The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (41 page)

As he discussed things with his commander, a badly wounded German soldier limped out of the woods.

‘What’s happening up there?’ Knittel shouted.

‘All quiet,’ the soldier replied. ‘Everybody seems to have taken off.’

He had scarcely finished replying when eight American GIs emerged from the woods.

‘Goddamn it, those
are Amis
,’ Knittel shouted. He ran with the anti-tank commander and took cover behind the wall of the abandoned house. The wounded soldier limped back into the woods.

As the Americans came closer it became apparent that they were prisoners covered by the rifles of two German soldiers following close behind.

‘What are we going to do with them?’ Knittel asked the commander. ‘If we’ve got to take off we can’t take them along with us through the woods.’

Knittel remembered the words of the Panzer Army’s leader, Sepp Dietrich, at the opening of the campaign, reported to him by the general’s adjutant: ‘No foreign soldier will stand on German territory at the beginning of the New Year. Everything that helps you advance is permitted. The Fuhrer covers you. Think of the Fatherland, which suffers under the enemy bombing terror, and be ruthless towards the civilian population. When military necessity demands it Allied prisoners of war should be shot.’
[178]
The solution to the American prisoners was obvious. Knittel also admitted later that he was emotionally upset by the news of the recent deaths of his men and wanted revenge.

As the soldiers came close, Knittel called out to the guards: ‘From which division are they?’

‘We don’t know,’ one replied. ‘We don’t speak English.’

Knittel waited until the American soldiers reached the house, then ordered their guard,
‘Mach’ sie fertig!’
- Finish them off!

The Americans were led in a line behind the house while Knittel and the anti-tank commander remained in the front. Five minutes later there were pistol shots. The two guards returned showing each other gold rings and watches taken from the prisoners.

‘You swine!’ Knittel shouted at them. ‘That’s not going to bring you any luck!’
[179]

On Christmas Eve, Knittel was forced to accept that the situation was impossible. He gave the order to retreat. This meant snaking through heavily wooded country covered in fourteen inches of snow and infested with American para-troopers. It also involved crossing a number of rivers where the bridges had been destroyed. Exhausted by days of combat without sleep, and fuelled only by hard biscuits and occasional shots of cognac, the soldiers struggled through the woods. A sergeant and five SS men were left behind to cover the retreat and destroy the last two operational tanks of the Kampfgruppe, a pair of seventy-two-ton Royal Tigers abandoned outside the Ferme Antoine. Then, before first light on Christmas morning, they too stole away.

Knittel’s men reached the icy, fast-flowing Salm river in full flood, and swam across. After covering twenty-five hellish miles and losing thirty men on the way, the survivors of Kampfgruppe Peiper - some seven hundred and seventy men in all - struggled into the German-held sanctuary at Wanne on Christmas Day.

They enjoyed only a brief respite before the remnants of the division were reorganised and sent back into battle at Bastogne on 30 December. Knittel was wounded the following day and taken out of the battle. The division fought on for another two weeks before retreating yet again to an area west of Cologne.

The Battle of the Bulge was over, and the Germans had suffered a rout. Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was reorganised yet again, and Kampfgruppe Peiper along with it. Back on German soil it was reinforced almost to its original strength, drawing troops from every source available, and sent to Hungary where it took part in an operation designed to break through the Russian front to the Danube. Hitler’s Own received another dreadful mauling, fighting in a sea of mud, and suffered appalling casualties. Unable to sustain its position the division fell back, against Hitler’s express but impossible command. Infuriated, the Fuhrer ordered that his elite bodyguard, which had fought fanatically for him in the toughest campaigns throughout the war, be stripped of its armband.

The war was lost, and on 8 May the order came for Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler to destroy its vehicles and armour. The men retreated rapidly westwards on foot, desperate to be captured by Americans rather than fall into the hands of vengeful Russians. Some men threw down their weapons, burned their uniforms and escaped into the mountains. The majority, however, crossed the Demarcation Line and were surprised to be casually waved through by American troops.

Once across, many tried to make it to their homes, but most were later arrested and put into camps, alongside three hundred thousand other prisoners. Some of the SS men, in a final irony, were among those housed in Ebensee. The senior officers were moved to the US Forces’ main interrogation centre at Camp King in Oberürsel, near Frankfurt - which had been the Luftwaffe’s primary interrogation centre. But Knittel had not served with the division in Hungary because of battle injuries sustained at Bastogne - the last of seven occasions on which he was wounded - and had disappeared.

Gustav Knittel had married a French woman when in Paris and they had had a baby boy together whom he had never seen. His wife had then moved from France to Germany to live in the family home in Ulm. Although she had not seen her husband since before the Ardennes offensive, and he had not returned to Ulm, Michel put her under surveillance. ‘I had to set up a system to find out any possible contact he might make with family or friends. I had my people pose as insurance agents and officials to approach the family without their knowledge.’

Among the agents activated to find Knittel was a beautiful, highly intelligent twenty-eight-year-old woman named Anna Konrad.
[180]
‘We created the legend for her that she was actually the wife of a high-ranking SS officer who had been arrested by the Allies and charged with war crimes.’ She posed as a fellow victim of Allied oppression, befriended Knittel’s wife and was soon accepted by the family.

Anna became a regular at the Knittel household. She confided her terror of the American Military Police and CIC agents, who constantly questioned her, and asked to be introduced to contacts who might help her obtain a new identity through ODESSA. The occasional visit became a regular event, and Anna spent long evenings with Knittel’s wife, a high-spirited if not very bright young woman in her late twenties. She became distraught at any mention of her husband’s disappearance, and demonstrated genuine devotion to him that was beyond doubt. Her worst fear, she confided, was that he might be dead. But months of contact and constant surveillance revealed nothing more than the fact that KnittePs wife was as ignorant of her husband’s whereabouts as CIC.

Knittel’s family and friends had been subjected to constant questioning for months before Michel took over the hunt. ‘I put a stop to the practice in the hope that the family would believe the heat was off, and pass this on to Knittel so he might think it safe for a visit. It seemed reasonable to believe he would surface - turn up somewhere, however briefly - to see his wife and child. I expected him to do so at Christmas, if only for a moment.’ Michel was so confident of this that he even cancelled a skiing trip he had planned to take over the holidays, but Christmas came and went and Knittel did not appear. ‘I went to midnight mass with Ted and found the service beautiful and moving.’ Michel now became convinced that he would show up over the New Year, and once more cancelled long-overdue leave. Again, there was no sign of the fugitive. Michel began to wonder whether the SS man might be dead after all.

And then Anna reported a breakthrough. On one of her visits to the Knittel household the wife appeared to be reborn and could not contain her joy and excitement as she passed on her wonderful news: her husband was alive! He had sent word that she was to be ready at a moment’s notice to meet him at a secret rendezvous. As she spoke, the depression that had dogged her lifted, and the light returned to her eyes.

A German agent now took over - one of Michel’s trusted informants who had been in the police - and arranged discreet, round-the-clock surveillance of the family house. A tense period of expectation followed, but as time passed and Knittel still did not appear it seemed that they had been fed a false lead. ‘Then, on the fifth of January, late at night, I got a report that his wife had left the house. She was followed to a remote area of the town where she disappeared in the dark. There were only three isolated houses in the vicinity and it was reasonable to presume she had gone into one of them, but we could not be certain.’ Further action posed a dilemma: to move on the houses but fail to capture Knittel would alert both man and wife. ‘I was following a hunch. I had no evidence that either Knittel or his wife were in any of the houses. It was a risk. I fought with myself whether to act or not, and followed my gut reaction and decided to strike.’

Michel and Ted Kraus called in a group of forty American troops and drove to the spot where Knittel’s wife had last been seen. The soldiers were told nothing about their mission, and Michel facetiously said to one that there had been a report of somebody stealing a pram. They were divided into four groups: one secured a perimeter around all the properties, while each of the other three was assigned a house. The troops were ordered to hold everyone they found and search each building from top to bottom.

‘I led a squad into one house and we quickly assembled everyone in the living room with guards over them. Frau Knittel was there, but not her husband.’ Michel climbed the stairs to the first floor, kicking open bedroom doors, searching under beds and inside wardrobes. He climbed a ladder into the attic. In the gloom beneath the eaves he made out a crouched man, very much the worse for wear, hiding in a corner. Michel ordered him to stand and clasp his hands behind his head. The man was unarmed and his papers identified him as Hans Jagomast, an agricultural labourer. Demobilisation documents stated that he had formerly been a corporal in the Wehrmacht. His head was shaved, his cheeks were bloated and he looked nothing at all like SS Major Gustav Knittel. ‘It looked like he had been through hard times,’ Ted Kraus said. ‘He hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks and was quite surprised that he had finally been caught. He admitted nothing and denied ever having been in the SS.’
[181]
The man said he had panicked when American soldiers had entered the house and that was the reason he had tried to hide.

Michel went carefully through his wallet and found a photograph of a woman, on the back of which was an inscription: FÜR GUSTEL, ALLES LIEBE - to Gustel, with love. Michel recognised the woman as Frau Knittel; Gustel was a form of endearment for Gustav. ‘So, Gustel,’ Michel said, ‘you changed your name to Hans Jagomast. But it’s Gustav, isn’t it - Gustav Knittel?’

Knittel said nothing.

‘You’ve done a good job to make yourself unrecognisable,’ Michel continued. ‘Take off your shirt and raise your arms!’

The standard SS tattoo denoting blood group was found under the left arm. Knittel sullenly admitted his real identity and said that the house they were at, number nineteen Blaicher Haag, belonged to his aunt’s husband, Alfred Schiebel.
[182]

As Knittel was brought out of the house under arrest, the commander of the American troops lounged against a wall, smoking a cigarette. He asked nonchalantly, ‘So now can you tell us who this joker is we’re freezing our arses off for in the middle of the night?’

Kraus told him they had picked up somebody important - Knittel, the SS officer suspected of murdering unarmed American prisoners at Malmédy. The American soldier’s easy manner evaporated, and for a moment he looked stunned. He turned his head towards the wall and began to sob. Later, he explained that his best friend had been one of those shot at the crossroads.

There was a fear that the prisoner’s life might be in danger once word spread among the GIs that he was wanted in connection with the Malmédy Massacre. Feelings ran very high against Knittel among the American troops, so Michel arranged to put him in a secure cell guarded by men he could trust.

‘How could you hope to stay free?’ Michel asked. ‘Everyone is looking for you after this terrible crime.’

The surrender of Germany had devastated him, Knittel said, and he felt the end of the world had come. At first he had no wish to carry on but, ironically, the will to live came from the sight of Jewish survivors. Unaware that Michel was a Jew, Knittel said, ‘At the end of the war I was shocked to see a Jew in the street still alive. I thought that these accursed people would have been finally wiped out for ever. How was it possible that any were still alive and free? When I saw that the Jews had managed to avoid extinction, that gave me hope. I said to myself, “If those dumb Jews can survive, I can survive. I’m at least as smart as any damn Jew.”’

Michel said nothing.

Once in jail, Knittel seemed to take pleasure in reasserting himself as an SS major. He spoke repeatedly of his amazement at having been caught. He had been so careful, changing his identity and appearance, working quietly on a farm with no outside contact with anyone. ‘It was the only time I ever came out of my hiding place,’ he said. ‘For a few hours at midnight. You know, I was absolutely sure I would never be caught. Never! NEVER!’ Curiosity about how he had been trapped began to obsess him. ‘How is it possible you caught me? Tell me!’ Michel allowed the obsession to grow, aware that doubt and curiosity would gnaw at the prisoner and lead him in time to suspect his own wife.