Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  To denigrate Wiesenthal’s efforts, as Varon does, is to defame a man who has successfully brought to justice 1,100 Nazi war criminals; a man who embarked on his sacred mission in 1945 unlike some recent arrivals who have embarked with much passion and fury and scant results in the 1980s.

  And, in a 1986 interview with me, Rabbi Hier drew a bead on New York lawyer-biographer Posner as one of those Simons-come-lately: ‘What Posner skips is that he himself had just completed a book and was about two weeks away from publication when the body was found in Brazil. In the book, he was going to give Mengele’s “actual” address in Paraguay. Then the events occurred in Brazil which led him to write a new book. So why does he tell the world how wrong Wiesenthal was and forgets to say that he’d seven-eighths published a book of interviews with high Paraguayan officers and generals and was about to pinpoint the exact location of Mengele in Paraguay? And yet he wants to fault someone else for making the same mistake.

  ‘Over the years, you have to remember that, if Simon had not been in there looking for Mengele – and, later, the entry of Klarsfeld as well – the world would have forgotten about him. A guy like Mengele wouldn’t have had to spend his last few years watching soap operas on TV in Brazil. He could have been back home in Bavaria or spending more time on the slopes in Switzerland.’

  In 1992, a team of British scientists flew to Germany to make DNA genetic tests comparing a blood sample from the corpse in Embu cemetery with a blood sample from Rolf Mengele, who has changed his name. The match-up left the scientists ‘99.97 per cent certain’ that the body was indeed Josef Mengele’s. German authorities were quick to embrace these results. ‘As prosecutors,’ they said, ‘we can assure all survivors of the Holocaust and their families that Mengele is dead.’

  Simon Wiesenthal is not so sure, but when I called to find out how he was taking the news, he was taking it personally: ‘All day my phone has been ringing with people who say they can prove Mengele is alive. And this is Mengele’s revenge on me.’

  To make matters worse for Simon, who had undergone prostate surgery a few years earlier: ‘The urologists are having a convention here. Many of them are Jewish and they all want to talk with me about Mengele. But not one of them is asking how I am pissing.’

  PART V

  Franz Paul Stangl, Gustav Wagner, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

  When first we practise to deceive!

  –Sir Walter Scott

  26

  Stangl the weaver

  With a few exceptions (such as the apprehension of Gustav Wagner, which will be treated in this section), Simon Wiesenthal’s role as a serious sleuth and Nazi-hunter ended somewhere between the extraditions of Franz Stangl in 1967 and Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan in 1973. In that interim, Wiesenthal became more of a publicist and conscience than avenger and researcher. Nowhere could his good use of his new-found power as a celebrity be better glimpsed than in his crusade for Raoul Wallenberg. Nowhere could his abandonment of his old talents be viewed with more alarm (yet, even here, with some grudging admiration for the pain he caused villains) than in his campaign to unearth Dr Josef Mengele. But now, before exploring the New Wiesenthal of the seventies and eighties, it is time to pause and appreciate the deftness, determination, and persistence of the Old Wiesenthal – and to detail three of his last hurrahs.

  Nine months and five days before Simon Wiesenthal’s birth in Galicia, Franz Paul Stangl was born on 26 March 1908, in the Upper Austrian town of Altmünster on Austria’s deepest lake, the Traunsee, to an attractive young mother and an ageing night watchman. His father, who hadn’t wanted him and wasn’t certain the boy was his, lived only for his military past in the imperial dragoons. ‘His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe,’ Stangl recalled in 1971 in an interview with British journalist Gitta Sereny. ‘He was a dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.’ His brutal father beat him so hard that, more than half a century later, Stangl still recalled not just the pain, but his mother’s screams of ‘Stop it! You’re splashing blood all over my clean walls!’

  Too old to fight in the First World War, Stangl’s father was nonetheless a casualty of the slaughter, for he died of malnutrition in 1916. ‘He was thin as a rake,’ the son remembered with no overt pity. ‘He looked like a ghost, a skeleton.’ A year later, Stangl’s mother married a widower with two children of his own. As soon as Franz was fourteen, his hard-pressed stepfather tried to put him to work in the steel mill where he was employed. ‘But I had my eye on working for the local textile mill,’ said Stangl. ‘That’s what I always wanted to do, and for that I had to be fifteen. So I got my mother and the school principal to say I had to stay in school another year.’

  Leaving school at fifteen to become a weaver, Stangl finished his apprenticeship in three years: ‘When I was eighteen and a half, I did my exams and became the youngest master weaver in Austria. I worked in the mill and only two years later I had fifteen workers under me.’ Playing the zither in a local club and giving music lessons at night, building his own sailboat on weekends, he remembered those years proudly and fondly as ‘my happiest time’.

  After five years, however, the happiness was wearing off. When he turned twenty-three in 1931, he realized that ‘without higher education, I couldn’t get further promotion. But to go on doing all my life what I was doing then? Around me I saw men of thirty-five who had started at the same age as I and were now old men. The work was too unhealthy. The dust got into your lungs – the noise. . .’

  And the dragoon uniform hanging in his father’s closet was under his skin. He often looked at young policemen patrolling the streets and envied how spruce and secure they looked in their uniforms. He applied to the Austrian federal police and, after an examination and interview, was ordered to report to their barracks in Linz, the Upper Austrian capital, for basic training.

  When Stangl gave his notice at the mill, the owner said: ‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me about it instead of doing it secretly? I was planning to send you to school – in Vienna.’

  Telling about this almost four decades later, Stangl wept. When interviewer Sereny, who spent more than seventy hours with him, asked why he didn’t change his plans when his boss told him that, Stangl answered through the tears: ‘He didn’t ask me to.’

  Austria was already an armed camp when Stangl donned his police uniform and began courting Theresa Eidenböck, an Upper Austrian perfumer’s daughter a year older than he; they met in Linz, where she was studying midwifery at the School of Social Work. Austria’s two major contending parties – the progressive (but not communist) Socialists (known as the Reds) and their conservative, heavily Catholic rival, the Christian Social Party (called the Blacks: the colour of priests’ robes) – each had its own flag, its own anthem, its own paramilitary force: the leftists’ Schutzbund (Workers’ Militia) vs the rightists’ Heimwehr (Home Guard). Untrained in democracy after a millennium of monarchy, the Austrian people gave to their political parties the loyalty most people give to their countries.

  In 1931, the post-World War I question of Anschluss (which then meant union with Germany, but would later mean armed annexation) was revived. In a 1932 Cabinet crisis, the ruling Blacks’ Minister of Agriculture Engelbert Dollfuss became Chancellor, governing with a one-vote majority in Parliament and dependent upon his party’s armed Heimwehr to keep him in power. Dollfuss, just turning forty, was an unimposing figure, not just because he stood not quite five feet tall, but also as the illegitimate son of peasants. Both his admirers and detractors were quick to nickname him ‘millimetternich’ after a more astute statesman and master manipulator who had tyrannized Austria while remaking the map of Europe more than a century earlier. Other enemies termed Dollfuss ‘the poisonous dwarf’.

  By 1933, with more than half a million Austrians out of work and Hitler taking power in Berlin, talk of Anschluss with their German-speaking neighbours
tripped off many Austrian tongues. The domestic Nazi party – hitherto a fringe group that hadn’t elected a single deputy to Parliament – made ominous noises amplified by infusions of propaganda and manpower from Nazi Germany. Der Führer proclaimed that the unification of Austria and Germany was ‘a task to be furthered by every means’. The Austrian province of Styria’s Heimwehr went over to the Nazis.

  Hitler’s atheistic fascism was distasteful to Dollfuss, who recognized early that the Nazis, while talking of the historic unity of Christian and German culture, were subverting the former with Teutonic paganism and the latter with racism and terror. Thus, he favoured a more Italian-flavoured, but homegrown, militantly Catholic Austro-fascism – and seized the chance in parliamentary turbulence on 4 March 1933, by declaring that Parliament had ‘suspended itself’. To avoid an election that would surely have won the Nazis some seats, he invoked an obsolete law from 1917 granting the government emergency powers. First, he outlawed the Nazi Party, whose growing numbers, driven underground, turned to grenades, subversion, and infiltration of government organs. The Communist Party, a negligible factor, was banned too.

  Until 1933, the Socialists – who could better be classified as ‘Social Democrats’ – had been pro-Anschluss, but the transformation of Germany into a Nazi dictatorship altered their position. Still, such was the mutual detestation between Socialists and Dollfuss that neither side considered uniting against Hitler, who would destroy them both. Otto Bauer, the brilliant Jewish leader of the Socialists, despised Dollfuss personally as a bastard who had usurped power. After all, in the 1930 elections, the Socialists had won forty-one per cent of the vote, making them the largest party in Parliament until Dollfuss abolished parliamentary democracy. Besides, they wanted no part of Austro-fascism or any other kind. When Dollfuss banned the Schutzbund, the Socialist militia, as a prelude to forming a one-party regime called the Fatherland Front, Austria was soon as seething a police state as any in the Balkans.

  On the morning of 12 February 1934, the inevitable conflict between Reds and Blacks erupted in Linz, where Patrolman Franz Stangl was stationed. Police broke down the doors of a workers’ club on the Landstrasse to confiscate arms from the outlawed Socialist militia. The Schutzbund greeted them with a hail of bullets which generated a general strike in the Socialist-ruled cities of Austria and a three-day civil war across the nation. When it was over, the victorious government forces – including police, Heimwehr, and Austrian army – had lost 128 lives, with 409 more wounded; official figures gave Schutzbund and Socialist casualties as 137 dead and 399 wounded, though, by counting families trapped in the bombardment of Socialist housing projects, the roll would come to more than a thousand. The Socialist Party was outlawed. Some of its leaders fled the country. Many of its members were arrested. Nine were executed.

  The fighting in Linz lasted just one day, but a rookie cop had his work cut out for him and Stangl could boast: ‘The Socialists entrenched themselves in the Central Cinema and we had to fight for hours to get them out. I was the one who flushed the last ones out that night at 11 p.m. – after well over twelve hours. I got the silver Service medal for that.’

  He held no grudge against Socialists and, in the beginning, no bent for the Nazis: ‘The Austrian police were very professional. Our job was to uphold the law of the land’ – by quelling disturbers of the peace, right or left, and by doing a job that had ‘nothing heinous or very dramatic about it then. It was just a job one tried to do as correctly – as kindly, if you like – as possible.’

  On 1 May 1934 – the Republic of Austria’s first May Day without a Socialist Party – Dollfuss’s puppet Parliament passed a new Constitution transforming Austria into a ‘Christian Corporate State’. By then, Dollfuss had opened detention camps for his opponents: one of them in Wöllersdorf, some thirty miles south of Vienna.

  Here, however, any resemblance to Mussolini or Hitler ends. Dollfuss enjoyed neither the power nor the popularity of il Duce or der Führer. The treatment of political prisoners at Wöllersdorf never rivalled that in Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp established by Hitler in 1933 on the outskirts of Munich. Dollfuss’s fascism was relatively free of the imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-clericalism that marked one or both of his neighbours’. And, instead of Anschluss, Dollfuss preached that the Austrians were the better Germans – defenders of a civilized tradition dating back a thousand years to Babenberg dukes who ruled Austria while Teutonic tribes to the west were subsisting on acorns – and affirmed a patriotic doctrine of ‘Austrianness’, combining German culture with Austrian tolerance: ‘Living with other nations for centuries has made the Austrian softer, more patient, and more understanding of foreign cultures, even though he has been and is conscious of maintaining the purity of his own culture and kind.’

  These qualities, too, would make Austrians like Stangl excellent exterminators a few years later.

  That much-misunderstood historical figure, Dollfuss, was as doomed as his doctrines. On 25 July 1934, in a meticulously bungled putsch called ‘Operation Summer Festival’, no fewer than 154 Austrian Nazis, wearing military and police uniforms, rode into the courtyard of Dollfuss’s Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz in eight trucks which penetrated security just by tagging along behind the regular 12.50 p.m. changing of the guard. They seized the building and shot Dollfuss to death, as intended, but failed to arrest his ministers and install a new government because the cabinet meeting they thought they were raiding had ended forty minutes earher. Only Dollfuss and his chief of security and the head of the Heimwehr were on hand. While the Austrian Army surrounded the Chancellery and the German ambassador negotiated the surrender of the Nazi invaders, the next Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, thirty-seven, hitherto Minister of Justice and Education, was convening the cabinet elsewhere in town and promising continuity.

  As a concerned citizen and professional policeman, Franz Stangl was appalled by the assassination of Dollfuss. A few days later, he discovered a Nazi arms cache in a forest. This won him, along with four colleagues, another medal – the Austrian Eagle with green and white ribbon –and enrolment in detective school. In 1935, he was transferred to Wels, an Upper Austrian hot-bed of Nazism, to investigate illegal political activities.

  Since the Nazis, like the Socialists, had enhanced his career, Stangl harboured an occasional kind feeling toward them. He contributed to a Nazi welfare fund to look after relatives of political prisoners. And, for a Nazi lawyer named Dr Bruno Wille, Stangl and his detective partner, Ludwig Werner, did ‘the sort of thing one was able to do at times before 1938: just warn someone under suspicion to watch his step.’

  In Vienna, the cultured but colourless Schuschnigg governed for nearly four years while Hitler watched Austria’s economy erode under German and Italian pressure, such as economic barriers to tourism, until he was ready to pounce. German troops crossed into Austria before dawn on Saturday, 12 March 1938; Hitler rode in triumph that day through his native town of Braunau to his home city of Linz, wildly cheered and welcomed all the way. In Vienna, Schuschnigg was escorted into what became ten weeks of house arrest followed by seven years in Hitler’s prisons and concentration camps.50 Far more brutally, another 76,000 foes of Nazism were arrested that weekend in Vienna alone.

  The first transport of 151 Austrians left Vienna for Dachau on 1 April: Jews, intellectuals, and politicians, including two Schuschnigg supporters who would survive to become postwar conservative chancellors of Austria: Leopold Figl and Alfons Gorbach. Nine days later, Hitler called a ‘plebiscite’ in Austria and Germany to ratify his Anschluss. With eighteen per cent of the electorate excluded for political or racial reasons, and the rest either feeling coerced or acceding to the inevitable with varying degrees of enthusiasm, 99.75 per cent of Austrians and 99.08 per cent of Germans voted yes.

  With Anschluss, Austria literally disappeared from the map. Renamed Ostmark, it was later christened ‘the Danube and Alpine Reich’s Provinces’. The very word ‘Austria�
� was banned. Working in Wels, Franz Stangl was no longer in the province of Upper Austria. Upper and Lower Austria were now called Upper Danube and Lower Danube.

  In the bloody purge that followed the bloodless entry of German troops into Austria, the Nazis arrested three of the five detectives who had won Eagles in 1934 for confiscating their weapons near Linz. As Stangl later recalled: ‘That left only my friend Ludwig Werner and myself. Meanwhile, in Linz, they’d shot two of the chiefs of our department. People we’d seen just a few days before. No trial, nothing – just shot them. Another one, also a friend of mine, was arrested too.’ When one of their colleagues remarked that ‘you’d better let your Eagle fly out the window’, fear gripped Stangl and Werner. They shredded their whole index-card file of suspected Nazis, communists, and socialists, and flushed it all down the toilet.

  Stangl and Werner were given forms to fill out. One of the questions asked whether they had been Nazi Party members back when it was illegal.

  Remembering the little favour they’d once done a Nazi lawyer, they went to Dr Wille and asked him to ‘remember’ that Werner and Stangl had been underground Nazis. Wille obliged by entering their names on his Nazi Party rolls for the previous two years. Then the two worried detectives completed their questionnaires by saying they’d been Party members since 1936.

  When Stangl went home that night, he thought his wife would be relieved, too, but instead she accused him of betraying her with ‘these swine, these gangsters!’ Through his pain, Stangl comprehended that, as an Austrian whose country had just been violated and as a devout Catholic, Theresa hated Nazis with a passion shared by many of her people.