Temporary release from Thunderbirds: ‘To Whom It May Concern: This is to certify that Michel Kroskof-Thomas, of Grenoble, France, has been attached to our Intelligence Unit S-2 since 27 August 1944, in the capacity of interrogator and scout. His services proved invaluable to this organization. He disregarded personal safety to carry out hazardous patrol missions and as a result was able to submit important information on enemy installations and strength. His ability to speak French, German and Polish has aided this organization in the interrogation of French civilians and German PWs. Reluctantly, we are forced to release Michel Kroskof-Thomas, in accordance with AG 230, Headquarters, VI Corps, dated 6 October 1944. He leaves with our sincere thanks and highest recommendation.’ Henry F. Teichann Jr, 1st Lt, Infantry, Headquarters, 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry, APO 45, Postmaster, N.Y. New York, 19 October 1944.
Take no prisoners: The quoted written order was given to the US 38th Infantry Regiment. Whiting, Massacre at Malmédy, p 62.
Battle of the Bulge: A library of books has been written on the Ardennes campaign. The fullest account is Cole’s The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge; the best is MacDonald’s The Battle of the Bulge; the most readable is Toland’s Battle: The Story of the Bulge.
Transfer to CIC: The date of the transfer, 28 March 1945, is quoted in a recommendation written by Michel’s senior officer, Captain Rupert W. Guenthner, 20 July 1945.
COWARDS AND TRAITORS: Quoted in Bishop, Fighting 45th, p 161.
Battle for Aschaffenburg: Reports on the battle appeared in Time magazine and the Associated Press, 2 April 1945.
Landseer: The breed is considered to be the black and white variant of the Newfoundland. It is named after the artist Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-73) who featured it in many of his paintings. By 1920 the breed was virtually extinct; German breeders recreated it by crossing the St Bernard with the Great Pyrenean Mountain dog.
A fabric of moans: The words are those of Staff Sergeant Donald Schulz. Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, p 104.
Unrecognisable as humans: Report by the US Signal Corps, quoted in Gilbert, Holocaust, p 796.
Murrow in Buchenwald: CBS radio broadcast, 15 April 1945. Text reproduced in Reporting WWII, Vol. II, pp 681-5.
Liberation of Dachau: Associated Press and various other correspondents mistakenly reported that the 42nd Division helped capture the camp, but in fact it did not arrive until after it had been liberated solely by the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry of the Thunderbirds. The Seventh Army Daily News Summary, 1 May 1945.
Combat rage: The GIs’ rage is described by Whitlock, Rock ofAnzio, p 360.
SS men killed: A ‘secret’ report on the killings was prepared by the Seventh Army’s assistant inspector-general, Lt Col Joseph Whitaker. It recommended that four members of the 45th Division be charged with murder and tried by court-martial. One of the officers to be charged later reported that General Patton destroyed the report in his presence. No disciplinary action was taken. Whitlock, Rock ofAnzio, pp 388-9.
Female journalist: Martha Gellhorn, then married to Ernest Hemingway, visited Dachau after the troops liberated it. ‘Actually she came in days later and struck people as self-important and pretentious,’ Michel says. Gellhorn, ‘Dachau’, Collier’s, 23 June 1945.
Infernal fire: The journalist was Sam Goldsmith, a Lithuanian Jew who had sought asylum in Britain before the war. His report appeared in Haboker, Tel Aviv, 1945. Quoted in Gilbert, The Holocaust, p 799.
Emil Mahl: Mahl was actually captured and interrogated in Munich, where he had fled at the approach of Allied troops.
Confession: Michel has kept the document of yellowing paper, ‘a souvenir of one of the gruesome testimonies of our time’. It is signed twice by Mahl on the final page.
Work detail in Dachau crematorium: The detail was made up of: Eugen Seybold, from Munich; August Ziegler, from Mannheim; Franz Geiger, from Augsburg; and Johann Gopaz, from Hariborg (Yugoslavia). All the men were interviewed at length by Michel and volunteered to give testimony in writing.
Dachau doctors: Gellhorn, ‘Dachau’, Collier’s, 23 June 1945.
Fritz Spanheimer: After the war Spanheimer remained in Munich and became a prominent attorney.
Nazi Party membership profiles: The mill owner, Hans Huber, later claimed to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that he was against Nazism and had ‘preserved the files and kept them hidden’ until their discovery by ‘an American GI’ ‘Berlin Document Center Aids Nazi Hunters’, Los Angeles Times, 11 March 1979.
Freight cars of documents: Robert Wolfe, A Short History of the Berlin Document Centre, 1994, p xii.
Post-war reorganisation of American forces: Franks, Citizen Soldiers, p139.
Child in Buchenwald: The American officer was Rabbi Herschel Schechter. The child, Israel Lau, was kept alive by the cunning and love of his nineteen-year-old brother, Naftali. After the war Israel Lau became Chief Rabbi of Netanya, in Israel. His brother became consul-general in New York. Bonnie Boxer, The High Holidays: Israel El Al, p 11. The incident is also quoted in Gilbert, The Holocaust, p 792.
Dr Frundsberg: Ted Kraus, Michel’s senior officer in CIC at this time, was party to the SS sting operation. ‘Michel posed as an important SS figure, and had an elaborate place set up which was very impressive, and he was able to put it all over. He had a theatrical touch.’ It was Kraus who organised and ran the tape recordings of the meetings. ‘I doubt very much if the transcripts still exist.’ Ted Kraus, interview with the author, New Haven, Connecticut, 30 October 1997.
‘Systematic... imbecility’: The quotation comes from a British Foreign Office official, Con O’Neil. Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, pp 142, 166; ‘politically... indifferent’: The quotation comes from Saul Padover, an American member of the SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division who arrived in Aachen two months after the war to find committed Nazis back in power.
Failure of de-Nazification: For a scathing and convincing account of the Allies’ failure at de-Nazification, see Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, passim.
Gestapo official: Six months later, after Michel had moved to Ulm, the man was arrested and interned. He wrote to Michel asking for help. ‘I went to Munich with Ted Kraus and got him officially released.’
Vatican seal: Many years after the ODESSA raid in Munich, Michel’s ex-student, John Cardinal O’Connor from New York, borrowed the seal to show it to Pope John Paul.
Werewolves: The single effective act carried out by the Werewolves seems to have been the assassination of Franz Oppenhoff, an ardent Nazi who was made mayor of Aachen just after the end of the war. The Werewolves considered him a collaborator. Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, p 142.
Churchill quotation: Winston Churchill, 28 October 1948.
D-Day list: see Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, p 85.
Martin Bormann: Ruthless and hard-working, Bormann rose from obscurity to a position of great power within the Nazi Party. Condemned to death in absentia at Nuremberg, he disappeared and was never found. His whereabouts and eventual fate have been the subject of endless speculation.
Georg Lermer: Although the Department of the Army released a sanitised version of CIC records on Georg Lermer and Rainbow to Michel Thomas, it stated in a letter: ‘This information is exempt from the public disclosure provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.’ US Army Intelligence and Security, Arlington, Virginia, 22 August 1986.
Soviet contracts: Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, p 228.
General W. Dornberger: Far from being held responsible for the exploitation of slave labour, Dornberger was granted top-secret security clearances, citizenship and national honours in the United States. He joined Bell Aircraft in 1950 and became senior vice-president of Bell Aerosystems Division of the multinational Textron Corporation. He died in 1980.
Pajamas and Apple Pie: See Simpson, Blowback, p 73.
Project Paperclip: For a full account of the political machinations surrounding Paperclip, see Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, Hunt, Secret Agenda; Lasby, Project Paperclip, Si
mpson, Blowback.
Villa Kauderer: Ted Kraus returned to the villa in Ulm in 1987 and found it transformed into a YMCA hostel, although it remained virtually untouched inside. On a walk through the city with Hans Joohs he turned a corner and bumped into ex-agent Hans Meyer. Ted Kraus, interview with the author, 8 April 1999.
Leo Marks: A lifelong friend of Michel, Marks was head of the code department of Britain’s Special Operations Executive that worked with the Résistance in the Second World War. He devised a code system for agents dropped behind enemy lines into occupied Europe based on his poems that were printed on silk handkerchiefs, underwear or coat linings. The most famous, written for the female agent Violette Szabo, begins: ‘The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have is yours...’ The poem was used in the film about Szabo, Carve Her Name With Pride. Leo Marks’s memoirs are both revealing and entertaining: Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide.
Hans Joohs: Michel became convinced of Joohs’s integrity and saw him as a victim of the war. Sponsored by Swifty Gearheart, Joohs won a scholarship to Syracuse University, New York, in 1949. He visited Michel on the West Coast the following year. ‘He still had his dog, Barry, who recognised me.’ The men remained friends until Joohs’s death in 1999. Joohs, interview with the author, 6 June 1998.
Ulm refugees: Screening teams at camps at Hersfeld, Hof, Ulm and Giessen processed three hundred thousand refugees during this period.
Ebensee revolt: The incident is recorded by Evelyn Le Chene, historian of Mauthausen and surrounding camps. When American troops liberated Mauthausen itself they found one hundred and ten thousand survivors - twenty-eight thousand of whom were Jews - and ten thousand bodies in a vast communal grave. Quoted in Gilbert, The Holocaust, pp 808-9.
Malmédy Massacre: Although a misnomer, the term Malmédy Massacre is used here to describe the killing of all unarmed American POWs during the Battle of the Bulge - not just the Baugnetz crossroads, where the greatest number were murdered. Ironically, no POWs were actually killed in the town of Malmédy, but half a dozen US troops and one hundred and seventy-eight Belgian civilians lost their lives through pilot error in three US bombing raids on the town, the last of which was on Christmas Day 1944.
Original Malmédy inquiry: See Bower, Blind Eye to Murder, pp 133-6.
Lowing of cattle: The description comes from a survivor of the massacre, James P. Mattera - see ‘Murder at Malmédy’, (with CM. Stephan if), Army magazine, December 1981.
Malmédy Massacre: The account here is a composite taken from the following sources: Toland, Battle, pp 55-8; McDonald, Battle of the Bulge, pp 213-23, 437-8; Cole, The Ardennes, pp 261-4; Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, passim; Whiting, Massacre at Malmédy, passim; Reynolds, The Devil’s Adjutant, passim.
Shed murders: See Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, p 113.
POWs to be shot: Attributed by Knittel to SS Stabaf Weiser, adjutant to Dietrich. From pre-trial statement of Knittel, National Archives, declassified on 16 September 1997.
Gustav Knittel in Stavelot: The account of the killing of the American POWs is taken from two pre-trial, sworn statements made voluntarily by Knittel himself. The commander of the anti-tank guns was SS Obersturmfuhrer Wagner; the wounded soldier was SS Obersturm-fiihrer Leidreiter. Knittel claimed not to know the names of the two soldiers who carried out the executions as they were from another unit. See Knittel sworn statements, National Archives, Record Group 338, Entry 147.
Anna Konrad: Not her real name.
Ted Kraus: Qouotation and information provided by Ted Kraus, interview with the author, 30 October 1997.
BlaicherHaag l9: The address of the house and the names of the aunt and uncle are taken from a letter written by Gustav Knittel to the Director of Army Intelligence, Washington DC, from Landsberg Prison, 5 January 1950.
Gustav Knittel’s background: See Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, p26.
Nazis recruited by CIC: See Simpson, Blowback, pp xiv, 6.
Gehlen’s reputation: Heinz Hohne, a senior editor of Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, wrote a critical book on the spymaster charging that he was much less efficient and effective than credited. Nevertheless, it is estimated that seventy per cent of all the US government’s intelligence on the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War was supplied by the Gehlen Organisation. See Hohne & Zolling, The General Was a Spy. Gehlen responded to the criticism with a self-serving autobiography, The Service: The Memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen.
‘Secrets of the Kremlin’: Gehlen is quoted by Mosley, Dulles, pp 115-16, 125, 234.
OSS Communists: See Ranelagh, The Agency, p 92.
Gehlen Organisation: For comprehensive accounts of this remarkable organisation and the man who ran it, see Hohne & Zolling, The General Was a Spy and Cookridge, Spy of the Century. For the relationship with US intelligence, see Simpson, Blowback pp 40-51.
Dr Franz Six: On his retirement he went to work for Porsche. In 1961 he gave evidence as a defence witness in Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel for crimes against humanity, despite the fact that his former boss then worked for rival Daimler-Benz.
Intelligence files empty: The dire and dangerous situation is described by Harry Rositzke, the CIA’s chief of espionage against the Soviet Union at the time. He worked closely with the Gehlen Organisation to fill the empty files. See Rositzke, CIA’s Secret Operations, p 20.
CIA copies reports: See Cookridge, Spy of the Century, p 201.
‘Anatomy of a Soviet Spy’. The original typewritten manuscript in German remains in Michel’s possession.
Hans Meyer: Not his real name. Although contacted by the author through an intermediary on several occasions, Hans Meyer declined to be interviewed.
Rudolf Schelkmann: One of the original typed reports for CIC on Schelkmann is in Michel Thomas’s possession. It dates the first contact as 1 November 1946 and the meeting in the hunting lodge as 26 November 1946.
Recommendations: Among the many recommendations was one from his commander in the Thunderbird combat CIC: ‘The ability displayed by Kroskof-Thomas in interrogations of suspects is graded Superior. His attention to duty was at the cost of his own health -interrogating certain individuals unceasingly from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Investigations by Kroskof-Thomas based on said interrogations drew excellent results. The devotion of Kroskof-Thomas to the assigned mission of this unit far exceeded the demands placed on other personnel. By superior performance in service to the United States Army it is believed that Kroskof-Thomas be favorably considered in his application for United States citizenship.’ Rupert W. Guenthner, Captain, Inf. 0-1302642,20 July 1945. Excerpts from another recommendation read: ‘I am particularly aware of the very high calibre of the work you performed in Munich, where I worked with you most closely. The fact that we occasionally disagreed on investigative methods pursued doesn’t in the least detract from my appreciation of your work. You have turned in an excellent performance. You have exhibited intelligence, initiative, superior devotion to duty, and an admirable comprehension of counter-intelligence techniques and work... I understand you have made an application for an immigration visa to the United States. I trust that this will be possible for you, and would be proud to know that a man of your principles and experience would be interested in eventually becoming a citizen of the United States.’ Ernest T. Gearheart Jr, Special Agent in Charge, Ulm Team 970/35, 307 CIC Corps Detachment, HO Seventh Army, APO 758. And another from his CIC commander in Ulm: ‘Due to a lack of experienced personnel and an overabundance of work, it was necessary to depend extensively on the qualities of Mr Thomas. He assumed these new responsibilities conscientiously, often exhibiting extraordinary initiative in investigations of CI interest. Particular commendation is given to him for his thorough work in the establishment of a well-organised informant network and in the pursuit of subversive groups detrimental to the interest of the American occupation policy... As a result of his long contact with Mr Thomas, the undersigned has only the highest praise for hi
m both for his work and his person. At all times he kept the interests and aims of the United States paramount.’ Theodore C. Kraus, Special Agent, CIC, 2 October 1946.
The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas Page 48