Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (44 page)

“Not long after this talk with Paul, I asked my boss for a day off and went to the Hartheim trial. I was lucky because just that day they heard testimony from a man – I think his name was Hartl or Höldl who had been a driver at Hartheim [the same Höldl, no doubt, who Stangl said drove him in Trieste]; I remember, he had a finger missing on one hand. And someone, one of the prosecutors I think, asked him, ‘And what about Franz Stangl? What did he do at Hartheim?’ And he answered, ‘He had nothing to do with the killings; he was only responsible for police matters.’ I can’t tell you how relieved I was. After all, it was only a coincidence that I was in court that day. Nobody, not even Paul, knew I had gone there. And here this man had exonerated him. I was so happy.…”

(It is a further indication of self-protective thinking that Frau Stangl is able – even now – to remember this testimony with such relief, even though in the context of Stangl’s later activities, which she honestly deplores and is deeply ashamed of, it is irrelevant whether or not this witness “exonerated” him in court for his actions at Hartheim.)

“But this driver got four years, you know,” she said. “That’s when I went back to Paul and told him that it couldn’t go on like this. ‘If this driver gets four years,’ I said to him, ‘what will you get, having been police superintendent of that place?’ I told him that he must get away, at once. ‘We’ve got my savings,’ I said, ‘my jewellery.…’ That, I thought, would at least get him started. I had a cousin in Merano who I knew would help him, and my former employers, the Duca di Corsini in Florence, I thought they would help too. Paul argued and hesitated for a long time – he really thought he should stay. But finally I told him I couldn’t take any more; I said if he didn’t get out, get himself a job abroad and send us money to live, the children and I would end up dead. I said I was at the end of my strength. So finally he agreed.

“No, I never thought for a moment he was in danger of being sentenced to die – not that. Why should they? He had never killed anybody. In Treblinka? As far as I knew – or at least had rationalized and accepted – in Treblinka too he was never responsible for anything but the valuables. No, it never occurred to me for a moment that he was in that kind of danger.”

“What about justice?” I asked. “Do you not feel and did you not feel then that ‘crime’, or if you like ‘sin’, requires retribution?”

“All I could think of then was the children. But anyway, you see, in the period between July 1944, after that traumatic experience of confessing to the priest, and the time we are now talking about – 1948 – I had managed to persuade myself that what had happened, what Paul had been involved in was part of the war … that awful awful war. And it was over. There was a really horrible institution in my home town, Steyr, a real antideluvian sort of prison; and I had visions of Paul being sent there, languishing perhaps for years and years in that … that dungeon, because that’s what it really was. You see, I never thought about Treblinka at that time – I suppose I … I had put it – forced it – out of my head. I thought of his being tried for Hartheim, and of his being sent to this dreadful prison – Garsten I think it was called. And so, you see, my only thought was that he had to escape.

“I gave him my savings, not much; I can’t remember how much exactly but I think it was less than 500 schillings. And I gave him a watch I had, a ring the Duchessa had given me and a necklace I had inherited from my grandmother.

“He went with another man – I can’t remember his name [later she remembered it – Hans Steiner]. They walked out of the prison a few days later carrying a rucksack with provisions; I think they took mostly tinned food. The next day an Austrian police officer came to see me. He asked whether my husband was in the house. I said no, he wasn’t and asked him to search the flat and he said, very politely, ‘No, no, that isn’t at all necessary,’ and left, just as quickly as he had come. Aside from this no one ever came to ask me anything; either from the Americans or from any newspapers.”

“Of course I only heard the details about Paul’s escape much later. But they certainly didn’t have much money – they didn’t even have enough to take a train – they walked, first to Graz; there he sold the jewellery, for terribly little. And it was also there he met up with Gustav Wagner.… They were walking past a construction site – a house that was being pulled down – when a man ran out and shouted ‘Herr Hauptsturmführer’ – and it was Wagner who was working on that site. When they told him they were on their way to Italy, Wagner begged them to let him come and he came then and there, more or less as he was; he had no money, nothing.…”

Simon Wiesenthal, widely credited with Stangl’s “capture” twenty years later in Brazil, was very sceptical of Frau Stangl’s statements to me. “I am afraid she led you by the nose,” he said. Herr Wiesenthal’s theory has always been that the escapes of people such as Stangl were carefully organized and aided by organizations such as the mysterious “Odessa” (often referred to in novels and popular journalism), the existence of which has never yet been proved. The prosecutors at the Ludwigsburg Central Authority for the Investigation into Nazi Crimes who know precisely how the postwar lives of certain individuals now living in South America have been financed, have searched all their thousands of documents from beginning to end, but say they are totally unable to authenticate “Odessa”. Not that this matters greatly: there certainly were various kinds of Nazi aid organizations after the war – it would have been astonishing if there hadn’t been. But we should not allow the seductiveness of various theories of conspiracy to prevent us from examining with an open mind the identities and motivations of the individuals who – now an established fact – really did help people like Stangl to escape.

I have spent a great deal of time seeking documentary evidence which would support or contradict the Stangls’ story of how they, and others like them, escaped from Europe; and the real facts, it turns out, are neither dramatic nor unequivocal; they are complex, ambiguous and merely prove again that in the final analysis, history is not made by organizations, but by individual men, with individual failings, and individual responsibilities.

“What nonsense,” Simon Wiesenthal said to me with reference to the Stangls’ claim that he “just walked out of Austria”. “How could he have, without papers, passport – what about the frontier? It’s all lies; he obviously had papers provided for him by Odessa.”

“My husband,” said Frau Stangl, “had his identity card in four languages. All Austrians had these cards from the end of the war.
*
He told me later that they were challenged by a policeman in Styria. They showed him their identity cards and asked him directions to the next village and he let them pass. My husband was a very good mountaineer and knew the Tyrolean mountains well from his youth. I think he said he found a way across to Italy behind the Brenner – or did he say Bolzano? – I am not quite certain. But I do remember that he said they crossed in the night and that it was very difficult for the two others, but that he managed to get them across. I don’t know myself how far they finally went on foot; I do know that they took a train from Florence to Rome. I had a cousin in Merano whose address I had given Paul – but I didn’t know at the time that he had emigrated to North America long before. I can of course prove this by my cousin’s letters.…”

Stangl had told me a little of this himself, although he did not mention his companions (he had referred to Wagner, but in another context).

“I escaped from the Linz prison on May 30, 1948,” he said. “Originally we had intended to ask my wife’s former employer, the Duca di Corsini, to help us. But then I heard of a Bishop Hulda at the Vatican in Rome who was helping Catholic
SS
officers, so that’s where we went.”

Stangl had the name wrong. He meant Bishop Aloïs Hudal, Rector of the Santa Maria del Anima, and priest-confessor to the German Catholic community in Rome (who died there in 1963).

“Was there any Protestant helping
SS
officers?”
I asked.

“Oh yes. He was in Rome too; Probst Heinemann.” That, too, was a mistake. There was a Kurator Heinemann at the Anima with Bishop Hudal, but Pastor Dahlgrün was the Protestant pastor in Rome who helped escapers. (Like the Catholics, the Protestants gave legimate aid to all kinds of refugees.)

“Did you have money?”

“Very little. Just some my wife had saved. She had a cousin in Merano – I tried to find him but he wasn’t there any more. I got caught in Merano, by the
carabiniere
– I think just because I was walking in the street, you know, and I suppose I looked foreign. Anyway, I talked myself out of it; I told them about my family and they let me go.…”

Frau Stangl enlarged on this incident – and I must emphasize again that when I saw Stangl, he had no idea that I would visit his wife in Brazil, and that neither of them knew in advance the questions I would ask. Again she mentioned his companions, while he didn’t, but the discrepancy is in their favour rather than not, underlining that this story had not been “prepared”.

“They went first to Merano,” she said, “where Paul looked for my cousin while the other two waited for him in the woods. When he couldn’t find my cousin, he went into a church – probably to have a rest – he wasn’t a church-goer otherwise. Anyway, when he came out, the
carabiniere
arrested him – I am not too sure for what but probably just because he looked like a German and they were supposed to arrest Germans. They put him in a car and were going to take him I don’t know where, but he showed them a picture of me and said how poor I was and how I needed him to earn money for us so that we could survive the next winter – he always
could
talk the hindlegs off a donkey – so finally they let him go. Next he and the two others went to Florence, but the Duca and his family were away on one of their estates, so they went on to Rome.…”

*
I queried Frau Stangl later about this card as I finally felt it unlikely that anyone who had been at Glasenbach would have had such an identity paper. “I don’t know where he got it from,” she replied, “but I vaguely remember something about a comrade who came to the prison later than he did, and who gave him his card. Paul replaced that man’s photograph with his own.”

7

T
HE ODYSSES
of various “wanted” Germans have been described in dramatic detail in many books. There may, indeed, have been a few adventurous escapes of top Nazis – though reason suggests that since large sums of money, false papers and connections abroad were easily available to such men and it is indeed a known fact that high Nazi administrators were issued with false papers weeks before Germany’s defeat, they were probably the ones least likely to be involved in subterfuge and drama. However that may be, examination of published material, together with what is now some years spent discussing this subject with people connected and involved with it, has led me very seriously to doubt that the majority of these men benefited from any sophisticated conspiratorial organization – be it “Odessa”, “Die Spinne”, “Die Schleuse”, “Kreis Rudel”, “Stille Hilfe”, “Bruderschaft”, “Verband Deutscher Soldaten” or “Kamaradschaftswerk”.

As defeat approached, the Germans – as did the people of the various countries of Europe they defeated in 1940 – obviously prepared various means of underground resistance, and aid organizations. Some of these were, no doubt, political, others social, others strictly aid organizations. Some – the Ludwigsburg Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen
*
has quite precise (though “restricted”) information on this – were well supplied with carefully channelled funds. But there is ample – and
real
– evidence that most of the published accounts vastly exaggerate their importance and their practical effectiveness.

It cannot, however, be questioned that escapers such as Stangl (and for that matter Eichmann, certainly a “bigger fish” administratively if not morally) did in the final analysis receive important assistance from two organizations which – to put it very mildly – allowed themselves to be grievously misused in aiding the escapes of individuals so dreadfully implicated: the International Red Cross, and the Vatican.

I believe that as far as the International Red Cross is concerned, it was entirely due to the organization’s not being equipped to carry out the rigorous individual screening that would have been required to deal with this complicated problem. This however is an explanation, not an excuse. It was obvious that the problem would present itself, and precisely in the place where it did – the International Red Cross office in Rome. That office ought, therefore, to have been enabled to cope with it.

As far as the Vatican is concerned, the same explanation applies to some extent, but far less convincingly. The Holy See’s record in the war years was so questionable that it – above all other organizations – was morally obliged to take a stand as far as escaping Nazi criminals were concerned. As it happened, the Vatican did take a stand, but it would seem that it was the precise opposite from the one that was required.

It is impossible to discuss the matter of the assistance given in Rome to escaping Nazis without devoting some thought to the larger subject of the whole attitude of the Catholic Church towards National Socialism.

When undertaking this project, I had no wish – indeed no thought – of devoting part of it to yet further discussion of the personality and motivations of Pope Pius xii. When Stangl had brought up the details of his escape through Rome, I realized that the matter would have to be touched on, but believed at first that, as he personally had been involved with only one particular cleric in Rome, Bishop Aloïs Hudal, examination could be limited to this one man, who is now dead. Unfortunately this proved impossible. The structure, the special discipline and the essential paternalism of the Catholic Church make it virtually impossible for a Catholic priest (or other religious) to take any action of consequence without the knowledge of his confessor and his superior in the hierarchy. Which is why – to take an example we examined earlier – it would have been highly improbable for the Catholic hierarchy to remain in ignorance of the Nazi plans for euthanasia, once a Catholic theologian had been officially commissioned to present an Opinion on potential Catholic reactions to euthanasia. It is equally improbable – although not, of course, impossible – that individual priests in Rome could help Nazi criminals escape overseas without the knowledge of their superiors.