![]() I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. "I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. ![]() "When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere - they weren't 'cargo' to you then, were they?" It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy. "They were cargo." He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. "So you didn't feel they were human beings?" At this moment he looked old and worn and real. Those big eyes which looked at me not knowing that in no time at all they'd all be dead." He paused. "What do you mean?" But he went on without hearing or answering me. I thought then, 'Look at this, this reminds me of Poland that's just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins."' They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. The cattle in the pens hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. "When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil," be said, his face deeply concentrated, and obviously reliving the experience, "my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. "Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren't really human beings?" I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work." "No, I don't mean to of course, thoughts came. I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank." "In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. "Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark, when you couldn't avoid thinking about it?" There were hundreds of ways to take one's mind off it I used them all." I repressed it all by trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. "To tell the truth," be then said, slowly and thoughtfully, "one did become used to it." "Would it be true to say that you got used to the liquidations?" He died of heart failure in Düsseldorf prison on June 28, 1971.įranz Stangl was interviewed by the author Gitta Sereny in 1970 and his comments later appeared in the book Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1983): Found guilty on October 22, 1970, Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. He admitted to these killings but argued: "My conscience is clear. It took another six years before he was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and arrested in Brazil.Īfter extradition to West Germany, he was tried for the deaths of approximately 900,000 people. With the help of friends, Stangl found work at the Volkswagen plant in Sao Paulo, still using his own name.įor years his responsibility in the mass murder of men, women and children had been known to the Austrian authorities, but Austria did not issue a warrant for Stangl's arrest until 1961. Stangl was joined by his wife and family and lived in Syria for three years before moving to Brazil in 1951. He escaped to Italy with his colleague from Sobibór, Gustav Wagner, where he was helped by some officials of the Vatican to reach Syria on a Red Cross passport. Always dressed in white riding clothes, Stangl gained a reputation as an efficient administrator and was described by Odilo Globocnik as “the best camp commander, who had the greatest share of the entire action.”Īt the end of the war, Stangl managed to conceal his identity and, although imprisoned in 1945, he was released two years later. Stangl was commandant of Sobibór from March 1942 until September 1942, when he was transferred to Treblinka. In 1942, he was transferred to Poland where he worked under SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Odilo Globocnik. In 1940, Stangl became superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically handicapped people were sent to be killed. ![]() After working as a weaver, Stangl joined the Austrian police in 1931 and soon afterwards the then illegal Nazi Party.Īfter Anschluss, Stangl was quickly promoted through the ranks. Franz Stangl, the son of a night-watchman, was born in Altmünster, Austria, on March 26, 1908.
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