Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (56 page)

“Paul was an incredibly good and kind father. He played with the children by the hour. He made them dolls, helped them dress them up. He worked with them; he taught them innumerable things. They adored him – all three of them. He was sacred to them.…”

*
In a recent letter Frau Stangl confirmed that they had definitely stayed at rue Haddat.

†
“I remember very many Germans,” she wrote even later, “from General Count Strachwitz down to Colonel Rössler.” She also said that the flat they rented in the rue Sheik Youssef [
sic
] belonged to people called Husseinis who were relations of the Grand Mufti.

*
Since the original publication of this book, Frau Stangl has moved back into the Brooklin house.

3

“
When the war was over
,” I had asked Franz Stangl in Germany, “
what did you want to do
?”

“All I could think of,” he said, “was Knut Hamsun’s novel
Segen der Erde [Growth of the Soil]
. That was all I wanted; to start from the beginning, cleanly, quietly, with only my family whom I loved, around me.”

“
You said earlier you always knew that one day you would have to answer questions about that time in Poland. If you knew, why didn’t you just face up to it? Why run away?
”

“I am an old policeman. I know from experience that the first moments are never the right ones. But you know, in Brazil I never hid. I lived and worked there from the beginning under my own name. I registered at the Austrian consulate – first, because my papers read that way, as Paul Franz Stangl. Later, when I had to get a copy of my birth certificate through them, from Austria, I changed it and it was entered correctly as Franz P. Stangl. Anybody could have found me.”

“
Did people – friends you made in São Paulo – know about your past?
”

“It never came up.”

“
But in all these years, have you never talked it out with someone? Your wife? Your priest? A special friend?”

“My wife and I talked sometimes about some of it; but not like this. I never talked to anyone like this.”

“
Did your children know
?”

His face went scarlet; it was the second time he showed real anger at a question (the first time had been when I had asked him, with reference to his conduct in Treblinka, whether it wouldn’t have been possible for him, in order to register his protest, to do his work a little less well. “Everything I did out of my own free will,” he had answered, “I had to do as best as I could. That is how I am.”)

“My children believe in me,” he said now.

“
The young all over the world question their parents’ attitudes. Are you saying that your children knew what you had been involved in, but never asked questions
?”

“They … they … my children believe in me,” he said again. “My family stands by me.” And he cried.

Renate – the Stangl’s middle daughter, and the younger of the two small girls who had spent a holiday five kilometres from Sobibor in 1942 – is slim, blonde, with a delicate and vulnerable face that looked, when I met her, much younger than her thirty–three years. “He was the best father, the best friend anyone could ever have had,” she said. She was driving me back into São Paulo from São Bernardo do Campo, late on a rainy night.

I knew that none of the Stangl daughters really wanted to talk about these things and – as I feel very strongly that none of the young can be held in any way accountable for their parents’ actions (or inactions) – I did not intend to press them. The little Renate said, with great effort, she volunteered.

“All I can say”, she told me that night in the car, almost in a whisper, “is that I have read what has been written about my father. But nothing – nothing on earth – will make me believe that he has ever done anything wrong. I know it is illogical; I know about the trial and the witnesses; and now I know what he himself said to you. But he was my father. He understood me. He stuck to me through thick and thin and he saved me when I thought my life was in ruins. ‘Remember, remember always,’ he once said to me, ‘if you need help, I’ll go to the end of the moon for you.’ Well, when he died in Düsseldorf I had just had an operation; but I decided I would be the one to fly over to bring him back here to Brazil – to us – for burial. I too would go to the end of the moon for him – that’s what going back to Germany then was for me. I hope he knows it where he is now. I love him – I will always love him.”

The eldest daughter, Gitta, whose health is very fragile, although unfailingly warm and polite on the telephone, was the only member of the Stangl family who felt unable to face the ordeal of talking to me at all. She suffered from one of the debilitating infections common in South America, and became much worse after her father’s arrest and trial. The youngest girl, Isolde or Isi, as good-looking as her mother and sisters, is the least oppressed by, or even involved, in these terrible events. Only seven years old when they arrived in Brazil, she has become totally part of this new continent: Portuguese is her language, she has now married a young Brazilian and if she too prefers not to speak of the past, it is not because it worries her, but because, protected by her youth, it is emotionally beyond her; her way of thinking, her concerns are those of a young Brazilian, and she is free of the past.

Renate – for good reason – is the one who feels most involved. Her marriage had broken up some time before Stangl’s arrest, for reasons quite unconnected with it. But Stangl believed to the end (despite reassurances I was finally able to give him) that his son-in-law, Herbert Havel, had been involved in his capture. I had asked him in April 1971, when it was he had first realized that he was being looked for.

“In 1964,” he said, “when my son-in-law showed me a Viennese newspaper where it said that Wiesenthal was after me.”

“You believe, do you, that your son-in-law gave you away to Wiesenthal?”

“Renate had left him. When he came to me in 1964, he said that unless I got Renate to go back to him, he would destroy us all.”

At the time this belief of Stangl’s did not seem surprising to me, because four months earlier, after his sentence to life imprisonment at Düsseldorf, newspapers all over the world had quoted Simon Wiesenthal to this effect, and I too, meeting Herr Wiesenthal for the first time in Vienna in December 1970, gained a similar impression. To quote the
Daily Express
of December 23, 1970: “Sitting in Düsseldorf High Court today was Simon Wiesenthal, himself a survivor of Nazi camps … today he said, ‘If I had done nothing else in life but to get this evil man Stangl, then I would not have lived in vain.’ [There follows a brief account of Stangl’s life since the end of the war] … Nazi-hunter Wiesenthal kept on the trail and in 1967 paid Stangl’s son-in-law £3,000 for information.”

After my first week of talks with Stangl I telephoned Herr Wiesenthal to check once more this particular element in the story of the arrest. Herr Wiesenthal then told me that he had been widely misunderstood; apparently he had just received a letter from Herbert Havel’s uncle in Vienna, telling him that Mr Havel intended to sue him for libel. Herr Wiesenthal then said that he was calling a press conference to make it perfectly clear that he had never met or communicated with Havel, had never received any information concerning Stangl from him, and had most certainly never offered him any money or reward. (It should also be pointed out that Herr Wiesenthal states quite plainly in his book
The Murderers Are Among Us
*
that the £3,000 – or $7,000 – for information about Stangl was paid to “a seedy character” – a former Gestapo man – who came to see him, he says, at his office in Vienna.)

I am glad that these pages offer an opportunity to repeat these assurances, because it was not only Franz Stangl who believed that Herbert Havel had been in some way instrumental in delivering him to justice. His family, particularly Renate (Mr Havel’s former wife), shared this belief.

When I repeated Herr Wiesenthal’s assurances to Frau Stangl six months later, she said that considering the sequence of events, and the many quotes in the newspapers, she still found them difficult to believe.

“You see,” she said, “when, some time after Renate’s marriage broke up and before we moved to Brooklin, Havel came to the house – it was in February 1964 – and brought this Viennese newspaper which said that Wiesenthal was looking for Paul – he
said
that ‘he had sent his Jewish uncle to see Wiesenthal’ … and we didn’t know whether to believe it or not. But seeing how he felt about us, there really wasn’t much reason to doubt what he said. A month later, in March 1964, he phoned Paul and summoned him – ordered him – to meet him: there isn’t any other way of describing it. Paul went and Havel told him that he had checked a photograph which had subsequently appeared in the Vienna paper and that he now had no doubt: that Paul was the man Wiesenthal was seeking. Paul was fatalistic about it – as he always had been. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it’s unavoidable. But if it comes to it, I want to give myself up – I don’t want to run away.’ He didn’t say that just once, he said it a thousand times.…”

(“
You weren’t really surprised
,” I had asked Stangl, “
when you were caught?
”

“I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “I had always expected it.”)

“The Eichmann trial?” Frau Stangl said. “Yes, Paul followed it avidly. He sat there [she pointed to an armchair in the little sitting room] and read everything that was said about it in the Brazilian and also in the German papers we got. Yes, he read a great deal about all these things, always: newspaper articles and many of the books that were written. But he never commented on any of them to me – we never spoke about any of it: it was taboo. After that thing with Havel and the Viennese paper, nothing happened for a long time. We moved to the new house in Brooklin, as you know, in early 1965 and there too, as I said before, we rarely talked about it. But he did say, though I don’t remember exactly when it was: ‘If that clever man Wiesenthal is looking for me, surely all he has to do is ask the police, or the Austrian consulate – he could find me at once – I am not budging.’

“Herr Wiesenthal’s account”, Frau Stangl said, “of how he found us, as he described it to the press and in his book – I don’t believe it. After all, why all the fuss? As Paul said, anyone could have found us, at any time. We were registered at the Austrian consulate in São Paulo since 1954; I was regularly writing home; everybody had our address. There was no call for all that drama.…”

*
Heinemann, London, 1967.

4

T
HERE DOES
indeed seem to have been no reason for “all that drama” considering that the Stangls really cannot be described as having “disappeared”. What is astonishing is not that Stangl was finally “found”, but that he was ever supposed to have been “lost”.

The American
CIC
appears to have known about his position in Sobibor and Treblinka in 1945, yet they handed him over to the Austrians in 1947 and the Austrians put him in an open prison from which – of course – he walked out. When he went to Damascus after being helped in Rome, he immediately informed his wife of his address, keeping up a regular correspondence with her, and when his family joined him there a year later, Frau Stangl gave not only their relatives, but also the Austrian police precise information about their movements, including Franz Stangl’s address. When they travelled via Italy to Brazil in 1951, they did so under their own name. When they reached Brazil, they lived and worked under their own name. In 1954 they registered under their own name at the Austrian consulate in São Paulo.

The Austrian consul there was Herr Otto Heller, who was still holding the same post when I was there in 1971. It is true that he denied having registered Paul F. Stangl, or having subsequently altered that registration to Franz P. Stangl, or that Stangl had ever, to his knowledge, been inside the consulate. But he agreed that Frau Stangl registered, and that she entered on the form the names of her children, and stated that she was residing with her husband, Franz P. Stangl. He produced two files, one for “Theresa Eidenböck Stangl”, the other for “Renate Havel Stangl”, and repeated that these were the only Stangls in his records.

Frau Stangl says: “We went together to register at the Austrian consulate in August 1954. Not for any particular reason, but only because we felt it was right and proper to register at one’s consulate, and we had so far neglected to do so.” (“Registration”, said Herr Heller, “is not required by Austrian law. It is in fact accepted by the consulate merely as a courtesy – a service to Austrian residents abroad.”)

“We needed nothing from them at that time,” said Frau Stangl. “Only much later, in 1957 and ’58 when the girls married, they needed a copy of their father’s certificate of citizenship or birth certificate – I don’t remember which – and we asked for it. The consulate never refused anything to either me or the children. As far as I can remember, when we went to register, the clerk told us he was an auxiliary or provisional clerk. He gave us two papers to fill out. My husband was always much slower and more deliberate than I in writing; and somehow he never remembered dates precisely.
*
So I remember that he was still writing when I finished and handed in my form. But I saw him fill it in, and I saw the clerk take it from him. I did not see what my husband had written. It was not the custom to be given receipts for registration, so we don’t have any proof of this.”

“Stangl” is not an uncommon name in Austria, and it is admittedly unlikely that a provisional clerk would have attached any special significance to it. Equally, I thought reasonable Herr Otto Heller’s comment to me; “If Herr Wiesenthal thought Stangl was in São Paulo, why didn’t he in fact address himself to us? That would have made us look through the files, and then, sure enough, we
would
have found his name – if nowhere else, then on his wife’s registration.”