Hitler on Anschluss: Hitler, Mein Kampf, p 3.
Hitler’s youth in Vienna: See Jenks, Vienna and the Young Hitler, passim.
Cardinal Innitzer: Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p 350.
Freud leaves Vienna: The colleague was Ernest Jones, who became Freud’s biographer. Jones, Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, Vol. III, p235.
Excesses in Vienna: Other eyewitnesses to events following the Anschluss were William L. Shirer, legendary foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, and G.E.R. Gedye of The Times. ‘The behaviour of the Vienna Nazis was worse than anything I had seen in Germany. There was an orgy of sadism’ (Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p 351); ‘The streets of Vienna were an inferno. As I walked through or drove past the mobs... one of the many sentimental phrases applied by the Viennese halted my brain - Das gold’ne Wiener Harz. There was little trace of golden hearts written on these hate-filled, triumph-drunken faces, and the memory of it makes one’s stomach queasy’. (Gedye, Betrayal in Central Europe, p 284).
Polish passports rescinded: The first law modifying citizenship was passed by the Polish parliament on 31 March 1938, followed by a decree cancelling the passports of foreign residents in October of the same year. Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p 267.
Evian Conference: See Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, pp 248-9.
Dianne Dudel: Michel’s cousin married Ileahu Ben Elissar, who became Israeli ambassador to the United States, and at the time of writing is the ambassador to France.
Ernst Ehrenfeld: After completing his prison sentence, Ehrenfeld served in the French Foreign Legion throughout the war. He survived to marry a French woman, and settled in France.
English general rages: Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, in Fuller, The Second World War, p 55.
Maginot Line: Home, To Lose a Battle, pp 25-32; Kemp, The Maginot Line, passim.
Jean-Paul Sartre quotation: From his memoir, Paris Under the Occupation; quoted by Ousby, Occupation, p 22.
General de Gaulle: See De Gaulle, Memoirs, pp 30-1.
Italians held off: Home, To Lose a Battle, pp 564-5.
Hitler at Compiegne: William Shirer wrote notes in his diary after watching Hitler through binoculars. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp 742-3.
Defeat of France and armistice: The fullest accounts are carried in Shirer, Fall of the Third Republic, and Home, To Lose a Battle.
Albert Camus quotation: Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, p 146.
Resisters of the First Hour: See Paxton, Vichy France, p 39.
Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws: See Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp xi-xvi, 3-20.
Influence peddling: Court document No. 69, Correctional Judgement 600, Nice Tribunal, 9 January 1941.
Acquittal: Court document No. 175, Case 17, registered in Nice, 17 January 1941.
Residence denied: Refus de Séjour, issued by authorities in Nice on 14 February 1941.
Internment order: Proposition Internment, Nice: Code # 151W21898: Transport 17 Juifs au Camp Le Vernet, 26 April 1941. Document provided from the archive of Serge Klarsfeld.
Gardes Mobiles: A section of the police ‘notoriously’ reactionary and brutal, according to the writer Arthur Roestler, ‘both in human material and tradition’, in Scum of the Earth, p 116.
Refugee goes mad: Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 66.
Concentration camps: The term camp du concentration was the official term, first used by Interior Minister Albert Sarraut in 1939. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 165.
French Dachau: This was the headline of the first article to appear in the international press in the New Republic on 11 November 1940. Other reports decrying conditions in the Vichy camps soon followed in the New York Times, the British papers the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, and the Swiss paper Journal de Geneve.
Le Vernet: The description of Le Vernet appears in the memoirs of the novelist Gustav Regler, Owl of Minerva, pp 333, 352-3. In 1941 Arthur Roestler published an account of his time in the camp after escaping to England. Undesirable foreign refugees are the ‘scum’ referred to in his title. Roestler’s description of the camp tallies closely with that of Michel Thomas. The account here is an amalgamation of Thomas’s memory and Roestler’s written record, made only months after his internment. See Scum of the Earth, pp 101-65, passim.
Thirty-one camps: The totals were reported by the Rundt Commission, a Gestapo tool authorised under the Franco-German armistice to visit French camps and extract any prisoner the Germans wanted under a system known as ‘Surrender on Demand’. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp 165-6; Fry, Surrender on Demand, passim.
Honour of France: André Jean-Faure, Vichy inspector-general of the camps, prepared reports for the Chief of State, Marshal Pétain himself, although it is doubtful that he ever saw them. A member of the marshal’s staff scribbled in pencil across a report on Gurs, ‘Not to be acknowledged’. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp 172-3.
Unit C: The huts of Unit C were finally rebuilt in October 1942 but there were no Jewish inmates to benefit from the improved conditions. They had all been deported ‘to the East’. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 175.
Dysentery of the soul: Regler, Owl of Minerva, p 336.
Walking skeletons: Michel Thomas has photographs in his possession taken of inmates for a later report on the camp. Their shrunken, emaciated forms are identical to the survivors of the Nazi death camps.
Man of bad reputation: The report stated: ‘Mauvaise reputation, moralite doutesse. A fait I’objet d’une information pour trafic d’influence. N’a pas obtempere au refus de séjour. Decision Ministerielle d’internment, 7 Mai, 1941.’ Report provided from the archive of Serge Klarsfeld.
Bureaucratic obstruction: See Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp 162-3; Fry, Surrender on Demand, p 157.
Arrival in Les Milles: Michel Thomas’s arrival in Les Milles was registered with the authorities on 22 December 1941. He was given the number 2539.
Les Milles: For a history of the camp, see Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, pp 95-6.
Saint Louis: Great Britain, Belgium and France finally agreed to grant asylum to the passengers, taking a third each. Only the refugees admitted to Britain survived.
Powerful deterrent: Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, p 104.
Never saw the sun: Many years after working in the mine Michel Thomas discovered that the respiratory problems he had been suffering were as a result of black lung. X-rays showed that his left lung manifested ‘increased interstitial fibrosis... a complication of exposure to coal dust’. Report by Gerald Salen MD, New York, 1993.
Round-up of French Jews: The BBC had announced the deportation plans to the Résistance on 24 July 1942. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, p 120.
Drancy: All but twelve of the seventy-nine deportation trains left from Drancy, as did over sixty-seven thousand of the seventy-five thousand Jews. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 252.
Extra beer and cigarette rations: Porch, The French Secret Services, p209.
Vichy ambassador married to a Jewess: The wife of Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s representative in Paris, was exempted from having to wear the Star of David, but virtually condemned to house arrest. The Germans insisted that the exemption was only good for her residence in the family property in the Basses-Pyrenées near Biarritz and suggested she live continuously on the estate. Her brother was later arrested, despite being in possession of an official paper stating he did not belong to the Jewish race. Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 237.
Jews constitute a national danger: Le Matin, 16 December 1941.
Violation of armistice: The Prime Minister was quoted in the article ‘Laval Losing Confidence’, Manchester Guardian, 30 September 1942.
Without brutality: Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, p 121.
Secu
rity strengthened: Ibid, p 120.
Police chiefs statement: Ibid, p 122.
Turkish citizens protected: Michel’s friend Nic Levy, interned with him both at Le Vernet and Les Milles, was one such Turkish Non-Deportable. He witnessed deportation after deportation at Les Milles but was never touched. After the war he opened an elegant men’s shop - Dorian Guy - opposite the Georges Cinq Hotel, and another -Soirees Elysees - in the Champs Elysees. The experience of Vichy convinced him to reverse his name to Yvel.
Number of children deported: These figures have been painstakingly compiled by Serge Klarsfeld from camp records in France and Germany. The figures for 1942 are: one thousand and thirty-two under six; two thousand, five hundred and fifty-seven between six and twelve; two thousand, four hundred and sixty-four between thirteen and seventeen. Klarsfeld, Le Memorial de la deportation des Juifs de France, unpaginated.
Quota requirement: By the end of 1942 a total of forty-two thousand, five hundred Jews were sent from France to Auschwitz, a figure the Germans found disappointing. For a detailed analysis of this period, see Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp 217-69 passim.
Willpower: One of the legacies of the camps, Michel Thomas jokes, is an ability to go for superhumanly long periods without feeling hunger or the need to urinate. Nigel Levy, the producer of the BBC documentary on Michel, remembers: ‘I went in at nine in the morning and left at eight at night. In all that time he did not move from the armchair, ate a single packet of crisps and, as far as I remember, never used the bathroom.’
Escape attempt: Many years after the war Michel Thomas met one of the children who had been taken from Les Milles on the bus that he had tried to board. The man had survived the war, and remembered the adult prisoner who had tried to escape by riding with them. The guards quickly found the escapee and arrested him.
Children separated: Donald Lowrie, who was active in relief work for the World Alliance of the YMCA, wrote a memorandum in August 1942 based on eyewitness accounts of this incident. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, pp 122,254.
Sam Fischer: Not the real name, which Michel was unable to remember.
Bummed a cigarette: The cigarette was given to Michel by Nic Levy, the Turkish Non-Deportable (see note 28).
‘What silence!’: The observer is quoted in Bower, Barbie, pp 29-30.
Lyon’s history of rebellion: See Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, pp 18-19.
Communist Résistance: The secret agenda of the FTP was revealed in archives released by Moscow in the first half of the 1990s. Porch, The French Secret Services, p 214.
Lyon and the Résistance: See Aron, France Reborn, p 546; Porch, The French Secret Services, pp 175-264 passim.
The Maquis: The term that came to describe the whole underground movement in France. The word is Corsican and describes the rough gorse into which the bandits of the island disappear.
Abbe AlexAndré Glasberg (1902-82): Redward, Résistance in Vichy France, pp 175-6; Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 207; Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, p 170; Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews, pp 73, 131.
Hitler’s communication with Pétain: Irving, Hitler’s War, pp 444-8.
Italian zone: See Zuccotti, Italy and the Holocaust, pp 75, 82-3.
Lyon and UGIF: Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, pp 199-216.
Disappointing results: The report is quoted in Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, p 207.
Michel at UGIF office: One published account of Barbie’s life identifies Michel at the UGIF office as ‘Michel Kroskof, a Polish artist’; see Bower, Barbie, p 58.
‘Without them’: The quotes by Barbie are from Bower, Barbie, pp 41, 51.
Darnand’s quotes: Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, p 105.
Background to Milice: Kedward, Occupied France, pp 66-7; Marrus & Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, p 335; Ousby, Occupation, p 267-75.
Arrested by Milice: Michel’s arrest was in Grenoble on 30 March 1943. Report on the service and activities of Mr Michel Kroskof-Thomas in the Résistance and Maquis, French Forces of the Interior, Isere, Section IV: signed by Captain Dax, St Ismier, 4 December 1944. Copy read and certified by Secretary General of the Departmental Committee of National Liberation of Grenoble, 22 August 1957 (signature illegible).
Michel’s betrayal: Today, Michel Thomas says of this incident: ‘I always wondered what I would do if I saw the young man who betrayed me again - and I did, on a street in Paris at the end of the war just before I went to the United States. Instinctively, I stepped forward and embraced him. And we had a very pleasant lunch together. I was happy to see him, and happy for him to see me alive so he wouldn’t have guilt. It was done and finished.’
Control of pain: This is not as unusual or extraordinary as it sounds. Professor Patrick Wall, a practising London physiologist, has spent a lifetime studying pain. His research has led him to believe that whether a sensation is interpreted as painful depends on what else the brain is attending to at the same time. Soldiers in the heat of battle often do not know they have been wounded; athletes continue to play after sustaining severe injuries. The brain prioritises. See Wall, Pain, passim.
Rene Gosse: For the role of academics in the Résistance, see Kedward, Résistance in Vichy France, pp 74-5. Gosse and his son were later murdered and their bodies were found in a ditch outside Grenoble. His colleagues deduced that both men had been tortured, and that the son had been killed in front of the father.
Sammy Lattès: After the war Lattès, a professor of Italian literature, became a national inspector of education.
Résistance positions: All these roles are recorded in the FFI (Forces Francaises de PInterieur) report.
Dax: The nom de guerre of Jean Berfini, a well-known Résistance figure based in Montbonnot.
BBC coded message: Kedward, In Search of the Maquis, p 174.
Capture of head of Secret Army: General Delestraint survived torture and two years’ incarceration in a German concentration camp. He was murdered by the Nazis as Allied troops advanced in 1945.
André Valat: After the war he became president of the veterans of the Grenoble and Gresivaudan Résistance until his death in 1996. There is a memorial to the memory of Georges Chappuy and Jean Nogues on the site of the encounter with the Germans outside Biviers. It reads: ‘French Résistance, Biviers Group. Here fell our comrades shot by the Germans on 17 June 1944 during a dangerous mission.’ The men were awarded the Croix de Guerre.
Henri: The nom de guerre of Henri Segal, a French Jew - ‘one of the heroes’, according to Michel.
Attack on Fort Murier: Aime Recquet wrote his own account of this incident - see Nal & Recquet, Autres Recits (published with La Bataille de Grenoble), pp 274-81.
Thérèse Mathieu: Michel did not see Thérèse Mathieu again in the war, but kept in touch and met her years later. After the war she was sent by the Ministry of Education to French Africa to set up a system of education. At the age of seventy she complained that there were certain Alpine peaks she was no longer able to climb. She died in 1955 in a car accident in her beloved mountains.
Battle of Vercors: The best and fullest account is chronicled in Michael Pearson’s book, Tears of Glory (passim), in which the author interviewed survivors and gained access to classified documents. See also Aron, France Reborn, pp 182-95; Chambard, The Maquis, pp 173-94; Ehrlich, The French Résistance, pp 168-88; Foot, SOE in France, pp 357-8,391-9; Kedward, In Search of the Maquis, pp 174-81; Morgan, An Uncertain Hour, pp 292-300.
Germans turned: Foot, Résistance, p 252.
Liberation of Grenoble: See Aron, France Reborn, pp 344-6; Chambard, The Maquis, p 193; Foot, SOE in France, pp 412-13; Recquet, Bataille de Grenoble, pp 296-9; Pearson, Tears of Glory, pp 301-12.
Horizontal collaborators: Bruckberger, One Sky to Share, pp 23-4.
Coiffure of 1944: Stein, Wars I Have Seen, pp 121,243.
Thunderbirds’ history: For a complete history of the division, from its entanglement with Pancho Villa through the Korean Wa
r, see Franks, Citizen Soldiers, passim; Whitlock, Rock of Anzio, passim.
Praise from Patton: Quoted in Whitlock, Rock of Anzio, p 53.
Italian campaign: see Reegan, Second World War, pp 287-301.
Thunderbirds: Background on the 45th Division, together with a combat chronology, is provided in 45th Division News, Thunderbirds Special Edition, Second Anniversary edition, Vol. V, No. 38, 10 July 1945.
Liberation of Lyon: The Milice witness was Max Pyot; the priest tortured by the Gestapo was Abbé Boussier; the Bron airport supervisor was Joseph Bouellat; the Résistance leader who sent the signed letter to the Gestapo was Yves Farge. See Aron, France Reborn, pp 345-6, Bower, Barbie, pp 104-7; Morgan, Uncertain Hour, pp 308-9, 314-16.
Liberation of Culoz: Stein, Wars I Have Seen, pp 215-16,244-5.
Thunderbirds’ prisoners: By the end of the war the Thunderbirds would have a tally of one hundred and three thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven POWs to their credit. It is impossible to calculate how many enemy were killed or wounded. 45th Division News, 10 July 1945.
Cracow ghetto: The chemist who witnessed the events in Harmony Square, Cracow, Poland, in the first week in June 1942 was Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who wrote a detailed account. Unknown to him the deportees were sent to Belzec and gassed. Eisenberg, Witness to the Holocaust, pp 194-203.
Silver Star: The recommendation was written - and appallingly spelt, in what seems to be the house style of American military reports - by Martin F. Schroeder, executive officer, 1st Battalion, 180th infantry, 45th Division, Seventh Army (undated). The medal was never awarded, possibly because Michel was a foreign national. ‘I never looked into it or followed it up. I believed in Mathieu’s credo that we were not in it for decorations. I still do.’ The recommendation reads: ‘From the time of the liberation of Grenoble, France, in August 1944 through the battle of the Vosges mountains in Alsace in November of the same year, Michel Kroskof-Thomas, a Lt of the French Forces of the Interior (Maquis Commando Group), was attached to the S-2 section of 1st Bn, 180th Infantry. During this time in adverse weather conditions and against intense enemy Résistance, he successfully led reconnaissance patrols into enemy territory to gain vital information necessary for the continued advances of our forces. Often he led as many as three patrols in one day, and on several occasions he volunteered to go on these patrols alone with utter disregard for his personal safety. He was instrumental in capturing many enemy prisoners whom he personally interrogated and obtained much vital information. His fluent knowledge of various languages was beneficial in interrogating German prisoners and captured slave laborers, and French civilians. In September 1944, in the vicinity of Aubry, France, one of the companies of the Bn was holding a bridgehead across a river, and was in an exposed position which was continuously threatened by counter-attack. Michel Kroskof-Thomas personally established contact with an agent of the FFI in a strongly held enemy town and obtained vital knowledge and exact information as to movements, positions, enemy strength, installations, armor, and minefields. Later, he supervised the maintenance of contact with agents in other enemy-held towns in the vicinity, and thus he daily received information concerning enemy movements, reinforcements and proposed activities of the enemy on a larger scale. On one occasion when two patrols had been captured while attempting to obtain further information concerning enemy positions he volunteered to go alone into the positions. On this patrol he personally observed all the enemy minefields in the vicinity, and succeeded in reaching a single house where he captured an enemy soldier and obtained additional information as to positions and activity. When other enemy soldiers approached the house, he succeeded in withdrawing with the prisoner and returned to friendly positions and with information concerning artillery targets in the vicinity. A few minutes after he left the house, it was set afire by the enemy. By knowing the location of strategic positions and installations, and giving personally observed results of our shelling, he was able to effectively direct fire on these enemy positions causing them to withdraw from their prepared positions. This greatly relieved the strain on the forces holding the bridgehead.’
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 47