by Alan Levy
In the very last days of Treblinka, a sergeant stood up after a good lunch and said to Tchechia and the two other women who had served it to him: ‘Well, girls, it’s your turn now.’
The other two cringed, but Tchechia laughed in his face and said: ‘I never did believe your fairy-tale promises, you pigs. Go ahead and kill us. Just do me one favour. Don’t ask us to undress.’ When one of the other girls began to weep, Tchechia told her: ‘Don’t cry. Don’t do them the favour. Remember, you are a Jew.’ Such people died prouder than Stangl ever lived.
After the revolt, transports continued coming to Treblinka for another fortnight and were liquidated in whatever facilities remained in operation. Stangl produced plans to rebuild the camp more efficiently than ever, but orders came down from Berlin through Globocnik to obliterate Treblinka. The machinery of the Final Solution was running low on Jews to process, and Zyklon B at Auschwitz and Majdanek had more potential than Treblinka’s low-grade carbon-monoxide technology. Transports ticketed for Treblinka would be diverted to Sobibor, though not for long: On 14 October 1943, a revolt closed Sobibor. A dozen SS men and more than a dozen Ukrainians perished, as did 200 Jews shot or blown up by mines while trying to escape. Of the 400 who did escape Sobibor, a hundred were later captured and killed. Others joined Soviet partisan units, with which most of them died in combat. Others died of typhus or were killed by Poles. Only thirty survived the war, among them the leader of the revolt, Alexander Pechersky, a Jewish soldier in the Red Army who would testify to Simon Wiesenthal against his tormentor Gustav Wagner, nearly four decades later.
The last transport – Pj (for Polish Jews) 204 – to reach Treblinka arrived on Thursday, 19 August 1943, and its passengers were destroyed the same day. Then Treblinka’s remaining buildings were demolished. The grounds were planted with pine trees, which grew astonishingly fast. Bricks of the dismanded ‘bath-houses’ went to build a farmhouse for a Ukrainian named Strebel who was put in there with his family and told to pretend they had been farming there since 1939. But no lie could long conceal the bones of more than a million men, women, and children. The liquefaction of their imperfectly burned bodies caused the earth to shift. Gases released by putrefaction blew the cosmetic top-soil off the burial pits. The Strebels fled before the Red Army came in late 1944.
Toward the end of August 1943, however, Franz Stangl had at last been able to tell his wife that her wish had come true: he was done with the death camps of Poland and about to be transferred to Trieste, considerably closer to home, for anti-partisan combat duty.
29
The secret bearers
If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it made monsters of mediocrities like Mengele, Eichmann, and Stangl. If Hitler embodied evil as few, if any, in history ever did, his mastery lay in his grasp and manipulation of power, but did he pose any greater physical danger to individuals and whole societies (Jews, gypsies, freemasons) than did these devoted servants of his who soldiered so zealously to translate his every fevered, far-fetched rant into unspeakable reality for millions? To paraphrase Shakespeare, some are born to power, some achieve power, and others have power thrust upon them. To the man in the street and the Jew in the ghetto of the Third Reich, those others were the ones to watch – and watch out for.
Mengele was ‘a man who believed in nothing but power, the ultimate cynic’, says his unwilling ‘Aryan’ underling, Dr Ella Lingens-Reiner, holder of law as well as medical degrees from the University of Vienna. ‘The trouble with Eichmann,’ writes Hannah Arendt, ‘was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ And Stangl, says Gitta Sereny, had an infinite capacity to manipulate and repress his own moral scruples, which, she insists, unquestionably existed.
If, unlike Mengele’s, the names of Eichmann and Stangl were unknown to Wiesenthal during his concentration-camp odyssey, this was because Eichmann worked mainly behind the scenes with fellow Nazis and Gentile collaborators as well as through the Jewish Councils he created and later liquidated. For facelessness, however, none of the others in Wiesenthal’s gallery could match Franz Stangl, whose name was unknown to the million and a quarter who passed through Treblinka or even to most of the sixty who survived his inferno.
By late 1943, he was a non-person to Hitler’s high command, too. SS Captain Stangl had left Poland for Trieste that September in a convoy with his chiefs, General Odilo Globocnik and Major Christian Wirth, and 120 other men. ‘I realized quite well, and so did most of us, that we were an embarrassment to the brass,’ he later told Gitta Sereny. ‘They wanted to find ways and means to “incinerate” us. So we were assigned the most dangerous jobs. Anything to do with anti-partisan combat in that part of the world was very perilous.’
Yugoslav partisans took no prisoners. Simon Wiesenthal confirms that, in Berlin headquarters’ jargon, ‘incineration’ meant eliminating their own men by sending them to a front from which they were not expected to return. This was the cynical Nazi solution to the problem these technicians of mass extermination posed to their superiors, who called them ‘secret-bearers, first class’, meaning that they knew too much for their own or the Party’s good. After blowing up the camps and planting farms and other cosmetic disguises atop them, as many expert witnesses as possible had to be removed.
With Wirth, it worked. ‘The savage Christian’ was killed in street fighting on the Istrian Peninsula on 26 May 1944. ‘I saw him dead,’ Stangl said with some satisfaction. ‘They said partisans killed him, but we thought his own men had taken care of him.’ A third theory, propounded by British historian Robert Wistrich in his invaluable Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (1982), suggests that ‘he may also have been the victim of a Jewish vengeance squad organized to hunt down Nazis mass murderers.’
Globocnik survived his Adriatic exposure; he had, after all, been born in Trieste and knew the treacherous territory. But the chief exterminator of Polish Jewry had three strikes against him: he was an alcoholic, a plunderer, and, worst of all, a bachelor turning forty. Since it was not considered ‘natural’ for one to rise so high in the SS without mating and breeding for the future of the ‘Master Race’, Globocnik was given leave to find a bride. His military travel orders from the highest headquarters deserve partial quotation:
It is important that SS Major General Globocnik marry soon to fortify him with the strength that only a good wife and home life can afford him against the rigorous existence of a pioneer. This would undoubtedly enable General Globocnik to conserve his energies for the larger tasks ahead of him, for which he is certainly qualified. Otherwise, there is the danger that, while the rugged and strongly masculine frontier atmosphere of the East would not necessarily destroy him, it might still sap those energies.
Put out to stud, Globocnik went a-courting in his home province of Carinthia (in what had been southern Austria) and found himself a hefty Hausfrau named Hannelore. According to Stangl, ‘she was a big blonde who was working in a hospital in the city of Klagenfurt’, where Globocnik married her in a civil ceremony in October 1944. When the war was over, he made his way back across the Dolomites to reach his Hannelore, but was stopped by a British patrol on 31 May 1945 along the banks of the Weissensee, a pristine mountain lake in Carinthia. There, according to most accounts, Globocnik committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule a few minutes after he was apprehended, though Wistrich again adds that ‘according to other versions, Globocnik was hunted down and killed either by partisans or by a Jewish vengeance squad in June 1945.’
For his first three months in the port of Trieste, Franz Stangl was assigned to Transport Security – in charge of guarding the closely watched trains headed north in late 1943 with passengers, plunder, and occasional prisoners. He had one narrow escape at the very end of this stint. Granted Christmas leave, he turned over his reins to Franz Reichleitner, the ‘secret-bearer’ who had succeeded him at Sobibor. That night, on a regula
r rural security patrol that Stangl would have made, Reichleitner was ambushed and assassinated by partisans. Intercepted in Udine in northern Italy, Stangl was recalled to hunt Reichleitner’s killers and his furlough was cancelled.
Back in Trieste, Stangl assembled twenty-five men ‘and we scoured the whole valley all night. There wasn’t any sense to it. It poured. It was pitch dark. There could have been a partisan behind every tree and we wouldn’t have known or found them. Only the next morning did we learn that while we were out the night before, partisans had marched through a village, singing. Everybody hid them. They were safe at home.’
After a brief assignment either hunting partisans in Fiume (now the Croatian port of Rijeka) or, in Wiesenthal’s version, rounding up Jews in Fiume and Abazia (now Opatija) for deportation to the extermination camp in Riseria di San Sabba, Stangl was granted a two-week leave at the end of February 1944 to go home and see his new-born third daughter. His wife was still in bed, recovering from a difficult pregnancy and a cold winter. When Stangl showed up with blankets, down comforters, and bed linens – gifts from the family conscious General Globocnik, he told her – Theresa Stangl said it was ‘like Christmas in March’. Stangl stayed a week. He didn’t quite say what his work was in Italy, but he did complain that he’d been ordered to stay on the look-out for Jews. ‘What do they think I am?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘A headhunter? They can leave me out of this now.’
Upon his return to Trieste, he was given his longest and biggest assignment there: as special supply officer for a strategic construction project in the Po Valley which involved some half a million Italian workers building last-ditch fortifications under German supervision. Not only was the post in the less perilous Italian portion of Globocnik’s command, but it was a position from which he would feather his nest for a postwar escape. ‘I was responsible for getting everything: shoes, clothes, food,’ Stangl would boast to Gitta Sereny. ‘I was the only one who went about in civilian clothes. Everybody, army and SS, had to help me. I carried a paper signed by the general stating that “Captain Stangl is authorized to act in uniform or civvies and all services are requested to give him every assistance in the execution of his command” . . . I had a man with me who had no other job except to carry trunks with millions in cash.’
‘Buy whatever you need,’ Globocnik had told Stangl. ‘Money is no object.’ He was free to patronize the black market, which was virtually the only source of gas, tyres, and spare parts. He made many contacts in northern Italy – wheeler-dealers, smugglers, gangsters, and nobility with something to sell – and some of them may have greased his postwar path across their turf.
When the war ended, Stangl made his way to the Attersee, a lake in Salzburg province, to stay with a village policeman he knew. One of his host’s colleagues, however, notified the US Army of Occupation that there was an SS officer in town. The Americans sent a car around and hauled Stangl off to the royal spa of Bad Ischl for questioning by US counter-intelligence. He gave his own name.
His interrogators focused on his anti-partisan activities in Yugoslavia and Italy, but he never mentioned his Polish past. Then they sent him to Camp Marcus W. Orr in Glasenbach, near Salzburg, for further investigation. He was there for more than two years.
In Glasenbach – less than a hundred miles from Wiesenthal in Linz – Franz Stangl, whose name didn’t enter Simon’s card files until 1948, spent twenty-six months in relatively tranquil detention by American counter-intelligence. ‘He underwent a routine investigation,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘Nobody knew he was the former commandant of Treblinka. He was questioned and gave routine answers about his wartime service. Then he went back to his bunk, lay down, smoked an American cigarette, and talked with fellow SS officers about escaping.’
To an alumnus of Mauthausen like Wiesenthal – who visited Glasenbach several times on behalf of the War Crimes Commission, OSS, and CIC – it was virtually a spa: ‘The internees were well-fed and sunburned, and they led a pleasant fife. They had amusing company from another part of the camp, where wives of high-ranking Nazis and some women who used to be concentration-camp guards were interned . . . The internees of the Americans, at least, lived like guests. They got medical care and cigarettes. In many cases, these “prisoners” were living better than the civilian population outside the gate.’
After more than two years in Glasenbach under very random and casual American investigation, Stangl had not yet been traced beyond Italy and Yugoslavia to Poland; there were so few survivors of Sobibor and Treblinka and he had stayed so aloof from the dirty details that no witnesses had yet surfaced to identify him by name. He might even have gone free in 1947 if his record hadn’t shown that, early in the war, he’d worked at Hartheim, the euthanasia castle which was just beginning to interest Austrian authorities. They asked that he be turned over to them for trial and, late that summer, he was transferred to a civilian prison in Linz.
Not only was his new address closer to home in Wels, but Stangl soon had a single room where his wife could pay him conjugal visits. Still not fully aware of his roles at Sobibor and Treblinka, Theresa Stangl confronted her husband with press clippings about the first smaller fry from Hartheim who were already on trial. She said that when he told her ‘how ill the patients were; how nobody could be killed without four certificates from the doctors . . . I cannot in all honesty say I felt bad about Hartheim.’ Still, she took a day off from her office job in a Wels distillery to attend one day’s hearings in the Hartheim trial. It happened to be the day when Franz Höldl, the Hartheim chauffeur, was asked by a prosecutor about Stangl and (in her word) ‘exonerated’ him of any connection with the killings there. ‘I was so happy,’ she recalled. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I was.’
Upon reading, however, that Höldl had been given a four-year sentence, Theresa Stangl prodded her husband to break out of his comfortable cocoon. ‘If this driver gets four years,’ she told him, ‘what will you get for having been police superintendent of that place?’ When she gave him her savings (less than twenty dollars) and her jewellery (a ring and a necklace) to finance his trip, he recognized that these were his marching orders.
‘The prisoners were often sent out to clear away rubble and help rebuild bomb damage,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, who was living in Linz at the time. ‘Later I heard Stangl was with a group of petty criminals who worked at rebuilding the VOEST steelworks in Linz. The prisoners were not heavily guarded. Why would they want to run away? They got more food in the prison than outside. A few kilometres away, at the Enns bridge, Russian soldiers guarded the frontier of the Soviet Zone of Austria. What prisoner would be fool enough to run away to there?’ Nevertheless, on the night of Sunday, 30 May 1948, Franz Stangl and another prisoner named Hans Steiner were not among those who’d marched out in the morning.
Stangl and Steiner had walked away from their work with a rucksack of canned foods and headed south on foot. The next day, an Austrian police officer called on Theresa Stangl and asked if her husband was at home. That was how she found out that he’d acted upon her advice. She invited her visitor to search her home, but he declined politely, ‘No, no, that won’t be at all necessary’, and left.
‘No one had seen Stangl escape,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘but no one got very excited about it. A notation was added to his file and the file thrown on top of many other files. Neither the American authorities nor the Austrian press was informed.’
Stangl said that he and Steiner walked the 150 miles from Linz, the Upper Austrian capital, to Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria. In Graz’s Renaissance old town, he sold his wife’s jewellery for a tiny sum and then, he later told her, was walking past a construction site where a house was being pulled down when he was recognized – by a labourer who rushed out shouting ‘Herr Hauptsturmführer!’ (‘Captain!’) and embraced him. It was ex-Master Sergeant Gustav Wagner, who had served with him in Hartheim and Trieste as well as Sobibor, and, having been more visible as chief of the gas chamber and second
-in-command at the death camp, had already been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal.
Wagner begged Stangl and Steiner to let him come with them. When they said yes, he walked off his job and joined them on their journey into Italy.
Simon Wiesenthal doubts much of Stangl’s and his wife’s Wizard-of-Oz version of this journey. It is unlikely that Stangl and Steiner would have walked all the way from Linz to Graz, particularly without a stop-off in Wels, just fifteen miles away. And, despite truth being stranger than fiction, it seems more than ‘purely coincidental’ that two such closely linked euthanasia and extermination alumni as Stangl and Wagner should get together so accidentally in Graz. ‘I am afraid she led you by the nose,’ Wiesenthal told a visitor who had just interviewed the Stangl woman.
When the Stangls claimed that he and Steiner and Wagner ‘just walked out of Austria’ over a mountain pass by night, Wiesenthal exclaimed: ‘What nonsense! How could they? Without papers or passports? What about the frontier? It’s all lies! They obviously had papers provided by ODESSA.’ While Frau Stangl insisted that her husband was ‘a very good mountaineer and knew the Tyrolean mountains well from his youth. It was very difficult for the two others, but he managed to get them across’, Wiesenthal believes they took the ‘monastery route between Austria and Italy. Roman Catholic priests, particularly Franciscan friars, helped pass the fugitives down a long line of “safe” religious houses.’
Many of these monks and other good Christians had sheltered Jews fleeing for their lives during the war. Of Rome’s 8000 Jews, at least half survived because they were hidden in convents, monasteries, houses of Catholic orders, and even in the Vatican. (Still others were sheltered by Italian neighbours and friends, but 2000, most of them women and children, died in Auschwitz or in transit.) For better or for worse, by 1945 some of these good Samaritans had been in ‘refugee work’ for so long that they no longer discriminated among their guests, but simply helped any ‘pilgrim’ on his way.