Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (2 page)

The People Who Speak

While researching this book I talked with many more people than those I quote. Here, for the reader’s convenience, I list under six headings only those whose words provide a major contribution to the actual text.

The main story.

F
RANZ
S
TANGL
, Police Superintendent of the Euthanasia Institute, Schloss Hartheim, November 1940 – February 1942; Kommandant of Sobibor, March 1942 – September 1942; Kommandant of Treblinka, September 1942 – August 1943. Interviewed in Düsseldorf Remand Prison where he was awaiting the result of appeal against a life sentence, in April and June 1971.

T
HERESA
S
TANGL
, his wife, interviewed at her home in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.

H
ELENE
E
IDENBÖCK
, his sister-in-law, interviewed at her home in Vienna.

Former SS men who worked with Stangl.

F
RANZ
S
UCHOMEL
, who worked in the Euthanasia Programme – photographic section – 1940–2, and later at Treblinka. Interviewed at his home in Altotting, Bavaria.

O
TTO
H
ORN
, who worked in the Euthanasia Programme in 1941, then in Russia and as of September 1942, in Treblinka. Interviewed at his home in West Berlin.

G
USTAV
M
ÜNZBERGER
, who worked in the Euthanasia Programme and as of August 1942 at Treblinka. Interviewed at his son’s home in Unterammergau, Bavaria.

Survivors of the extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka.

S
TANISLAW
S
ZMAJZNER
, who was at Sobibor, to whom I talked in Goiania, Brazil, where he is an executive in a paper factory.

R
ICHARD
G
LAZAR
, who was at Treblinka, to whom I talked at his home near Berne, in Switzerland, where he works in an engineering firm.

S
AMUEL
R
AJZMAN
, who was at Treblinka, to whom I talked in Montreal, where he runs his own lumber company.

B
EREK
R
OJZMAN
, who was at Treblinka, to whom I talked in Warsaw where he works in a factory. He is the only Treblinka survivor still living in Poland, and he accompanied me when I visited the camp-site.

J
OSEPH
S
IEDLECKI
, who was at Treblinka, to whom I talked at his home in Upper New York State where he is
maître d’hotel
at a large resort.

External witnesses of events connected with Sobibor and Treblinka.

W
LADIMIR
G
ERUNG AND HIS WIFE.
Wladimir Gerung is chief forester of Sobibor and custodian of the camp-site. His wife lived within twenty miles of the camp while it was in operation.

H
ORST
M
ÜNZBERGER AND HIS WIFE.
Horst is the son of Gustav Münzberger and helped me understand what it is like to be the son of a man who was in charge of the gas chambers at Treblinka.

H
UBERT
P
FOCH
, now a Vienna City Councillor, who as a young soldier in transit, on August 21, 1942, witnessed the arrival of a transport at Treblinka and who has kindly allowed me to quote from the diary he kept at the time, and to reproduce photographs he took.

F
RANCISZEK
Z
ABECKI
, who was traffic controller at Treblinka (town) station from May 1941 until after the camp was demolished. A member of the Home Army (the Polish resistance), his undercover job was reporting German troop movements, but it enabled him to keep a detailed – and unique – record of all the transports coming through his station on the way into Treblinka camp.

In connection with the Euthanasia Programme.

D
IETER
A
LLERS AND HIS WIFE.
Dieter Allers is a lawyer who in December 1940 was appointed chief administrative officer of T4, which administered the “General Foundation for Institutional Care” (the euphemism for the Euthanasia Programme), and later – although Herr Allers contests this – the “Final Solution”. Sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a recent euthanasia trial, he is now back home in Hamburg where I spoke to him and his wife. Frau Allers did her war service as a secretary for ‘T4’ (and briefly at the Euthanasia “Institute”, Schloss Hartheim). She and her husband met and married during that period.

A
LBERT
H
ARTL
, who left the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1934, joined the
SS
(Sturmbannführer – Major), and in 1935 was appointed Chief of Church Information at the Reich Security Office: a position enabling him to be uniquely well informed on the relationship between the National Socialists and the Churches with reference to the Euthanasia Programme.
In connection with the escape network provided by the Catholic Church in Rome, and the relationship between the Vatican and Nazi Germany.

M
ONSIGNOR
K
ARL
B
AYER
, Director of the International Caritas in Vienna, who held a similar position in Rome during the period discussed in my book.

D
R
E
UGEN
D
OLLMANN
, who was Hitler’s interpreter in Rome and now lives in Munich.

M
ADAME
G
ERTRUDE
D
UPUIS
, who has held an important position in the International Red Cross in Rome since before World War II.

H
IS
E
XCELLENCY
, M
ONSIEUR
K
AZIMIERZ
P
APÉE
, Polish Ambassador to the Holy See from July 14, 1939, to December 1948, who still lives in Rome.

F
ATHER
A
NTON
W
EBER
, a Palatine priest at the St Raphael Society in Rome, who was closely concerned with providing aid for refugees and escapees.

B
ISHOP
J
AKOB
W
EINBACHER
, Auxiliary Bishop of Vienna, who in 1952 took over as Rector of the Anima in Rome from Bishop Alois Hudal (now dead) from whom Stangl obtained a Red Cross passport and funds to enable him to escape to Syria.

F
ATHER
B
URKHART
S
CHNEIDER
,
SJ
, head of the team of Jesuit historians working on the Vatican publication
Actes et Documents du Saint Siège relatif à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.

Part I

1

I
FIRST
met Franz Stangl on the morning of Friday, April 2, 1971, in a little room which was ordinarily used as a waiting and rest room for lawyers visiting the Düsseldorf remand prison. The room was the same size as the cells in the prison’s modern block, the block in which Stangl was detained. It had the same barred windows, the same dreary view of the paved inside yard, and the same kind of minimal furnishings in blond polished pine. It was impersonal, neutral, with nothing in it to please or edify, but equally nothing to distract the eye or mind: the right place for the particular seventy hours I was to spend with this particular man.

When, on December 22, 1970, the Düsseldorf court sentenced Stangl to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 people during his tenure as Kommandant of Treblinka, “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, who had played a part in his capture, told reporters that Stangl’s conviction by the Germans was at least as important as Adolf Eichmann’s by the Israelis. “The Stangl case”, he said, “provided West Germany with their most significant criminal case of the century. If I had done nothing else in my life but get this evil man, I would not have lived in vain.”

It was difficult to associate the quiet, courteous man the prison governor presented to me that morning, with that description.

Sixty-three years old, Franz Stangl was tall, well built, with receding grey hair, a deeply lined face and red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing grey flannel trousers, a white shirt, a tie and a neat grey sweater. When I met him he had been in prison four years and two weeks, virtually all of this time in solitary confinement. During the three years of the preparations for the trial, the prison also accommodated several of his former subordinates and the strictest precautions were taken to prevent them from communicating with one another. But even after these men, their sentences confirmed, were moved to a penal institution, he remained in isolation in his six- by twelve-foot cell because several young prisoners had muttered threats against his life. Only a few days before I met him, his increasing depression had decided the prison authorities to allow him a daily period of exercise in the prison yard and some contact with selected prisoners. “But even now he hardly talks to anyone,” one of the prison officers told me later. “He is a loner.” Most of his day was spent in his cell reading and listening to the radio, his prison possessions arranged around him in pristine symmetry.

Despite his totally sedentary life Stangl was muscular, straight-backed and to all appearances both relaxed and controlled.

He and the prison governor, Herr Eberhard Mies, a former lawyer, shook hands and bowed to each other. Presented to me, Stangl bowed again – both times it was a gesture of courtesy, not deference or even respect. Herr Mies inquired after his health. Speaking quietly and conversationally in the soft German of his native Austria, in the semi-formal way it is taught in Austrian provincial schools, Stangl replied that he was feeling better. “I have signed up for the chess club,” he said, “and I think I’ll attend some classes when they start again after Easter. Literature, I think; it will be interesting. They are going to have them twice a week, aren’t they?” Unexpectedly, it seemed an encounter between equals. Stangl, very different from the “small man” I had been told I would find, gave the disquieting impression of an imposing and dominant personality in full control of himself and his environment.

This impression persisted up to a point, and despite his obvious apprehension about our impending talks, throughout that first morning. After we had been left alone, he immediately began to rebut various accusations made during his trial. The arguments, the phraseology, the very words he used were gratingly familiar from his and other trials for Nazi crimes: he had done nothing wrong; there had always been others above him; he had never done anything but obey orders; he had never hurt a single human being. What had happened was a tragedy of war and – sadly – there were tragedies of war everywhere: “Look at Katyn,” he said, “look at Dresden, Hiroshima and now Vietnam.” He was sorry, yes sorry for that young American lieutenant who, like him, had done no more than obey orders in Mai Lai and was now having to carry the can.

I listened to him all morning, almost without interrupting. His sentence was on appeal and it was clear that he had been advised, or had convinced himself, that these “interviews” would enable him – he may even have thought they were intended to enable him – to state his case once more in the only way the cases of people like himself had ever been stated. The precedent had been established at Nuremberg where the arguments proposed by the defence for some of the accused were sometimes close enough to a kind of truth to throw at least some doubt on the
quality
of their guilt. It was a technique which, for want of anything better, had subsequently been adopted by all who followed the Nuremberg accused into the dock, whatever their standing, whatever their past involvement. But polemics was not what I had come for.

Shortly before breaking off for lunch – when, I had been told, I would have to give him as much time as he wanted for his meal and rest – I told him that having listened to him for two and a half hours I thought I had better explain what I really wanted. He could then think about it and let me know after lunch whether he wanted to go on. I said that I knew inside out all the things he had said that morning; all of them had been said before by any number of people. And I didn’t wish to argue the right or wrong of any of this; I felt it was pointless. What I had come for was something quite different: I wanted him really to talk to me; to tell me about himself as a child, a boy, a youth, a man; to tell me about his father, his mother, his friends, his wife and his children; tell me not what he did or did not do but what he loved and what he hated and what he felt about the things in his life which had eventually brought him to where he was sitting now. If he didn’t want to do this, but preferred to go on in the vein of that morning’s recital, then I would listen to him, I said, to the end of that afternoon, go back to England, write a little something about the interview, and that would be the end of it. But if, after thinking about it, he decided to help me delve deeper into the past (
his
past, because things had happened to and inside him which had happened to hardly anyone else, ever) then perhaps we could find some truth together; some new truth which would contribute to the understanding of things that had never yet been understood. If this could be done I would be prepared to stay in Düsseldorf as long as he liked; days or even weeks. I told him, too, that he had to know from the start that I abhorred everything the Nazis had stood for and done, but that I would promise him to write down exactly what he said, whatever it would be, and that I would try – my own feelings notwithstanding – to understand without prejudice.

When I’d finished he didn’t say anything, only nodded. And when a moment later the guard came to take him back to his cell, he left the room with nothing but a small formal bow. I was not at all sure I’d see him again.

I lunched that day in the canteen and talked to several members of the prison staff. It was evident at once that they
liked
Stangl. “If only they were all like Stangl,” they said, “our life would be a bed of roses.” Some of them said “like
Herr
Stangl”. I remarked on that “Herr” to one of the older guards, who shrugged and said, “That’s what we are supposed to call them now. ‘Herr’ indeed!”