Michel Thomas

Michel Thomas (February 3, 1914 – January 8, 2005) was a polyglot linguist, language teacher and decorated war veteran. He survived Nazi persecution, served in the French Resistance and worked with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After the war, Thomas emigrated to the United States, where he developed a language-teaching system known as the Michel Thomas Method. A sometimes controversial figure, in 2001 Thomas unsuccessfully sued the Los Angeles Times for defamation, and in 2004 was awarded the Silver Star by the U.S. Army.

Life
Thomas was born Moniek (Moshe) Kroskof in Łódź, Poland, to a wealthy Jewish family who owned textile factories. Seeing the young boy suffer from the antisemitic taunts of the local residents, his parents sent him to live in Breslau, Germany with an aunt, where he fitted in comfortably. 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
Thomas' biography gives an account of his war years: When France fell to the Nazis, he escaped to Nice, which was nominally neutral under the Vichy government, changing his name to Michel Thomas so he could operate in the French Resistance movement more easily. He said he was arrested several times, and sent to a series of Nazi concentration/slave-labor camps, finally being sent to Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. In August 1942, Thomas secured release from Les Milles using forged papers and made his way to Lyon, where his duties for the Resistance entailed recruiting Jewish refugees into the organisation. In January 1943, he was arrested and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, only being released after convincing the Gestapo officer that he was an apolitical French artist. He would later testify at the 1987 trial of Barbie. One month later, after being arrested, tortured and subsequently released by the Milice, the Vichy French paramilitary militia, Thomas joined a commando group in Grenoble, assisting the OSS, then began working for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps.

When the Dachau concentration camp was liberated on April 29 1945, Thomas learned the whereabouts of Emil Mahl (the "hangman of Dachau"), whom Thomas arrested two days later. Thomas, along with CIC colleague Ted Kraus, subsequently captured S.S. Major Gustav Knittel (wanted for his role in the Malmedy massacre). Mahl and Knittel were later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death, although both sentences were subsequently commuted. Thomas also engineered a post-war undercover sting operation that resulted in the arrest of several former S.S. officers. A 1950 Los Angeles Daily News article credits Thomas with the capture of 2,500 Nazi war criminals. In the final week of World War II, Thomas was also said to have played a part in the recovery of a cache of Nazi documents from a paper mill in Freimann, Germany. These included the worldwide membership card file of more than ten million members of the Nazi party. After the end of the war, Thomas discovered that his parents and most of his family had died at Auschwitz.

Post-war
In 1947, Thomas emigrated to Los Angeles, where an uncle and cousins resided. He opened a language school in Beverly Hills called the "Polyglot Institute" (later renamed "The Michel Thomas Language Center") and developed a language-teaching system known as the Michel Thomas Method, which he claimed would allow students to become conversationally proficient after only a few days' study. His clients included diplomats, industrialists and celebrities such as Raquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Emma Thompson, Woody Allen and Grace Kelly, who paid him fees up to up to $25,000 for his services. He later produced audio versions of his courses for general sale. The success of the school led to tours and a second school in New York, as well as a series of language tapes and books. At the time of Thomas' death in 2005, his tapes and books were the leading method of recorded language-learning in the United Kingdom. In 1997, Thomas participated in a BBC television science documentary, The Language Master, in which he attempted to teach French to a group of UK sixth form students in five days, despite their having had no previous experience with the language.

Thomas remained unmarried until late in life, when he wed Los Angeles schoolteacher Alice Burns. After producing a son and daughter, the marriage ended in divorce. In 2001, Thomas unsuccessfully sued the Los Angeles Times for defamation, after the newspaper published an article which Thomas claimed had cast aspersions upon his war record and language classes. In 2004, Thomas was awarded the Silver Star by the U.S. Army for his contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. The award was presented by former Senator Robert Dole and Senator John Warner at the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C. on May 25, 2004.

Death
Michel Thomas died of heart failure at his home in New York City on 8 January 2005. He was 90.

Controversies
In the 1980s, Thomas' well-publicized statements about Klaus Barbie caused controversy with the U.S. Justice Department, and his testimony at the trial of the former Gestapo chieftain was excluded by the prosecutor. Thomas was also the subject of unflattering articles in the French press. In recent years, several aspects of Thomas' war record have been challenged, most notably by the Los Angeles Times in 2001. Citing military records, 1945 newspaper articles and eyewitness testimony, the newspaper challenged Thomas' claims that he was a U.S. Army officer instead of a civilian employee, that he accompanied the first battalion as it liberated Dachau, and that he discovered and rescued a cache of Nazi Party ID cards (the L.A. Times credited a German man with the rescue). A 2004 Newsday article also concluded that Thomas was a civilian Army employee.

Klaus Barbie
In 1983, after the arrest of Klaus Barbie, Thomas criticized a U.S. Justice Department report into Barbie's role as a post-war spy for the U.S. The report said American intelligence officials hired Barbie in 1947 because they didn't know about his Gestapo past. Thomas claimed that statement was false, because he had written a memo in 1945, while working with the Counter Intelligence Corps, identifying Barbie as a former Gestapo officer. This led one Justice Department official to tell the Los Angeles Times that, "if [Thomas] wrote a report, it no longer exists. There is an awful lot of evidence to suggest that we didn't know [of Barbie's past] until 1949." Allan Ryan, the author of the Justice Department report and the Department's chief Nazi investigator, subsequently called a press conference in which he denounced Thomas' reliability. In 1987, Thomas testified at Barbie's trial in Lyon. The lead prosecutor, Pierre Truche, asked the jury to disregard his testimony against the former Gestapo chieftain, as he found Thomas' version of events to be "inconsistent," and believed the jury would find his story hard to accept.

Defamation case
In 2001, Thomas sued the Los Angeles Times for defamation, claiming that its April 15, 2001 article "Larger Than Life" had falsely implied he had exaggerated or fabricated aspects of his life story and had implied his language classes were a "sham". At a February 4, 2002 hearing to determine whether the case should be put to a jury, the judge dismissed the suit, concluding that the article was a commentary rather than a hard-hitting investigative report, and that no reasonable jury would find that the Los Angeles Times had intended to put across the impression that Thomas had lied about his past. The judge said that "at most, a reasonable juror would find that [the] Defendants intended to raise questions about Thomas' story." Thomas was ordered to pay the newspaper's legal fees and a subsequent appeal to Ninth Circuit Court was also unsuccessful.