Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Treblinka on the day Franz Stangl arrived in August 1942 was, he confessed to Gitta Sereny, ‘the most awful thing I saw during all of the Third Reich. It was Dante’s inferno. It was Dante come to life.’

  When his naturalized British Boswell asked what could shock him after several months at Sobibor, he told her: ‘In Sobibor, unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live without actually seeing; most of us never saw anybody dying or dead. But Treblinka. . .’

  Chauffeured by an SS driver, Stangl started to smell where he was going when they were still miles away, following the River Bug. Fifteen or twenty minutes before reaching his destination, he began seeing corpses along the railroad tracks: first one or two, then two or three, and finally, upon reaching the Treblinka depot, hundreds that had been there for days, rotting in the heat. In the station stood a train full of Jews: some dead, some still alive, all sealed together for days on end and an eternity to come.

  Entering the camp and alighting in the Sorting Square, Stangl ‘stepped knee-deep into money. I didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewellery, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable; hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square, in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls – whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside – weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music . . . There was shooting everywhere.’

  As the pagan bacchanal raged around the inferno, Dr Eberl, the outgoing commandant, greeted his successor, who asked crisply why the treasure they were standing in wasn’t going to headquarters. With a straight face, Eberl replied that the transports had been ransacked somewhere along the way.

  After a few hours, Stangl drove on to Warsaw and reported to the police chief of Poland, General Odilo Globocnik, a fellow Austrian born in 1904 to Croatian parents. A protégé of Reinhard Heydrich, Globocnik had been removed as the Nazi Gauleiter of Vienna in 1939 for embezzling funds and recruiting local débutantes for sex orgies. Himmler, however, had pardoned him and sent him to Poland to ‘liquidate Jews, aristocracy, intelligentsia, and clerical elements’ there. When Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in the spring of 1942, Himmler had put Globocnik in charge of ‘Operation Reinhard’ in Poland, where he publicly pledged a million deaths to honour his mentor. Reporting only to Himmler and no intermediate authority, Globocnik – whose domain included Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka – tripled his quota and confiscated some $45 million in cash, jewels, and negotiable securities, pocketing $5 million worth for himself before turning the rest over to the Gestapo. An alcoholic who consumed two quarts of vodka a day, Globocnik often boasted that he needed the money to keep himself afloat.

  Stangl said that when he tried to tell Globocnik that his mission at Treblinka was impossible, Globocnik showed more interest in the valuables he’d seen strewn around. Captain Christian Wirth – whose jurisdiction as supervisor of death camps in the region included Sobibor and Treblinka – was summoned from Belzec to clean up the mess so Stangl could make a fresh start. Wirth arrived next morning and, after a long meeting with Globocnik, accompanied Stangl back to Treblinka.

  While Wirth conferred with Eberl, Stangl went to the mess for coffee and chatted with some of the camp’s officers, who told him that Treblinka was ‘great fun; shooting was “sport”; there was more money and stuff around than one could dream of, all there for the taking; all one had to do was help oneself. In the evening, they said, Eberl had naked Jewesses dance for them, on the tables.’

  What was Stangl’s reaction? ‘Disgusting – it was all disgusting.’

  Franz Suchomel, the SS sergeant in charge of collecting and processing Jewish gold and valuables, remembers that the first suggestion he heard Stangl make was to put buckets in ‘The Tube’ – the path, thirteen feet wide and 350 feet long, flanked by ten-foot-high barbed-wire fences – leading directly from the undressing rooms to the gas chamber. The women in particular, Stangl told Wirth, defecated on their way in, but, in Sobibor, buckets had helped maintain decorum.

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you did with the shit in Sobibor!’ Wirth said bluntly. ‘Let them shit all over themselves! You can clean it up afterwards.’ Later, two Jews were assigned to hose ‘The Tube’ between transports.

  After dinner on his first night there, Wirth announced he would be staying a while. Eberl and four of his officers left the next day for a Waffen SS unit on the Russian front.57 Wirth rang Warsaw and stopped all transports until Treblinka could be tidied up, which took him and Stangl two weeks before a technocrat called Sergeant Heckenholt could be summoned from Belzec to expand the existing gas chamber with a dozen more cottage-like ‘bath-house’ annexes which all led to the same end.

  Early in the clean-up, the two partners in crime, Wirth and Stangl, stood at the rim of the burial pits filled with black-and-blue bodies. ‘It had nothing to do with humanity – it couldn’t have,’ Stangl said later. ‘It was just a mass of rotting flesh.’ At the time, though, Wirth asked him, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’, and it was his wording, Stangl insisted later, that ‘unconsciously started me thinking of them as cargo.’

  Almost beside herself, interviewer Sereny said to Stangl: ‘There were so many children! Did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?’

  ‘No,’ Stangl replied, ‘I can’t say I ever thought that way. You see, I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass.’ Inmates of Treblinka have described Stangl standing atop the earthen wall dividing what were actually called ‘Death Camp’ and ‘Living Camp’ (Roll-Call Square; housing for ‘work-Jews’; stables, textile store, bakery, and coal pile) in his white jacket and riding-pants and boots, ‘like Napoleon surveying his domain.’ Under questioning from Sereny, Stangl conceded that, as soon as the living were naked in the undressing barracks, they ceased to be human beings to him: ‘I avoided [them] from my innermost being. I couldn’t confront them. I couldn’t lie to them. I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die. I couldn’t stand it.’ But he was not too squeamish to stand on the wall and ‘watch them in “The Tube” . . . naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. . .’

  ‘Could you have changed that?’ Sereny asked. ‘In your position, couldn’t you have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Stangl answered. ‘This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.’ Stangl’s propensity for euphemism travelled with him from Hartheim to Sobibor to Treblinka, where ‘resettlement’ meant death within hours and ‘The Tube’ was termed ‘The Road to Heaven’. Woven into ‘The Tube’s’ barbed wire soon after Stangl took command were pine branches changed daily by a camouflage squad of twenty ‘work-Jews’. For it was truly at Treblinka that Stangl emerged as a Master of Illusion in an underworld whose every gateway was inscribed with the myth of ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work gives freedom’).

  For the Christmas season of 1942 – the only Christmas in the camp’s year and a quarter of existence – Stangl presented Treblinka with a ‘railway station’ to enrich the solitary platform at the end of the line where the tracks disappeared into a mound of sand. Adjoining the platform was the windowless rear wall of the Sorting Barracks, where the victims’ valuables, clothes, and women’s hair (used for stuffing mattresses and insulating submarines) were readied for shipping. On to this wooden wall, Stangl had fake doors and windows painted in pleasing pastels. The ‘windows’ were lined with cheerful curtains and framed by green blinds: all painted. The ‘doors’ were stencilled with signs saying ‘STATION MASTER’, ‘TOILET’, ‘INFIRMARY’ (with a red cross), and even ‘FIRST CLASS’ and ‘SECOND CLASS’ waiting-rooms. The ‘station’s’ ticket window has been appraised by
an artist as a triumph of trompe l’oeil which tricked the eye with the false perspective of its painted ledge and vertical grillework barred by a horizontal ‘CLOSED’ sign. Next to the window, a large timetable announced departures to Warsaw, Bialystok, and Wolkowysk, but the one true destination, Death, wasn’t posted. Only the flowers on the front façade were real.

  To enhance the mirage of a transit camp, two arrows pointing in opposite directions led to real doors, but both were death’s doors. The arrow pointing left ‘To BIALYSTOK’ took thousands to the undressing rooms to be shorn of all earthly belongings, including female hair, before being put through ‘The Tube’. The arrow pointing right ‘To WOLKOWYSK’ led to one final fatal illusion: a fake ‘hospital’ with a red cross on its front, but no roof. The old and sick as well as the very young – all those deemed unfit to make their way through the undressing barracks and ‘The Tube’ – were dispatched to this ‘hospital’, where nurses undressed them and seated them on the rim of a continuously burning pit. There, an executioner named August Miete shot them in the neck and let them topple in; the SS called this ‘curing with a single pill’. Rather than waste precious bullets on children, Miete might throw them in alive, but more ‘humane’ SS men would sometimes smash tiny heads against the wall first. That was how the milk of human kindness trickled through Stangl’s Treblinka.

  Although it took longer to shear the women who went through ‘The Tube’, a hundred or more females from every transport were sent up ‘The Road to Heaven’ ahead of the first men who stood naked and shivering in the Undressing Square. ‘Men won’t burn without women’ was one of the ‘scientific’ truths of Treblinka. Because the female layer of subcutaneous fat is more highly developed than that of males, women’s bodies were used to kindle the fires from the bottom. Blood, too, was found to be first-rate combustion material. And young corpses burned faster than old ones, for their flesh was softer, as veal is to beef. At Stangl’s request, an instructor in incineration – Herbert Floss, an SS technical sergeant in his forties with a solicitous smile of perpetual care on his face – was sent over from Auschwitz. He was nicknamed Tadellos (Perfect) for his favourite expression – ‘Thank God, now the fire’s perfect’ – when, ignited by gasoline, the pyre of corpses would burst into flames.

  ‘Today we burned 2000 bodies,’ Tadellos told the ‘work-Jews’ at roll-call one night. ‘This is good, but we must not stop here. We will set ourselves an objective and devote all our efforts to reaching it. Tomorrow we will do 3000, the day after tomorrow 4000, then 5000, then 6000, and so on until 10,000. Every day we will force ourselves to increase output by one thousand units. I count on you to help me.’

  And, driven by the law of supply and demand – enforced by whipping and killing – they did.

  Cosmetically, the finishing touch to the all-important first impression of Treblinka came when Stangl’s deputy, Kurt Franz – a former boxer known as ‘The Doll’ for his puffy, pouty good looks – had a realization that ‘a station without a clock is not a station.’ The camp carpenters painted the face of a clock on to a wooden cylinder eight inches thick and twenty-eight inches in diameter. The ‘hands’ of the ‘clock’ were painted to read three o’clock. Time stood still in Stangl’s Treblinka on the edge of eternity.

  Some arrived in airless boxcars, defecating on their dead and licking the sweat from each others’ skins to slake their thirst. Polish and Russian Jews travelled in cattle cars; Czechs and Western Jews in passenger coaches or sometimes – as with a trainload of rich Bulgarian Jews – in sleepers with a special baggage car for their valuables. No sooner had they dismounted and disrobed, however, than they were just cattle to be butchered into meat and bones and then burned to ashes and reduced to dust in 120 minutes of orchestrated violence and delusion that gave them no time to think – or resist.

  ‘Faster! Faster!’ they were commanded in a rain of clubs and whips punctuated by thunderclaps of pistol shots. Men who lingered for a last look at loved ones were commended to the voracious mercies of a dog called Barry, a mongrel St Bernard which, when presented by Stangl to his deputy, ex-boxer Kurt Franz, was already trained to bite off male genitals on command. All ‘The Doll’ had to say to his dog was a mocking ‘Look, man, that dog isn’t working!’ and Barry would emasculate the victim, whom Kurt Franz would usually finish off with a bullet. At least three such canine attacks inside and outside ‘The Tube’ were documented at ‘The Doll’s’ 1964–5 trial in Düsseldorf, where he received a life sentence. Also introduced as evidence was his scrapbook of photos from Treblinka. The album was titled ‘The Best Years of My Life’.

  ‘Faster!’ and ‘Faster!’ the victims of Treblinka climbed over each other just to escape from frying-pan to fire, from the terrors of ‘The Tube’ to annihilation in the thirteen ‘bath-houses’ (one of them disguised as a synagogue) which disposed of 12,000 Jews in a typical day, but could – and, on occasion, did – kill 30,000 per diem by working around the clock. To Herbert Floss’s perfection of the technology was added Kurt Franz’s pugilistic insight into primitive physical medicine: if you make a man run all the way to the gas chamber, he will not only get there sooner, but, already gasping for breath, he will die faster.

  On busy days, children, naked and barefoot, stood shivering in ‘The Tube’ waiting to be gassed. When their feet froze, they had to be ripped from the ground – or torn in half by ‘Sepp’, a ferocious SS guard who specialized in killing children. Sometimes ‘Sepp’ couldn’t wait until his small ‘clients’ were in ‘The Tube’. He would seize them by the feet upon arrival at Treblinka and smash their heads against boxcars. ‘Sepp’, later identified as Josef Hirtreiter, was the first Treblinka ‘Hangman’ to be brought to trial. In Frankfurt in 1951, he was given life in prison.

  Most of Treblinka’s executioners, however, were not German, but Ukrainian, for Stangl’s staff, aside from slave labour, varied from thirty to forty SS and 200 to 300 Ukrainian guards, with the ideal ratio being five Ukrainians to each German. The Ukrainians, who had been at war with the Jews for most of the nearly 2000 years they had been living together, took to the task with unsurpassed zeal. One of them, Fyodor Fedorenko – later of Waterbury, Connecticut58 – not only whipped prisoners as he herded them into gas chambers, but shot those who knelt at his feet begging for mercy.

  Above the entranceway to the main gas chamber was carved, in gold Hebrew letters, ‘THIS IS THE GATE OF THE LORD. THE RIGHTEOUS SHALL ENTER THROUGH IT’. Behind the doors was no Gentile St Peter, but Ivan and Nikolai, two Ukrainians who had joined the SS and operated the machinery of death. Ivan was the taller of the two. He had close-cropped blond hair and grey eyes that seemed kind and gentle until you looked into them – but, if you did, he would shatter your skull with a six-foot-long gas pipe he carried as a club. Nikolai, a pallid miniature of Ivan, brandished a sabre, but he was merely a brute while Ivan was a sadist who recurs in the annals of Treblinka as ‘Ivan the Terrible’.

  Whenever they needed more bodies for a full load before turning on the gas (throughout its brief history, Treblinka stuck with Wirth’s outmoded, but effective, carbon monoxide technology, using motors from captured Soviet tanks and other dismantled equipment), Ivan and Nikolai would step out into ‘The Tube’ to hurry their victims along. Once, in a fit of frenzy, Ivan the Terrible borrowed Nikolai’s sabre and slit open the bellies of a group of women from the Warsaw ghetto. Then, after piling the disembowelled women at the end of the ‘Road to Heaven’, he forced some male prisoners to mount and have sex with them.

  Even before the war had ended, in a 1944 memoir called One Year in Treblinka, a 1943 escapee named Yankel Wiernik wrote how Ivan ‘enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us lie down on the floor and whip us brutally. While he did this, his face showed sadistic satisfaction and he laughed and joked. He finished off the victims according to his mood at the moment.’

  At the age of fifty-two, Wiernik had w
orked in the body-disposal detail. Written in hiding and published underground, his account of life and death at Treblinka was the first to reach England and America and shock the world. He wrote:

  The screams of the women, the weeping of the children, cries of despair and misery, the pleas for mercy, for God’s vengeance, ring in my ears to this day, making it impossible for me to forget the misery I saw.

  Between 450 and 500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring twenty-five square metres [thirty square feet]. Parents carried their children in their arms in the vain hope that this would save their children from death. On the way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and with Ivan’s gas pipe. . .

  The bedlam lasted only a short while, for soon the doors were slammed shut. The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and, within twenty-five minutes at the most, all lay stretched out dead or, to be more accurate, were standing up dead. Since there was not an inch of free space, they just leaned against each other.

  ‘Even in death,’ Wiernik noted, ‘mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends or foes. There was no more jealousy. All were equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they were all yellow from the gas.’

  At Treblinka, Chiel Rajchman, a textile merchant from Lodz, had worked as a ‘dentist’ – tearing open the corpses’ mouths with pliers and extracting any gold or silver dental work. Escaping in August 1943, he hid in a bunker in Warsaw and jotted his recollections of Treblinka until the Red Army entered in early 1945 and freed him of everything but his recollections: