The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (32 page)

One day, Michel was passing through a small town during curfew, driven by a tough, daring CIC agent called Pico. The sound of a piano playing provocative and strident Nazi marching songs filled the deserted streets. The jeep bounced across the cobblestones and pulled up outside the block of apartments where the music was being played.

Michel jumped out, went to the front of the building and hammered on the door. It was opened by a porter who quickly stepped aside the moment he saw an American soldier with a carbine slung across the shoulder. Michel climbed a single flight of stairs and knocked loudly on the door of the apartment where the piano continued to play. The music stopped.

After a pause, the door was opened by a tall, beautiful young woman who glared with undisguised hostility at Michel in his American uniform. ‘I was passing by and heard the piano and wondered who could be playing so loudly at this hour?’

‘I was playing. Is it wrong to play the piano?’ The woman looked at him with a superior air of defiance and contempt.

Michel pushed past her and entered the apartment. ‘You play very well, although I cannot say I admire your taste in music’ He glanced about him, and said casually, ‘Your identity papers!’

The demand only served to increase the woman’s contemptuous manner as she took a leather wallet from her handbag and rifled unhurriedly through it. Her languid action was designed to be a provocation, and Michel was provoked. He reached forward and took the wallet from her. ‘It was a little trick I used when I asked for papers. I always took everything. Those who had nothing to hide didn’t mind, but those who did hesitated - if only for a fraction of a second. Depending on those reactions I could read who they were. She had a reaction.’

He began to go through the documents. Another trick he employed if he found anything of interest was to skip over the document as if it were of no importance. He ignored a pass to Peenemiinde, the V-2 rocket complex, signed by Goering, and inspected the woman’s ID papers briefly. He returned all the documents to the wallet and handed it back.

‘That piano music was very loud.’ He walked to the window, opened it and called down to Pico to join him. ‘I want a complete house search,’ he said. ‘Top to bottom. Everything!’

Pico looked surprised, but began the search as the woman maintained her detached and aloof manner. A thorough search turned up a quantity of engineering blueprints with an obvious military application.

‘What are these?’

The woman lost a little of her composure. She insisted she was merely a student who had been given drawings by her professor, who had subsequently fled.

Michel put on a sad face. ‘It is unfortunate that he is not available to verify your story. You’ll have to come with us.’

They drove to the temporary CIC HQ, set up in an evacuated town nearby. The woman continued her open defiance and left no one in any doubt that she was an unrepentant Nazi. Michel remained silent as he listened to his CIC colleagues question her. The lengthy interrogation produced nothing, except to establish that the woman was not a student but a qualified engineer with a high-level clearance to pursue secret work. She refused to supply either details of her work or the name and location of associates. ‘However hard the interrogators pushed, her attitude never changed. She never answered, and said nothing. Not a word.’

There were no facilities in the combat zone to keep prisoners, or the time and resources to pursue interrogations in depth, so it was decided to send her to the rear. Michel suggested he talk to her alone in a final attempt to break through the steely reserve. His colleagues shrugged sceptically and wished him luck.

The woman was taken to a barely furnished room and left alone to contemplate her fate. Michel then entered, sat down and started talking softly in a coaxing, conspiratorial tone.

‘I want to talk to you alone, away from the others. I think you should understand that if you don’t answer questions here you will be turned over to the Special Interrogation Centre. The people there do not accept silence for answers. They have ways to make a person talk. They use very unpleasant techniques. I’d rather not see you subjected to this.’ There was no response, and she remained haughty as ever. Michel paused. ‘That would not be very pleasant for you... a woman.’ Once again the woman did not seem to react.

The ‘Special Interrogation Centre’ did not exist, but had a sinister ring, and he allowed the woman’s imagination to invent the nature of questioning pursued in such a place. She would have known what went on in Nazi interrogation centres and would have no reason to think the Allies behaved any differently.

‘I’m trying to avoid sending you there,’ Michel continued. ‘Why am I trying to avoid it? Because I understand you.’ He paused for effect. ‘Although you see me in an American uniform, inside is a German. I am German -
Ganz und gar ein Deutsche.
Entirely and altogether German.’

This was a performance Michel had developed to a fine art over the previous weeks - an appeal from one true German to another. He explained that his mother was from Hamburg and his father from Berlin, and that they had emigrated to America before the war. He offered the helping hand of a German brother, with a connection to the future, to a victim stranded and alone among the ruins of a doomed Nazi state. The war was lost, the Reich at an end, but an eternal Germany remained to be redeemed and rebuilt.

‘Yes, I came here with the United States Army, but not to fight my people or conquer them. I am here to liberate them from tyranny. To liberate them from this insane destruction. What did you do, all of you? To my country! To my people! I came back here and found a destroyed nation. You
know
the war is lost. Between the Americans and the Russians the country will be squeezed into nothing. Continuing the war only adds to the death and destruction. Worse, the longer the war goes on the greater the danger of the Soviets chewing off more territory, more people. The rockets you developed will be used against you by the Communists.’

The spiel went on and on, aggressive and outraged. And over it hung the threat of the Special Interrogation Centre and its unspoken horrors. The woman continued to say nothing and seemed untouched by fear. ‘I had never seen so much genuine contempt. Such arrogance and defiance. I think she would have withstood torture. I was impressed.’

Nothing seemed likely to move the woman from her implacable position. Michel began to wind down and said simply that if she did not co-operate he would be powerless to prevent her being sent away. No future American interrogator would ever understand her.

At first, there was no reaction. Michel sighed, and prepared to leave.

‘Wait,’ the woman said quietly. She seemed to find it difficult to speak. ‘Maybe you’re right in some of the things you say.’

‘Let’s talk,’ Michel said. ‘Who are you and what is your connection to Peenemiinde? Why don’t you tell me about it? Take your time.’

The words now came in a torrent that was a lament for a political dream destroyed and a country in ruins. Michel listened sympathetically and nodded understandingly as he gently guided the woman into revealing those areas of her life in which he was interested. ‘She told me she was a physicist. That she had worked at Peenemiinde on the V-2 and at other secret plants. She told me about new weapons, the latest missiles that were way beyond the V-2 - faster, more accurate, and more destructive. And that they were fully developed and ready for production. She gave me vague indications of the location where these weapons were under construction.’ At the end of a long session they were both exhausted.

‘I appreciate your co-operation,’ Michel said. He told her that it would no longer be necessary to send her to the interrogation centre and that he would organise a place for her to stay the night. The army always requisitioned a number of abandoned houses in the combat zone for officers’ use, and he now took the woman to one.

A peculiar and delicate atmosphere of trust had developed between them. The deserted house was well-furnished and comfortable, and as the electricity had been cut off, Michel lit a number of candles. ‘To help her settle in I showed her the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, and as I was about to leave she began weeping. I sat down beside her to comfort her and she grabbed me, laying her head on my shoulder. Between sobs she confessed to a terrible sense of having betrayed her country, her friends, her associates. Only because of my sympathy and understanding, she told me, had she turned traitor.’

It was a charged moment: the two of them alone together in the bedroom of a comfortable house in flickering candlelight. The war seemed far away and momentarily unreal. The ‘sympathy and understanding’ had been completely false on Michel’s part, but in the seductive atmosphere of the moment romance swept over him. ‘I felt physical and emotional attraction. She was lovely, and nestling in my arms. It only would have taken my acquiescence and a hug to go further.’

But conscience nagged. The woman had been made vulnerable and amorous only through deceit. ‘First I had undermined her self-discipline by inducing great anxiety about her future. Then I had stripped away her loyalty by presenting myself in a fake pose and turning her nationalism upside down. And certainly her strong attraction to me owed much to the relief she felt on escaping physical and mental pain from the “Special Interrogation Centre” through what she thought was my influence. For my part, while I retained reluctant respect for her initial defiance, I also knew she was truly one of the enemy. I had suffered too much from the Germans to become emotionally involved with one, beautiful and intelligent as she was. I pulled away from her and said good night.’

Back at the CIC offices the next morning, everyone was certain that Michel had slept with the enemy, although Counter Intelligence took a liberal position regarding such things. A strict non-fraternisation order, signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, barred military personnel from mixing with the German population except in a professional capacity. ‘I didn’t try to persuade them it never happened. I doubt if they would have understood my reactions any more than she did. I had been very tempted.’

Among the many prisoners processed by Michel at this time was an SS man concerned about the fate of his dog. The Wehrmacht used dogs in combat and the massive black and white Landseer-Newfoundland had been chosen for its size and strength, and trained against its nature to be an aggressive attack animal. The SS man had grown fond of his ferocious charge and was genuinely disturbed that it might be put down. He held the dog tightly on a short leash and choke chain as it snarled menacingly at anyone who came close.

‘Beautiful dog,’ Michel said approvingly.

As he approached, the animal rose to its feet, pulling against its leash. It seemed to roar like a lion rather than bark, and its fangs were bared behind the quivering Ups of its enormous head. Without thinking, Michel moved his clenched fist towards the dog’s open mouth.

‘
Nein
!’ he commanded. Confused, the Landseer growled uncertainly but obeyed.

‘I’ll take him,’ Michel said, and the SS man handed him the leash.

The dog’s name was Barry, and he proved to be a handful. Although enormous and very strong - books recommend that owners of the breed harness the animal to a small cart as part of the dog’s exercise routine - the Landseer is gentle and friendly by nature. ‘He had been trained to be mean. To go on the attack in battle. He barked and snarled at everyone and had been rewarded for this behaviour. I began to teach him differently. I don’t train animals, I teach them. It took a while, but he slowly began to respond. He accepted me almost immediately, but he was ferocious with other people. I had a German police dog before - Rando, who got killed on the road - and knew the commands and how they were trained. Barry began to accept the people who worked with me and was actually very friendly. But he did not allow people he didn’t know anywhere near him. He proved an effective interrogation aid.’
[136]

The Thunderbirds now joined the attack on Nuremberg, the Bavarian city that had hosted the massive, operatic Nazi party rallies in the 1930s. Once a beautiful walled medieval town, it was now reduced to ruins by Allied artillery bombardment and air raids. Three regiments attacking abreast moved into the city and five thousand prisoners were taken on the first day. It was a strange battle with no discernible front line, just shifting urban chaos with Americans in one street and Germans in another, slugging it out.

An American agent from the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), who had lived and worked within the city and radioed intelligence reports to the advancing troops, now found himself trapped. Michel volunteered to get him out. He changed into civilian clothes and was driven by jeep as far into the city as possible. He then slipped into the section occupied by the Germans. ‘The chaotic conditions created by the battle actually made it less difficult than it sounds and I located the OSS agent fairly easily. I moved through the streets as a German civilian, and there was no fighting where I was. I had been given the address and a city plan. I then led the OSS man back to the American lines and made a rendezvous with the jeep.’

Driving back through the section of the city captured by the Americans, they were shot at from a building by German snipers. Bullets ripped into the pavement and ricocheted off walls. The driver pulled into cover while Michel took his carbine and ran towards the building, snapping off a few rounds as he went. ‘In retrospect my action seems foolhardy, but I was still operating on the winner’s luck of a gambler on a hot streak.’