Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (26 page)

“
But if you made this offer to Globocnik,” I said, “it means that you actually volunteered your collaboration, doesn’t it?
”

“All I was doing,” he replied sharply, his face once again undergoing that now familiar change, “was to confirm to him that I would be carrying out this
assignment
as a police officer under his command.”

“
But you and Michel, months before, had acknowledged to yourselves that what was being committed here was a crime. How could you, in all conscience, volunteer, as you were doing now, to take any part in this crime?
”

“It was a matter of survival – always of survival. What I had to do, while I continued my efforts to get out, was to limit my own actions to what I – in my own conscience – could answer for. At police training school they taught us – I remember, it was Rittmeister Leitner who always said it – that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action and intent. If any of these four elements are missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offence.”

“
I can’t see how you could possibly apply this concept to this situation?
”

“That’s what I am trying to explain to you; the only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking. By doing this I
could
apply it to my own situation; if the ‘subject’ was the government, the ‘object’ the Jews, and the ‘action’ the gassings, then I could tell myself that for me the fourth element, ‘intent’ [he called it ‘free will’] was missing.”

“
Except as far as administering the valuables was concerned?
”

“Yes. But having established the possibility of illegal trafficking this had become a legitimate police activity.”

“
But these valuables which you were proposing – or agreeing – to administer wouldn’t have been there but for the gassings. How could you isolate one from the other? Even in your own thinking?
”

“I could, because my specific assignment from the start had been the responsibility for these effects.”

“
What if you had been specifically assigned to carry out the actual gassings?
”

“I wasn’t,” he said drily, and added in a reasonable and explanatory tone: “That was done by two Russians – Ivan and Nicolau, under the command of a sub [Gustav Münzberger].”

3

T
HE CAMP
was between forty and fifty acres (six hundred metres by four hundred) and was divided into two main sections and four subsections. The “upper camp” – or Camp II – included the gas chambers, the installations for the disposal of the corpses (limepits at first, then huge iron racks for burning, known as “roasts”), and the barracks for the
Totenjuden
, the Jewish work-groups. One of the barracks was for males, another, later, for females. The men carried and burned the bodies; the twelve girls cooked and washed.

The “lower camp” or Camp I was subdivided into three sections, rigidly separated by barbed-wire fences, which, like the outer fences, were interwoven with pine branches for camouflage. The first section contained the unloading ramp and the square –
Sortierungsplatz
– where the first selections were made; the fake hospital (the
Lazarett
) where the old and sick were shot instead of gassed; the undressing barracks where the victims stripped, left their clothes, had their hair cut off if they were women, and were internally searched for hidden valuables; and finally the “Road to Heaven”. This, starting at the exit from the women’s and children’s undressing barrack, was a path ten feet wide with ten-foot fences of barbed wire on each side (again thickly camouflaged with branches, constantly renewed, through which one could neither see out nor in), through which the naked prisoners, in rows of five, had to run the hundred metres up the hill to the “baths” – the gas chambers – and where, when, as happened frequently, the gassing mechanism broke down, they had to stand waiting their turn for hours at a time.

To the left of this part of the camp, separated from it by barbed wire, were the living and working quarters of the
Arbeitsjuden
– the Jewish workers who staffed this lower part of the camp: the joiners, carpenters, shoe-makers, tailors and goldsmiths, doctors in the clinic, laundry workers, kitchen hands and the
Kapos
– the ghetto administrators and police. To the right of this so-called ghetto complex was the
Appelplatz
– the yard where roll-call was taken twice a day. The yard was also used for other purposes, such as concerts, Kurt Franz’s ideas of “sport” (running races and boxing matches which ended when the losers were dead), punishments (the whipping-block was in almost daily use at the evening roll-call) and executions (usually by hanging, frequently upside down). “
Did the workers have any kind of social life?
” I asked Stangl. “Of course, of course,” he replied. “At the end of the working day they went for walks.” – “
Walks? Where?
” – “On the
Appelplatz;
or they sat about in groups and chatted.” (Another subtle idea of
SS
-fun was the ghetto-latrine which the work-Jews could only visit for a precise number of minutes controlled by a prisoner guard with a big clock, whom the Germans dressed comically as a rabbi and called the “shit-master”. “He was a quiet gentle man, I think an engineer or designer from Warsaw,” one of the survivors told me. “He used to lie on his bunk at night and cry.”)

To the left again of this central area, beyond yet another fence, were the quarters of the eighty Ukrainian guards. Forty yards or so west began a small side-street which led into the “Kurt-Seidel Strasse”, a two-lane cement road built on Stangl’s orders and named after the
SS
officer in charge of its construction. South-east of this road, along which in the spring of 1943 flowers and evergreen shrubs had been planted, were Stangl’s quarters containing his bedroom, a guest room, his office and the offices of his two senior administrative assistants, the orderly Stadie, and the book-keeper Mätzig. There was also a clinic for the staff, a dentist, barbers – and a zoo. “We had any number of marvellous birds there,” Stangl said, “and benches and flowers. An expert from Vienna designed it for us – of course, we were able to have experts for anything.”

Finally, across the street were the
SS
living quarters; forty
SS
men were assigned to Treblinka at one time or another, but only twenty were stationed there at any time. The cleaning of the
SS
quarters was done by Jewish girls, the cooking however, by Polish – non-Jewish – women. I have not seen this fact mentioned in any of the histories of the period. “Oh yes,” said Suchomel, “there were three Polish girls working in the German mess; and they lived there too. Of course they had their days off and could go and see their families. Their names were Janina, Sofia and Genjia – that’s short for Eugenia. Oh yes, they all survived.”

If the mind boggles at the idea of people having a “job” at Treblinka from which they had “days off” to go and see their families in the surrounding villages, this is perhaps a deficiency in our imagination. For the car-entrance to the camp, and the section where the Germans – and Ukrainians too – lived was, it would appear, anything but forbidding. The street, the mess, the barracks, Stangl’s house, the munition depot, the garage and petrol “station” – all of it was banked with flowers. “It is difficult,” said Stangl, “to describe it adequately now, but it became really beautiful.”

•    •    •

In this exploration of how the weaknesses and fears of men such as Stangl can be exploited to operate a death-machine like Treblinka, his own account of his daily life there, and the way he deliberately manipulated and repressed his moral scruples (which unquestionably existed) is particularly illuminating.

Throughout the three days of this part of his story he manifested an intense desire to seek and tell the truth. This need, strangely enough, was emphasized rather than belied by the extraordinary callousness of many of his explanations and tales. He was telling the truth as he had seen it twenty-nine years ago and still saw it in 1971, and in so doing he voluntarily but unwittingly told more than the truth: he revealed the
two
men he had become in order to survive.

“I got up at dawn,” he began. “The men used to be livid because I made my first round at 5 a.m. It kept them on their toes. I first checked the guards – the British were supposed to have dropped parachutists in the region and I had had to secure the camp against the outside; we had put up a second outer fence of steel anti-tank obstacles. And then I went up to the
Totenlager.
”

Franz Suchomel would have none of this, although in fact he ended by confirming Stangl’s description. “Five o’clock?” he said. “Nonsense. Why
should
he get up that early? He had other people who could do that for him. At least,
I
never saw him at that hour and I was often around then. Yes – he probably came to breakfast some time around 7; anyway, that’s when breakfast was served. I don’t think he often started work at 8. If he really got up early, it was only to check that everything was properly prepared in the gas chambers. That was his main concern, because, after all, he had to reckon with new transports every hour.”

“Stangl?” said
SS
man Otto Horn, who worked for a year in the upper camp supervising the burning of the bodies. “I only saw him in the upper camp twice in all the time I was at Treblinka. He told you he came there twice a day?” He laughed. “Impossible. Of course,” he then added quickly, “I shirked as much as possible – I always volunteered for night-duty so as to avoid the other things, so he may have come when I was off. But
I
only saw him there twice. When I was on duty at night I used to go and just sit behind one of the barracks and snooze. I didn’t
want
to see anything. Yes, I think several people felt like I did. But that was the most positive thing one could do – you know, play possum.…”

•    •    •

“
What were you doing at the
Totenlager
at
6
a.m.?
” I asked Stangl.

“It was a
round;
I went everywhere. At 7 I went in to breakfast. After a while I had them build our own bakery. We had a wonderful Viennese baker. He made delicious cakes, very good bread. After that we gave our army-issue bread to the work-Jews. Of course.”

“
Of course? Did everybody?
”

“I don’t know. I did. Why not – they could use it.”

This bakery is a good example of how variously things are remembered by different people, something I was to find time and again while researching this book. Suchomel and Richard Glazar both remembered the baker and his name (Reinhard Siegfried – “Lovely name for a Jew, isn’t it?” said Glazar). And both said he came from Frankfurt, not Vienna. But Glazar thought that although he was supposed to start work in the
SS
bakery, the bakery never actually materialized because “this was only just before the uprising” (August 2, 1943). Suchomel, on the other hand, had, so to speak, two versions of the baker, which he gave me on two different occasions. In the first story Siegfried worked in the
SS
bakery, “but there was no question of giving army-issue bread to the work-Jews,” he said. When, however, in reply to a question, he wrote about it a few months later, he wrote, “Kapo Siegfried … baked
only
for the Jews.”

“I tried other ways to get them food too,” said Stangl. “You know the Poles had ration books which allowed them an egg a week, so much fat, so much meat. Well, it occurred to me that if everybody in Poland had the right to ration tickets – if that was the law – then our work-Jews were in Poland too and also had the right to ration tickets. So I told Mätzig the book-keeper to go to the town council and request a thousand ration books for our worker-Jews.”

“
What happened?
”

He laughed. “Well, in the surprise of the moment they gave him a thousand rations for that week. But afterwards the Poles – the town council – complained to somebody at
HQ
and I was hauled over the coals for it. Still, it was a good try and we did get something out of it; they had a thousand eggs that week.” (“Oh yes, certainly,” said Suchomel. “Mätzig got out of the Polish authorities what he could; he was a decent bloke. He got the Jews cereal and marmalade – that I remember clearly. A thousand eggs? Well, I don’t know anything about that – but it’s possible.”)

“
Getting back to your daily routine, what did you do after breakfast?
”

“At about 8 I’d go to my office.”

“
What time did the transports arrive?
”

“Usually about that time.”

“
Didn’t you attend their arrival?
”

“Not necessarily. Sometimes I went.”

According to Suchomel, Stangl was usually there, “though he always avoided any transports from Germany or Austria, which were accompanied by German police. When that happened, the police officers were quickly taken to the mess so that they couldn’t see anything, and then they were pushed off again on the same train when it went out (after it was cleaned).” According to Treblinka survivor Joe Siedlecki, Stangl was “often, always on the ramp in his white suit, often on horseback, very elegant”. (But Siedlecki’s account is another example of how misleading memory can be, because although Stangl didn’t arrive at Treblinka until September, at the earliest late August he said, “He was there when I arrived.…I arrived in July. He
must
have been there – he was the Kommandant.”)

“
How many people would arrive on a transport?
” I asked Stangl.

“Usually about five thousand. Sometimes more.”

“
Did you ever talk to any of the people who arrived?
”

“Talk? No. But I remember one occasion – they were standing there just after they’d arrived, and one Jew came up to me and said he wanted to make a complaint. So I said yes, certainly, what was it. He said that one of the Lithuanian guards (who were only used for transport duties) had promised to give him water if he gave him his watch. But he had taken the watch and not given him any water. Well, that wasn’t right, was it? Anyway, I didn’t permit pilfering. I asked the Lithuanians then and there who it was who had taken the watch, but nobody came forward. Franz – you know, Kurt Franz – whispered to me that the man involved could be one of the Lithuanian officers – they had so-called officers – and that I couldn’t embarrass an officer in front of his men. Well, I said, ‘I am not interested what sort of uniform a man wears. I am only interested in what is inside a man.’ Don’t think
that
didn’t get back to Warsaw in a hurry. But what’s right is right, isn’t it? I made them all line up and turn out their pockets.”