The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (35 page)

With the surrender of Germany, the Thunderbirds took on the role of occupying army and struggled to process the vast number of captured soldiers. By the end of May the total number of captured prisoners held by the 45th Division alone approached one hundred and twenty-five thousand. Despite the non-fraternisation and de-Nazification policy, necessity demanded that German officers serve as liaison personnel to the Allies. The non-fraternisation laws applied to all Germans, including anti-Nazis, who at first were offered no role in terms of replacing the previous evil system.

In war-ravaged Munich, the doughboys of the 45th Division celebrated and looked forward to going home after two long and bloody years of combat. Following VE Day, and the reorganisation of American forces, the Thunderbirds were transferred from the Seventh Army to General George Patton’s Third Army, and on 12 June 1945 they moved to a new camp beside the Autobahn on the outskirts of Munich.
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But for Michel, in Counter Intelligence, defeat brought an extra workload as the search for war criminals began. He did not talk about his fears concerning the fate of his own family. Emotionally, he entered a state of blank anxiety. The liberation of Dachau, and subsequent reports from other camps, had dealt a stunning psychological blow to his spirit.

On top of his other duties, Michel took a jeep and made his way through the chaos to visit the liberated camps. He questioned survivors in German and Yiddish. ‘I gathered people up to talk because many of them came from Auschwitz where I knew my family had been. Wherever they came from I wanted to find out about my family. All the time, every day, I searched for news.’

The most disturbing moments of these visits came from the reactions of the children. ‘The first time I went to a liberated camp the children ran from me and hid. Because of the uniform. They could not distinguish between a German and an American uniform. That hurt me very much, to see little children running away from me in horror. That was very painful. Non-Jewish children told me how they were put to work searching discarded clothing for hidden valuables. The older boys told stories of carefully lining up bodies, head to toe, in neat rows - when some of the corpses would be family members. It was all said in a matter-of-fact way, not expressed with horror at all. It had become natural. I listened, and was transported to some alien, nightmare world.’

The children who survived the camps were like no other children in the world. In Buchenwald an American officer, who was also a rabbi, pulled a living eight-year-old boy from a pile of corpses. Shattered by the horror of it, the adult burst into tears. He quickly tried to compose himself in order to protect the child, so he thought, and began to laugh.

‘How old are you?’ he asked the child in Yiddish.

‘Older than you.’

‘How can you say that?’ the rabbi said, thinking the experience had deranged the child.

‘You cry and laugh like a little boy, but I haven’t laughed for years and I don’t cry any more. So tell me, who is older?’
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In his capacity as a CIC agent, Michel was able to receive the lists of survivors compiled by the army. These were usually scarcely decipherable carbon copies of badly typed originals, often incorrectly spelt, made up of thousands and thousands of names that were neither in alphabetical nor any other order. But the crude lists were registers of the living and offered hope. ‘I spent whole nights going over these lists... names, names, names. These were lists of life and death. To find a name meant to find a life. Not to find it... I lived in the suspense of not knowing whether any of my family was alive.’

The strain took a terrible emotional toll as deep down he suspected his family was dead. ‘I did not hope to find their names, I had to find their names. When I did not find them I could not, and did not, accept what happened. For me to accept the destruction of the lives of my parents and aunt and uncle was unthinkable. I would never admit it until I had absolute proof. I could not acknowledge that they had been slaughtered.’

Night after night, week after week, he went through every name on every list. The psychological tension and emotional pain were insupportable, and he became physically unwell. He began to cough and throw up blood, and suffered such extreme rectal bleeding that he feared for his life. ‘I thought I was very sick, maybe I was dying. I feared the worst.’

He confided in no one and continued with his duties. ‘I didn’t want to go to hospital and be taken away from my work.’ He made enquiries and learned that there was a distinguished professor of medicine in Basle, Switzerland, who specialised in his condition. He packed a small suitcase, changed into civilian clothes and drove in his commandeered BMW to Basle. He checked into the professor’s clinic and went through several days of tests and examinations. The professor then received him in his office and began writing prescriptions.

‘What is it?’ Michel asked bluntly. ‘What do I have?’

The doctor answered that in his opinion Michel had gone through a deep emotional crisis and had suffered a trauma of enormous impact.

‘Are you saying it’s psychosomatic?’

The doctor looked at his patient in surprise, as the term was not much used then. He hesitated before he answered. ‘Yes. I’m certain it is.’

‘Thank you. You can tear up the prescriptions. I don’t need any medication. Now I understand the cause, I can handle it.’

He left Basle relieved of an enormous burden of anxiety and drove back to Munich. ‘I felt I would survive and find the strength to carry on. I could not allow myself to succumb to despair.’

On the surface he continued to show nothing of either his physical or spiritual pain, and went about his work with dogged professionalism, earning himself the reputation throughout the unit of a workaholic. All around him he heard expressed the crude desire for revenge, a course he rejected utterly. ‘There was talk of putting poison in the SS prisoners’ food. I found this deplorable, despicable.’

In contrast, Michel decided to throw a party just a few weeks after the end of the war. On his own initiative, and without the army’s knowledge - and with the usual flagrant disregard for the strict non-fraternisation laws in force - he organised an elegant musical gala for a large, invited gathering of senior American personnel and prominent Germans. ‘We had the best possible singers and musicians for a great programme of classical music planned around the world-famous opera singer of the time, Hans Hotter. I employed local artists to draw handmade invitations and sent them out with the programme to high-ranking officers of the US Army, senior figures in the military government, and important Allied intelligence people. I screened and investigated important local Germans who were known to be either anti-Nazi or non-Nazi. And we had a party.’

The location was the palatial residence of an anti-Nazi surgeon, Professor Krecke, just outside Munich. The gala was held on a beautiful summer’s evening and lanterns were hung in the trees of the large garden. ‘People didn’t know I had sent invitations to Germans, obviously. I organised it so they showed up after the Americans were already seated.’ Even so, there were disapproving murmurs when the American brass saw the seats in the rear fill with elegantly dressed Germans. ‘It was a shocker.’ Michel quickly strode on to the stage and addressed the audience, first in English and then in German.

‘The war is over. And with the end of hostilities we should also end hatred of the enemy because now there is no enemy. To keep on hating is self-destructive, so we have to reach out to each other. We now have two duties: to eradicate the evils of Nazism for ever, and to work together to create a new democratic Germany. Tonight I want us all to celebrate not only the end of the war but the beginning of co-operation. That is why I have invited a selection of Germans who are willing to work with us. We have to communicate. And one universal language that reaches all of us and which we all understand is the language of music. It speaks to our emotions and our hearts.’

He sat down, and the music began. Today, it is difficult to imagine how contrary this simple speech was to the spirit of the times. Six years of the most brutal war the world had ever seen, in which fifty-five million people had been killed, had filled vast reservoirs of hatred. Germany was in ruins. Michel’s lone voice suggesting reconciliation was not easily understood by either side in the immediate aftermath of such carnage.

More peculiar still, if the audience could only know it, was the background of the man making the plea for a united, collaborative future with a former enemy. He had suffered so much because of the war, continued to suffer, and would always suffer, and yet sought a new beginning rather than a harsh accounting.

As the musicians played beneath the stars in the summer garden hung with lanterns, the audience fell under the music’s spell and was transported from the reality of war and death. Instead of being court-martialled, Michel was later congratulated by senior officers who might have nurtured notions other than reconciliation. ‘After the classical music we had laid on a large buffet with a band that played light, popular music with dancing.’ That night the non-fraternisation laws went by the board and, only days after the end of the fighting, Americans and Germans danced - although still not with each other.

Today, so many years after the war, Michel’s action still seems incomprehensible to him. ‘I look at that young man, who was myself, and wonder: How did he do it? Why did he do it? I don’t have a clear answer. Sometimes looking back I find it difficult to understand myself. At the time I was literally bleeding inside. I suppose I did not want my anger and quest for justice reduced to bitterness and lust for revenge. I refused to become one of the brutes. I wanted and needed reconciliation.’

It was one of the most significant decisions of his life, taken automatically and almost without thought. He had chosen life over death, the blessing not the curse.

VII - Aftermath

In the months following the defeat of Nazi Germany, five SS officers were blindfolded and driven in two separate cars into the countryside outside of Ulm, on the road to Stuttgart. It was a cold, wet night and each man felt the fear rise in him as the cars passed through an elaborate arrangement of roadblocks and security checks. The men were members of a post-war underground network representing some four thousand SS officers and men, and SD intelligence agents dedicated to the resurrection of the Nazi state. They were on their way to meet the unknown commander of a much larger and powerful umbrella group, the Grossorganisation.

The cars turned off the road on to an unpaved track and came to a halt deep among dripping woods. The blindfolded men heard a final exchange of passwords and the rattle of weapons. The roar of heavy vehicles sounded in the background as they were led along a muddy path, made slippery by trodden autumn leaves, to a building in an isolated clearing. They waited shivering in the cold rain to be summoned into the HO of the Grossorganisation. Numerous people seemed to come and go, until at last, long after midnight, the SS men were led into the building through deep puddles of icy water.

Even inside, the blindfolds remained. The men were forbidden to speak and were kept waiting in an unheated corridor. Despite the late hour, the HQ remained furiously active as people brushed past in response to snapped commands. Doors opened and closed, heels clicked and aides scurried.

After what seemed an age, the SS men were marched down a long corridor and through a doorway. The blindfolds were removed. The sight that confronted them made every moment of the long, cold wait worthwhile. They found themselves in the vast hall of a hunting lodge where a log fire blazed. Mounted on the walls were the heads of wild boar and stag, with the portraits of leading Nazi figures hung between them, and in pride of place was a large painting of Adolf Hitler himself.

All around was an impressive display of weaponry: pistols, flame throwers, machine guns, assorted grenades, and ammunition of every calibre. Sabotage kits - the pride of the SS intelligence units - were stacked in one corner. There was also a small mountain of coffee and cigarettes - both almost impossible to obtain in post-war Germany - and an open safe filled with bundles of paper money. The lodge was clearly the heart of a powerful organisation, an unapologetic and defiant throwback to the heady days of the Third Reich. The audacity of the display was balm to bruised Nazi souls. For defeated men suffering the added humiliation of foreign occupation, the very existence of the Grossorganisation’s HQ was psychologically uplifting.

Seated behind a large desk that bore a bronze bust of Hitler was an impressive man, framed between two swastika-shaped candlesticks, immaculately dressed in civilian clothes except for a military-style brown shirt. He had the manner of a high-ranking party functionary familiar with power and unquestioning obedience. Hard and unsmiling, his unblinking stare was a challenge rather than a welcome, and there was about him the unmistakable, indelible stamp of the Gestapo fanatic.

The SS men were announced with full rank and drew themselves up and flung out their arms in salute. ‘Heil Hitler!’ The man behind the desk returned the salute limply, in the style of Hitler himself. He made a curt gesture with his head for them to sit. A long silence followed in which he studied a dossier carefully, suddenly raising his head to glare at the leader of the SS men.

They knew this intimidating figure to be Dr Frundsberg, commander of the Grossorganisation. He immediately delivered a quiet but forceful rebuke over the existence of any unit with military potential operating outside the Grossorganisation’s umbrella. No local underground splinter group, he declared with authority, could be allowed to function in any capacity as a separate entity. It must either disband or be absorbed into the Grossorganisation. The master plan was to have everything centralised under one command. Anything else was treason, and traitors would be dealt with as such.