Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (55 page)

She showed me the reference, made out to “Paul Adalbert Stangl”. She believed that they had muddled his and his father’s names, having seen him described on his Red Cross
laisser-passer
as “Paul F. Stangl, son of Adalbert Stangl”. “They weren’t terribly precise about names over there,” she said. She told me that she had often handled her husband’s Red Cross paper in Damascus. “It was a white booklet, about six by eight centimetres, with the red cross on the cover and the particulars inside” – the particulars, including his nationality, his parents’ names and the birth dates of herself and the children. “I didn’t see the Red Cross passport again after he had received or applied for the Syrian
laisser-passer
; maybe he had to hand it in at the
Sûreté
, but I don’t remember.”

Frau Stangl remembered that their journey to Brazil cost them about 4,000 Syrian pounds, adding, “We had about 5,000 dollars, so we managed quite well.” After my conversations with Franz Stangl were first published in the
Daily Telegraph Magazine
, several people were moved to suggest that such an expensive journey must have been paid for with stolen money, or again money from the Vatican, or from “Odessa”. The travel agent Thomas Cook confirms, however, that a ticket from Beirut to Santos, Brazil, via Genoa, while it would now cost £173 sterling, or about $432, would have cost considerably less in 1951; and that it would have been perfectly possible for a couple with three children to manage the journey on about £400 or $1,200.

“On the ship from Syria to Genoa,” said Frau Stangl, confirming a story her husband had told me, “we met a former British officer who had been imprisoned in Teheran for three years as an agent.” Like Stangl, this man had been on the island of Rab during the war. But a far stranger coincidence – one which brought tears to Stangl’s eyes when he told me about it – was that the man had once stayed with relations of Frau Stangl in a place called Mürzzuschlag. When they met him on the ship, he was on his way back to Austria where, it would appear, he had decided to live.

“As soon as we knew we were going to Brazil,” said Frau Stangl, “we wrote to a young German engineer who had gone there from Damascus before us. He and his fiancée met us off the ship at Santos, and we stayed our first night in São Paulo with her parents, who were German-Brazilians. The next day we moved into a boarding-house and Paul started at once looking for a job. Of course, again, we had practically no money; in fact, all we had left was forty dollars. But then, we had every reason to think he’d get a job at once. And sure enough, he came back the evening of our first day and said there was hope of one almost immediately, and that meanwhile we’d keep going on our forty dollars. Well, the most awful thing had happened; because of course I had known we’d have to change that money – after all, even though it was a boarding-house, still we couldn’t hope to manage without cash. Well, a German woman I had met that very morning said she’d get me a good exchange-rate, so, stupidly, I had given her all our money. And then she came back and said she’d given it to a man who’d said he’d get cruzeiros at a good rate and he’d made off with it. I couldn’t
prove
she was lying; after all, it was perfectly possible that she could have been just as stupid as I. Anyway, there was all our money gone and I had to tell Paul.

“No, he wasn’t angry; he was never angry with me, or any of us, in that sense; he never raised his voice, or lost his temper – until much, much later – and never never did he strike or spank the children. Anyway, a week later Paul got a job with a Brazilian textile firm. He didn’t speak Portuguese but he managed at first with German, Italian and the little English he spoke, and he learned Portuguese fantastically quickly; of course he had this marvellous memory. When they hired him, it was as a ‘weaver’, but after a very short time he was put in charge of planning – especially everything to do with the machines. It turned into what was an engineering job more than anything else. He earned 3,000 cruzeiros. He stayed with Sutema – that’s what they were called – for two years, much of it travelling.”

This mention of Stangl’s travelling in Brazil reminded me of his story of seeing cattle in pens by a railway, waiting to be slaughtered, and thinking, “This reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked – trustingly – just before they went into the tins …” and I asked his wife if he had spoken to her about this. She said that he never had. “But you know, he suddenly stopped eating meat at one point; I can’t remember exactly when it was, but it was quite soon after we arrived.”

She said he changed jobs twice after leaving Sutema, to earn more money. In both his second and third jobs his salary was 8,000 cruzeiros. All the figures given me by Frau Stangl, including these, are confirmed by tax and insurance records she showed me, and which I checked carefully.

“At the end of 1955 Paul fell ill,” she said. “It wasn’t anything the doctors could put their finger on – nothing we could really understand. Much later – after his coronary in 1966 – we thought it had probably been his heart all along. But that wasn’t diagnosable at the time; he felt weak, had rheumatism, was unable to walk or even stand for any length of time. Perhaps it was finally the reaction to all those terrible years; I have always thought that his coronaries were the result of his terrible mental and spiritual stress.

“Anyway, once again a way had to be found for us to survive. We had been building our little house out here in São Bernardo do Campo since two months after our arrival in Brazil; we built every single bit of it, we had no professional help except in the end for the electricity. Paul even did the plumbing, and all the children helped with the building and, of course, the painting. We built room after room, first just camping outside, then moving into one room after another, as the house grew. It was finally completed only in 1960 – it took us nine years to build.

“But when Paul got ill, I got a job at Mercedes–Benz. I started at the bottom of the secretarial ladder, but after a while was given more responsibility until, in the end, for the last two years I worked there, I was in charge of book-keeping, with seventy girls under me. I stayed with them until 1962; they were very very good to me.

“Meanwhile, as he’d got better, Paul had started a small workshop in our house. He had bought old machine parts from second–hand dealers, built several weaving machines, hired a few women and was producing elastic bandages for hospitals. At first he did his own selling, but after a while he had to stop; he became very irritable and used to lose his temper dreadfully if the hospitals didn’t buy. Finally I took over the selling in my spare time. I remember a hospital matron saying to me, ‘Oh dear, that dreadful man is your husband?’ She didn’t really mean he was dreadful – I mean, he
wasn’t
dreadful; it was just, I think, that he was very concerned over my working so hard, and desperate to make a success of his venture, so when they wouldn’t buy, he’d be miserable and get abusive.

“In 1957 Renate [their middle daughter] got married to an Austrian called Herbert Havel; and a year later Gitta [Brigitte, the eldest daughter, born on July 7, 1936] also married an Austrian. Paul continued his work at home through 1958, until the summer of 1959. By that time his health had improved tremendously, and when the little workshop died a natural death, I helped him get a job with Volkswagen.…”

A great many writers have either stated outright, or implied, that German firms in Latin America and the Near and Middle East have generally provided employment and “cover” for escaped Nazis. While this is obviously true in some specific cases, it is doubtful whether many or indeed any company ever made it a matter of deliberate policy, or that it happened as a result of pressure by powerful post-war Nazi organizations. Once again, when it did happen, it was probably the result of the initiative of a few individuals. A sober look at the facts in general indicates that as far as Latin America is concerned, most of the “rank and file” escapers had to rely on their own resources, while the majority of those of higher rank who escaped either to very reactionary Latin American countries or to the Middle East were finally employed not by commercial companies but by various governments eager to take advantage of this sudden supply of “talent”.

Volkswagen is one of the companies most often mentioned in this connection. Frau Stangl’s story – pedestrian rather than dramatic – of how her husband got his job with them, appears to me to represent the kind of thing which very likely happened in the great majority of cases.

I have no particular wish or reason to exonerate Volkswagen (the company was, as it happens, somewhat less than helpful in my attempts to investigate this matter in Brazil), but I would like to separate rumour and gossip from fact. And there are two reasons why Frau Stangl’s account appears to make better sense than the kind of stories we have been presented with so often.

The first of these reasons is that it was eight years before Stangl obtained this job at Volkswagen S.A.; eight years of living a more than modest working-class life in a working-class dwelling (just as, incidentally, the Eichmanns did in the Argentine). If he had been able to exploit his Nazi past in order to get a well-paid job with a German firm such as Volkswagen, why did he not do so earlier? And secondly, by October 1959, when he did get the job, it must already have been crystal-clear to anyone that the atmosphere was changing. The old guard in all these companies was nearing retirement age, and the young executives who were arriving from Germany, frequently graduates from American schools of business management, would be unlikely to approve appointments made for reasons of ancient, and now unpopular, political loyalties.

“Through my work at Mercedes-Benz,” said Frau Stangl, “I had met a great many people in the car industry. When Paul had to have a job and there was nothing in his line at Mercedes, I asked one of our neighbours who was head of technical management at Volkswagen – his name was Jablonski. It was he who got Paul his job. He started as a mechanic but was soon promoted, and ended up in charge of preventive maintenance for the plant, with a salary of 25,000 cruzeiros a year (a large salary in Brazil at that time).

“Our situation had now really vastly improved, and I thought how nice it would be to move to a different place, and even to have a different and larger house. Where I really wanted to live was ‘Brooklin’ – one of the best residential districts of São Paulo; a lot of nice Germans lived there, and diplomats and nice Brazilians. I thought it would be so good for the girls. Of course Paul never had my kind of … I don’t know what to call it … initiative perhaps, or cheek if you like, or perhaps just faith, to risk, to plan things, to bring about a change in our life – actively you know, rather than just passively. I had asked him what would he think of our trying to find some place to live in Brooklin. But all he said was, ‘We could never afford that.’ Well, I decided to go ahead anyway. I talked to the people at Mercedes-Benz about it. They were extraordinarily nice you know, very paternalistic towards their staff; anyway, they helped me buy a plot of land; it cost 400 cruzeiros (land values were evidently extremely low). I had saved 200 and Mercedes lent me the other 200, and they ‘lent’ me one of their architects to design the house.”

(Later, having seen this house, I was to tell Frau Stangl that even so I found it hard to understand how they could have built it with their limited means. She replied in a letter: “The Mercedes-Benz solicitor was Dr Jairo. He arranged the contract for the purchase of the land for me; and a notary public, Senhor Joaquim, helped me with registering the title. I have all the papers, and all receipts from builders, etc, and the acknowledgment from Mercedes-Benz on repayment of the loan. All of them are at your disposal and you can compare them with my salary slips.”)

“We built very, very slowly,” she said. “It was professionally done but I got everything quite a bit cheaper because of Mercedes. But I paid for all of it – Paul didn’t even want to move, he disapproved – he finally bought a car when we moved in 1965. I had done countless hours overtime – whole nights – but when we moved in, we didn’t have one centavos of debts. And I was happier than I’d ever been because I felt that this was really my creation, my gift to my family.”

(The two-storey house at Frei Gaspar, in Brooklin, stands behind a wrought-iron fence above a small terraced garden full of flowers. There is a two-car garage at street level, big picture windows and the whole thing, with its clean Scandinavian-type modern lines would fit happily into any modern development in Europe or America. It was here Stangl was to be arrested; after that the family moved back to the little house in São Bernardo which had been let. The Brooklin house, now tremendously increased in value, has since been let advantageously to diplomatic families.)
*

“This was a very good time for us; all the children were doing well; Gitta happily married and in her new house in São Bernardo [she was to have a baby soon]; Renate [who later got a divorce] and her younger sister both working at Volkswagen too – everybody had good jobs and was earning good money and I was looking after them and loving it. The new house had everything: a beautiful kitchen, big living room, bedrooms for all of us, a lovely dining room, and of course the garden which Isolde and I had planted. The terrible times were, if not forgotten, then certainly suppressed; we rarely, rarely spoke of them. If I ever very gently touched upon the subject, Paul would say wearily, ‘Are you starting on that again?’ and I’d stop. After all, I too didn’t
want
to think about it any more.

“I was so sorry for the people who had been killed, but I too continued to rationalize: I know this now. I told myself, those men had been killed in those camps like soldiers at the front. They killed them – I said to myself – because of the war. Oh, deep down I knew it wasn’t so. But that’s how I rationalized it for myself. I never never allowed myself to think that women and children had been killed. I never asked him about that and he never told me. [And she must simply have turned off her mind when these facts were mentioned – as they were, often – in the Brazilian as well as the German press.] If my thinking – as I know now,” she said, “was illogical, then it was because that was how I wanted, how I needed, how I
had
to think in order to maintain our life as a family and, if you like – for I know this also now – my sanity.