsess him. ‘How is it possible you caught me? Tell me!’ Michel allowed the obsession to grow, aware that doubt and curiosity would gnaw at the prisoner and lead him in time to suspect his own wife.

  Michel returned to the jail frequently to interrogate his prisoner, subjecting the SS major to lengthy questioning sessions. Knittel was a classic SS officer, commended by the commanding general of Leibstandarte, Sepp Dietrich, as one of his best officers. He was well-educated, came from a middle-class background, and had joined the Nazi Party and an SS Political Alert Unit at the age of eighteen. As an officer cadet he had earned high marks for ideology and was commissioned at the age of twenty-three on 9 November 1938, the anniversary of Hitler’s abortive putsch of 1923. He was wounded in combat in France and Russia, where he was awarded the Knight’s Cross for cool and skilful leadership under fire.[183]

  ‘I had him for weeks. He complained early on that he had been made to work all night to clean his cell with a toothbrush. I was enraged. I called the head of the prison and insisted that no prisoners should be touched or abused in any way.’

  The questioning took the form of long conversations. ‘We talked about the objectives of the Ardennes offensive, and he spoke with pride about the rapid advance made by Rampfgruppe Peiper. I remarked that he must have taken a number of American prisoners in such a breakthrough.’

  Knittel said that prisoners were a problem as the division was not equipped to handle them.

  ‘You mean you shot your prisoners?’ Michel asked.

  ‘No, I did not. I ordered them to be shot.’

  Although Knittel readily confessed to giving the command to shoot unarmed American prisoners, he insisted that he was following orders issued at the beginning of the offensive. ‘However, he admitted he agreed with them because the army could not afford to waste time and bother with sending prisoners to the rear.’ Knittel explained dispassionately about the inability to cope with the large number of prisoners which he ascribed to American cowardice. Their deaths had been a necessity of war. ‘He talked quite calmly about how they were killed. He was able to talk about it without any remorse or apparent feeling. He was candid and cool, as if mass murder was understandable to those familiar with the rigours of combat.’

  But Knittel’s voice changed as he spoke of his outrage when his men looted personal belongings from the dead: ‘After the shooting some of my men stripped the corpses of their watches and rings. Their behaviour was a serious breach of conduct. I ordered the business stopped at once and made it clear none of the bodies was to be touched.’

  As he spoke about the looting, he grew increasingly agitated. ‘It was a complete switch from the dispassionate account of the killings. It was such a change that it threw me. I was confused. He practically screamed about call
ing his men back and preventing the looting. This enraged him, made him furious.’ The contrast between the detached report of the cold-blooded murder of prisoners, and the fury over the aftermath, seemed to make no sense. At first, Michel assumed it was some arcane part of the SS military code of honour.

  ‘Tell me, major,’ he asked, ‘you had just calmly ordered your men to kill unarmed soldiers, but became angry when they tried to loot the bodies. What made you so upset?’

  Knittel’s eyes narrowed and the answer was snarled between clenched teeth. ‘Because looting the dead brings bad luck!’

  Throughout the lengthy and numerous interrogations Michel never once showed any personal animosity towards his prisoner. ‘Towards the end of the questioning, after he had confessed to murder, he begged me to tell him how we got on to him. He had become truly obsessed by this, as I had foreseen. He could not understand how it was that he had ventured out for such a short time and been caught. I said nothing but just watched him. He was going through terrible mental torture. I knew what was playing on his mind, and I was so tempted to look at him innocently and say, “Your wife - she’s French, isn’t she?” Not as an answer, but as a question. He would have been destroyed emotionally. I felt it would have sent him into such mental torture that it would have killed him. And why shouldn’t he be destroyed? This murderer. This war criminal. I had no regard for Knittel’s feelings. I let him beg and plead, and the more he did so the more I was tempted. It was easy to hate him. I was so tempted to sour his relationship with his wife - it would have cut deep to let him think the woman he loved had betrayed him. But I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t.’

  Michel approached the interrogation of Gustav Knittel’s wife with the same inner revulsion he felt for her SS husband. ‘It was extremely difficult for me. I had considered myself French for so many years. I knew how we in the Résistance felt about French women who associated with the hated German occupiers, and here was one who had married an SS officer! Before Knittel’s arrest, his wife had been questioned by the CIC agents and been given a full account of the atrocities her husband was accused of, yet she chose to stay in Germany and wait for him. I could not understand. How could a French woman betray her own country and people?’

  At their first encounter Michel expressed this contempt for a French woman who could marry an SS officer. ‘How could you? As a French woman! The invaders of your country - the occupiers. The brutes! How could you?’

  The woman looked at Michel calmly and replied in a soft but firm voice, ‘L’amour ne connait pas de frontière’ - Love knows no borders.

  Michel could not help but be moved, and was secretly envious of such a love. It reminded him with a sharp pang of the selfless love Suzanne had displayed. ‘The straightforward answer disarmed me, despite my strong feelings. It came out of her soul. She did not seek either to excuse her husband or justify him. That demonstration of devotion and loyalty, the strength of her love - ill-deserved, but true - made me see things differently. I had been so caught up in the passions of the war and my work after it that I had forgotten there were emotions stronger than hatred of an evil enemy, stronger even than a person’s best interests. This woman’s unconditional love for an evil man affected me strangely. I had gone to her with great anger, but left deeply moved.’

  Knittel fully expected and accepted that he would be executed within a short time and asked Michel to grant him a last request. The major had married his wife in a civil SS ceremony and now wanted a religious wedding as he did not want his son to be considered illegitimate. ‘I asked his wife if she wanted this and she said that she did. They were Catholics, so she chose a priest and I arranged for a wedding service to be held in prison.’

  Gustav Knittel duly appeared before an American military tribunal at Dachau in May 1946, charged with murder. Along with twenty-three other officers and forty-nine non-commissioned officers or enlisted men from Kampfgruppe Peiper, the prosecution charged that the accused ‘did wilfully, deliberately and wrongfully permit, encourage, aid, abet and participate in the killing, shooting, ill treatment, abuse and torture of members of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, and of unarmed civilians’. All the SS men were found guilty as charged and sentence was passed in July. Gustav Knittel was among twenty-three defendants to receive life imprisonment. His commander, Joachim Peiper, was sentenced to death, along with forty-two other SS officers and men. The remainder received lengthy prison terms.

  Knittel was transferred to Landsberg Fortress, the same jail in which Adolf Hitler was imprisoned after his abortive putsch in Munich in 1923. It was the same prison that held Emil Mahl, hangman of Dachau, and Michel’s involvement with both men was far from over.

  CIC had developed a schizoid nature after the war. On the one hand its record for the capture of war criminals remained unrivalled, and the evidence gathered and investigative files accumulated - not least the Berlin Document Centre, initially funded by the US Army - resulted in thousands of successful prosecutions in many countries. But at the same time another, top-secret section of CIC was recruiting war criminals to work as intelligence officers, in the same manner that Project Paperclip employed Nazi scientists.

  Top-secret operations that enlisted German intelligence officers with experience in covert operations gave known war criminals of dubious value a new lease of life. SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, one-time senior aide to Adolf Eichmann, volunteered his services to CIC and was used for interrogation and recruitment of other former Nazi intelligence officers. Among Bolschwing’s previous career achievements was the planning and oversight of a pogrom in Bucharest. He was later picked up by the CIA and employed as a contract agent. SS officer Robert Verbelen was a contract agent in Vienna for CIC, despite a known background that included the torture of two captured American pilots. The US Army Chemical Corps hired Dr Kurt Blome, a leader in Nazi biological research. This involved experiments on humans and caused unimaginable suffering. Senior Nazi Foreign Office official Gustav Hilger was flown in secret to the US on a military transport. These men were the first of many, and typical of a breed that enjoyed protection by the American intelligence community in various programmes that continued until 1973.[184]

  The most important Nazi intelligence agent to be recruited by the US was General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s senior expert on Russia. During the war, Gehlen’s organisation had been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths when it employed ruthless methods of interrogation and torture against Russian POWs. (It is estimated that approximately four million Soviet POWs were deliberately starved to death.) As a favourite of Hitler, Gehlen enjoyed great success and meteoric promotion, but his reputation relied greatly on the smoke and mirrors of his profession. His reports were carefully crafted to be so equivocal that they often allowed him to take credit whatever the outcome.[185]

  In March 1945, two months before the end of the war, Gehlen had taken out a solid-gold life insurance policy. He secretly microfilmed everything the German Army’s military intelligence service had in the files on the USSR. The films were packed in fifty-two watertight steel drums and buried in three hiding places in the Bavarian Alps. Gehlen stayed with the most important of these in a chalet located at a place called Misery Meadow, and waited to be captured by American forces. When he surrendered, together with his top aides, he bartered the priceless hoard in exchange for his life and future. ‘Here are the secrets of the Kremlin,’ Gehlen had boasted as he revealed the sealed steel containers containing the world’s most valuable espionage files. ‘If you use them properly, Stalin is doomed.’[186]

  He also offered the Americans another valuable intelligence asset in the form of an espionage network already in place behind the Iron Curtain. In addition, he produced a list of agents from the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) who, he claimed, were members of the US Communist Party.[187] Dressed in an American lieutenant-general’s uniform, Gehlen was flown to Washington DC together with three of his top men, in August 1945. He returned to Germany
with the blessing and money of the intelligence community, and set up the Gehlen Organisation.[188]

  Its early staff of fifty officers, many of whom were enlisted with false names and papers to protect them from prosecution, established themselves at Pullach, near Munich. They were a sinister crew of known war criminals. Among them were men like Willi Krichbaum, one-time Gestapo leader in south-eastern France; Fritz Schmidt, Gestapo chief in Kiel; and Hans Sommer, who had torched seven Paris synagogues in 1941. Two SS officers, Emil Augsburg and Franz Six, ran the émigré section of the organisation. Augsburg was one of the Nazi regime’s leading experts on Eastern Europe, who had also led a murder squad in Russia. Apart from working for the Gehlen Organisation, Augsburg was simultaneously employed by CIC, French intelligence, a private network of ex-SS officers, and possibly British intelligence. Dr Six, as he liked to be known - his doctorates were in Nazi law and political science - had been dean of Berlin University where he ran an SS think-tank concerned with strategic intelligence on the USSR. He, too, was a wanted war criminal who had led a mobile killing squad on the eastern front.

  However, despite Gehlen’s protection and CIC sponsorship, another arm of CIC went ahead and prosecuted Six. He was charged with war crimes, including murder, and was sentenced to twenty years in prison by a military tribunal in 1948. But he served only four years before being granted clemency by the US High Commissioner in Germany. The clemency board specifically approved the former SS man for a position in the Gehlen Organisation, and he returned to work a few weeks after his release.[189]

  Under Hitler, Gehlen had reorganised his operation so that intelligence collection was greatly improved, and he placed great value on research and analysis. He impressed high-ranking US Army officers with his forecasts of Soviet policy in post-war Europe, most of which history has since proved incorrect. His value to America was exaggerated by a scarcely credible intelligence gap with regard to the Soviet Union. The US intelligence files on Russia were virtually empty, and did not even include the most elementary information on roads and bridges, the location of major weapons factories, or even road maps and city plans. As a result the US Air Force was obliged to plan for nuclear war using dated material in the Library of Congress.[190]