Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story by Christopher Robbins

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The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Boldly escaping Vienna after the Anschluss, having refused to make accommodations for being Jewish, he arrived stateless in France one week before Kristallnacht. But rather than let this most precarious of positions defeat him, Thomas began to fight what was to become a fantastic and ultimately heroic personal war against the forces of barbarism that engulfed his world.

Arrested by Vichy France, Thomas was starved for two years in a concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrénées and forced into slave labor in a coal mine in Provence. He avoided being sent to Auschwitz by hiding within the confines of a deportation camp for six weeks as its infuriated masters took increasingly dramatic action to capture him at all costs -- and ultimately to no avail. He then joined the secret army of the Resistance and during one mission was captured and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyons, whom he barely deceived into releasing him. Re-arrested by the French Milice (Gestapo) and tortured, Thomas held out by entering a psychological state in which he no longer registered pain, and after six and a half hours his defeated tormentors threw him into a cell. He survived and promptly rejoined the fight. After the Allies liberated France, he joined the American forces, fought his way into Germany in active service and was with the troops that liberated Dachau. There he caught, interrogated and obtained the handwritten confession of the head of the camp's crematoria, known as the "Hangman of Dachau."

At the end of the war Thomas became a highly unorthodox and extraordinarily effective Nazi hunter. As an officer with American counterintelligence, but largely as an unprecedented independent force, he masterminded and executed an ingenious scheme to infiltrate and expose underground networks of diehard SS men by posing as a mythical Nazi purportedly hand-chosen by Martin Bormann to organize the rise of a Fourth Reich.

Though his entire family had been slaughtered in Auschwitz, and many close friends killed in combat, at the cessation of hostilities Thomas staged a Reconciliation Concert. Using German musicians, and in direct defiance of strict Allied non-fraternization laws, he brought friend and foe together in a belief that there had to be a different and better future -- and that individuals had the power to make it happen.

Christopher Robbins has dug deep to explore and substantiate the details of the Michel Thomas story. He has authenticated every episode through camp records, Vichy documents, Resistance papers and U.S. Army reports as well as with hundreds of hours of interviews with the man himself. Today, Michel Thomas teaches languages to inner-city kids, movie stars and heads of industry, succeeding in a matter of days even with people who consider themselves hopeless as linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seems to have a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind. In Test of Courage we are led through the extraordinary experiences that have shaped the profound insight of this most fascinating and complex man, whose story is one of the most inspirational of the century.

Library Journal

Robbins (Assassin, Air America) recounts the life of Michel Thomas, detailing his fight and survival in World War II. Born in Poland, Thomas moved to France as a young man after his vocal opposition to the Nazis put him in danger. After Germany took France, he was arrested and held in concentration and deportation camps before escaping to fight in the French Resistance and later in the U.S. Army. After the war, Thomas hunted war criminals as an agent with American Counter Intelligence. He could never forget his own experiences and the suffering that he had witnessed, and he felt that, as a survivor, he owed it to those who died to bear witness. This is a very compelling story of how Thomas fought his way from being a refugee to being a hero remarkable for his courage and ingenuity. Well researched and easy to read, this book reminds us that the world as a whole did little to stop the Holocaust but that many individuals did whatever they could to save lives. Recommended for history and biography collections.--Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll., Wheeling Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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The memories of Michel Thomas stretch back to the crib: a huge but benign black dog the size of a bear viewed through the wooden bars of a playpen; the sensation of being pushed in a pram in the open air; the texture of a cloth pulled from the drawer of a sewing machine and its oily smell; the glittering silver shapes of the machine's metal frets used for different stitches, and their pleasing feel and cold metallic taste when placed in the mouth. His first erotic memory, vivid and thrilling, dates from the age of three. Crawling on the floor, he looked up at the towering figure of his young nanny and glimpsed under her skirt. The girl wore no underwear. Stretching heroically, the toddler reached up and touched bare flesh. "The naked female behind! I liked it -- I still see it!"

At a very early age he began consciously to recover and hold on to these memories of what he calls his "cradlehood." It was his first act against being overwhelmed by a hostile world.

Michel Thomas was born Moniek Kroskof, in Lodz, Poland, under the shadow of the First World War, into a prosperous Jewish family that owned a large textile manufacturing company. He was the only child of the second marriage of his mother, Freida, a strong, independent woman in her late twenties who was highly unusual for her time. Arranged marriages were then the norm among well-to-do Jewish families, and at the age of eighteen Freida had married a man considered to be from a suitable family. The relationship was a failure from the start, but instead of suffering within the marriage she rebelled and demanded a divorce. It was a scandalous decision for a young girl to make, but Freida insisted in the teeth of fierce family opposition.

She later met and married Samuel Kroskof, an engineer who had worked in the oil fields of Iran and Azerbaijan. The couple lived together in Lodz where the joy felt over the birth of a baby boy was tempered by fear of war. At the outbreak of hostilities, Poland became a battleground. As the German Army advanced towards Lodz, a part of Russian Poland at that time, the local population panicked. Poland was first partitioned by Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1772, after which the country's history became an endless cycle of insurrection and reprisal. After a nationalistic uprising in 1863, Russia imposed a harsh policy of Russification within its zone, stripping the country of all autonomy and turning it into little more than a province of the empire. Russian was adopted as the official language in schools, and the use of Polish was restricted. Jewish life became particularly difficult. Treatment of the Jews, many of whose families had lived in the city for hundreds of years, became vicious. There were daily executions by hanging of those accused by the Russians of sympathizing with the Germans, and the fact that a quarter of a million Jews served in the Russian Army did nothing to mitigate the prejudice against them. Shops and houses were looted, synagogues defiled, and hundreds of thousands of Jews living within the Russian partition were driven from their homes. They took to the road, carrying their possessions on carts and bicycles, struggling with suitcases and bundles, their children in their arms.

Samuel and Freida remained in Lodz with their baby during this terrible time of fear and privation. The city had always been an ugly industrial place of grime, smog and noise. Its factory chimneys belched foul smoke into sooty skies and the sun found it difficult to shine through the polluted air and dingy window panes. The city at war became dismal, its few scattered trees felled for firewood and its unpaved streets churned into liquid mud by troops and horses. Most of the remainder of the already diminished population fled, including the Russian bureaucracy that had been in the city for a century. Lodz became a ghost town.

When Michel was only eight months old, the German Ninth Army surrounded the city. The ensuing battle was waged on a monumental scale, the first great carnage of modern warfare, and for weeks the two armies fought each other to the point of exhaustion until winter paralyzed them. Icy winds brought temperatures to below freezing and at dawn each day both armies removed from the trenches the corpses of those frozen to death in the night.

The Germans finally took the city in December, but at a high cost: German losses in the campaign were about thirty-five thousand killed and wounded; Russian losses are unknown but conservatively estimated to be around ninety thousand in all. Germany went on to take over the whole country, stripping industry of everything valuable and sending the booty back to the homeland. Copper was collected from factories, church steeples, frying pans and even door-post amulets. The thick leather transmission belts from the textile mills were sent back to Germany for soldiers' boots, and roofs were stripped of lead. The country's raw materials were also plundered, paid for with vouchers redeemable after the war, which the locals said were not worth a plug groschen.

German sentries stood on every corner to prevent looting and riots. Food was scarce, even for the prosperous, and milk was unobtainable. There were ration cards for the terrible bread, made from a mixture of chestnuts and potato peelings and tasting of clay. Stray dogs and cats were rounded up and rendered down for their flesh, which was sent back to Germany as animal feed. Disease raged in epidemic proportions, the worst of which was typhus. Hospitals overloaded with military casualties were obliged to leave the sick to die, and corpses without shrouds were trundled to cemeteries in wheelbarrows.

As the war ground on, one terrible year after another, the desperate conditions took their toll on the health of mother and child. It also did nothing to help a failing marriage. Freida seemed unprepared, or unwilling, to give up the degree of independence that marriage demanded and broke up with Samuel. One divorce was a scandal, a second social disaster, but Freida seemed unperturbed by the opinions of others. She remained on friendly terms with her ex-husband and later took Michel to see him regularly. The child resented the visits as a duty and an imposition, and during his formative years became emotionally distant from his father.

Michel was brought up in a world of doting women. He lived together with his mother, his aunt Idessa -- two years younger than his mother and a beauty -- and his grandmother. With the collapse of tsarist Russia in the revolution of 1917, and the final defeat of Germany the following year, Poland once again became a nation. The factories of the family textile business, which had floundered and closed during the war, gradually picked up production. Michel grew into something of a wild child, independent and wilful, even as a toddler. The women in his life indulged him shamelessly. "I felt I had two mothers. I was surrounded by love. It was like air. Love was so much part of my life it was like breathing. The security of love was very strong. I am sure that is where I have drawn my strength over the years -- that absolute bedrock of mother love."

By the age of four Michel had developed an advanced case of rickets, news of which had been kept from his mother, who had been taken into hospital with typhus. He was cared for by his grandmother and aunt -- his second mother. By the time Freida returned home after an extended stay in the hospital, the child's legs were so bowed he could hardly walk. "I still see my mother as she came into the living room and her reaction as she saw me -- my horribly curved legs."

Rickets was common at this time and often left children permanently crippled, and his mother's initial joy at seeing her son turned to anguish. "Oh my God," she blurted, "he cannot walk!"

"Yes I can," Michel cried out, delighted to see his mother at home again and eager to please her. In a display of superhuman will and effort, he dragged himself around the dining-room table. He held on to the backs of the chairs and hauled himself from one to another. "See, I can walk!"

Freida wrote to all the experts in the field, and consulted family friends in the medical profession in a desperate search for a cure. She developed a remedy that was an early form of health cure and radical for the time. Michel was put on a diet of fresh vegetables, fruit juices and hot honey drinks with egg yolk -- and less palatable doses of cod liver oil. He was soon walking again and eventually recovered to the point that he began to excel at sports.

"When I went out with my mother, her friends would always talk down to me. Idiotic baby talk in a strained voice -- endless stupid questions that were meaningless. It irritated me. So I gave them strange, unexpected answers. They would become confused and embarrassed, and always they would say, "'How precocious!'" It puzzled him that adults talked to children in such a manner. "I wondered why they talked like that. I came to the conclusion that although they had all been children, they had somehow forgotten their childhood." It was an alarming insight. "A little while later I thought, If they have forgotten their childhood, when I grow up I will forget mine. And that horrified me! It was a terrible shock. To forget everything! To forget me as I am now! Every day was filled with growth and change and events -- and it would all be forgotten! And I would be forgotten -- cease to exist, wiped from the world! I could not let that happen."

He carefully began to develop a system to help him remember childhood. Unable to read or write, he adopted a mental process in which he forced himself to think as far back as he could and reclaim feelings and reactions. He flagged these with a child's mental markers of color, smell, touch and taste. In this way he could recapture and fix a moment in his memory, logging the significant events of his life into his system. It was a large task for a six-year-old but he conscientiously stuck to his method until, at the age of twelve, he spent weeks painstakingly writing the history of his childhood into a lined notebook, the Memory Book -- a document sadly lost to posterity. "I owe a lot to that child. He made a vow not to forget. He influenced my development as a man and laid out the pattern of a lifetime."

It was also at the age of six that he experienced an incident so powerful and disturbing that it forever changed his life. The family lived in a spacious apartment that had a balcony filled with oleander plants overlooking a large courtyard. In one corner was a well used as an emergency water supply on the occasions when the city's mains failed. One sunny spring afternoon his mother went out on the balcony looking down into the quadrant where the children played. Suddenly, she became rigid. A boy and his teenage sister ran to the well, leaned over its side and began calling down into it. The urgency of the children's voices echoed through the courtyard: "Moniek, Moniek -- come back up, your mother is calling. Moniek, come up!"

Freida was filled with dread that her mischievous son had fallen into the shaft. Fearing the worst, she ran down the stairs and out into the courtyard. She peered into the well and began to call for her son. There was no reply. The surface of the water was black and still with no sign of life. She became hysterical and began to wail, ripping at her garments and hair. A large crowd gathered to watch the display of grief in silence, as if at a theater performance.

Just then Michel ran into the courtyard. The sight of his distraught and inconsolable mother shook him to his soul. He had been climbing trees in a garden adjoining the apartment building and had not been near the well. An adult had called him down from a tree and led him back to the courtyard that had filled with people.

Michel was led through the crowd to his mother and she fell on him in relief, hugging and kissing him. The drowning had been a cruel, brutish joke hatched by a child and fed by adults. "These men and women who were our neighbors, non-Jewish Poles, enjoyed the spectacle of the despair of a Jewish mother. No one said anything, or tried to explain it was a joke gone too far, or that they did not mean it. Nothing! They were enjoying it.

"This viciousness and hatefulness traumatized me. My belief system as a child was totally shaken. It changed me. Changed the child. After that I was no longer wild but clung to my mother's side. I became a mother's boy. It took a physical toll on me and I became a sleepwalker. I would pick up a pillow from my bed, put it under my arm, and try to walk out of the house. My mother actually put a bell around my neck. I suffered nightmares -- terrible nightmares! Not of the incident itself, but of horrible monsters coming through the window to get me. I was scared of the dark and the things I imagined it held. I developed chronic asthma. That trauma was so deep, so strong, I quite literally could not breathe Polish air."

His mother grew alarmed at the severity of his condition and took him from one specialist to another without success. "I just couldn't live in Poland, I felt the atmosphere that strongly. It was such a betrayal. At the age of six I had been made aware of the difference between a Jew and a non-Jew. I wanted out -- to get away from Lodz."

In later life, Michel analyzed the virulent nature of Polish anti-Semitism. "It was worse even than Ukrainian or Russian anti-Semitism -- far worse than in Germany. It was a direct result of the teaching of contempt for Jews by the Catholic Church to a largely ignorant and illiterate peasant population. These people emerged from their churches after a Sunday sermon hating the Jews, whom they had been told had murdered Christ their God."

Freida, who was a shrewd businesswoman and held an important position in the family company, traveled all over Poland and now began to take Michel along with her. Since the trauma he had become a difficult and demanding child, and his physical and psychological states were alarming. He was touchy and sensitive and resented doing what was expected of him even when it was agreeable. He grew increasingly stubborn and disobedient. "I had my own ways and got away with it."

As they visited the towns of Poznan and Danzig, and other areas that had been part of the German partition of Poland, Freida noticed her son's spirits lift. "Traveling on a train I can remember looking out at the countryside and everything seemed so beautiful...the cows, the horses, the landscape. Still I can see it -- I can feel it, I can smell it. Through my childish eyes it was a different country because I was out of the Polish-speaking region."

On one of these journeys, just before Michel's seventh birthday when he was at his most difficult, his mother engaged him in a long and serious conversation. They walked through the streets of Poznan together, and she explained the trouble he was causing and the problems this posed for her. "Can you imagine if you had a son, a boy like you are? How would you handle him?"

Michel pondered the question. After some thought he recommended a regime of strict rules and harsh discipline, accompanied by draconian punishment for the least infringement. He elaborated on the rules, which were ruthless in their severity, and on the punishments that were equally extreme.

"Very interesting," his mother said. "I have learned a lot. You have taught me how to handle you."

"Oh no!" The child's response was immediate. "For me it's too late!"

The system was never introduced, and Michel kept his true feelings over the incident to himself, but he felt tricked. He had been betrayed by his own mother and was deeply hurt. "The only time I was ever hurt by my mother. I still feel it now."

It was evident to the child as they traveled together that his mother was both well-known and respected. Michel also came to understand that his upbringing was somehow privileged and more comfortable than that of many of the children around him. Freida took great trouble to imbue him with her own philosophy, explaining that privilege and riches could be stripped from anyone at any time, and that the only true wealth was knowledge. The mind, she insisted, was something that a human being carried with him, a treasure trove that could be endlessly enriched and never taken away. "What you are and who you are and what you know -- these are the only things that count. That has to be strong. Everything else can be destroyed." Freida was imparting a life lesson that would pay a high dividend in the future.

Michel's condition remained extreme, but his relief when outside the Polish-speaking region was so evident that Freida decided her son's health depended upon his leaving the country. Aunt Idessa had married and gone to live in Breslau, just across the border in Germany, where her husband owned a highly successful wholesale wine and spirits business, complete with its own vineyards. Some six months after the trauma it was decided that Michel should go to live with his adored aunt, something he accepted happily. "I was not homesick, or in tears -- I was happy to be going. I knew I was not being sent away but that I was going to my aunt, who seemed like a part of my mother. I did not feel I was losing my mother -- I knew she would always be with me. She was in my heart."

But travel had been forbidden to Jews under the previous Russian regime, as had college education, and passports in the new Poland were still difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. The child would have to be smuggled out of the country. A German friend from Breslau arrived one sunny afternoon in an open convertible. Michel was excited at the prospect of the journey, which he saw as a grand adventure despite the welter of rules that seemed to govern it. Advice and instructions were piled upon him. Most important of all, he was told that during the journey he was not to speak at all in the presence of other people or attract attention in any way.

His mother pretended to be happy and excited about the journey as she saw him off. But as the car sped away and he turned to wave goodbye, he saw Freida collapse to the ground. Michel squirmed in his seat and wanted to turn back, but was assured with a comforting, adult nod from the driver that everything was as it should be.

It was a long journey that took all day. The driver spoke no Polish, and Michel no German, but they drove along comfortably enough in silence. The hood of the car was down and it was a sunny day. The man occasionally turned to the child beside him and smiled kindly. Somewhere near the border he pulled the car over to the side of the road and bought baskets of the first cherries of the season. He handed one to Michel, who ate the delicious fresh fruit greedily.

They crossed the border without incident. The man seemed familiar with the German frontier guards who waved them through after only a perfunctory inspection. The young charge was delivered to his aunt in the old part of the city of Breslau. He was delighted to see Idessa, who could not have been happier to have him. Michel had shed his first identity as a Polish child and was about to enter his life as a German youth.

And suddenly he could breathe.

As a child, Michel adored Germany. The journey from Poland had been a passage from darkness into light; his arrival, rebirth and liberation. True, the financial circumstances of the Weimar Republic were disastrous in the wake of the First World War (in 1914 the mark exchanged at four to the dollar; by November 1923 it was 130 million to one) but this hardly concerned a young boy who felt he had been delivered from hell. The family seemed to have everything and lived comfortably. His health improved dramatically -- although he still had to be watched at night -- and while he was a rather serious child for his years, he was adventurous and enjoyed life to the full. Slowly, the trauma began to fade.

His mother visited him as often as she was able. Sometimes she would travel on a business passport that strictly limited the number of days the bearer was allowed to stay out of the country. On other occasions she would take great risks to enter Germany illegally. Even if his mother arrived in the dead of night, Michel could sense her in the house, and her silent presence at the end of the bed was enough to wake him. "I would feel just a touch on my foot when I was sleeping and know it was my mother."

The adults led him to believe that he was living in the most civilized country in the world, and his experience confirmed it. Breslau was the biggest and most important city in eastern Germany, with more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, and was a mixture of two cultures: old-world bourgeois-merchant and modern-industrial. A bishopric for a thousand years, the city had a somber, no-nonsense burghers' beauty and stolid charm. It had once been a fortress, but Napoleon had ordered the destruction of the castle keep and walls, and only the moat remained. The city had a university, theaters, several newspapers and a number of attractive parks. It also had its monumental modern structures, such as the concert hall built in 1913 boasting the biggest cupola and organ in the world. The apartment buildings close to the factories in the working-class area were a uniform gloomy gray, but the young Michel felt he was living in paradise.

He had begun to learn German immediately on his arrival, fell in love with the language and made rapid progress. "I didn't want to hear the Polish language, and didn't speak it. As quickly as I learned German, so I erased Polish. It was total rejection." He was also taught to ski in the mountains of Silesia, and from the age of seven grew up on skis. "A winter without skis was unthinkable. I was not always the best, but the most daring." His aunt taught him to dance, something that became a lifelong love. He was taken to the opera and the concert hall, and classical music became important at an early age -- primarily Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin. "I couldn't imagine life without music. I wouldn't go to sleep without listening to classical music." He was also obliged to take piano lessons, a ten-year sentence that produced little result. "It was not handled well. I loved music but hated to practice. I resented the imposition of those daily sessions." It was an early example of how not to teach. "When I finally gave the piano up I played the trumpet to join the school orchestra, and because it was my own choice I loved it. I was very loud but not particularly good."

At the age of seven Michel met a German girl his age who initiated him into the mysteries of sex. "She was a sweet little girl and we used to play together. She wanted to play a doctor and nurse game that was new to me and we went to the basement of her building. So we had fun, naked. But we were surprised by an old man who saw us en passant and walked away. It was terrible for me to be discovered like that. Terrible! I felt so guilty and ashamed!" Michel was so bothered by the experience that he confessed everything to his aunt. "Idessa sat down with me and talked very simply about growing up and sex and love. She told me there was no reason to feel shame. She said that sex should be connected to love to make it meaningful and beautiful. 'But not now! Wait until you grow up.'"

Other interests were encouraged, perhaps to steer the youngster away from precocious sex, and an early love of animals developed. "I grew up identifying with all life, and this extended to animal life. I developed a love and an understanding for animals, and ended up with dogs, cats and eighteen birds." He was given a canary named Mouki. "A wonderful singer! We were friends, and I always left the door to his cage open. In the morning when I had breakfast I would call him and he would come and perch on the table."

A mate was found to keep Mouki company, and other birds followed. The family apartment in Breslau had a large balcony overlooking a garden, and Michel and his birds colonized it. Half of the balcony was turned into a gigantic birdcage, modeled on one seen on a visit to the zoo, complete with grass, elaborate perches and a live tree. The outside cage was connected directly to Michel's bedroom through a window. "I developed good personal relationships with all the birds, and they would fly around my room. I called to them individually and they would perch on my finger."

The childish interest developed into a passion, and eventually led to a life-changing insight. At the age of eleven Michel was taken on a summer holiday in the mountains. His room had a terrace, and he discovered a bird's nest with eggs under the eaves. At first the birds flew off at his approach, but slowly they grew accustomed to his presence. "I was very curious, so every day I sat at a respectable distance until they finally accepted me. I watched the chicks hatch and saw how the parents taught them. They taught them. In bird language. The chicks learned to react to certain sounds -- there were sounds for danger, so that they would keep quiet, and others for food when they were about to be fed. This was language, communication. And I learned with the little birds and found it fascinating.

"They had to learn how to fly, and to be daring. Some of the chicks were timid, some courageous. The very timid ones had to be pushed out of the nest. I observed definite individual behavior in each chick almost as soon as it hatched." These observations led to the conclusion that most animal behavior was learned, not instinctive. It was an insight that changed the way he thought -- that one of the powerful innate drives in all living beings is the urge to learn.

Michel became absorbed in mythology and devoured books on the subject. His imagination had been captured by the Romans and Greeks at an early age; as he grew older he was inspired by the romantic heroes of German mythology. He took a handsome leather-bound volume of Legends of the Gods: Treasures of German Mythology from the bookshelves of his uncle's library, and read by flashlight beneath the sheets long into the night. "They were stories about values and about heroes who stood up for those values. I completely absorbed these Nordic heroes. Siegfried was a good example." This led to a love for the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas he heard at the Breslau opera house, especially the tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Later, during the war, when he learned that the great Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite, a deep conflict was created. Wagner, an extreme radical and revolutionary of his day, was Adolf Hitler's ideological mentor, and the composer's political writings were his favorite reading. "Even though I learned very early on to separate the personality and character of an artist from his work, I could not listen to Wagner during the war. It took me years to go back to him."

The German educational system of Gymnasiums demanded high academic requirements in order to move from one class to another. Only those pupils who were selected had a chance of a good education -- as long as they kept up and could fulfil the academic requirements year after year. Although Michel excelled in the German language and was good at sports -- especially running, swimming and skiing -- he deliberately chose to be average in most subjects. This made him popular. He understood that as a non-German he would have to do better than his peers to be accepted as an equal, but did not want to be identified with Die Streber -- the swots. Instead he found that the combination of his independent nature and prowess at athletics was enough to make him accepted as a natural leader.

On one occasion at school a mischief-maker was asked to own up to a particular misdemeanor. Silence descended on the classroom and no hands were raised. The teacher threatened the entire class with punishment unless the culprit confessed. The silence deepened. At last Michel stood and owned up to the crime. He was not the guilty party, and both his classmates and the teacher knew it, but he took the punishment. The silence had irritated him. "I could not stand cowardice. By standing up to cowards I learned by experience what worked, and the knowledge became a tool."

His schoolmates saw him as tough and austere, while at home he was preposterously indulged. "Somehow I led two lives. At school I was very active in sports and was physically strong, which meant the others looked up to me. Then when I took my friends home they saw me in a different light, with women fussing over me, telling me to keep warm, pressing food on me. I was completely over-mothered. My friends were surprised. My life at home didn't fit my outside image.

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Chapter Seven

One weekend, after Michel had been in America for almost a year, he arranged to go to the beach with friends. It was a beautiful summer's day and the top was down on the convertible as they drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. Somebody made an amusing remark and everyone laughed. Michel joined in. A sudden, awkward silence fell and an uneasy atmosphere enveloped the group. After a pause, one of the friends explained gently that no one had ever heard him laugh.

It was only then that Michel realized that at some time during the war he had lost the ability to laugh or cry. The insight shocked him. And while the gift of laughter had returned, he feared surrendering to the sadness within him. "I realized I was filled with unhappiness and yet I was unable to cry. It was as if inside of me I had a chest filled with tears. As long as the chest remained closed I could have fun and be happy. But if it was opened, even a little, it would not be a release but disintegration. My fear was that there would be an explosion of tears. It would be a flood, and I would drown."

The prosperity and ease of postwar life in southern California lacked reality, and Michel felt detached and remote in the comfortable world of peace. "I identified with Gulliver, from Gulliver's Travels, moving alone through a strange land. But at least for Gulliver there was a visual difference when he looked about him. I was a Gulliver who looked like everybody else, but I was utterly different and removed from the people around me because of what I had been through.

"After the action of war, life was very dull. There was no real connection. As a young man I had often been in danger and always felt in charge. I was used to swimming in shark-infested waters, and I knew how to survive in that hostile environment after years in camps and in combat. It was natural to me. Suddenly, I had come from a cold, shark-infested ocean into a warm, calm lagoon and found it difficult. It was not just the adjustment from military to civilian life, which is quite an emotional upheaval, but the sense that nobody understood, or tried to understand, who I was or what I had been through. I was different and alone — Gulliver in an alien world. It took years to reintegrate."

Michel had set sail from Le Havre in July 1947 for the United States with a wad of signed letters in his pocket from senior officers in the U.S. Army recommending him for citizenship. But although he had served and fought in the American uniform, the process was complicated because he had been unconventionally taken into the army during combat, rather than signed up on U.S. soil. Months of dangerous combat side by side GIs of the Thunderbirds, and exemplary service with the Counter Intelligence Corps, culminating in the capture of one of America's most wanted war criminals, did not constitute grounds for a waiver of the rules. Once again he was stymied by bureaucracy. He remained stateless.

His departure from Europe had been delayed when he learned that he could not take his dog, Barry, on a military transport plane. "They would have taken him in the hold, but I didn't want that." He went from one shipping company to another in Paris in search of one that would agree to take the dog. Almost all of them had rules forbidding animals, but one that carried a mixture of freight and cargo agreed, subject to the captain's consent. Michel traveled to Le Havre and went to see the captain. "I showed him Barry's glowing recommendations from the U.S. Army and he agreed to take him as long as he remained in a certain section of the ship and did not enter the passenger cabins or the dining room. When I brought Barry on board, the captain was amazed to see this giant of a dog."

Suzanne also made the journey to Le Havre to see Michel off at the dockside, an emotional moment for both of them. The couple had met on several occasions after the war on a friendly basis. Suzanne sought rapprochement, while Michel denied the love, which remained buried. "The truth is that I did not realize how much in love with her I was. I had a conflict within myself over how I felt, which I tried to remedy. But it was impossible." They would remain close for the rest of their lives, in a friendship that was held in a state of love suspended, and Michel visited Suzanne whenever he traveled to France. Suzanne married the Cuban diplomat who became consul in Nice. "But people do not remain the same and our characters went in different directions. Even if the world had collapsed, I remained positive and optimistic. Suzanne became bitter. She had everything — money, houses, diplomatic cars — but became a habitué of casinos." On the quay in Le Havre, Suzanne gave Michel a photograph of herself. On it was written, "Avec tout mon coeur — je reste toujours, ta Suzanne" — With all my heart — I remain forever, your Suzanne.

There were only a dozen or so passengers on board ship and, apart from Michel, they were all French war brides sailing to the States to join the American soldiers they had married in Europe. Despite the demanded proscription on Barry's movements, he soon took up a position under the captain's table, where he was fed illicit titbits. The young brides were a happy, lively group, excited about the future, and Michel enjoyed listening to them talk about their lives. One of the women spoke of an anti-Nazi German officer she had met in Paris who had impressed her. "I asked her to tell me about him. It was very curious. She said he was from Breslau, and called von Waldenburg, and I realized as I listened that he was the son of my aunt's closest friend, Mia."

Later, in the United States, Michel's shipboard companion sent him Mia's address in Hamburg. He began a circumspect correspondence under an assumed name, both hoping and dreading to receive news of his aunt. "She wrote me letters about her close friend, my aunt, and mentioned the nephew who went off to France. That was me." But as the letters began to describe the fate of German Jews unable to escape Hitler, Michel stopped writing. "I never revealed my true identity. I realized I did not want to know what she knew."

Michel landed in the United States at Galveston, Texas, and was met at the dock by his friend, Colonel Wilson Gibson, the tank commander from the Thunderbirds who had given him a Silver Dollar as a token of friendship. Wilson received him like a brother, installed him in his house and introduced him to his wife and three small children, the youngest of whom had been named after Michel. He stayed for a number of weeks, and Wilson persuaded him to settle in New Orleans, study law and join the legal practice he had set up. Michel was convinced by his friend's arguments and promised to return once he had made a courtesy visit to family living in Los Angeles. The men parted the best of friends and shook hands as potential partners.

Michel's uncle, Abraham — his mother's brother — had left Poland for New York before the First World War and had finally settled in Los Angeles, where he built up a successful wholesale cutlery and silverware business. His five children were Michel's first cousins, and he was warmly received.

An unspoken agreement came into being between uncle and nephew not to discuss the fate of the family in Europe. The subject was too painful for both of them. Abraham handed him a bundle of the last letters received from Germany and Poland. Michel took them without a word. His inability to accept the murder of his family, particularly his mother and aunt, was absolute. He knew deep within himself that they were dead, wiped from the earth, but he could not bear to face the awful truth. He was unable to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning that is one of the most ancient and solemn in Judaism. Traditionally, the prayer is believed to help the souls of the dead find lasting peace, and is recited over the grave of the deceased for eleven months and on the anniversary of the death ever after. "I could not say Kaddish. Could not! Knowing is one thing, accepting is another. I did not feel guilty for not saying these prayers — I would have felt guilty if I had said them. I would have felt a party to their deaths.

"The world's Jewish community regards the six million men, women and children who died in the Shoah as martyrs. I say No! My parents — my whole family — were not martyrs for their religion. They were slaughtered because of their race. There was no choice — that is not martyrdom."

As Michel was preparing to return to New Orleans, he received terrible news. Wilson Gibson had been taken ill with acute appendicitis and had died suddenly before he could be operated upon. It seemed unbelievable that this soldier, who had landed in Africa, then battled across Sicily and up through Italy, France and Germany, could die in such a way after returning home safely to American soil. Michel's sense of himself in the New World, fragile at best during this period, was shaken.

He decided to remain in southern California and rented a house in Beverly Hills. Barry seemed to find it as difficult to adapt to peacetime life as his master, but eventually became familiar all over town. "He learned to cross streets — I think he looked at the lights. He drove with me everywhere in the car and if he felt I had stayed too long somewhere he would put his great paw on the horn." Man and dog had always been close, and now they became inseparable. "He was a strong and wonderful companion to me in those years of feeling like Gulliver. I learned so much from Barry about communication with nonhuman animals. If I worked late in the evening, he would lie down and wait for me. And he always seemed to know when I was finished and jump up in anticipation. I wondered how he did this. I thought perhaps I made some slight move or gesture that signaled my intention. I decided to test him. I made no move and did absolutely nothing except have the thought, 'I'm ready to leave.' And he jumped up." There was only one thing that could make Barry revert to his previous incarnation as a dog of war, and that was the sight of someone in a uniform. He would bark and snarl in his old SS manner at the police and mailmen of Beverly Hills, who learned to give him a wide berth.

The option of working for the UN faded as it became clear that it would take years to become a U.S. citizen. Although Michel was a legal immigrant, there seemed no shortcut, despite the fact that California Congressman Clyde Doyle and Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas introduced private bills before Congress to obtain citizenship based on his war record.

In the meantime, he concentrated increasingly on education, particularly languages. "In a way I saw education as a continuation of the war. Democratic countries had fought not just to defeat the Nazis but to preserve free societies. I felt one of the factors that contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party was an educational system in Germany, which I had experienced as a student, that concentrated on creating a small elite to govern a vast, ignorant mass. I remember professors proclaiming that graduation from high school needed to be difficult: 'We want an elite — we don't want an educated proletariat!'" Michel believed the opposite to be true, and that a free society needed an effective educational system for all to produce informed and concerned individuals. He had been impressed by a statement made by Thomas Jefferson: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

As he thought more about the necessity of an educated citizenry and the importance of learning, his thinking was given added direction by a remark made by the professor at the Sorbonne when Michel had been a student in France: "Nobody knows anything about the learning process of the human mind." "I wanted to explore and probe that learning process. I needed to find out how humans learn so I could discover how to teach. And I felt that the most alien thing for somebody to learn was a foreign language. Not the most difficult, but the most alien — simply because you know nothing when you begin. And I took as my cornerstone the idea imparted from my math teacher, that there was nothing so complicated that it could not be made simple. So I chose to teach foreign languages because it would allow me to probe the learning process from zero to high levels of achievement."

The Polyglot Institute on 400 North Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills (occupied today by Chanel) opened in September 1947. The building was a small, one-story California bungalow converted into an office. A large painted sign of a parrot was placed outside. Directly across the street was Sugie's Tropics, a fashionable meeting place at the time where people enjoyed exotic and powerful cocktails such as Missionary's Downfall.

The Polyglot Institute did not prosper at first, but lurched from one financial crisis to another. Michel was joined at the institute almost immediately by Dorris Halsey, who helped translate documents, type letters, boil eggs for sandwiches, and bathe Barry. In reality, she managed and ran the school. More important, Dorris was a fellow alien. "We understood each other very well. I had been stateless, like Michel, and worked with the Resistance and French intelligence and been imprisoned by the Germans. You walk around with those experiences for the rest of your life. Half of my friends who had been active in the war had been killed. So Michel was not closed down with me because I knew of what he spoke. He didn't have to explain, or dot the i's or cross the t's. We communicated in half-words. He was an alien and so was I."

Dorris was actually a Hungarian Catholic from Budapest who was sent alone to Paris on a practically deserted Orient Express at the age of eight. She was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in the southwest of France when the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone. "They came to the school to find out if anyone spoke German, and like an idiot I put my hand up." She was ordered to work as an interpreter at the local German command post after school. As Frenchman betrayed Frenchman, Dorris's main activity was mistranslating, losing or delaying as many of the numerous letters of denunciation as she was able. She also reported to the Resistance. The locals, however, treated her as a collaborator and refused to fill her ration allotment of eggs and butter. "I was told by the Resistance that being thought of as a collabo was a good cover — but it was not easy to bear."

The Germans eventually discovered her activities and she was sent to prison in Toulouse. "Luckily, it was then 1944 and they were retreating all over the place, so I was not sent to a camp." St. Michel's prison in Toulouse dates from 1275 and Dorris was placed in a small cell with thirty-nine other women for a total of ninety-six days. "There was a mixture of political prisoners and prostitutes and God-knows-what, all sleeping on straw mattresses. I became the cell's champion flea and louse killer and would tell the others fairy tales from Hungary and Germany to send them to sleep at night and avoid my turn to empty the slop bucket."

After the Liberation, Dorris returned to her village to find a photograph draped with red, white, and blue ribbon in a local shop window in recognition of her work, but it was scant compensation for the painful period of social ostracism. She moved to Paris and began to work for the Deuxième Bureau — the French intelligence service. Her mission was to deliver thousands of francs in cash to hotel porters and concierges employed as paid informers.

American troops on the Champs Elysées threw cigarettes at French girls to see if they would stoop to pick them up. Dorris ground them under her heel and was accused by the GIs of being less friendly than the German girls. But one American officer was more gracious when he asked for directions in appalling French. "What on earth are you trying to say to me, captain?" Dorris replied in English. They went for a drink together and the American turned out to be a major in the Quartermaster Corps. "He had access to instant coffee, cigarettes and nylons, and I was seventeen." The couple married and Dorris moved with her husband to California, where she later met Michel. "He was very easy to work with. He became my friend, my confidant and eventually godfather to my second marriage. Many of the friends I still have today I met through Michel. And later my second husband and I were witnesses at the ceremony for Michel's citizenship."

One of Dorris's early tasks at the Polyglot Institute was to translate divorce papers for the actor George Marshall, whose wife was the well-known French actress Michelle Morgan. (He later married Ginger Rogers.) "I also taught the occasional mad Hungarian if he came through the door. I became a sort of mascot and was known as Miss Polyglot."

Another of Dorris's many roles in the office was to play romantic traffic cop in Michel's love life. "Michel was the greatest Casanova I have ever known. Women found him a romantic Casablanca figure, and he had mystery and allure for people whose only hardship in the war was a shortage of gasoline coupons. There was this guilt among those who had not been in the war but remained safe and cozy in America." The womanizing had a driven quality. "I watched all the goings-on with great amusement. Someone would be coming in as someone was going out, and I was in the front office going crazy. Everyone believed they were the one and only one, and I thought there might be a disaster sometime."

Michel developed a reputation in Hollywood as a ladies' man. "I love women and they know it and feel it. My relationships were very good friendships, and I was open and honest and didn't make promises or cause unrealistic expectations. I always said very early on that marriage was out of the question. It's true there were a lot of ladies, and I did not tell one about the other, but everybody knew where they stood." Dorris accused Michel of abusing his charm. He defended himself by comparing his weakness to Dorris's partiality for cake. "You are offered a beautiful cake — chocolate, lemon, sponge or whatever — could you resist? Wouldn't you be tempted to take a slice?" From then on, when women called, Dorris would hold up a drawing of a slice of cake.

Michel disliked Dorris's first husband intensely and felt she was wasting herself on him. "After I learned English I realized we didn't have much in common," Dorris said, "especially when he told me that the only thing he read was the labels on beer cans." Michel introduced her to Reece Halsey, head of the literary department at the William Morris Agency. The two hit it off, divorced their respective spouses and married. "They had a long and good marriage. Reece Halsey quit William Morris to start his own agency and Dorris left the school to work with him." Michel lost a colleague but gained a lifelong friend and met the extraordinary collection of writers the new agency represented, including Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley. "I have fond memories of Henry Miller. We played a lot of Ping-Pong together." He met many writers at Miller's home, and quarreled with Lawrence Durrell, irritated by his indifference and easygoing attitude towards the collaboration of Vichy.

Michel was very much on the scene, and he received endless social invitations to a wide variety of Hollywood parties and enjoyed the company of the successful and the famous. "He learned the necessity of being a chameleon," Dorris said. "He could be bright and intelligent and cultured or play the simpleton. He could change."

But even in Hollywood, the war was never very far away.

In the period directly after the war, when Michel worked for U.S. Army Counter Intelligence in Germany, he had been largely ignorant of American politics and public opinion back in the States. He rarely read American newspapers or magazines, with the exception of the Stars and Stripes, although he knew that the Malmédy Massacre had outraged Americans and had resulted in a commitment to hold war crimes trials. The subsequent court case should have been a straightforward prosecution of SS criminals, but suddenly the tables were turned and the U.S. Army would stand accused.

All seventy-three SS defendants had been found guilty in the trial. However, by the standards of American peacetime courts, the army's legal procedures were open to criticism. The defendants had been tried en masse, with only numbered white cards draped around their necks to identify them. The verdicts were hastily delivered when each of the accused received an average of only two minutes' deliberation before sentencing. Punishment seemed arbitrary and illogical. Gustav Knittel, for instance, who confessed to giving the order to shoot eight unarmed American prisoners, received a life sentence, while his commander, Joachim Peiper, who personally issued no such order, was given a death sentence. In Germany the verdicts were seen as victors' justice.

The lawyer assigned to defend Peiper, and several others of the accused, was Colonel Willis Everett, a Georgia attorney who was demobilized from the army directly after the trial. He returned to America feeling that justice had not been done and began to orchestrate a public attack on the army in an attempt to have the sentences overturned.

Two weeks before the trial began, Everett had objected that some of the defendants' statements had been made under duress. In addition, the prosecution admitted that in some instances interrogators had used elaborate "mock" trials to obtain confessions. Black hoods were placed over prisoners' heads, and they were then led into a room where inquisitors sat behind a table with burning candles and a crucifix. The prisoners believed they were at an actual trial, and were told their lives were ruined and that they would never be released.

The first of thirteen investigations made by the army into the treatment of Malmédy prisoners was launched. Thirty of the SS men Everett had named as having made serious charges against the army were interviewed. Only four claimed mistreatment, ranging from blows to the head or body to being pushed down stairs. However, a review of the verdicts criticized both the conduct of the trial and questioned the admissibility of some of the sworn statements, given the nature by which they had been obtained. Temporary stays of execution were granted and the convicted men were allowed the opportunity to appeal.

Ex-SS officers used the official criticism of the army to elaborate upon the accounts of American brutality to feed a rumor mill. Wild stories went around of prisoners being starved, having their testicles crushed, their teeth knocked out, and being subjected to freezing temperatures and intense heat. Human flesh and hair was said to have been found on the walls of the men's cells together with a black hood with dry blood upon it. The rumors circulated among the American military in Germany and then spread to the States.

Everett's original intention of denigrating the procedures of the Dachau trial now expanded into a campaign to rehabilitate the convicted SS murderers as honorable soldiers. As one army review after another rejected the claims of his former clients, he petitioned the Supreme Court, continuing to cite the discredited rumors as evidence. When the petition was rejected, the lawyer met with the secretary of the army, who had publicly expressed concern over the conduct of the case. Everett repeated the rumors and unsubstantiated allegations as fact. He claimed all the defendants had been tortured in their cells by Jewish refugees intent on revenge. (Correspondence written by the lawyer at this time displayed open anti-Semitism. He resented bitterly the trial judges' legal adviser, who was Jewish, and complained that three members of the investigating War Crimes Group were Jewish refugees.)

Appalled by what he took to be fact, the secretary of the army ordered a halt to all executions. The proclamation provided new ammunition for the pro-German lobby in America, and unrepentant Nazis in Germany, to attack the conduct of the entire war crimes trials. New accusations were made that confessions had been obtained from defendants by threatening to hand them over to the Russians. The secretary of the army appointed a three-man commission of American judges to investigate the way war crimes had been prosecuted, with particular emphasis on the Malmédy trial.

The judges flew to Frankfurt to spend six weeks studying the case and prepared a classified report. It found no evidence of systematic intimidation and declared the trials to have been "essentially fair," although some of the methods used in obtaining sworn statements were again categorized as "questionable." The report went on to say that the evidence proved the guilt of the defendants, but suggested commuting the death sentences to atone for any injustice that might have been committed.

A separate investigation, conducted by the Administration of Justice Review Board over seven months, cross-examined all those involved in the pretrial interrogations. It too criticized some of the methods employed but also concluded that there had been no violence. After close scrutiny of trial transcripts, the review found substantial evidence against the twelve men condemned to death.

A sensational new element was now introduced when one of the judges sent to Frankfurt on the three-man panel, LeRoy Van Roden, claimed that he had been prevented from publishing the truth. He said in a public speech that he had received statements proving that interrogators had abused, beaten and tortured the Germans to extract confessions. The effect of the judge's remarks was to destroy the credibility of the report and make it seem little more than a whitewash. The pro-German lobby in the States attacked it, and an editorial in the Chicago Tribune lamented the depths to which American justice had sunk.

But Van Roden had actually received his information from Everett and had merely repeated the lawyer's most extreme allegations. The men had been roommates in Frankfurt after the war, and also shared prejudices. Van Roden, too, was an open anti-Semite and expressed the belief that Jewish refugees were using their recently acquired American nationality to pursue race vengeance. The attacks fueled the army's critics over the handling of the Dachau cases. Most Germans now openly sympathized with the convicted Malmédy SS men, whom they saw not as criminals but as victims of the admitted malpractice and incompetence of the American Army.

The army received another blow when a German newspaper disclosed that the U.S. military government in Germany had reduced the life sentence handed down on the notorious Ilse Koch to four years. The gruesome stories surrounding Koch, known as "the Bitch of Buchenwald," had graphically illustrated the perverse side of concentration camp life and outraged American public opinion. Ilse Koch, who had no military rank or official position, was married to the commandant of Buchenwald, where she lived for six years. When her husband had been removed for corruption, she chose to stay on. Fifty-one thousand people died at the camp through starvation, murder and torture. The stories in the American press reported that Koch had selected prisoners with interesting tattoos for extermination. The camp's pathology department skinned the corpses and then tanned the human hide to be made into gloves and lampshades. Critics of the U.S. military now suggested that the sentence reduction was proof that Koch had not committed any crime in the first place.

American politicians in those states with large German populations began to see the growing backlash to the war crimes trials as a vote-winning bandwagon. And an unknown junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, hopped aboard. McCarthy desperately needed a cause to deflect attention from a court case in his home state where he was awaiting conviction by the Wisconsin State Supreme Court on charges of unethical conduct in a local trial. He now gave his support to a petition for clemency filed by the wife of Hans Schmidt, the former adjutant of the guard battalion at Buchenwald. McCarthy claimed that Schmidt had been denied a proper trial and had been tortured during interrogation to make a false confession. It was not true, but the senator demanded to know why the army had not commuted the sentence. He omitted to mention the proven fact that Schmidt had overseen executions on a daily basis for four years.

The plea was rejected, as McCarthy surely knew it would be, but the publicity encouraged a slew of petitions to the White House on behalf of hundreds of war criminals. And while the twelve remaining Malmédy death sentences were initially upheld, the publication of the previously classified judges' report added weight to the demands of Everett and allied Congressmen for a reprieve. They ignored the finding that the men were guilty and chose to concentrate on criticism of the army's methods of interrogation.

Yet another inquiry into the Malmédy trial was set up, this time to be conducted by the Senate's Committee on Armed Services. An idea of the emphasis and direction this would take, along with the exaggerated and unreal atmosphere in which it would be conducted, was provided in advance by Senator McCarthy. "It sickens me to the core of my being...that Americans have engaged in these brutal and unjustified acts."

The murdered American POWs and Belgian civilians had been forgotten, and the interrogators had become the villains. Six of the twelve remaining death sentences passed on the Malmédy SS men were now commuted, while execution of the remainder was delayed until the committee reported its findings. McCarthy introduced the unique brand of low showmanship and political charlatanism to the hearings that would later turn him into a national figure. He ranted and raved about the abuse of prisoners, with particular emphasis on damage to their genitalia, but was unable to produce a scintilla of evidence to back his accusations. The witnesses he called tended towards gross exaggeration and outright lies. A German dentist claimed to have heard screams of pain coming from the jail and reported that twenty prisoners had teeth smashed by the interrogators. An independent investigator found no evidence whatsoever to support the charge.

Undeterred, McCarthy attacked foreign-born Jews, whom he claimed had maliciously abused American justice. He shouted, bullied and lied for a month, then when it became apparent that his case was about to collapse, he called a dramatic press conference and resigned. He told a room packed with reporters that the inquiry had become a whitewash to protect men who had extracted confessions under torture, "brutalities greater than we have ever accused either the Russians or Hitler's Germany of employing."

After McCarthy stormed off the stage, the inquiry dismissed the allegations of violence. It laid the blame for the initial acceptance of the rumors on an organized conspiracy by Nazis and their American sympathizers to discredit the trials. (McCarthy would return a year later, having discovered Communism, to reduce another Senate investigation into a circus act.)

One such German sympathizer, Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, wrote to a prisoner in Landsberg at the end of 1949, actually soliciting further allegations against the U.S. Army. "Confer with your fellow prisoners to determine if there are any notorious cases of injustice involving any of them so that you will be able to call such cases to the attention of the representatives of the Inspector-General when they arrive."

The convicted Malmédy war criminals in jail at Landsberg Fortress took heart. It was hard to believe, but powerful American politicians had willingly stepped forward to support them, American lawyers continued to petition Washington on their behalf, and a significant section of American public opinion was on their side. The men conferred daily with one another in the prison yard, met frequently with German and American lawyers, and carefully planned the most effective strategy to bring about their release.

In the winter of 1949, the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express ran a story outlining Michel's capture of Gustav Knittel — as one of the principal perpetrators of the Malmédy Massacre — and Emil Mahl — hangman of Dachau. The story was picked up by the International News Service and reprinted in the European edition of the Stars and Stripes. The final paragraph of the news report read: "Next month Congress will consider giving Thomas full U.S. citizenship because of his war services without waiting for the five-year period of residence." The war criminals were given shrewd advice to seize upon this vulnerable area of attack. Although neither Knittel nor Mahl spoke English, and certainly did not read Stars and Stripes, their leader, Joachim Peiper, obtained an interpreter's diploma in English while in prison.8 Much had been made in the various hearings of "recently" naturalized American émigrés pursuing their interrogations in a spirit of revenge rather than justice. Here was a man who was not even American.

On the day after Christmas 1949, Mahl wrote a letter to Michel via the Stars and Stripes — typed in German on one side and translated into English on the other — objecting to statements he made to the paper. "I was neither a Nazi nor at any time hangman at Dachau. I was a plain prisoner of the Third Reich, and in my capacity as a concentration camp inmate it was my assignment to have corpses cremated in the camp crematorium after executions. Thus I was Kapo Crematorium. Therefore you are requested to omit in the future to mention my name in a derogativ [sic] manner, even if it should be your intention to do that to impress people for the purpose to get American citizenship granted to you at a premature date."

In fact, Mahl had been sentenced to death for his activities at Dachau, although along with other war criminals his sentence had been reduced to ten years of confinement. He had sought the job at the camp crematorium and volunteered as hangman. Emboldened by support in the States, the convicted murderer now claimed that the U.S. Army had never returned money taken from him on his arrest. He estimated the value and thoughtfully worked out the exchange rate: three hundred and five U.S. dollars. "You are requested to have this amount transferred to me. In case I should receive no answer from you until 1 February 1950, I shall report the case to the competent legal authorities in the U.S. to have you indicted for theft. Furthermore I shall inform members of the U.S. Congress who are competent for the grant of [sic] American citizenship to you. Sincerely, Emil Mahl."

Michel was sickened to receive the letter, but particularly outraged by a stamp in the right-hand corner of the letter: PASSED BY CENSOR. It seemed to give official sanction to a war criminal's crude attempt at blackmail. "I made sure to bring it to the attention of the proper authorities that they might take action in the future to prevent proven war criminals from making threats with official approval."

He prepared a statement for the press, which shared his sense of outrage and quoted his reaction. "It is strange that Mahl should receive ten years of imprisonment, because if he is innocent, as he claims to be, then this man should be released — with all the necessary apologies. But one cannot help wondering, with amazement and some frightful doubt, what made it possible to commute a lenient life sentence given to Ilse Koch, into four years of confinement. And what caused the change of the death sentence of the Hangman of Dachau to ten years of imprisonment — the same punishment which could be given under U.S. laws to a nineteen-year-old boy for breaking into a grocery store."

A second, more subtle and invidious letter was written in Landsberg at approximately the same time by Gustav Knittel. It was sent not to the press — or Michel, who never learned of it — but to the U.S. Army's Director of Intelligence at the Pentagon. Cleverly drafted, it hit on every weakness in the Dachau trials revealed in the various judicial reviews, exaggerated in the press and distorted by McCarthy. Knittel was careful not to refer to his own crimes, as he was unable to withdraw his sworn confession ordering the murder of eight American POWs. Instead, he adopted a self-righteous position in which he claimed to be intent on helping his needy wife and restoring his personal honor.

The target of his attack was Michel Thomas, who had captured and interrogated him. Quoting from the article in the Stars and Stripes stating that Michel was not an American citizen, Knittel attempted to portray him as an émigré interrogator bent on revenge (Knittel remained unaware that Michel was a Jew). "I should like to state that I have no interest whatsoever which persons the American Congress consider worthy to be granted American citizenship," Knittel wrote. "Likewise I have never borne any grudge against my apprehension by Thomas, as he was fully acting in the line of duty. However, my objection is directed against the attempt on the part of Thomas to base his 'merits in the interests of the U.S.' on untrue facts which not only touch my personal honor but which might hurt me in the future."

Knittel had perfectly caught the mood of the times when a confessed Nazi SS murderer could appeal to the head of intelligence of the U.S. Army to defend his personal honor against an émigré interrogator. He proceeded to launch an attack on Michel and Ted Kraus, head of CIC in Ulm at the time — who was, of course, not only American but German-American. It repeated the rumors and lies that had been disproved in endless independent legal reviews, but were nonetheless still believed by pro-German groups in the U.S. and a large section of the populace in Germany.

Knittel claimed that upon arrest he had been ordered to take off his blue woollen pullover, which had never been returned to him. A pair of his wife's gloves had also disappeared. He accused the men of stealing a set of china, his watch and money, and a jubilee edition of Goethe's Faust — the irony of which might, or might not, have escaped him. He also complained of brutal treatment at the CIC prison in Ulm after Michel and Ted Kraus had given instructions to the sergeant on duty and left. "At first I had to stand at attention in a corner for two hours," Knittel wrote. "Then on order of the sergeant, a German auxiliary policeman brought in a bucket with water and a toothbrush. I was ordered by the sergeant to scrub the floor of the guardroom with the toothbrush which lasted from about midnight to 0500 hours. While I was kneeling down and scrubbing the floor, I was repeatedly beaten with a dog whip by the guards under the laughter of their comrades. One evening during the second week of January, my cell was locked, a guard entered, aiming a pistol at me and telling me that he would shoot in case that I should move [sic]. Then appeared soldiers in uniform who slapped me about thirty times in my face. When I did not react to this maltreatment, they threw all items they could get hold of outside my cell. A scar above my eye is still a visible mark of this maltreatment."

Meanwhile, according to Knittel, his aunt, wife and child were placed in confinement two cells away from him. "I could hear the crying of my child for reasons of not being properly fed, which depended entirely upon the mood of a female warden. For eight days the little child of seven months was not allowed to be taken out in the fresh air. After my futile attempts, my wife finally succeeded that [sic] the baby was taken out for twenty minutes daily, but she and my aunt were not allowed to leave the cell for a single moment during these three weeks."

Knittel also wrote that while unable to prove that Michel and Kraus were directly responsible for his mistreatment, he was certain they had condoned it and were the "bad spirits" behind the action. He then addressed the manner in which he was interrogated on five occasions over three days. The interrogations opened with Michel threatening to incarcerate all of Knittel's family, including his elderly parents, unless he agreed to give up his POW status. "Thomas declared that I would be given to the Russians in case I should be found innocent in the matter."

It is true that immediately after Knittel's arrest he was ordered by a guard at the prison to clean his cell with a toothbrush, and the man had been severely reprimanded by Michel for his action. But there was no truth whatsoever in any of Knittel's other accusations. Neither Knittel's aunt, nor his wife — and certainly not his baby — were arrested. Frau Knittel was questioned in the comfort of her own home. The only time she entered the prison at Ulm was for the wedding condoned and organized by Michel. "It is ironic, but I went out of my way to protect Knittel from the beginning. It was well-known that he was responsible for Malmédy and he now came under the control of American MPs. But they would not have dared mistreat him after I had expressed my anger over the toothbrush incident. It was the only complaint he ever made to me, and after that they knew how I would react if he was treated badly. The talk of a dog whip and the laughter during the beating is typical of the Gestapo and SS mind-set. American soldiers, of course, did not carry whips. And I rejected using psychological torture, if you can call it that. I could have destroyed him by making him suspect his wife as the person who betrayed him, but did not. I regret it — it was a golden opportunity."

Knittel's accusations cunningly repeated almost every charge ever brought against American interrogators, short of having his testicles crushed. He claimed to have been whipped and beaten by guards, tortured psychologically through his wife and child, and physically humiliated and mistreated. The threat with the pistol and the alleged theft of personal belongings — particularly the gloves — exactly mirrored accusations made against the SS during the Malmédy Massacre.

As a conclusion to his "respectfully submitted" letter, Knittel hoped "that a just solution can be found to restore my personal honor." There is no record of any official reply, but the letter was added to the mountain of petitions and complaints the army had received. It is an indication of the anxiety of the army at the time that it was not thrown contemptuously in the wastebasket but preserved in the National Archives.

The stature of the incarcerated Malmédy murderers continued to grow in Germany until they were transformed from war criminals into folk heroes. The mass-circulation press continued to print stories reporting the most extreme of the discredited accounts against the American investigators. Colonel Willis Everett, the American attorney defending the war criminals, had become a white knight in the eyes of ordinary Germans, who saw him as a good man bent on justice rather than vengeance.

The authorities in America now handled the lawyer with great care and civility, and assured him in writing that eighty percent of the sentences of war criminals under review were being recommended for remission or drastic reduction. In an extraordinary decision, the U.S. Army said that the killings at Malmédy had been committed in a fluid combat situation when Germany was desperate. The army was arguing military necessity as a mitigating factor in a case involving the murder of its own troops.

On the surface, it seems to be a baffling position for the army to have taken, even after continued criticism. The numerous investigations found it to be essentially guilt-free and honest, yet it became strangely defensive, almost as if it had something to hide. And it did.

The army was keeping a dark secret that would have blown the Malmédy case apart, and it had nothing to do with questionable interrogation techniques or sloppy legal procedure. It was hiding a full-scale massacre of its own, perpetrated by American troops from none other than Michel's Thunderbird regiment, the 180th.

Four days after the Thunderbirds landed in Sicily in 1943, newly bloodied in bitter combat, a dozen men from a company of the 180th were wounded in a firefight as they approached the airfield at Biscari. The battle raged from dawn to late afternoon, but at midmorning two Italian soldiers emerged from a dugout carrying a white flag. They were soon followed by a group of thirty-two more Italian troops accompanied by two Germans, all of whom were captured by a single GI, who took them to his sergeant. Word of the capture was sent to the officer in charge of the company, a young captain, who promptly gave an unequivocal order: the prisoners were to be shot. The order was carried out by a firing party of some two dozen men, a number of whom had volunteered for the task. Altogether thirty-four unarmed POWs were shot in the head or chest.

Nearby, a sergeant also belonging to a company of the 180th was given the job of escorting another group of more than forty prisoners to the rear for interrogation. The unarmed men were put into columns of two and marched several hundred yards along a road, accompanied by the sergeant and nine GIs. The prisoners were then ordered to move off the road into an olive grove. The sergeant borrowed a Thompson sub-machine gun from one of his soldiers and suggested those who did not want to witness what was about to happen should avert their eyes. He then opened fire and mowed thirty-seven prisoners down.

Both sergeant and captain subsequently faced court-martial. Although other soldiers had been actively involved or were passively complicit in the killings, the 45th Division's inspector-general recommended in the first case that charges be brought only against the captain, as the firing squad believed it was carrying out a lawful order. Similar circumstances surrounded the sergeant, who acted alone and had also announced to his men he was following orders, although none of the accompanying troops did anything to stop him or oppose the action. Both defendants claimed at their separate court-martials that they believed they had been ordered not to take prisoners.

The captain quoted a pep talk given by General George S. Patton to the Thunderbird company commanders, while the division was still in North Africa, about to invade Sicily. "When we land against the enemy, don't forget to hit him and hit him hard. We will bring the fight home to him. When we meet the enemy, we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades, and he must die. If you company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you, and when you get within two hundred yards of him and he wishes to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick him. He can do no good then. Stick them in the liver. We will get the name of killers, and killers are immortal. When word reaches him that he is being faced by a killer battalion, a killer outfit, he will fight less. Particularly, we must build up that name as killers and you will get that down to your troops in time for the invasion."

As an incitement to brutality, it outstripped Adolf Hitler's speech to the SS Panzer divisions at the opening of the Battle of the Bulge. It carried the clear instruction not to take prisoners and encouraged young officers to pass the message along to green, inexperienced troops. Numerous witnesses remembered Patton's bloodthirsty remarks, and many said they took it to mean that no prisoners were to be taken.

The captain, who maintained he was following orders, was cleared of the charges against him. The sergeant offered a more muddled and unconvincing defense and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The disparity in the verdicts was extreme and caused concern to the division's judge advocate and many senior officers, who feared political repercussions. The War Department recommended that the sergeant be granted clemency with the proviso "that no publicity be given to this case because to do so would give aid and comfort to the enemy and would arouse a segment of our own citizens who are so distant from combat that they do not understand the savagery that is war." The sergeant was released after serving a year of his sentence and returned to duty, reduced to the rank of private. The captain died in action in Italy later in the year.

General Patton was not called as a witness in either court-martial. By the time the verdicts were reached, his explosive temperament and erratic behavior had already created an international scandal when he slapped two shell-shocked soldiers in an Italian field hospital. This later became the declared reason for denying Patton command of U.S. ground forces on D-Day, but as both his senior officers, General Omar Bradley and General Dwight Eisenhower, knew of Biscari, it is likely that the massacre was a significant factor in that decision.

Biscari caused great concern to the U.S. Army and the War Department, and conditions of the utmost secrecy were imposed on the court-martial proceedings. It was felt that any publicity was bound to present limitless propaganda possibilities to the enemy, trigger harsh reprisals against American troops in the field and have a detrimental effect on public opinion in the United States. The massacre was covered up so effectively that few soldiers in the division ever heard about it. "I never heard anyone in the Thunderbirds talk of this," Michel says. "It was inconceivable to me when I was with them that they could act like that. It just did not happen in France or Germany. Prisoners were treated well. I am sure that very few of the men ever knew anything about it."

But the guilty secret of Biscari haunted the army throughout the Malmédy trial and the investigations that followed. The fear was that either McCarthy, the press, or the accused SS men themselves might come to hear of it. The results would be calamitous. Biscari offers an explanation of the army's tolerant view concerning the murder of its own men at Malmédy and the leniency later shown towards its perpetrators.

The American Commander-in-Chief of European Command commuted the six remaining Malmédy death sentences on January 31, 1951. The mood at Landsberg was understandably ecstatic when the news arrived. Joachim Peiper, leader of the Malmédy prisoners, was moved to write a fulsome letter of praise to his defender. "We have received a great victory, and next to God it is you from whom our blessings flow. In all the long and dark years you have been the beacon flame for the forlorn souls of the Malmédy Boys, the voice and the conscience of the good America, and yours is the present success against all the well-known overwhelming odds. May I, therefore, Colonel, express the everlasting gratitude of the red-jacket team (retired) as well as all of the families concerned."

For Michel, and the slaughtered Malmédy Americans long in their graves, natural justice had been grotesquely mocked. Peiper was correct in saying that the Nazi SS had won a great victory. The men who had captured, interrogated and successfully prosecuted the perpetrators of the massacre had been maligned and denigrated, while SS murderers and unrepentant Nazis had been turned into national heroes by their politically motivated American champions.

Veteran groups in America were outraged. There was also a degree of concern expressed in Congress, and the occasional critical editorial in the serious press, but the pendulum had swung in the murderers' favor. An inexorable process had begun that would eventually set all the Landsberg "Malmédy Boys" free. Knittel was released in 1954.13 By the summer of 1956, only three of the accused were left in jail and they were released within the following six months. Peiper himself, the last of the Malmédy Boys, became a free man at Christmas. He was promptly hired by Porsche, the company that had made the Panzer tanks he had commanded, and duly became the first nonfamily member to be selected as company secretary.

Copyright © 2000 by Christopher Robbins