Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (21 page)

5

“
Did you want your family to come to visit you in Poland?
” I asked Stangl.

“I wanted to see them, of course. But don’t you see what the fact that they were allowed to come meant? Globocnik had said to me, months before, that I needed leave. But they weren’t going to let me go home, like other people. I was in danger, it was quite obvious. And they were making damn sure I knew about it.”

Stangl’s wife and two little girls, six and four, arrived very soon after his wife had written to tell him of the forms she had filled out, and they all went to stay with the surveyor, Baurath Moser, in Chelm, twenty miles or so from the camp.

“
Were you officially on leave then, or did you have to go to Sobibor during that time?
”

“While we were in Colm, I was on leave.”

“
Did your wife ask you what you were doing in Sobibor? What sort of camp it was?
”

“Very little then: as I told you she was used to my not being able to speak to her of service matters. And we were so glad just to be together. The funny thing was, though, that I heard nothing from Lublin, or from Wirth. I didn’t have any official instructions how long my leave was to be, how long the family would be allowed to stay, or anything. After about three weeks I went to see Höfle and asked him. He said, ‘Why make waves? If nobody’s said anything to you, why not just keep them here for a while? Find a place to stay nearby, and don’t worry’.”

“
What did you think that meant?
”

“I was so glad to have them there, you know; it was such a relief, I just decided not to think, just to enjoy it. I found rooms for us on an estate just a few kilometres from Sobibor camp, near the village. It was a fish-hatchery belonging to Count Chelmicki [he said ‘Karminsky’, but Frau Stangl corrected this later].”

“
How far exactly was that from the camp?
”

“Five kilometres.”

Pan Gerung, the custodian of Sobibor, remembered the fish-hatchery well thirty years later; it had been demolished a year before I visited Poland. But he and his wife were dubious about the Stangl family having stayed there. “You are probably confusing it with a big white house the Germans built as a kind of country club for their officers, on the other side of the lake. They used to go there for weekends, for the fishing – and other days too, in the evenings. An enormous amount of drinking went on there, and other things. Poles weren’t allowed in.”

I replied that I was sure it was the fish-hatchery the Stangls had stayed at – no doubt they had requisitioned rooms there because the other place was unsuitable for small children.

“But the fish-hatchery was four kilometres from the camp, through the woods,” said Pan Gerung. “If he really rode through these woods, on his own – why, anyone could have shot him, any time.” This Polish inhabitant of a different Sobibor, in a different age, sounded honestly puzzled, even amazed. And what he said was true: everyone in those parts knew what Sobibor was; everyone knew Stangl was the camp’s Kommandant; anyone – if for no other reason than a gesture – could have shot him on those almost daily rides through the woods. But no one did.

“
The Chelmickis
,” I said to Stangl, “
must have known or guessed what was going on at Sobibor, However secret an operation it was, there must have been rumours. Did your wife still not know?
”

“The Chelmickis were very nice. But I don’t think they would have dared to talk about it even if they had heard rumours.” (“ … The Jews who worked in the fish-hatchery,” Frau Stangl was to write to me later, “were all treated very well. And so was I.…”)

“But my wife
did
find out, though not from them,” Stangl said. “One of the non-coms, Unterscharführer Ludwig, came by once while I was out. He had been drinking and he told her about Sobibor. When I got back she was waiting for me. She was terribly upset. She said, ‘Ludwig has been here. He told me. My God, what are you doing in that place?’ I said, ‘Now, child, this is a service matter and you know I can’t discuss it. All I can tell you, and you must believe me: whatever is wrong –
I
have nothing to do with it.’ ”

“
Did she believe this, without further questions or arguments?
”

He shrugged. “She spoke of it sometimes. But what else could I say to her? It did make me feel, though, that I wanted her away from there. I wanted them to go home. The school term was about to start for the older of the girls anyway.…” the sentence trailed off.

“
It was too difficult having them there now that she knew. Wasn’t that it?
”

He shrugged his shoulders again and for a moment buried his face in his hands. “Just about then I had a message that I was to come to Warsaw to see Globocnik – by this time he had two offices, one in Warsaw, the other in Lublin. Now it seemed even more urgent to me to get the family home. I got hold of Michel and said that I entrusted my family to him; for him to get them out as quickly as possible. Then I said goodbye to my wife and children and went to Warsaw.”

“
When did they leave?
”

“Later I found that Michel got them out in four days. But I only found that out after they had gone. And I didn’t know what awaited me in Warsaw. I thought that this was probably it – that I was finally for it. But when I got to Globocnik’s office, he was nearly as friendly as he’d been the first time we met. I couldn’t understand it. He said, almost as soon as I came in, ‘I have a job for you; it is strictly a police assignment.’ I knew right away there was something wrong with it, but I didn’t know what. He said, ‘You are going to Treblinka. We’ve already sent a hundred thousand Jews up there and nothing has arrived here in money or materials. I want you to find out what’s happening to the stuff; where it is disappearing to.’ ”

“
But this time you knew where you were being sent; you knew all about Treblinka and that it was the biggest extermination camp. Here was your chance, here you were, face to face with him at last. Why didn’t you say right there and then that you couldn’t go on with this work?
”

“Don’t you see? He had me just where he wanted me; I had no idea where my family was. Had Michel got them out? Or had they perhaps stopped them? Were they holding them as hostages? And even if they were out, the alternative was still the same: Prohaska was still in Linz. Can you imagine what would have happened to me if I had returned there under these circumstances? No, he had me flat: I was a prisoner.”

“
But even so – even admitting there was danger. Wasn’t anything preferable by now to going on with this work in Poland?
”

“Yes, that’s what we know now, what we can say now. But then?”

“
Well, in point of fact, we know now, don’t we, that they did
not
automatically kill men who asked to be relieved from this type of job. You knew this yourself didn’t you, at the time?
”

“I knew it
could
happen that they wouldn’t shoot someone. But I also knew that more often they
did
shoot them, or send them to concentration camps. How could I know which would apply to me?”

This argument, of course, runs through all of Stangl’s story; it is the most essential question at which, over and over, I found myself stopped when talking with him. I didn’t know when I spoke with him and I don’t know now at which point one human being can make the moral decision for another that he should have the courage to risk death.

However, my reactions to some of the things Stangl said in this part of his account changed slightly subsequently, as a result of my conversations with his wife. These demonstrated very clearly that – if nothing else – he had manipulated events, or his memory of events, to suit his need to rationalize his guilt, his awareness of his guilt or (at that point in our talks) his need to avoid facing it.

“He had written to me soon after he got to Poland saying he was ‘constructing’,” said Frau Stangl, “but he didn’t say what. And all I could think of was how glad I was he wasn’t at the front. And then, when he’d been there for a long time without leave [it was interesting that she considered two months ‘a long time’], he wrote to say that they were going to let us come to visit him as he was not going to be allowed on leave away from the East at all. And shortly afterwards a Wehrmacht officer arrived with travel papers for us.

“The two children and I travelled out in June. I remember we missed the connection in Cracow; you can imagine what it was like travelling with two small girls in the middle of the war.

“No, I knew nothing – nothing whatever. He met us off the train, and, of course, we hadn’t seen him in months, it was just wonderful to see him again. Once again, that was all I could think of. We went to stay in Chelm in the house of the chief surveyor, Baurath Moser. In a way I suppose that was the first time I came into contact with anything to do with Jews [in Poland] because he had two young Jewish girls there, as domestic servants. They were called the two
Zäuseln
*
– I don’t really know why. They were nice girls, helped me with the children and all that. Although I hadn’t any notion of the true situation, there were things that made me wonder: you see, the walls of the house were very thin and I would hear Baurath Moser in the room next to ours when I was in bed. He had both the girls – the
Zäuseln
– in there and … well … he did things to them, you know. It would start every night with his telling them what to take off first and then what next and what to do and so on … it … it was very embarrassing. And I didn’t like what he did to the girls; but, you know, I mainly asked myself, ‘Why do they do it? Why don’t they just give notice?’ That’s how little I knew.” (Later, in a letter, Frau Stangl mentioned these girls again – and this time slightly differently: “The two
Zäuseln
in Chelm,” she wrote, “were always merry, had good food, and were very neat.”)

“But I was very glad when Paul told me he had arranged for us to move to the fish-hatchery – it would be better for all of us, and I was glad to get the children away from that house. No, while we were in Chelm, Paul was on leave; it was when we moved to the fish-hatchery that he had to go back to work.

“And one day while he was at work – I still thought constructing, or working at an army supply base – Ludwig came with several other men, to buy fish or something. They brought schnapps, and sat in the garden drinking. Ludwig came up to me – I was in the garden too, with the children – and started to tell me about his wife and kids; he went on and on. I was pretty fed up, especially as he stank of alcohol and became more and more maudlin. But I thought, here he is, so lonely – I must at least listen. And then he suddenly said, ‘
Fürchterlich
– dreadful, it is just dreadful, you have no idea how dreadful it is.’ I asked him ‘What is dreadful?’ – ‘Don’t you know?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you know what is being done out there?’ – ‘No,’ I said, ‘What?’ – ‘The Jews,’ he answered. ‘The Jews are being done away with.’ – ‘Done away with?’ I asked. ‘How? What do you mean?’ – ‘With gas,’ he said. ‘Fantastic numbers of them [
Unkeimliche Mengen
].’

“He went on about how awful it was and then he said, in that same maudlin way he had, ‘But we are doing it for our Führer. For him we sacrifice ourselves to do this – we obey his orders.’ And then he said, too, ‘Can you imagine what would happen if the Jews ever got hold of
us?
’

“Then I told him to go away. I could hardly think. I was already crying. I took the children into the house. I sat there, staring, staring into an abyss – that’s what I saw;
my
husband, my man, my good man, how could he be in this? Was it possible that he actually saw these things being done? I knew about Wirth – Paul had talked about him from the moment I arrived, even at the station – but that wasn’t what I was thinking of then.…My thoughts were in a whirl; what I needed above all was to confront him, to talk to him, to see what he had to say, how he could explain.…”

She left the children playing in their room and went out along the path in the forest she knew he would have to take to ride home. “I walked for a long time and sat down on a tree-trunk to wait for him. When he rode up and saw me from afar, his face lit up – I could see it. It always did – his face always showed his joy the moment he saw me. He jumped off his horse and stepped over – I suppose to put his arm around me. But then he saw at once how distraught I was. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘The children?’

“I said, ‘I know what you are doing in Sobibor. My God, how can they? What are
you
doing in this? What is your part in it?’ First he asked me how I’d found out, but I just cried and cried; and then he said, ‘Look, little one, please calm down, please. You must believe me, I have nothing to do with any of this.’ I said, ‘How can you
be
there and have nothing to do with it?’ And he answered, ‘My work is purely administrative and I am there to build – to supervise construction, that’s all.’ – ‘You mean you don’t see it happen?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he answered. ‘I see it. But I don’t
do
anything to anybody.’

“Of course, I didn’t know he was the Kommandant: I never knew that. He told me he was the
Höchste Charge.
I asked him what that meant and he said again he was in charge of construction and that he enjoyed the work. I thought, ‘My God.’

“We walked back to the house, me crying and arguing and begging him over and over to tell me how he could be in such a place, how he could have allowed himself to get into such a situation. I am sure I made no sense – I hardly knew any more what I was saying. All he did, over and over, was reassure me – or try. That night, I couldn’t bear him to touch me – it was like that day in 1938 when I had kept away from him for weeks … weeks and weeks, until I finally felt sorry for him … but that night in Sobibor-Salovoce he seemed to understand. He just kept stroking me softly and trying to quiet me. Even so, it was several days before I … let him again. And that was only just before he was called to Lublin to see Globocnik. I finally allowed myself to be convinced that his role in this camp was purely administrative – of course I
wanted
to be convinced, didn’t I? But anyway – I can’t quite remember the sequence of events, but I know I wouldn’t have parted from him in anger.