Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (37 page)

Had they ever asked him to do that?

“No.”

Supposing they
had
asked, and had said they’d shoot his family if he didn’t, would he have signed?

“No,” he persisted. “I wouldn’t give up my faith.”

“Gustl,” his wife nudged him. “If they threatened your family? Your children?”

“I would have given up my faith,” he said obediently.

“I don’t want to say much,” said Horst later, “but about this business of the Church: it’s only here, in Unterammergau, that he went back to going to church. After he … after he rejoined the Church.”

“Rejoined?”

“There was a ceremony. After being a
Gottgläubiger
he was officially received back into the Church.” (A priest was to tell me later that this was
not
an officially prescribed – or required – ceremony. “It would be at the discretion of the local priest,” he said. “Ordinarily, all a Catholic who had become a
Gottgläubiger
would have to do, would be to go to confession, receive absolution and then take communion. It is a matter of choice whether or not it is also made into a festive occasion.”)

I asked Horst Münzberger and his wife whether they spent a lot of time with the old people? Did the grandparents have a lot of contact with the children? Was there tension, or did they all get on all right?

“All right?” Horst laughed bitterly. “How can it be all right? We manage, that’s all, because we have to manage.”

His wife nodded sadly. “What can we do? They are old.”

“Of course there is tension; it is in us all the time,” said Horst. “It is especially difficult for my wife.”

“Do the old people have any money of their own?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“I can’t say whether he ever had any money after Treblinka – I couldn’t say yes or no. But certainly he had none at the time of the trial and afterwards. I even went to try to get some help for him.…”

“Help? From whom? Odessa?”
*

“No, I don’t know ‘Odessa’. But somebody told me there was an organization who helped people like him, so I went to them – hiag I think they were called.”

“How did you get their address?”

“It was all very hush-hush. I was sent from one place to another – this one knew and that one too. Anyway, finally I got to this office and they asked all about my father. I asked them for money for my mother – you know, he was going to prison for twelve years; we hadn’t got anywhere much yet with the business; we had so little money. So I thought perhaps they’d want to help look after my mother. But not at all. They said he had no right to their help.…”

As
HIAG
is the
SS
equivalent of the British Legion or of American veterans’ organizations, an organization primarily designed to keep up contact with, and give assistance to, members of former
SS
fighting units
(of whom there were many more than those who have become so familiar to the world through films and novels, as concentration camp personnel) it is a little puzzling why so much mystery should have been made of
hiag’s
whereabouts. They advertise their existence quite openly in the
SS
magazine
Der Freiwillige
, published by the Munin Verlag, in Osnabrück. It is true that this paper is obtained by subscription and is sent out under plain cover; but it is not by any means a clandestine publication. What is more understandable is that they refused Horst’s request. They are very anxious to establish the ss, in retrospect, as a purely fighting unit and are therefore, no doubt, loth to contribute financial assistance to those members of the
SS
who they are most anxious to repudiate.

“But now it’s not a question of money, of course,” said Horst. “The business is doing well. It isn’t that. And I am glad to let him work here – he does small simple things; it helps him.… Yes, I still love him – I suppose. I suppose loving one’s father is like living – one just does. About what he has done … I could not even tell you – I could not find the words to tell you how terrible, how beyond everything terrible I think it is. And that it should be
my
father.…”

There was silence in the beautiful small sitting room full of beautifully made things – all made by Horst himself. Next door, in the big kitchen, the children played and laughed. They are very attractive with that gay and clear-voiced beauty of small German children.

“The worst of it,” Horst continued, “is the children. You see, my wife and I, we know very well that one day, not long from now, Christian [the oldest boy] will ask us questions; he is eight now. When he is ten or so, they’ll be getting modern history at school. I don’t know how much that school teaches them – but they can’t just not tell them about these horrors. And then – you know what villages are – some other child is bound to say to him, ‘Yeah Christian, your grandpa was in this.’ And he’ll come home and say to us, ‘What did Grandpa have to do with that?’

“That’s what my wife and I wanted to talk to you about. That’s what we wanted to ask: How shall I tell my son?”

*
The name of a possible Nazi escape network, much discussed in recent years.

13

“
At the trial
,” I said to Stangl, “
it was said over and over that you had the reputation of being superb at your job. The prisoners called you a
Burgherr
Napoleon’. When you appeared they said, everyone, including your own staff, worked harder, faster. And, in fact, you received an official commendation as the ‘best camp commander in Poland’, didn’t you? Would it not have been possible for you, in order to register some protest, if only to yourself, to do your work a little less ‘superbly’?
”

One couldn’t help but remember the evidence at his trial given by three survivors who were described by the prosecutor, Herr Alfred Spiess, as “particularly unemotional, balanced and reliable”. They affirmed that he was present at floggings and hangings, although he denied that he ever had been. Four of the witnesses, Glazar, Unger, Strawczynski and Samuel Rajzman, and five of the
SS
men, Rum, Matthes, Münzberger, Miete and Horn, confirmed that at least seven hangings took place at Treblinka during Stangl’s tenure – several of them hanging men upside down – and that Stangl, if he did not attend them, as was claimed by some of the prisoners, must “at least” have known about these events, which were, of course, noted in the official camp reports – the logbooks. One of the survivors testified that he particularly remembered a hanging which took place in the presence of the Kommandant on May 8, “because that happened to be my birthday”.

This question about his dedication to his work was one of the few during our meetings that made Stangl angry. “Everything I did out of my own free will,” he answered sharply, “I had to do as well as I could. That is how I am.”

Frau Stangl, with good reason, had very definite memories about the month of May 1943. “That’s when I saw him again for the first time since Christmas,” she said, “when he came on his way through from Cracow to Linz on an official trip; but he only stayed one night. It was the only time I saw him until July, so that was when we started our youngest, Isolde. She was an eight-month baby, born on January 5, 1944. Later, at the trial, a witness said Paul had attended an execution – a hanging – on May 8; he said he remembered it was May 8 because it was his birthday. I thought and thought about that; for a while I wasn’t absolutely sure whether he had been home on May 3 or May 8, but then later I realized it couldn’t have been May 3 because I had my period that day. So he was home on May 8; so he couldn’t have attended an execution in Treblinka that day, could he?”

It was never quite clear why it couldn’t have been on May 5 or 6 he was at home; equally, it was never quite clear why – considering that he was involved in the death of hundreds of thousands, his wife thought it so vital to prove that he had not “attended”
one
execution, except of course that to her, disproving any horror he was accused of, must be a comfort. “That day in May,” said Frau Stangl, “I hardly asked him about anything. He did tell me that he was still trying to get out; to get a transfer to an anti-partisan unit in the East. But of course that night I was only happy – it was such overwhelming happiness just to be together for these few unexpected hours. But even on that brief stop-over I remember he went again to see Fräulein Hintersteiner in Linz.”

Fräulein Hintersteiner had worked as a bookkeeper-secretary at the Schloss Hartheim euthanasia institute and her testimony at Stangl’s trial, like that of other witnesses called by his defence, bore out the old saying about sinking ships. She said she had met Stangl at Hartheim; that the work there was under the seal of secrecy on the penalty of death; that she had been a member of the Nazi Party only since the Anschluss but, yes, that she had “sympathized with them” before the Anschluss. She said she knew what was happening at Hartheim but couldn’t remember whether she had ever discussed this with Stangl, though it was possible. There were ten to fifteen people working in the office there – a community bound by secrecy – who lived, worked and took their recreation together. Was she an intimate friend of Stangl’s? No, just “colleagues” as with all the others. She knew “Kaufmann and his wife” through her brother; they were neighbours of theirs at home. She could not recall whether or not she had told Stangl that Kaufmann was being posted to the Crimea, but it was possible; Kaufmann had told her after the beginning of the war against Russia that he was being posted there, though she couldn’t remember in what capacity. She didn’t know whether Stangl and Kaufmann knew each other. She could not recall that Stangl had asked her to use her influence with Kaufmann to obtain a posting for him as Kaufmann’s aide. She could not remember whether or not she had “put in a good word for Stangl” but she rather thought not, as her acquaintance with Kaufmann was not “this close”. Nor could she remember whether Stangl had reminded her of such a request and consequently she couldn’t remember either whether she had transmitted such a request. In short, Fraulein Hintersteiner’s memory – like that of many others – was so impaired that all she could remember precisely were details of what so conveniently she didn’t remember. It is quite extraordinary how the the memories of the people who lived through hell – and this applies in different ways to men like Glazar as well as to Stangl – remained intact, while those so infinitely less imperilled broke down.

“We were now going into phase four,” said Richard Glazar, “and life did become somewhat better. Partly I suppose it was that we were completely conditioned to it. Partly because we were more secure. Robert Altschuh had heard an
SS
tell Suchomel in the tailor-shop that Stangl had said ‘too many Jews had been sieved through’: if the transports increased again, he said, and the camp was reactivated, there were no longer sufficient workers to operate it efficiently. That sounded to us as if they were unlikely to kill any of us experienced personnel. But, it was also because, with our minds focused on the revolt, we were by now almost hysterically alive; we were reckless to the point of insanity.

“In June the remnant of the Warsaw ghetto arrived; they were a terrible sight, more dead than alive. And in July there were a few more very poor transports.…”

From what Richard Glazar and the other survivors say, the enormous importance that was attached by the prisoners to every word and every move of Stangl’s emerges very clearly; and equally the extent to which whatever he said or did affected their spirit – their spirit being what kept them alive.

“
You have said all along, you hated what was happening
,” I had asked Stangl. “
Would it not have been possible, I ask you again, to show some evidence of your inner conflict?
”

“But that would have been the end,” he said. “That is precisely why I was so alone.”

“
Supposing for a moment it
would
have been the end, as you say. There were people in Germany who stood up for their principles; not many, it is true, but some. Yours was a very special position; there were less than a dozen men like you in all of the Third Reich. Don’t you think that if you had found that extraordinary courage, it would have had an effect on the people who served under you?
”

He shook his head. “If I had sacrificed myself,” he said slowly, “if I had made public what I felt, and had died … it would have made no difference. Not an iota. It would all have gone on just the same, as if it and I had never happened.”

“
I believe that. But even so, don’t you think somewhere, underneath, it would have affected the atmosphere in the camp, would have given some others courage?
”

“Not even that. It would have caused a tiny ripple, for a fraction of an instant – that’s all.”

“
What did you think at the time was the reason for the exterminations?
”

His answer came at once: “They wanted the Jews’ money.”

“
You can’t be serious?
”

He was bewildered by my reaction of disbelief. “But of course. Have you any idea of the fantastic sums that were involved? That’s how the steel in Sweden was bought.”

“
But … they weren’t all rich. At least 900,000 Jews mere killed in Treblinka – more than 3 million altogether on Polish soil during the existence of the extermination and concentration camps. There mere hundreds of thousands of them from ghettos in the East, who had nothing
…”

“Nobody had nothing,” he said. “Everybody had
something.
”

(“Even those from the extreme East of Poland, the poorest, brought something,” said Richard Glazar. “I remember working on their clothes: they wore padded tunics, very much like coolies’, in China. They were awful to handle, full of lice –
white
with lice along the seams. One time I was just about to put one of them into a bundle I was making up and somebody said, ‘Wait.’ He ripped it open and there, glued together inside the padding, were dozens and dozens of hundred dollar bills. Another day, one of the
SS
came in with a basket full of food. ‘Pull up your sleeve,’ he said to me, ‘and put your hand in all the way.’ I did. It was full – elbow deep – of gold dollars.”)