Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (3 page)

Prison staff in West Germany are well trained (including 200 hours of lectures on psychology), and almost all the officers I spoke with that day, and in the ensuing weeks, appeared to me to be articulate and compassionate men who were intensely interested in what my conversations with Stangl would produce. They spoke freely about the complicated conflicts his presence in the prison brought to their minds. Many of them questioned – as do most people in Germany – the continuation of the Nazi crime trials so many years after the events, and several of them brought up the same worn-out arguments: nobody in Germany had known anything of the horrors, and no one who had not lived under a dictatorship could understand or presume to judge. At the same time almost all of them – though there were exceptions – agreed unhappily that as long as any of the men who were involved in these terrible deeds were alive, it would be immoral to do nothing. One of the men I spoke with on that first day was twenty-four – he hadn’t even been born at the time of Treblinka. “Stangl”, he said thoughtfully, “impresses us like a
man
– you know what I mean? An intelligent human being, not a brute like Franz.” (Kurt Franz, a former cook, was Stangl’s notoriously brutal adjutant, who briefly commanded and then liquidated Treblinka after Stangl was relieved, and is now serving a life sentence in West Germany.) “Perhaps …” he went on, “now at long last one of them is going to have the courage to explain to my generation how any human being with mind and heart and brain could … not even ‘do’ what was done – it isn’t our function to say whether a man is ‘guilty as charged’ or not – but even see it being done, and consent to remain alive.”

Stangl looked indefinably different when he was brought back to the little room on the second floor at 2 p.m. He had taken off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, but he still looked spruce – that wasn’t it. He was as well shaved as he had been in the morning – had probably shaved again – yet he no longer looked quite clean-shaven, nor was his skin as taut and young-looking as before. Earlier I had noticed and been slightly surprised by his broad red hands because they had seemed so much in contrast to the rest of his appearance and bearing, but now it flashed through my mind that they fitted him, or at least some part of him.

“I’ve thought about what you said,” he told me at once, his voice slightly unsteady. “I hadn’t understood before – I hadn’t understood what you wanted. I think I understand now … I want to do it. I want to try to do it.…”

There were tears in his eyes before we even began to speak of his childhood. “I thought you just wanted – you know – an ‘interview’,” he said, emphasizing that loaded term. I had some English cigarettes and he took one – he was, I soon saw, a chain-smoker. “My childhood,” he began, shaking his head several times, “I’ll tell you.…”

He was born in Altmünster, a small town in Austria, on March 26, 1908. His only sister was then ten, his mother still young and pretty, but his father was already an ageing man.

“He was a nightwatchman by the time I was born, but all he could ever think or talk about were his days in the Dragoons [one of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial élite regiments]. His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe. I was so sick of it, I got to hate uniforms. I knew since I was very small, I don’t remember exactly when, that my father hadn’t really wanted me. I heard them talk. He thought I wasn’t really his. He thought my mother … you know.…”

“Even so, was he kind to you?”

He laughed without mirth. “He was a Dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him. I remember one day – I was about four or five and I’d just been given new slippers. It was a cold winter morning. The people next door to us were moving. The moving van had come – a horse-drawn carriage then, of course. The driver had gone into the house to help get the furniture and there was this wonderful carriage and no one about.

“I ran out through the snow, new slippers and all. The snow came half-way up my legs but I didn’t care. I climbed up and I sat in the driver’s seat, high above the ground. Everything as far as I could see was quiet and white and still. Only far in the distance there was a black spot moving in the whiteness of the new snow. I watched it but I couldn’t recognize what it was until suddenly I realized it was my father coming home. I got down as fast as I could and raced back through the deep snow into the kitchen and hid behind my mother. But he got there almost as fast as I. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, and I had to come out. He put me over his knees and leathered me. He had cut his finger some days before and wore a bandage. He thrashed me so hard, his cut opened and blood poured out. I heard my mother scream, ‘Stop it, you are splashing blood all over the clean walls.’ ”

He said that when he was eight, two years after the beginning of World War I, his father died of malnutrition. “He was thin as a rake; he looked like a ghost, a skeleton.”

A year later his mother married a widower who also had two children. “One was a boy exactly my age: we became inseparable. He was killed, in 1942.”

“Did your stepfather treat you like his own son?”

“He was all right” – he paused. “Well, of course I wasn’t his son, was I?” He paused again. “I remember, sometimes I felt jealous of my stepbrother.”

When the two boys were fourteen, Stangl’s stepfather wanted them to leave school and go to work in the local steel mill where he worked himself. “He wanted us to earn money – he always thought of money. Wolfgang – my stepbrother – he didn’t mind: he was very happy-go-lucky; he didn’t mind anything. But I had my eye on working for the nearby textile mill – that’s what I always wanted to do, and for that I had to be fifteen. So I got my mother and the school principal to say I had to stay in school another year.”

“Did you have many friends?”

“No, but I had taught myself to play the zither and I joined the zither club.” He began to cry quietly and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Excuse me.…”

He left school at fifteen and became an apprentice weaver.

“I finished my apprenticeship in three years,” he said. “When I was eighteen and a half I did my exams and became the youngest master-weaver in Austria.” He was still proud of this achievement. “I worked in the mill and only two years later I had fifteen workers under me. I earned two hundred schillings a month, and gave four-fifths of it to my parents.”

“Is that all you kept for yourself? At twenty, was that enough?”

He smiled. “I was making twice that by giving zither lessons at night.”

“Did you have more friends by then?”

“No. But I had the zither. On Sundays I built myself a Taunus – a sailboat.” Again he began to cry and continued for a long time. “Excuse me.…”

“What is it that makes you cry when you remember this?”

“It was my happiest time.” He shook his head again and again with a gesture of helplessness.

By 1931 – at twenty-three – five years after becoming a master-weaver, he had come to realize that he was at a dead end. “Without higher education I couldn’t get further promotion. But to go on doing all my life what I was doing then? Around me I saw men of thirty-five who had started at the same age as I and who were now old men. The work was too unhealthy. The dust got into your lungs – the noise.… I had often looked at young policemen in the streets: they looked so healthy, so secure – you know what I mean. And so clean and spruce in their uniforms.…”

“But you hated uniforms?”

He looked surprised. “That – that was different.”

Looking back at Austria during the early thirties, when following the years of depression there was violent conflict between the Socialists and the Austrian Nationalist – and devoutly Catholic – Chancellor Dollfuss, I could see that there might be something in this “difference”. It was a place of constant turbulence, alarming headlines, hostile crowds, street fighting, police sirens, shootings, barriers; and, perhaps in contrast to the anarchy in the air – I remembered from my own childhood memories – uniforms
did
seem attractive.

Stangl applied to join the police and went for an interview. “It was quite difficult,” he said, “quite an exam, you know.”

Several months later, when he had already more or less given up hope, he was notified that he was to report within days to the Kaplanhof – the police training barracks in Linz – for basic training.

“I went to see the owner of the mill and explained why I had made that decision. He said, ‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me about it rather than do it secretly? I intended to send you to school, in Vienna.’ ” He cried again.

“Couldn’t you have changed your plans when he told you that?”

He shook his head. “He didn’t ask me.”

The Austrian police training was tough. “They called it the ‘Vienna School’,” he said. “They were a sadistic lot. They drilled the feeling into us that everyone was against us: that all men were rotten.”

He stayed at the school for a year, then became a “rookie”. Working first as a traffic policeman and then on the riot squad, he graduated in 1933. “Even then we had to go on living in barracks. But it didn’t matter to me: my girl friend, who I had met in ’31, had gone to Florence to work as a nanny for the Duca di Corsini. I had nothing to do except work. So I volunteered for special duties, evenings and weekends.”

“What sort of special duties?”

He laughed, “Oh, you know, just flushing out villains here and there. It was all good experience and I knew it wouldn’t hurt my record. During the Socialist uprisings in February 1934 there were terrific street battles in Linz. In one of them the Socialists entrenched themselves at the Central Cinema and we had to fight for hours to get them out. I was the one who flushed the last ones out that night at 11 p.m. – after well over twelve hours. I got the silver Service Medal for it.”

Through the weeks to come, however terrible the stories he was telling, Stangl was constantly to fall back into police jargon.
“Der war ein Strolch
” – “he was a villain” – he would say, applying this almost affectionate description indiscriminately to a whole range of people across the years: first Austrian politicians and crooks, then Germans and Poles, Christians and Jews.

In July 1934 the Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, was assassinated. “Of
course
the Nazis killed him,” Stangl said, in a tone which made it quite clear that, as an Austrian police officer, he had automatically condemned such an act. A few days after the assassination, Stangl found a Nazi arms cache in a forest; a feat which three months later earned him a decoration – the Austrian Eagle with green-white ribbon – and a posting to the cid school.

“That was the beginning,” he said grimly. This medal and the reason for it, he said, hung over him like a sword of Damocles for years. The training at the
CID
school was “fantastically intensive”, he said. “Twenty-one lecturers for nineteen students. But for me, I know this now,” he said heavily, “it was the first step on the road to catastrophe.”

In the autumn of 1935 he was transferred to the political division of the
CID
in the town of Wels, thirty minutes by train from Linz (the capital of the province), and at that time, three years prior to the Austrian Anschluss – the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 – a hotbed of illegal Nazi activities. “I was just getting married,” he said. “Wels was a very nice place to live. And the assignment was considered a great plum for a man not yet thirty.”

“What were your duties in your new assignment?”

“Well, you know what Austria was like then. We had to ferret out anti-government activities by anyone: Social Democrats, Communists
and
Nazis.” As a Kriminalbeamter – a
CID
officer – he wore civilian clothes.

“But perhaps seeing it was Wels, and the way many of you felt privately about the Nazis, perhaps you acted a little less severely, did you, against the Nazis than the others? A little differently in your manners?”

“Among the eighteen men in that department there were certainly some who favoured the Nazis,” he answered in a reasonable tone of voice. “But in general, you know, the Austrian police was very professional. Our job was to uphold the law of the land. And on the whole that’s what we did, never mind who was involved.”

“But surely, for an intelligent man, in the midst of the political turmoil of Austria at that time, it was impossible not to form his own ideas? What did you yourself feel about the Nazis then?”

Stangl had a curious habit, which was to become very familiar as our talks went on, of changing from the semi-formal German he usually spoke to the popular vernacular of his childhood whenever he had to deal with questions he found difficult to answer. This was manifestly not a conscious act; nor did it necessarily mean that at those moments he was lying. In fact it was often, on the contrary, when he was telling a very difficult truth that he took this instinctive refuge in the “cosy” language and mannerisms of his childhood.

“You know,” he said, “outside, of course, of doing my job properly, I wasn’t really very interested. You see, I had just got married. I had, for the first time, a home of my own. All I wanted was just to close the door of my house and be alone with my wife. I was mad about her. I really wasn’t political you see. I know it sounds now as if I should – or must – have been. But I wasn’t. I was just a police officer doing a job.”

“But a job you liked?”

“Oh yes, I liked it. But there was nothing heinous or even very dramatic about it then. It was just a job one tried to do as correctly – as kindly, if you like – as possible. Though, it is true, the
way
one did one’s job could not be quite isolated from circumstances.”

“Circumstances?”

“Well, you see, until early 1937, the Minister of the Interior was a confirmed anti-Nazi, Dr Bayer. But in the early spring of 1937 – just a year before the Anschluss – he was sacked and there were changes all the way down the line. Our new Director of Police was a man called Rubisch and he let it be known immediately – at the very first meeting all of us attended – that from that moment on the attitude of the police towards the Nazis had to change. And of course a year later, in March 1938, everything changed.”