The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (48 page)

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 organised 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 honour’. 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 bin, 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 per cent of the sentences of war criminals under review were being recommended for remission or drastic reduction. In an extraordinary decision, the US 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 blooded 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 mid-morning two Italian soldiers emerged from a dug-out 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-martial 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 defence 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 behaviour 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 US 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 US 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 Thunder-birds 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.
[205]

The American Commander-in-Chief of European Command commuted the six remaining Malmédy death sentences on 31 January 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.’
[206]

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’ favour. An inexorable process had begun that would eventually set all the Landsberg ‘Malmédy Boys’ free. Knittel was released in 1954.
[207]
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 non-family member to be selected as company secretary.
[208]

IX - Success

The Polyglot Institute began to attract increasing interest. At first people walked in off the street, then, as word spread, actors and celebrities started to take the course. The press wrote articles about Michel and his method, describing him as a language wizard, and the institute became fashionable among the rich and famous.

‘I considered my school as a laboratory. Early on I developed a system that promised a high level of achievement in six weeks. A very short time then.’ The system would continue to evolve through ceaseless innovation and experiment over the next twenty-five years until, with the occasional refinement and polish, it became what it is today. In three days students are now guaranteed a comprehensive knowledge of a western language’s grammar, together with a functional vocabulary, enabling them to write, read and converse in all tenses - without the need to memorise by rote, take notes or complete homework.

In the early days, however, not all the citizens of Beverly Hills burned with the desire to learn. One man wandered into the school, took a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and waved it under Michel’s nose. ‘That’s the only language I need in this world - US Green!’ Michel also found it expedient to change the name of his school to the Michel Thomas Language Centre after he discovered that nobody seemed to know what ‘polyglot’ meant.