Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (4 page)

“Had you known in advance that the Germans were coming in on that day?”

“Oh no,” he replied immediately. “I suppose there were people amongst our lot who knew. But I didn’t. You have no idea, though, how organized they were, nor how frightened we became at once.”

In his account of these times, Stangl manifested a prodigious memory. By the time he had reached the Socialist uprisings of February 1934 he had mentioned sixteen names, mostly of people who had only briefly crossed his path. By noon of the third day, my list of names he had remembered had grown to fifty-four, and I stopped counting.

“What affected us a lot though,” he went on, “was Cardinal Innitzer’s call to Catholics to co-operate. And of course the fact that Schuschnigg [who succeeded Dollfuss as Chancellor] threw in the sponge at once. What
I
felt above all was fear. You remember that medal I’d been given – the Eagle? Well, five people had received that at that time. The Nazis took over on March 13; on the 14th they arrested two of those five and a few days later a third. That left only my friend Ludwig Werner and myself. Meanwhile in Linz they had shot two of the chiefs of our department. People we’d seen just a few days before. No trial, nothing – just shot them. Another one, also a friend of mine, was arrested too. And Dr Bayer – the former minister – he was sent to a concentration camp. I helped to get him out of Buchenwald later.
*
One of our chiefs used to make open remarks against the Nazis. We all used to wonder amongst ourselves how we could stop him. But how could we take it upon ourselves to warn a superior? I remember, one of the other men in my section – his name was Schlammer – he said to me, ‘You’d better let your Eagle fly out of the window’.
†
Ludwig Werner and I were becoming frantic. We had all been given a questionnaire to fill out. One of the questions – the most important one, we thought – was whether we had been illegal Nazi Party members. Werner said we had to
do
something – we couldn’t just sit and wait for them to take us. We decided that the first thing to do was to get rid of our file cards; we had this index, you know, with an annotated card for each person in our district who had been suspected of Nazi, Sozi [Socialist] or Communist sympathies. So the first thing we did was to flush the cards down the lavatory.”

“All the cards?”

“No, just the ones referring to Nazis. And then Werner remembered a lawyer who had been an illegal Nazi and whom he, I and another colleague had helped a bit not long before.…”

“What do you mean helped?”

“It’s the sort of thing one was able to do at times before ’38 – just warn someone who was under suspicion to watch his step.”

“Nazis?”

“Not necessarily. Anybody nice – decent, you know.”

This was not a very likely explanation. But I had felt from the beginning that, except on the rarest occasions, it would be essential to let him develop his story in his own way, without showing obvious scepticism or interrupting with critical comments.

“Werner thought,” he said, “that we could ask this lawyer – Dr Bruno Wille was his name – to say that he knew we had been illegal members.”

“Diditmdrk?”

“Yes. Werner went to see him and he said he’d arrange for our names to appear on the illegal Party lists for the previous two years. So after that we filled out the questionnaire and said that we’d been Party members since 1936.”

“And that wasn’t true?”

He shook his head. “No.”

The question of whether or not he had been an illegal Party member had been the subject of considerable discussion at Stangl’s trial; and what was particularly discussed was the prosecution’s contention that before the Anschluss he had contributed to a fund for the aid of Nazi detainees, and that this went a long way to prove his illegal Party membership.

“How about these contributions you are supposed to have paid to a Nazi aid-fund?”

“Well yes, I did contribute to an aid-fund. The first week I was transferred into the cm the chief came around one day with a young girl and introduced her to Werner and me as someone who was collecting for the relatives of political prisoners.”

Ludwig Werner, questioned in Austria in 1968, shortly before he died of natural causes, was evasive regarding the extent of his “friendship” with Stangl and his knowledge of his opinions or actions. He himself, he said, had been relieved of his duties on October 22, 1939, and was arrested on November 14 and accused of being an opponent of the Nazi Party and of having had illegal financial dealings with a Jew. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and kept there until April 1941, when he and his family (as was the custom for political unreliables) were compulsorily moved to Bohemia where he worked in a civilian job until he was called up in 1943 for service on the Eastern front. He was a prisoner of war in Russia from 1944 until 1948, after which he again worked as a
CID
officer in Leoben, Austria, until his retirement in 1965. He would not say that he had been a friend of Stangl’s, but neither had they been enemies. He had no memory whether he and Stangl had ever discussed political matters. Therefore he couldn’t say what Stangl’s attitude towards National Socialism had been. “All of us, though,” he said, “at that time – just before the Anschluss – sympathized with the Nazi Party. I don’t mean just the participants of that police course, but the population in general.”

Regarding the questionnaire, many officials, he said, “wrote more than was strictly true. Because one was afraid of being sacked.” Yes, he remembered Dr Bruno Wille. “He was a member of a legal firm,” he said tersely, and refused to be drawn beyond that. Regarding the aid-fund, he couldn’t say whether Stangl had paid contributions to such a fund. Nor did he even remember if such a fund had existed, so he was unable to comment on whether or not it was for the purpose of supporting political detainees who were Nazis, or detainees of other political persuasions.

“I went home that day after we got that business organized with Dr Wille,” Stangl said, “you know, terrifically relieved. I was so grateful to Ludwig Werner for finding that solution – you have no idea. Anyway, the moment I got home, I told my wife: I thought she’d be as relieved as I.…” Suddenly he began to cry again, but differently this time: the deep sobs of a man reliving a pain long suppressed.

“What happened?”

“She hated them you see,” he finally went on. “We are Catholics of course, and she is very devout, always was. She was so terribly, terribly angry. ‘You betrayed me with these swine,’ she said, and I suddenly realized that she didn’t believe me. She thought I really had been an illegal Nazi. Oh my God.…” He went on crying for many minutes.

“Did you end up by convincing her?”

“A long time – it took a long time.” It was clear he was still not sure that he had ever convinced her.

And he had not. It was not only the Düsseldorf court thirty-two years after the event who disbelieved Stangl’s assurance that he had not been an “illegal” Nazi. Months after I had first seen Stangl, his wife, in Brazil, was to repeat to me that she had not believed him.

“No, of course I didn’t tell them that when I had to testify at his trial – how could I have?” she said. “If my husband hadn’t told you about it himself, perhaps I wouldn’t have admitted it to you either. But as it is,
because
he told you – and the way he told you – today is the very first time that I feel perhaps he did tell me the truth then – perhaps he wasn’t an illegal after all.” And she too cried.

Frau Stangl’s sister, Helene Eidenböck, who lives in Vienna, had no doubts. “Oh yes,” she said, “I think he was an ‘illegal’ – they all were, you know, in that part of Austria. If he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have got on so fast. And that’s what they wanted, both of them – to get on.”

And former ss Franz Suchomel, who worked under Stangl at Treblinka, and now, after four years in prison, lives in southern Germany, said, “Stangl told me himself that he had been an ‘illegal’. He wore on his uniform jacket the chevron of the ‘Old Fighters’, which wasn’t that easy to obtain.”

Neither of these last two opinions is necessarily proof that Stangl was lying, since obviously if his story to me was true, the fact that his name had been entered on the “illegal” list would have allowed him to establish his membership as part of his record and would thus automatically have given him the privileges that went with such a record; while he could conceivably have told Suchomel that he had been an “illegal” because he wanted to secure his position by getting this piece of information around. What it does prove, however, is that both his family and his “troops” had believed him to be not a “conscripted” but a “voluntary” Nazi.

The deeper he went into his story, the clearer emerged the picture of the fatal fusion between his own character, and the sequence of events.

“What,”
I asked,
“was your first specific contact with the Jewish situation in Austria after the Anschluss?”

“At that time they said that what they wanted was to force the Jews to emigrate – you know, just to leave.”

“That’s what you thought the policy was?”

“It
was
the policy. They had set up a special section of the Gestapo for ‘Jewish Action’ – Section IIB2 – where they established a register of Jews and their property.” (In Vienna this department was headed by Eichmann. All the research into this subject tends to confirm that the ‘Final Solution’ – the physical extermination of the Jews – was not proposed, and probably not even considered except, possibly, in private conversations between Hitler and Heydrich, until 1940.)

“What did you have to do with Section IIB2?”

“In principle nothing. I was in the political section, 2C. But you see, I think they knew how I felt. You know, that I wasn’t really with them. Because after the Austrian Kristallnacht
*
the Gauleiter – Eigruber – called me in and advised me to keep my mouth shut and help IIB2 whenever I was asked.”

“Didn’t that sound sufficiently ominous to you to indicate that this was the moment to get out?”

“But you see, it wasn’t ominous then, and it wasn’t a question of ‘getting out’: if it had only been as simple as that! By this time we heard every day of this one and that one being arrested, sent to a
KZ
[concentration camp], shot. It wasn’t a matter of choosing to stay or not stay in our profession. What it had already become, so quickly, was a question of survival.”

“So what finally was your first direct contact with whatever it was they were doing about the Jews?”

“It was after the Sudeten thing:
*
I was ordered to accompany the chairman of the Jewish Council to Bohemia. They wanted us to check how many Jews were still living there and what they owned in property. Four of us went: myself and one of my juniors, Hirschfeld the chairman – a very nice fellow – and his secretary, a young chap called Hunger.”

“How did you travel?”

“Oh, by car.”

“But presumably you had to stay somewhere overnight. How was that organized?”

“We stayed together, in a hotel. We ate together. How can I explain? It was all quite ordinary and friendly. As I said, Hirschfeld was a nice man. He had a very difficult job. You see, every Jew who wanted to emigrate forfeited his property. But they also each had to pay a certain sum – it was called a ‘tax’ – in order to get the exit permit. It was Hirschfeld who had to find this money for poorer Jews who didn’t have enough. On that trip he told me lots of stories of the trouble he was having getting rich people to give him money for poorer ones. After that trip, for a long time he’d always come to me when he needed help, because he knew I’d do what I could.”

“Do you know what happened to him later?”

“I am not sure,” he said vaguely. “I think somebody said he’d gone to America.”

Max Hirschfeld, it is true, went to America in December 1939, and lives in San Francisco. He refused to come to Germany to testify at Stangl’s trial and his testimony was taken in San Francisco (this happened in several cases when a witness was unable or unwilling to go to Germany). Mr Hirschfeld confirmed the car trip to Bohemia; or rather, he said there were two such trips, each of them lasting only one day. “We all had lunch together,” he said. “I paid the bill for everybody without being asked.” Mr Hirschfeld denied that he had visited Stangl in his office. He said that Stangl was subordinate to two other officials, Botke and Greil, and that Greil had also been along on the trips to Bohemia. Stangl himself, said Mr Hirschfeld, had no authority, but received his orders from these two. “His office was next to Botke; it was he I went to see and Stangl could hear what I discussed with him.”

It was suggested by the defence that Mr Hirschfeld had written Stangl a postcard from the USA, but Mr Hirschfeld said that was not true, although he
had
sent a postcard to Greil with whom he “had good contact” and who had repeatedly helped him. He also said, however, that “Stangl was not impolite to me. He addressed me as ‘Hirschfeld’, but that was the custom; he said neither
‘du’
nor ‘Jew’ to me. Eichmann was different – he always addressed me in the third person.… To describe my relationship with Stangl as ‘amicable’ is certainly exaggerated. I would say, however, that I could converse with him more freely than with other officials of that department.”

In January 1939, shortly after the political, i.e. security, branch of the police had been absorbed into the Gestapo, that section of the Wels police department was transferred to Gestapo
HQ
in the provincial capital, Linz. “But we had our lovely flat in Wels,” Stangl said, “so I commuted every day. Our chief now was a German, a terrible reactionary from Munich, Georg Prohaska. I hated him at once. Soon after we were transferred, some man came from Berlin and ‘in the name of the Führer’ [he said it derisively] read out our new ranks. Me, ‘in the name of the Führer’, they appointed Kriminalassistent. But I wasn’t having it: that was a demotion, not a promotion. In Austria a Kriminalbeamter – which is what I had been – is a permanent position; it gives you the right to a pension. A Kriminalassistent in the German police hierarchy is nothing – just a temporary.”