Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (6 page)

“Weaknesses? Yes, I had weaknesses, but it’s only now I realize what they were: I was proud of being clever in school, of always having the best marks; the teacher used to say to my mother, ‘I can’t measure her by the class average – it doesn’t apply to her.’ Aside from that, already in school I sang and acted – my mother paraded me around and showed me off to everybody.”

Frau Stangl’s sister Heli – Frau Helene Eidenböck, whom I visited, unannounced, in Vienna in 1972 – was obviously equally aware of the “differences” between the two of them. A woman of transparent integrity and great charm, her answers to questions are simple and direct; there is no doubt that in her time she has felt bitter about her sister – not to speak of her sister’s husband – and she certainly remembers this pain. But later she said that they are closer now – better friends than they had been.

Heli Eidenböck worked for many years as a cook in a big restaurant near Vienna’s City Hall. Her husband – of rather late years – a construction engineer who died in 1968, was a Jew. “My mother doted on Resl and my eldest brother,” she said. “I and the younger boys were closer to our father. Yes, perhaps he
was
rough on Resl sometimes: I think he was fed up with my mother’s mooning over her. She was given all kinds of opportunities we never had. My mother thought she was so clever, so pretty. She went to boarding-school you know, a convent. She really became quite different to the rest of us. We had nothing to say to each other.…”

“After two years in Vienna,” said Frau Stangl, “in 1928, it was the beginning of the Depression and people were being sacked everywhere. But I had felt anyway for some time that I must do something else, something I could get
involved
in, and I had thought of social work. I applied to the School of Social Work in Linz and they took up my references. People in Steyr said the school would be mad to take me; that I didn’t have a thought in my head except dancing and theatre. But the principal called me in for an interview and she said she didn’t believe it and that I was to take a test. That was the first ‘test’ I took, the first time I heard that word. It took all day, but I sailed through and they accepted me. I went to the school for two years, from March 1930 on, and I loved it. We had terrific fun and learned so much: it was a wonderful course.

“One of the things we had to study was midwifery. And one day, in the door of the Women’s Clinic in Linz, my friend Anna Vockenhuber introduced her cousin Franz to me, a tall handsome man. The moment I saw him I said to myself, here is someone I like. I liked his looks, his manners, just everything about him. Though when we got talking, although I fell in love with him, I think I felt as much compassion or pity for him as love: he told me about his awful childhood; how alone he had been; his terrible father; his jealousy of his stepbrother Wolfgang – it was sad.

“By the time I met him he was already doing well in the police and I thought it was wonderful how hard he worked. We saw a lot of each other. Whenever he had a free moment he came up to see me at the Riesenhof [her school]. We went to concerts, theatres and wine-cellars – it was a glorious time.

“When I graduated in 1932, the principal called me in and told me that the princely family of Corsini in Florence were looking for a governess. She said she couldn’t think of anyone she was willing to recommend as highly as me, and did I want to go. Well, I told Paul – I always called him Paul – and he was very upset. But I thought to myself, we can’t marry yet and what shall I do? I must admit, it was
very
tempting anyway. I so much wanted to see something of the world before I settled down, and I was dying to get to know the ‘princely’ life. So I went, in the early summer of 1932. It was wonderful, just wonderful. They were wonderful to me. They had two little girls of four and six. There were of course staff who did everything domestic; a nursery maid to do their laundry and all that, and servants to do the cleaning. I was only there to speak German and some French to them and to do their ‘nursery-kindergarten’ work with them. The Corsinis had castles all over the place; I travelled with them wherever they went. And whenever I could I haunted the Florence museums. They used to send a manservant to look after me, wherever I went. I ran the poor man off his feet. I stayed with them for two and a half years. Paul wrote to me every day, or almost every day. I wrote him once a week.”

Later it turned out that at that time Frau Stangl still called her husband Franz, not Paul. This emerged when she showed me a wooden jewellery box he had carved for her while he was in the
SS
internment camp after World War II: it was inscribed
In lieber Treue und stiller Sehnsucht, Dein Franzl
. “That’s what I called him in my first love,” she said then. “Later I told him that everybody around where we lived was called Franz – ‘I’ll call you Paul’. And that’s what I remember him as: Paul.”

There is a split in Frau Stangl’s attitude to her husband; on the one hand she “stands by him” romantically, honourably and conventionally. On the other hand, she seeks
small
ways to emphasize her individuality, her separateness from him. Her renaming of him is in some subtle way connected with this. At the time when she changed from Franz to Paul, the split was not so marked, but she probably felt even then, perhaps unconsciously, a need to emphasize her intellectual and moral superiority over her husband. If, for example, she says now, “He wrote to me every day, or almost every day; I wrote him once a week”, this, one may infer, is a way of indicating that she is and always was a separate and different kind of person, more needed by him than he was needed by her. How, indeed, in the context of the present,
could
she allow herself to be seen as needing him (as in a human way she doubtlessly does), considering what he became?

“After two and a half years,” she continued, “Paul wrote he couldn’t stand my being away any more, so I went back – in May or June 1935. He had a flat in Linz then, where I stayed. He stayed at the police barrack,” she added quickly. They had not slept together during their courtship, she said. “We got married in Wels, in October 1935 – it wasn’t a formal wedding; the verger was our witness. Paul had borrowed a motorbike and we went on a short honeymoon to Mittenwald.” After that they moved into a flat they had prepared – the one Stangl was later to describe nostalgically as “my first real home”. Later they moved to another one, just as small, but with a garden, at Weiradenhausstrasse 4 in Wels. And that remained their home until Frau Stangl joined him in Syria in 1949.

“The flat at Roseggerstrasse,” she said, “was very small, but nice. I got pregnant at once and I was completely concentrated on Paul, my home and the baby I was carrying. The only people we ever saw socially were one other young couple in the same house, but even them very rarely: we were sufficient to ourselves.” She met none of his colleagues in the police and knew little about his work except that he was constantly being promoted, praised and even decorated for this and that achievement. “I was very proud of him.”

She said she was soon aware of his wild ambition. “It lasted until the end of the war.” But it is likely that she didn’t learn to understand until much later that this ambition was a weakness in him rather than – as it seemed first – a sign of strength.

“Was he vain?” I asked.

“Vain? No, I never thought of him as vain – just incredibly tidy.”

In our discussions Frau Stangl’s memories of the pre-Anschluss time in Austria were mostly of this warm married life; obviously a refuge for both these young people with unhappy childhood backgrounds. But in letters a year after our talks she wrote slightly differently about her childhood – after this passage of time she sought safety, perhaps, in clichés: “My father was a prosperous man from a highly reputable and distinguished family,” she now said. “At that time Austria was beset by severe economic crises and he had to sell his business and began to drink. As he had no head for alcohol, he was at that time often drunk. But he took himself in hand later and was a wonderfully good father to me then and loved by everyone.”

It was not only about her own childhood that she changed the emphasis upon reflection. “I don’t think that my husband’s difficult childhood had any influence on his development,” she wrote in the same letter. “You see, the boy was only eight years old when his hard old jealous dragoon of a father died. And he had his young incredibly industrious and loving mother who one year later, married again. And his stepfather, who still today at ninety-four or ninety-six I think, is going strong, was an exemplary, good and much loved father to him.…”

In São Bernardo, at the time when we met, Frau Stangl remembered vividly the day, very soon after the Anschluss, when her husband came home from work and, the moment he entered the house, said, “It’s all right now – I’ve fixed it – we don’t have to worry any more: they can’t do anything to us now.”

“I asked him what he had done,” she said. “I had of course known how worried he had been – with all those people being arrested, shot.…” Oddly enough, however, she does not appear to have known in detail about the
Adler
– the “Eagle” decoration he had received before the Anschluss and on which, in his talks with me, he blamed so much of what he subsequently did or submitted to. Nor does she appear to have known about his having been on “a blacklist of police officials due to be executed” as he told me.

“He told me then,” she said, “that his friend Ludwig Werner had ‘organized’ with Dr Bruno Wille so that Paul’s and Werner’s names would be inserted into a list of illegal Nazi Party members. I remember very well that this Dr Wille was a
friend
of Werner’s.…” But she didn’t believe her husband’s story. “It was a terrible blow to me,” she said. “It was as if this man I had so respected, so admired, suddenly fell off the pedestal I had put him on. ‘You betrayed me with these swine, these gangsters,’ I told him. ‘You who I thought an honourable man, working for his country.’ ” And these were the very same words Stangl had used to describe this incident to me. Certainly they would not have been in communication about this specific question between the time he told the story to me in Düsseldorf prison, and the time he died – nineteen hours after I saw him last – when in fact he had no idea that I would go to see his wife in Brazil.

I asked Frau Stangl why she had said this to him, why she hadn’t believed his story.

“I’ve always had a feeling for truth,” she said, “a kind of hunch if you like, even about future events. I just knew that day that he wasn’t telling me the truth. And the thought that he had lied to me all this time, he who I had believed incapable of lying, was terrible for me. There were so many factors involved: how can I put it? You see, I was an Austrian, with all my heart and soul. And then, I was devout – I always have been. What I believed in happened to be the Catholic Church; it was the Church of my country and I was brought up in it. But mainly I just believed in God. And to think – oh, it was a terrible blow, just a terrible blow. My man … a Nazi.…It was our first real conflict – more than a fight. It went deep. I couldn’t … you know … be near him, for weeks, and we had always been so close; this had always been so important between us. Life became very difficult.”

Even though the way her husband had told
me
about this, caused her to waver for a moment while I was there, it is clear that although she heard him tell this story and testify about it many times, she never really believed him. But none the less, she also said that he never gave the impression of being a Nazi, never even showed the slightest sympathy for them. “And he never said anything against Jews,” she said. “I never heard him say a word like that. There were
always
people coming to our house who knew he was in the police and wanted to ask him for help. I even said to him once, I remember, ‘Can’t you see them somewhere else, a café or something?’ But he said, how could he.…” (There is no evidence that any Jews ever came to Stangl’s house, and he himself did not claim it.)

She remembered well his telling her about the chairman of the Jewish Council in Linz, Herr Hirschfeld. “He said”, she recalled, “that he was glad Hirschfeld himself was going to be able to get out. And then one day he came home and said Hirschfeld had told him something extraordinary. He’d said he was going to go to Australia if he could; because if he went anywhere closer, like the us, there’d be Jews, and wherever there were groups of Jews there would be pogroms. He said Hirschfeld said that the character and personality of Jewish group-living made that almost inevitable. I remember Paul saying, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary that he should say that about his own people?’

“Very soon after that, his whole department was moved to Linz but he still came home to Wels every night – oh, he wouldn’t have stayed away. And in Linz, of course, there was at once this Prohaska with whom he had trouble from the very beginning.

“I remember the day he came home with that form and said, ‘Now they want me to sign this,’ and it said on it – I can’t quite recall the exact wording, but something about his affirming that he was a ‘believer’ but that he renounced his allegiance to the Catholic Church. I said, ‘Of course you aren’t going to sign it.’ That was the second awful blow for me: finally we couldn’t talk about it any more, he wouldn’t talk about it: and in the end I never knew whether he had signed it or not, but I really thought he hadn’t. Are you sure he did? This was when he began to say from time to time that he wanted to get out of the police. But then you see, the war started and he was given an ‘indispensable’ rating and then, of course, he had to stay.…”

3

I
N NOVEMBER
1940 Stangl, by now again promoted, was ordered to report to Berlin for instructions.

“The order was signed by Himmler,” he said, a tone of awe in his voice even now. “It said I was transferred to the General Foundation for Institutional Care (Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege) and that I was to report to Kriminalrath Werner at the Reichskriminalpolizeiamt Berlin, Werd’scher Markt 5. Kriminalrath Werner told me”, he continued, “that it had been decided to confide to me the very difficult and demanding job of police superintendent of a special institute which was administered by this Foundation, the
HQ
of which was Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin.”