A REVIEW OF MY BACKGROUND AND QUALIFICATIONS

 

My name is Robert Wolfe.  For thirty-four years I was an archivist at the National Archives, functioning as its senior specialist for captured German and related records. I served during World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters, and was awarded a Combat Infantry Badge and Purple Heart.  I was also an official in the U.S. Army occupying Germany from April 1945 to November 1948.

 

I joined the National Archives in 1961, upon concluding service as a member of the American Historical Association team microfilming captured German records at the World War II Records Center in Alexandria, Virginia.  My work also included serving as archival consultant to the Department of State for the Berlin Document Center (BDC) and as Special Adviser to Eli Wiesel for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Among my publications are two major edited works: Captured German and Related Records: A National Archives Conference (1974) and Americans as Proconsuls: U.S. Military Government in Germany and Japan, 1944‑52 (1984).

 

I taught history at Brooklyn College, at George Washington University, and at Wesleyan University, where I presented a course on the Nuremberg trials.

 

As archival consultant to the Department of State for the BDC from 1968 to 1994, I was the chief American negotiator for the return to the West German government of original captured Nazi Party personnel and person-related records assembled by the victors at the BDC.  During that time, I wrote official reports and presented and published papers concerning the history of those records, specifically including reference to the discovery and capture of the Nazi Party records found at the Freimann paper mill.  One such publication was a Preface to The Holdings of the Berlin Document Center: A Guide to the Collections (BDC, Berlin, 1994).  That preface was entitled "A Short History of the Berlin Document Center."

 

I am currently under contract as a historical consultant at the National Archives, advising the Interagency Working Group (IWG) implementing the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. My function is to advise the IWG regarding the historical context of Federal agency records currently under consideration for declassification.

 

My experience in postwar Germany, and thereafter as an archivist and historian of captured German records, provides perhaps unique expertise to evaluate the evidence advanced as proof that Michel Thomas was the original discoverer of the Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = NSDAP) Master Membership card file (Zentralkartei) and related records.

 

      Immediately below I offer a brief summary of the evidence, both circumstantial and direct, that leads me to believe that Michel Thomas was the first Allied soldier to discover the NSDAP membership cards and related files awaiting pulping at a paper mill in Freimann, Bavaria just outside Munich in early May 1945.  I have followed this evaluation with a Commentary section, including footnotes.  That section includes a more detailed discussion of the evidence I construe as substantiating his discovery, along with a discussion of contrary insinuations by Los Angeles Times reporter Roy Rivenburg in his article "Larger Than Life" implying that Michel Thomas was not a "real" CIC Agent, and was not at the liberation of Dachau.

 

A REVIEW OF THE CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

 

o     Michel Thomas has ample documentation of his service as an Agent in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).  Regardless of his citizenship status, no reasonable person could question that Thomas served as a bona fide CIC Agent, based on the available documents, photos, and statements of his CIC colleagues as presented in his biography, Test of Courage.  These have been further supplemented by sworn statements of CIC colleagues and additional documentary evidence offered in a defamation suit Thomas brought against the Los Angeles Times in October 2001.

 

o       During Spring 1945, Thomas was one of about twenty Agents in the 45th Division CIC.  This unit was stationed in southern Germany and moved with the advancing troops of the 45th Infantry Division.  A log of the movements of the 45th Div. CIC shows that on April 29, 1945 they were in Schrobenhausen, in the vicinity of Dachau and Munich; from May 1 to June 15, 1945, they were in the Munich area itself.  Thus, Thomas' unit was in the area where the files were discovered, at the time they were discovered.

 

o     Separate U.S. Army reports from 1945 found at the National Archives confirm that it was an unnamed person or persons in the 45th Div. CIC who made the original discovery of the NSDAP Master Membership file at a paper mill in Freimann.  The most detailed of these reports, written by Major William D. Browne of Third Army MG Special Branch in October 1945, mentions that Hans Huber was the manager of the mill, the Josef Wirth Papier‑Pappen und Wellpappenfabrik.  That report states that Huber "reported the files to CIC officers and Military Government officers in early May and again in July" [emphasis added].

      A Seventh Army G‑2 Historical Report dated 20 June 1945 states that in May "An estimated 68,000 kilos of Party records and documents of Reichsleitung SA were discovered by agents of the 45th CIC Detachment in a paper mill at Freimann ([map grid] X‑8763).  Included among the papers were all Party membership cards with identification photos, documents relating to the Party, SA courts, and SA administration."

 

o       The 45th Div. CIC Agent credited by the official History of the CIC with the discovery of the documents, Francesco Quaranta, could not speak or read German according to his widow, who was recently interviewed.  She also said that he never mentioned to her finding the files, during or after the war.  The date on which the CIC history places Quaranta's discovery, May 20, 1945, is well past the "early May" date cited in original Army reports of the discovery.  The CIC history also states that Quaranta "was advised" of the presence of the files at the paper mill, without specifying who advised him.

 

o        Walter Wimer, a surviving member of the 45th Division CIC who filed a sworn Declaration on behalf of Michel Thomas in his case against the Los Angeles Times, states in his Declaration that of the roughly twenty members of the unit, perhaps five or six spoke German, including himself and Thomas.  No other member of the 45th Division CIC ever claimed to have discovered the Master file at the paper mill.

 

A REVIEW OF THE DIRECT EVIDENCE

 

o     Michel Thomas has in his possession today an original decree (Erlaß) signed by Heinrich Himmler that is demonstrably from the same set of correspondence known to have been found originally at the paper mill in May 1945. Contemporaneous US Army records list the files of the Reichsstatthalter in Bayern (Bavarian State Government) as sent to the BDC sometime during December-January 1945/6. Between 1965 and 1994 the entire collection was microfilmed at the BDC for deposit in the United States National Archives.

 

There is no plausible scenario by which Thomas could have come into possession of this original document other than having found it himself at the mill.  The letter is itself unimportant‑‑a piece of routine ministerial correspondence appointing one Ludwig Dittmar to a government position in the State of Bavaria; however, it has profound evidentiary value to Thomas because an Abschrift, or retyped true copy, of the same letter was in the Reichsstatthalter in Bayern section of the files sent to the BDC.

 

The Abschrift's authenticity is further validated by the signed annotation on its obverse of Himmler's Under Secretary at the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Dr. Hans Stuckart, who was responsible for the Reich civil service system. Stuckart's annotation states that the true copies are intended for deposit in the files of the Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior, so that Dittmar might retain for his personal file the originals adorned with Hitler's and Himmler's signatures.  It is the Himmler original that Michel Thomas took with him from the paper mill in 1945 and has in his possession to this day.

 

 

COMMENTARY

 

REGARDING THOMAS' DISCOVERY OF THE NSDAP MASTER FILE

 

      Michel Thomas' most important contribution to history and justice is unquestionably his discovery, identification, and preservation of the Nazi Party personnel card files and related records awaiting pulping at the Josef Wirth Papier‑Pappen‑ Wellpappenfabrik (paper, cardboard, and corrugated-paper mill) located in the Munich suburb of Freimann.^[1] Whatever success the victors had in the punishment of war criminals and the denazification of Germany was based in considerable part on the possession and access to these personnel records of the Nazi Party and its subordinate formations,^[2] affiliated associations,^[3] and superintended organizations,^[4] which were discovered, identified, and reported by CIC Agent Thomas. With these records, in conjunction with the Third Reich ministerial and military records captured in wartime or seized postwar, the occupiers were able to apprehend war criminals and oust untrustworthy German officials, and ultimately to empower those trustworthy Germans who have developed a viable democracy over the past half century.

 

      As noted above, I wrote the Preface to The Holdings of the Berlin Document Center: A Guide to the Collections (BDC, Berlin, 1994). Michel Thomas' account of his discovery of the files accurately fits the context I described in that Preface, but his name does not appear in the initial CIC report because his extra official status required a

signature by an American citizen, a function apparently performed by Thomas' CIC colleague, Francesco Quaranta.

      At the time of his discovery of the Nazi Party card files in early May, when Thomas persuaded a US army unit occupying the Freimann area to post a guard, he took a historically unimportant--but crucial evidence in this context--original document from the Reichsstatthalter in Bayern files. This was the ribbon copy of a directive, dated 10 January 1945, promoting Dr. Ludwig Dittmar to the rank of Ministerialdirektor in the Bavarian Ministry of Interior as of 1 December 1944; it bears the penned signature of Heinrich Himmler as Reich Minister of Interior.

      Recently, I was given the opportunity to examine that document still in Mr. Thomas' possession. Its letterhead, paper stock, type fonts, and physical condition are precisely compatible with the Reichsführer SS/Reichsminister des Innern letterhead on documents of the period at one time in National Archives custody prior to transfer to the Federal German Archives in 1962. Himmler's pen and ink signature, unlike a photographic or electrographic copy, raised a palpable track on the obverse, which along with its type fonts, assures that this is indubitably a ribbon copy.

      Beyond these external characteristics, the internal content comports with the context of authenticated related Third Reich documentation. To centralize civil government authority stringently in the dictator of the Third Reich, all state and local governments were headed by governors selected by Hitler and appointed by the Reich Minister of Interior. This was emphatically the case in Bavaria with its long history of craving autonomy, if not sovereignty, against central German authority, whether Hapsburg or Hohenzollern.^[5]

      State governors had little real authority in the Third Reich, merely carrying out Der Führer's instructions for civil administration under the supervision of the Reich Ministry of Interior. Actual regional and local authority was exercised by the Nazi Party Gauleiter, early Party members steeped in Nazi ideology who could be trusted to carry out its brutal suppression of all opposition and its extreme racial policies.

      Ritter Franz von Epp was the governor Hitler selected for Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazi "Movement." A nobleman, a World War I general in the Bavarian army, and an unreconciled monarchist, he was prominent in the failed 1920 Kapp Putsch to overthrow the Weimar Republic, as well as the aborted Hitler Putsch of November 1923, and served as a member of the Nazi Party Reichstag delegation from 1930 to 1933.^[6]

      Dr. Ludwig Dittmar had served the Bavarian state administration at a progression of hierarchical levels when Himmler (who had succeeded Wilhelm Frick as Minister of Interior in August 1943), citing a certificate (Urkunde) signed by Hitler, promoted Dittmar to the rank of Ministerialdirektor in the Bavarian Government.^[7] The letterhead on Dittmar's promotion flaunts Himmler's capacity as Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police--a commingled Party and government post--above his title of Minister of Interior--a mere central government cabinet position.^[8]

      In his capacity as Under Secretary at the Reich Ministry of Interior, Dr. Hans Stuckart^[9] directed the preparation of two contemporaneous true copies (Abschriften) of the Dittmar appointment letter. These copies bore only a typed Himmler signature. Along with the (Urkunde) signed by Hitler and the ribbon copy (Erlaß) signed by Himmler, Stuckart sent the two Abschriften to the  Reichsstatthalter in Bayern for deposit in Bavarian State Ministry files,^[10] so that the Urkunde and Erlaß could be given to Dittmar for his personnel file. Thomas found the Urkunde among the Bavarian officials' personnel files awaiting pulping at Freimann.^[11]

      Epp's personal papers and correspondence, dating mainly before his 1933 appointment as Bavarian governor, were retrieved from his Munich residence on May 29 and 31, 1945 and ended up in the United States inaccurately designated as files of the Reichsstatthalter in Bayern.^[12] The true files of that provenance, mainly dating from 1933 to 1945, were found on 20 December 1945 in a building located at No. 7

Prinzregentenstrasse, Munich,^[13] and shipped to the BDC sometime during December-January 1945/46. Evidently this was yet another stash of records brought in from the Freimann paper mill and "abandoned" by 7th Army MG Special Branch. Among them was one of the true copies signed by Hans Stuckart.^[14]

 

‑‑ Thomas' Attempts to Secure and Preserve the Files

 

      On or about May 2, 1945, Michel Thomas found at the Freimann paper mill the ribbon copy of the letter promoting Ludwig Dittmar bearing the infamous Heinrich Himmler's penned signature. Thomas retained it to demonstrate to Munich Military Government officers the great intelligence value of the tons of records awaiting pulping at the mill. After mid‑June 1945, when the 45th Division CIC departed the Munich area, Thomas' CIC assignments gave him no opportunity to return to Freimann, but he kept Himmler's Erlaß, the very document he still has in his possession. Between June 1945 and today he has had no opportunity for access to any document in the Reichsstatthalter files.

      Some days after his initial discovery, Thomas was asked when the records would be removed from the Freimann site so the guard unit could be relieved. He "advised" his fellow CIC Agent Francesco S. Quaranta‑‑unlike Agent Thomas an American citizen but lacking knowledge of German^[15]‑‑about the records at the Freimann site. Quaranta signed an official report--so detailed, knowledgeable, and precise that it was indubitably drafted by Thomas--in order to justify the massive transportation effort required to remove the records to a secure location for processing.^[16]

      Thomas recalls that he asked a Major Baer and a Sergeant Buss of the Munich Military Government Detachment^[17] to take custody of the tons of what Thomas remembers as reasonably intact and arranged records at the time of his discovery. Beginning just one week after Quaranta signed Agent Thomas' CIC report, on May 27 books and files, on May 30 NSDAP membership cards, and on June 7 Blutorden lists, were brought into Munich from the Freimann paper mill, presumably on Baer's order. As early as June 22 1945, a monthly 7th Army CIC report covering May 20 to June 20, already reported "an estimated 68,000 kilos of Party records . . . were discovered by agents of the 45th CIC Det in a paper mill at Freimann."^[18] There was no further follow‑up, probably because Baer's detachment left Munich when 7th Army turned Munich and Bavaria over to Third Army by June 20, 1945.

      On June 18/19, the newly-arrived 3rd Army Intelligence Center Documents Section^[19] discovered in the Nazi Party administration buildings (NSDAP Verwaltungsgebäude, Arcisstrasse Nrs. 8-10) membership cards for that part of the alphabet from T to Z covering most of the Gaue occupied by British and Soviet forces, It is not clear whether these files had ever been sent to or retrieved from the Freimann paper mill.

      From that time, more than two months elapsed--including a muffed opportunity in July when Huber claims he again reported the records still at Freimann to American authorities--until the day in mid-September when a cleaning woman brought the card files in "a Munich warehouse" to the attention of Major William D. Browne, chief of OMG Detachment E‑205, (Regierungsbezirk Oberbayern) Special Branch.

      On September 20, four bags containing approximately twenty to thirty thousand membership cards were found by 3rd Army MG Munich city detachment E-201 Special Branch in its rooms on Cuvillierstrasse. These had been retrieved from the Reichsfinanzhof where they had been "abandoned by 7th Army Headquarters CIC." Further investigation in the latter building disclosed approximately 6 to 7 million cards, all of which had been retrieved from "a paper mill near Munich." By September 21, Third Army was already reporting that there were loose cards that

would require approximately 15 2 1/2 ton trucks to transport.^[20]

      If these had been "abandoned" by 7th Army G5 in mid-June as Major Browne assumed,^[21] then his own MG detachment was even more culpable for neglecting from June through July until September those Nazi Party files

already assembled by 7th Army MG in Munich, let alone the remainder still at the paper mill. Thomas remains suspicious that the reasonably well ordered files he last examined at Freimann--as were those Major Browne found "abandoned" in Munich--in the interim had been deliberately jumbled and nearly buried when re-discovered at Freimann in September.^[22]

      It is astonishing that Third Army Military Government in Munich was either unaware or gave no priority to the records stored in "a warehouse under its control"--presumably the Reichsfinanzhof^[23]--until sometime in September 1945, when the charlady recognized the nature of those documents, and brought them to the attention of Major Browne.  He then took action to round up Nazi records still in or already brought back to Munich; eventually he was also retrieving those left at Freimann. But in his somewhat officious zeal, although his lengthy final report plainly shows otherwise, he played down the role of his 7th Army Military Government and CIC predecessors, and glorified his German informants Herr Huber and the charlady. His report, however, does record Huber as stating that he showed the records to CIC officers early in May, which conforms to Thomas' dating of his initial discovery.^[24]

      Evidently, because of the characteristic slippage attending changes of command, more than two months elapsed between Michel Thomas' coup of May 2 and the charlady's discovery in September, although he had exerted himself beyond the call of duty to assure exploitation of his momentous windfall.

 

‑‑ George Leaman's Curbstone Evaluation

 

      Roy Rivenburg cites as authoritative George Leaman's unfounded derogation of Michel Thomas' competence to identify the Nazi Party documents. On the face of it, Leaman was insufficiently informed to offer such a curbstone opinion. His competent inventory of the well ordered BDC files is the above mentioned The Holdings of the Berlin Document Center: A Guide to the Collections, for which I wrote the Preface.  Leaman's inventory was compiled in the 1990s, and benefited

much from previous US intelligence analyses, descriptions and re‑descriptions which were based primarily on the initial interrogations of several arrested Nazi Party record‑keepers.^[25]

      Leaman apparently made little attempt to explore the odyssey of the files between April 1945 and December 1945, before they arrived at the BDC in Berlin.^[26] He seems unaware or has forgotten that the card files were evacuated to several paper mills for pulping and reached Berlin by way of various Munich buildings and repositories--not to mention some files that detoured through the Ministerial Collection Center (MCC) located in a former explosives factory at Fürstenhagen, twelve miles southeast of Kassel.^[27]

      Leaman's suggestion that Michel Thomas could not have identified the cards as Nazi Party records is absurd.^[28]  True, only the application form for Party membership bears the full official party title as a heading in bold print, but both central and regional membership cards in both their pre‑ and post‑1937 forms bear the words Mitglieds Nr. (Members Number) or Mitgliedskarte (Membership Card), plus the word Ortsgruppe (Local Group). More obvious were the letterheads on the voluminous Nazi Party correspondence and memoranda also awaiting pulping at Freimann. Thomas' previous experience in Germany, where 7th Army CIC

had been active for weeks in targeting Third Reich files including card files, coupled with his knowledge of German, would have provided more than enough background knowledge for him to quickly recognize that the cards he was scrutinizing were important Party membership cards.  The volume of cards would also have made their significance apparent.

      Rivenburg's nitpicking point that Thomas' could not recall the color of the cards is also absurd: people obviously recall only some details but not others of events they experienced nearly six decades before. In fact, the cards are color-coded in at least eight pastel shades or borders, which Thomas need not have bothered to note, let alone recall, in order to evaluate on the spot the importance of his find.

 

‑‑Leaman's Endorsement of Stefan Heym's Account As Authoritative

 

      Apparently Leaman recognized the need to support his supposition, but he offered only the secondhand reporting and subsequent fictional embroidery of Stefan Heym as more "on the mark" than Thomas’ account.^[29]  This was a poor choice indeed.  Heym's accounts do not even address what happened to the cards in the spring of 1945, other than a passing reference to Huber's early May report to CIC agents which at any rate supports Thomas' version of events.  From Heym's unpublished account deposited in the Cambridge University Library,^[30] and in its fictional sequel, "A True Story," published in The Cannibals and Other Stories (Leipzig, 1958), pages 38-54,^[31] it is clear that Heym's source was Hans Huber, whom he interviewed in the fall of 1945 after Major Browne's rediscovery of the files gained international publicity.  Heym's avowed pretext was his concern to protect Huber from likely retribution from his fellow Germans for turning over the files.  In both accounts, however, Heym's polemical real purpose is to vent his contempt for the United States and the CIC, a contempt he apparently maintained to the end of his life.

      My direct personal experience of Heym's attitude towards the United States derives from the early summer of 1945. I was assigned as US Army press censor of an overt U. S. Army German‑language paper, the

Süddeutsche Mitteilungen, published in Heidelberg to instruct and inform the indigenous population of the region surrounding that city. On one occasion I was obliged to excise hostile criticism of American occupation policy by U.S. Army editorial writer 1st Lt. Stefan Heym.

      Heym was seconded to Heidelberg temporarily as local editor. Neither his predecessor (Eugene Jolas, prewar editor of the Paris literary magazine, transition), nor his successor (Corporal Irwin Strauss) gave me any reason to use my blue pencil.  But Heym, for the

one and only issue he edited, drafted a virulent attack on American occupation policy. This violated a Four Power agreement that any criticism of one anothers’ occupation policies was to be conducted confidentially rather than ventilated before the German public.  Unable to persuade Heym to accept my objections‑‑based strictly on military regulations regardless of possible validity of some of his criticism‑‑we pulled the switch on the presses until the offending lines were purged.

      After extensive travel in the United States during 1949-50, Heym defected to Soviet occupied East Germany. There he continued to hold in contempt American foreign policy, the US Army and its ignorant "CIC boys," reiterating his "low opinion of the CIC people and their ilk,"^[32] to say nothing of his contempt for the Federal Republic of Germany, where since 1990 he nevertheless enjoyed freedom of speech to the day of his recent death. To be sure, his ingrained suspicion of all authority had long since turned against the since defunct Deutsche Demokratische Republik (East German government) as well.

  

 

REGARDING THOMAS' SERVICE AS A BONA FIDE CIC AGENT

 

      I dwell only briefly on a few instances where cogent evidence was furnished Roy Rivenburg‑‑and obdurately ignored by him. The official "History of the Counterintelligence Corps" registers that "Agents Thomas and [Frederick J.] White  . . . informed . . . that the town for which they were heading was in German hands. . . . collected tactical information about the situation ahead and forwarded it to Target Force Headquarters, along with a report of initial security measures they had instituted at Hersbruck."^[33]  Mention of "Agent Thomas" by name in such an active capacity in the CIC official history is all that is needed to validate that he functioned as a recognized CIC agent in spite of his lack of US citizenship‑‑refuting Rivenburg's grudging concession that Thomas was merely a "civilian employee." Mr. Rivenburg was presumably aware of this mention of Mr. Thomas in the CIC History before he wrote his article, but chose to ignore it and did not mention it to his readers.

      American forces in general, and CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) teams specifically, during their 1944-45 invasion and conquest of the

European Axis, were typically American in that their personnel lacked sufficient foreign language capacity to deal easily with the local populations, friend or enemy. Consequently there was widespread resort to information and assistance from friendly locals.

      In my postwar military government capacity, I had many dealings with CIC agents. I learned thereby how dependent they and other American

occupation agencies were on the language talents of Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution. The majority of these had reached the United States and returned to Europe as American citizens and soldiers. But some few "displaced persons" served just as effectively as de facto American soldiers--of necessity a close-kept secret within their immediate CIC units. This, as in the case of Michel Thomas, rightfully later earned them American citizenship. For the sake of efficiency and protection these few were clothed in the same US Army officer's field khaki as their CIC colleagues, which like those of CIC agents bore only the "US" collar symbol rather than an officer's usual collar rank insignia. Official records plus written and oral evidence proffered by his CIC colleagues unmistakably substantiate that Michel Thomas was among the latter rare category.^[34]

 

 

REGARDING THOMAS' S PRESENCE AT THE LIBERATION OF DACHAU

 

      My not inconsiderable knowledge of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp has far less depth than that of the capture of the Nazi Party records, so I mention only in passing Roy Rivenburg's careless dismissal of the contemporaneous photographic evidence provided by Michel Thomas.  This photographic evidence has since been corroborated by other CIC members.^[35]

      Rivenburg offers no contrary evidence, only the liberating unit's commander Felix Sparks's recollection that there were no accompanying CIC agents, which under the chaotic circumstances he was unlikely to have noticed. Furthermore, there was a convergence of intelligence personnel‑‑to say nothing of war correspondents‑‑at every liberated concentration camp, particularly during the first day or so. Thomas does not claim that he arrived in the liberator's convoy, only sometime

during that day. This is not the only instance that Rivenburg carelessly raises suspicious conjecture. Mr. Thomas offers as further evidence his capture and interrogation of Emil Mahl, a former Dachau prisoner who was "promoted" to a job as hangman of the camp, and is referred to as "The Butcher of Dachau" in the History of the CIC, and was elsewhere dubbed "the Hangman of Dachau." Thomas' account of his arrest of Mahl conforms in date and organizational unit to the account in the CIC History that "On 7 May,

Agents of the 45th CIC Detachment arrested Mahl."^[36]  Additional research has revealed that in fact, the May 7, 1945 date reported in the CIC history is probably the date of a report concerning Mahl's arrest, rather than the actual date of his arrest.

Mahl was tried and convicted for his crimes at a Dachau War Crimes trial, and originally received a death sentence, which was later commuted to ten years. He served his sentence in Landsberg prison, from which he wrote to Thomas in 1949, complaining of alleged theft of minor items of personal property. This was a devious attempt to exact revenge on Thomas, who Mahl had learned from a Stars & Stripes article was in the process of acquiring his U.S. citizenship.

  In 1951 Mahl petitioned the Modification Board in Heidelberg to move back his prison release date based on his original arrest (by Thomas) on May 1, 1945.  Mahl submitted the sworn statement of a witness to his arrest in this petition.

 

FINAL COMMENTARY

 

      I believe it is appropriate to characterize Mr. Rivenburg's article as one of spiteful niggling.  I find "niggling" an appropriate term in the face of all the evidence Mr. Rivenburg was provided, which he brushed aside although he has no such evidence to disprove Mr. Thomas' wartime experiences. Instead, he offers only suspicious conjecture of the most hateful sort.

      While the style in which Test of Courage was written may not be one that appeals to scholars, it is after all a book written for a popular audience.  Print journalism, especially opinion columns and feature stories‑‑to say nothing of television and radio programs‑‑is increasingly cavalier about facts in assuming entitlement to attack subjects of biographies and other nonfiction. In Rivenburg's wayward feature story on Michel Thomas, it is difficult to escape the inference that there is an underlying spite, if not outright malice, by an inactive sideline observer toward a courageous performer in a dangerous arena.