Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (17 page)

“
What did the camp look like when you got there?
”

“It was just the Sobibor railway station. The station building and acro
SS
from it the forester’s hut and a barn, that’s all; just those three wooden buildings.”

“
And who did you find at Sobibor?
”

“That was a surprise for me,” he said the first time, “because there were several people there I already knew: they’d been in the.…you know … the Euthanasia Programme. Especially one – Michel, he’d been the head nurse at Hartheim.”

(He repeated this answer on a second occasion, but when I asked him the same question yet again, six weeks later, he suddenly said that Michel had actually travelled to Sobibor with him.)

“
Weren’t you a bit surprised to see Michel there? What did you think a nurse was doing at this supply camp site?
”

“Well, I didn’t really think about it. I knew of course that as the
Aktion
was over, the staff had become available –
something
had to be done with them. Also, it was very nice for me to have a friend there.”

It was of course quite clear at the time that the story of his beginnings in Poland and of some of the euthanasia phase, was at least partly fabrication, partly rationalization and partly evasion. But having pressed him about this repeatedly – on each occasion when we went through it again – I hoped that if I didn’t press him too hard, he would find it possible later on to revert to telling me the truth about the rest of it, however difficult.

He went on to describe the Polish workers, whom he found a “lackadaisical lot”. “They lived in the neighbourhood and went home at night – no doubt to get drunk on their
slivowitz.
Anyway, they always arrived late in the morning.”

Within two or three days he obtained a Jewish “work-commando” of twenty-five men, he said, and some Ukrainian guards from a nearby training camp, Trawniki. “At that time we really had nothing, no amenities for anybody,” he said. “Those first weeks we all bunked in together.”

“
What do you mean ‘all together’? The German staff, the Ukrainian guards and the Jews?
”

“At first we just used one hut while we were working on the others:
we
slept on the floor in the kitchen, and the others in the loft. Everything had to be built from scratch.”

“
When did you first find out what the camp was really for?
”

“Two things happened: when we’d been there about three days, I think, Michel came running one day and said he’d found a funny building back in the woods. ‘I think there is something fishy going on here,’ he said. ‘Come and see what it reminds you of.’ ”

“
What did he mean, ‘in the woods’?
”

“It was about ten or even fifteen minutes’ walk away from the railway station where we were building the main camp. It was a new brick building with three rooms, three metres by four. The moment I saw it I knew what Michel meant: it looked exactly like the gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim.”

“
But who had built this? How could you possibly not have noticed it before? Or seen it on the plans?
”

“The Poles had built it – they didn’t know what it was to be. Neither Michel nor I had had any time yet to go for walks in the woods. We were very busy. Yes – it was on the plans, but so were lots of other buildings …” the sentence trailed off.

“
All right, you hadn’t known: but now you knew. What did you do?
”

His face had gone red. I didn’t know whether because he had been caught out in a lie or because of what he was about to say next; it was much more usual for him to blush in advance than in retrospect.

“The second thing I mentioned happened almost simultaneously: a transport officer, a sergeant, arrived from Lublin – he was drunk – and said, to
me
[he sounded angry even now] that Globocnik was dissatisfied with the progress of the camp and had said to tell me that ‘If these Jews don’t work properly, just kill them off and we’ll get others’.”

“
What did that indicate to you?
”

“I went the very next day to Lublin to see Globocnik. He received me at once. I said to him, ‘How can this sergeant be permitted to give
me
such a message? And anyway, I am a police officer: how can I be expected to do anything like that?’ Globocnik was very friendly. He said I had misunderstood: I was just overwrought. He said, ‘We’d better get you some leave. You just go back for the moment and get on with the building. You are doing fine.’ And then he said, ‘Perhaps we can arrange to have your family come out for a bit.’ So I went back. What else could I do?”

“
Did you ask Globocnik about the gas chambers?
”

“There was no opportunity,” he said firmly. “I went back to Sobibor and talked it over with Michel. We decided that somehow we had to get out. But the very next day Wirth came. He told me to assemble the German personnel and made a speech – just as awful, just as vulgar as his speeches had been at Hartheim. He said that any Jews who didn’t work properly here would be ‘eliminated’. ‘If any of you don’t like that,’ he said to us, ‘you can leave. But under the earth,’ – that was his idea of being humorous – ‘not over it.’ And then he left. I went back to Lublin the next morning. Sturmbannführer (Major) Höfle,
*
Globocnik’s aide then, kept me waiting in the office all day, and again the next morning. Then he finally told me that the General would not be available for me. I went back to Sobibor. Four days later a courier came from Lublin with a formal letter from Globocnik informing me – in ice-cold language – that Wirth had been appointed inspector of camps and that I was to report to him at Belsec forthwith.”
§

Wirth had by then commanded both Chelmno and Belsec, a much larger establishment. At Chelmno it was found that the method of gas-vans was impracticable for the huge task on hand, and he claimed to have invented the Jewish
Sonderkommandos
*
(probably falsely, as this idea, reverting to the legend of the Pharaonic tombs, seems more likely to have emanated from Heydrich’s fertile intellectual brain). At Belsec the first large-scale exterminations with engine exhaust gas in gas chambers were begun in March 1942.

“I can’t describe to you what it was like,” Stangl said; he spoke slowly now, in his more formal German, his face strained and grim. He passed his hand over his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “I went there by car. As one arrived, one first reached Belsec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The Kommandantur was 200 metres away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell …” he said, “Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him … he was standing on a hill, next to the pits … the pits … full … they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses … oh God. That’s where Wirth told me – he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge.”

Although I have never doubted that Stangl’s first experience of a death-camp in operation was – as he claimed – that day in Belsec, he did give me, here too, two versions of this experience, although they were only marginally different. (His giving different versions of events is not too important from the point of view of facts. It is, however, of psychological relevance, for the gradual decrease in evasions, embellishments, and anxiety to project a favourable image of himself reflects significantly and accurately the intensity of his emotion, and possibly the psychological changes these conversations produced in him.)

The second time I asked him to tell me this story, he said: “Wirth wasn’t in his office; they said he was up in the camp. I asked whether I should go up there and they said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you – he’s mad with fury. It isn’t healthy to go near him.’ I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said that one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them – oh God, it was awful. A bit later Wirth came down. And that’s when he told me.…

The historical record provides a number of horrifyingly graphic descriptions of Wirth’s Belsec where the installations constantly broke down, causing unimaginable suffering to the deportees who were either left waiting, naked and without food or water, in the open, sometimes for days, or else were crammed into railway cars the floors of which had been covered with lime and were left to suffocate on sidings only a few hundred metres from the camp. These conditions – the beginnings of which Stangl obviously saw in April 1942 – have been described by Jan Karski in
The Story of a Secret State
,
*
and by Kurt Gerstein. Both men visited Belsec. Gerstein did so in his official capacity as Obersturmführer (Lieutenant) in the
SS
Health Department and his description of the gas chambers is probably the most terrible that has emerged from approximately that period. Gerstein’s somewhat ambiguous but undoubtedly tortured personality has been amply described in the literature (although his death, in Fresnes prison on July 17, 1945, remains clouded in mystery). Karski (now professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.) who was an indomitable courier for the Polish government in exile, spent a day at Belsec disguised as a Ukrainian guard. Karski’s description of the extermination of the Jews in Poland reached London and Washington as early as October 1942 (presumably, at least through the diplomatic post, also the Vatican in Rome). Although the fact of the physical extermination of the Jews in Poland was by then thoroughly known to the Allies – and to the Vatican – Karski’s detailed description to the world press,
MPS
, Members of Congress and religious leaders in London and Washington, and his meetings with Anthony Eden and President Roosevelt, provided the first testimony of an eye-witness. If previously there had been any doubt, after meeting Karski or reading his report, the Allied leaders knew precisely what was happening in Poland.

I had no doubt whatever of Stangl’s sincerity when he described his reaction to Belsec. Nor could one doubt that this was the real moment of decision for him: the time when he might have braved what he certainly considered the deadly dangers of taking a stand … and didn’t because it wasn’t in him to do so.

“I said [to Wirth] I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I simply wasn’t up to such an assignment. There wasn’t any argument or discussion. Wirth just said my reply would be reported to
HQ
and I was to go back to Sobibor. In fact I went to Lublin, tried again to see Globocnik, again in vain: he wouldn’t see me. When I got back to Sobibor, Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting – we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?” He stopped. He stopped at that point, when he told me about it, just as he and Michel must have stopped talking about it at that point; because, if there was nothing they could or dared do – there was nothing else to say.

“
But you knew that day that what was being done was wrong?
”

“Yes, I knew. Michel knew. But we also knew what had happened in the past to other people who had said no. The only way out that we could see was to keep trying in various and devious ways to get a transfer. The direct way was impossible. As Wirth had said, that led ‘under the earth’. Wirth came to Sobibor the next day. He ignored me; he stayed several days and organized everything. Half the workers were detailed to finish the gas chambers.”

“
While Wirth was organizing, what were you doing?
”

“I just went on with other construction work,” he said wearily. “And then one afternoon Wirth’s aide, Oberhauser, came to get me.
*
I was to come to the gas chamber. When I got there, Wirth stood in front of the building wiping the sweat off his cap and fuming. Michel told me later that he’d suddenly appeared, looked around the gas chambers on which they were still working and said, ‘Right, we’ll try it out right now with those twenty-five work-Jews: get them up here.’ They marched our twenty-five Jews up there and just pushed them in, and gassed them. Michel said Wirth behaved like a lunatic, hit out at his own staff with his whip to drive them on. And then he was livid because the doors hadn’t worked properly.”

“
What did he say to you?
”

“Oh, he just screamed and raved and said the doors had to be changed. After that he left.”

“
And after he was gone, what did you do?
”

“The same thing; I continued the construction of the camp. Michel had been put in charge of the gassings.”

“
Put in charge by whom?
”

“By Wirth.”

“
So now the exterminations had really started; it was happening right in front of you. How did you feel?
”

“At Sobibor one could avoid seeing almost all of it – it all happened so far away from the camp-buildings. All I could think of was that I wanted to get out. I schemed and schemed and planned and planned. I heard there was a new police unit at Mogilev. I went again to Lublin and filled out an application form for transfer. I asked Höfle to help me get Globocnik’s agreement. He said he would do what he could, but I never heard of it again. Two months later – in June – my wife wrote that she had been requested to supply details about the children’s ages: they were going to be granted a visit to Poland.”

*
Hans Höfle, Deputy Director of the
Aktion Reinhard
, hanged himself in the Vienna remand prison in August 1962 while awaiting trial.