Michel Thomas

Michel Thomas (February 3, 1914 – January 8, 2005) was a polyglot linguist and language teacher. He survived Nazi persecution and served in the French Resistance and with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps during WWII. Although several aspects of his war record were challenged, most notably by the Los Angeles Times, Thomas felt vindicated when the Army awarded him a Silver Star in 2004. After World War II, Thomas developed a unique language-teaching method, which was acclaimed by many of his students, including a number of celebrities, who said it enabled them to become conversationally proficient after only a few days' study.

At the end of his career, Thomas was paid fees up to $25,000 each by a clientele of diplomats, industrialists and celebrities including Raquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Emma Thompson, Woody Allen and Grace Kelly, (who had to learn French rapidly after becoming engaged to Prince Rainier of Monaco). Thomas guaranteed his students would never forget the languages he taught them, and he provided free refresher classes if needed, no matter how long the intervening gap in time.

Life story

As chronicled in his biography, Test of Courage by Christopher Robbins, Thomas led a remarkable life. He was the lone survivor of three World War II concentration/slave-labor camps (Gardanne, Les Milles, Le Vernet); he helped liberate Dachau (p. 180-181); he took LSD with author Aldous Huxley (p. 269); his idea for an artificial island university was stolen by the Prince of Monaco, who used it to build a casino (p. 272-273); he narrowly escaped Gestapo chieftain Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon (p. 111-113); he rescued 10 million Nazi Party ID cards from destruction (p. 187-188); and his post-war undercover work led to the arrest of hundreds of Nazis who had plotted to resurrect the Third Reich (pp. 193-197, 237-245). Over the years, his stories have been questioned by several newspapers, a documentary film and a Justice Department Nazi hunter, but Thomas went to great lengths to provide documentation for his accounts, which were supported by another Nazi hunter, a former National Archives documents expert, former Army colleagues and others.

Thomas was often coy about revealing his age and birthplace. From 1949 to 1987, newspapers reported that he was born in France (the specific location varied from story to story). From 1987 forward, Thomas said he was born Moniek (Moshe) Kroskof in Łódź, Poland, to a wealthy Jewish family who owned textile factories. Seeing the young boy suffer from antisemitic taunts of the local residents, his parents sent him to live in Breslau, Germany, with an aunt. In Germany, although he was still the only Jew in his peer group, he excelled and managed to fit in fairly comfortably. However, the rise of the Nazis drove him to leave for the University of Bordeaux in France in 1933, and subsequently the Sorbonne.

World War II

When France fell to the Nazis, Thomas escaped to Nice, which was nominally neutral under the Vichy government; here he changed his name to Michel Thomas so he could operate in the French Resistance movement more easily. According to his biography, he was arrested, nevertheless, and spent four months in solitary confinement before being released; he was subsequently arrested once more and sent to Le Vernet in the Pyrenees, then to the mines at Gardanne, near Aix-en-Provence, for slave labor until his lungs deteriorated, after which he served as slave labor cutting wood in the Alps before finally being sent to Les Milles, also near Aix-en-Provence, from where Jews were sent to the death camps at Auschwitz. Thomas managed to escape all three, including once after he voluntarily returned to Le Vernet when his girlfriend secured his release and he didn't approve of the circumstances, according to his biography.

In August, 1942, Thomas escaped Les Milles using forged papers, and once more began recruiting Jews to join the Resistance. In January, 1943, he was again arrested and, according to his biography, personally interrogated by Klaus Barbie. Although fluent in German, Thomas maintained the facade of a simple apolitical French artist who did not understand the German language, even when Barbie tested him by ordering another officer, in German, to shoot him. His lack of reaction convinced Barbie that he was telling the truth, and he was released. He would later testify at the trial of Barbie in 1987. But prosecutor Pierre Truche asked the jury to disregard Thomas' testimony. As reported in the Chicago Tribune at the time, Truche told jurors, "With the exception of Mr. Thomas, all the witnesses are of good faith." Several French newspapers mocked Thomas' testimony. However, Thomas was defended by other experts, including Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Klarsfeld said Thomas provided information before the trial that "he could not have known unless he was there."

A month after encountering Barbie, Thomas was again arrested, by the Milice, the Vichy French paramilitary secret police, who tortured him for six hours. After being released, Thomas joined a commando group in Grenoble, assisting the OSS, then the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, after quickly teaching himself the English language. Shortly after the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau on April 29, 1945, he interrogated crematorium workers, who gave him information about the identity and whereabouts of Emil Mahl, the 'hangman of Dachau' whom Thomas arrested two days later. Mahl was later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death, although the sentence was later commuted.

In the postwar aftermath, Thomas discovered that his parents and most of his family had been murdered at Auschwitz.

Rescue of Historic Cache of Nazi Documents

In the final week of the war, Thomas said, he was given a tip to go to a paper mill in Freimann, Germany, near Munich, where Nazi leaders had sent a convoy of trucks bearing unknown but important cargo. At the mill, Thomas discovered a mountain of Nazi documents that had been sent there to be pulped. These included the worldwide membership card file of more than 10 million members of the Nazi party.

There is debate about Thomas' account. According to his biography, he pressured Occupation Government authorities, who he says did not understand the significance of the files, to properly secure them. When they failed to act, "I did something that I would never usually do," Thomas told his biographer. "I leaked its existence to the press. It was picked up, and only then did the military government take action." His biography says the documents were then "moved under guard to the Army Document Center in Munich." The Los Angeles Times, after reviewing 1945 newspaper articles and military records, noted several problems with this version of events. First, there wasn't any press coverage when Thomas said there was. It came many months later and wasn't prompted by a leak. Nor did it cause military officials to move the cards to a safe location. The transfer was already well underway when the press coverage began. Also, military records say the 7th Army, which Thomas worked for, had "abandoned" the cards at the mill. The real hero, according to October 1945 articles in the New York Times and London Express, was mill owner Hans Huber, who disobeyed Nazi orders to destroy the cards. Huber was also the person who told 7th Army officials about the cards in May and, after they did nothing to save the cache, persisted when Patton's 3rd Army arrived, the articles said. Thanks to Huber and a German woman, the files were "rediscovered" that fall by a 3rd Army officer, Major William D. Browne, who called a press conference. Browne's report of September 1945 said the documents had originally been visited in May by agents in a small unit of the CIC -- of which Thomas was one of the few German-speaking members. CIC archives said the agent from Thomas' unit who went to the mill in May was Francesco Quaranta. But Thomas' supporters, citing an interview with Quaranta's widow, say Quaranta never mentioned any role in the discovery.

Maj. Browne's report led Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force headquarters finally to undertake a full-scale cataloging and recovery effort, and the rescued document cache became the subject of press coverage. The documents subsequently became the centerpiece of the Berlin Document Center and the membership cards were instrumental in Allied efforts to denazify Germany, and in the Nuremberg Trials. The BDC was maintained under American control until 1994. The entire collection was microfilmed and is in the U.S. National Archives; the original documents were turned over to the German Bundesarchiv.

World War II Stories Questioned

In 2001, after publication of Thomas's biography, Test of Courage by British author Christopher Robbins, a publicist for Thomas and Robbins asked Los Angeles Times staff writer and former humor columnist Roy Rivenburg to profile Thomas. The result was a lengthy story critiquing the book.

The Los Angeles Times used military records and eyewitness accounts to raise questions about Thomas's WWII stories, including his claims to have been an officer in the U.S. Army and to have accompanied the first American troops as they broke into Dachau. For instance, the newspaper reported that the Army had no record of Thomas' service. It also found National Archives records bearing Thomas' signature over the words "civilian assistant." Thomas' supporters criticized the newspaper for focusing on such a minor detail instead of noting that his work was praised by superiors and colleagues in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).

Regarding Dachau, the Times interviewed an eyewitness and several experts who disputed his biography's claim that Thomas accompanied the very first battalion of U.S. troops as it entered the Dachau concentration camp on the morning of April 29, 1945. Thomas' supporters say he never claimed he was with the first battalion into Dachau, only that he arrived later that day. However, Thomas had repeated his original story in a sworn deposition filed with his libel lawsuit: "On April 29, 1945, the 3rd battalion of the 157th Regiment liberated the Dachau concentration camp. I accompanied these troops." After his legal team interviewed the commander of that battalion, Felix Sparks, Thomas began insisting he never said he was with the 3rd battalion. Thomas' supporters again criticized the Times for focusing on a minor detail and ignoring evidence that Thomas was indeed at Dachau, including photographs he took and documentation of his interrogation of crematorium workers. They also produced statements from Sparks and another Dachau expert claiming The Times had misled them in claiming Thomas said he was with the 3rd battalion.

Thomas's account of the rescue of the Nazi ID cards was also challenged by the L.A. Times, which credited a German man, Hans Huber, with saving the files. The newspaper based its conclusion on 1945 articles in the New York Times, London Express and other newspapers, as well as interviews with George Leaman, who penned a modern history of the files for the Berlin Document Center, and Stefan Heym, a U.S. Army journalist who wrote a lengthy history of the documents shortly after World War II. Leaman scoffed at Thomas' claim that he "immediately understood how important" the ID cards were because they specifically mention the Nazi Party. Leaman pointed out there is no reference to the Nazi Party on the cards: "It wouldn't be obvious from the cards themselves what organization they were from." Heym, in an interview after being shown Thomas' account, also rejected Thomas' version of events. Thomas' supporters have challenged Heym's reliability, noting that some of his wartime reporting was censored by the Army because of its anti-Occupation tenor, and because he later became an East German communist. But a former director of the Berlin Document Center and other experts had told the L.A. Times that Heym's account was the most authoritative. Thomas also discounted Leaman's credibility because Leaman cited Heym's writings, even though he hadn't read them in eight years. Thomas' supporters have not explained the discrepancies between Thomas' story and the 1945 articles in the New York Times and London Express. However, when Thomas sued the Times for defamation, he hired a private investigator, who found documentation in the National Archives corresponding to Thomas's account and submitted it, along with other documentation, to Robert Wolfe, the National Archives' principal expert in captured German war documents. Wolfe reviewed the materials and produced a monograph crediting Thomas as the first Allied person to see the files. Based on Wolfe's analysis, Thomas was credited with the cache discovery in a February 2006 issue of the U.S. Attorney's Bulletin, in an article by a career prosecutor in the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

The Times article caused outrage among Thomas's wartime comrades. Members of the 45th Infantry Division association sent signed cards to the L.A. Times protesting the article, and several comrades who hadn't seen Thomas in nearly 60 years came forward with sworn affidavits to the U.S. Army verifying his wartime heroism. In October 2001, Thomas sued the Times for libel. He didn't challenge the article's factual accuracy. Instead, he contended it falsely implied he had exaggerated or fabricated aspects of his life story, especially about his World War II record, and he said the newspaper systematically ignored documents he showed them to back up his accounts. Two of Thomas's CIC colleagues from WWII filed affidavits on his behalf in the suit; one stated he had been interviewed by Rivenburg but never mentioned in the article. Times attorneys said the article was fair and accurate, and they noted, for example, that the Dachau photos Thomas submitted as evidence were dated "May 1945," whereas the camp was liberated April 29.

Under California's anti-SLAPP law, which was enacted to prevent wealthy plaintiffs from filing frivolous suits to chill free speech rights, Thomas had to prove the article was defamatory on its face before he could proceed to trial. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, stating, "A reasonable reader or juror might conclude, after reading the article and considering the various points of view presented, that Thomas had in fact lied about his past. But no reasonable juror could find that Defendants intended to convey that impression. At most, a reasonable juror would find that Defendants intended to raise questions about Thomas' story."

Thomas appealed to the 9th Circuit Court, which upheld the ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Under the anti-SLAPP law, Thomas was forced to pay all of the Times' legal fees, totaling $98,000. The newspaper's lawyers tried to collect a larger amount, but were reprimanded by the judge for excessive billing, and ordered to lower their fees substantially.

Meanwhile, the Army researched archival records concerning Thomas's combat valor in France in 1944, and granted him the Silver Star 60 years after his original nomination for the decoration. During the week of Memorial Day 2004, former Senator Bob Dole and Senator John Warner, along with the Ambassador of France, Jean-David Levitte, presented the medal to Thomas at the newly-dedicated National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. The same week, Thomas was honored at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at its 'Salute to Liberators' of Nazi concentration camps.

Post-war

In 1947, Thomas emigrated to the United States, where he opened a language school in Beverly Hills, California, the 'Polyglot Institute'. He later renamed the school 'The Michel Thomas Language Centre' because, as he said, in America "no one knew what 'polyglot' means". The success of the school led to tours and a second school in New York, as well as a successful series of language tapes and books. At the time of Thomas' death in 2005, the series was the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom.

Thomas remained unmarried until late in life, when he wed Alice Burns. After a son and daughter, the marriage ended in divorce.

In 2006 to counteract The Daily Mail's sucessful free language course giveaways, The Daily Express gave away a number of Michel Thomas language CDs free from T.M. Retail and WH Smith outlets.

External links

• michelthomas.com - his official site, including a bio and testimonials from some of his students
• michelthomas.org - website with detailed information regarding defamation suit against Los Angeles Times, including downloadable historical documents
• casp.net/thomas.html - copy of court ruling rejecting Thomas' libel lawsuit against the Los Angeles Times.
• offkilter.org/thomas.html - webpage that debunks Thomas, prepared by L.A. Times staff writer Roy Rivenburg.
• Language teaching system - US Patent 6565358

Blinded By Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality - Chris Mooney, Columbia Journalism Review. A valuable warning to Wikipedians about how some methods used to 'balance' coverage can lead to biased, inaccurate and misleading reporting. Focuses on criticism by L.A. Times editor John Carroll of an article in his paper debunking the lack of scientific foundation for a link between abortion and breast cancer.