Michel Thomas

Michel Thomas (born February 3, 1914, Łódź, Poland—died January 8, 2005, New York, New York, U.S.) Polish-born linguist, teacher, and member of the French Resistance during World War II, known for his eponymous method of foreign-language instruction.

Kroskof was born into a Jewish family who owned a textile factory in Łódź. Because of increasing anti-Semitism in Poland, he was sent to live with his aunt in Germany when he was seven years old. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany forced him to resettle again in 1933, this time in France. After graduating with a degree in philology from the University of Bordeaux, he moved to Austria in 1938 to study psychology at the University of Vienna. Following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938 (the Anschluss), Kroskof was deprived of his Polish passport by the Polish embassy in Vienna; he became stateless (German: vogelfrei) and had to go into hiding. He returned to France and, following Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, joined the French army, where he served in the intelligence corps. After the fall of France (1940), Kroskof helped Jewish refugees and was arrested by the Vichy government on a charge of influence peddling; he was eventually interned in four different concentration camps run by Vichy authorities. He escaped from the Les Milles camp in Aix-en-Provence in August 1942 and then joined the French Resistance, taking the name Michel Thomas (among others) as a nom de guerre. His entire family was killed in the Holocaust, specifically in the Auschwitz extermination camp.

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Thomas performed a number of remarkable feats during the war. Most notably, he is credited with the retrieval of a large cache of official Nazi Party documents, including millions of membership cards and related files. This information proved critical in efforts to identify and arrest war criminals after the end of hostilities. Thomas himself participated in the arrest of Emil Mahl, the “hangman of Dachau,” and in his interrogation. After the Normandy Invasion (June 1944), Thomas served as a liaison officer with U.S. forces and as an interrogator and scout attached to the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division. In the last months of the war, and afterward in occupied Germany, Thomas served as an agent of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), participating in efforts to root out pro-Nazi subversive elements and to pursue war criminals. (Thomas’s wartime exploits were recounted in The Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story [1999], a biography written by the British journalist Christopher Robbins.)

In 1947 Thomas immigrated to the United States and adopted Beverly Hills, California, as his new home. A polyglot, Thomas eventually became famous for his innovative technique of foreign-language instruction (the Michel Thomas Method) and for his glamorous clients, who included Grace Kelly, Alfred Hitchcock, Barbra Streisand, and Woody Allen. Thomas promised to teach his clients the basic elements of a new language in only a few days (for a substantial fee) by building on commonalities with English. He also founded a network of language schools (the Michel Thomas Language Centers). Thomas’s method became especially popular as a self-teaching method based on audio recordings.

In 2001 a scathing profile of Thomas was published in the Los Angeles Times. The article questioned Thomas’s claims about his various accomplishments and suggested that he had exaggerated or even fabricated parts of his life story, including his presence at the liberation of Dachau and his role in the recovery of the Nazi Party membership cards. Thomas’s biographer strongly defended him and criticized the article for ignoring key evidence. Thomas promptly filed a civil suit for defamation against the newspaper and the author of the article. A federal district court judge granted the defendants’ motion to strike (dismiss) the complaint on the basis of California’s so-called anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) law, which required the plaintiff in a civil suit that arises from the defendant’s exercise of the right of freedom of speech to establish by “reasonable probability” that the plaintiff would prevail should the case go to trial.

In 2004 Thomas was awarded a Silver Star medal for “gallantry in action against the enemy in France” during World War II. Thomas had been nominated for the medal by his superior officer in the U.S. Army in 1944 for the courage he displayed at the Battle of Autrey (France).