Nazi Hunter (53 page)

What Stangl called ‘the winding-up process’, however, was just the curtain falling after a dress rehearsal. With the conquest of Poland, Hitler had found a vast arena in which to
perform the Final Solution on a scale that none of his Hartheim puppets – except, perhaps, ‘the savage Christian’ – could have envisioned.

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Only staff and a few selected slaves stayed overnight at the extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. While Auschwitz did have a gas chamber, the vast
complex was primarily a concentration camp for slave labour that had survived ‘selections’ upon arrival (and during subsequent weed-outs) at its extermination annex, Birkenau, a couple
of miles away, where multiple ovens, pits, chimneys, and gas chambers worked around the clock. So as not to turn queasy German stomachs into organized opposition, virtually all extermination
facilities were installed in the conquered east, where protest was punishable by summary execution. Only toward the end of the war – as the drive to finish the Final Solution outstripped the
machinery of death – did such German concentration camps as Buchenwald (which Wiesenthal survived) and Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank died) diversify from starvation, disease, hangings, and
firing squads into mass extermination too.

Belzec (where Wiesenthal’s mother perished), Sobibor, and Treblinka – the three camps opened by Christian Wirth in Poland in 1942 – were entrusted to alumni of the aborted
euthanasia programme. Thanks to his success at Chelmno in 1941, ‘the savage Christian’ was named supervising inspector of the four extermination camps, all of which used diesel
exhausts: Wirth’s preferred method of extermination.

Though none of them lasted more than a year at a time, together they destroyed some two and a half million Jews. They shut down only when the extermination of East European Jewry was nearly
complete and because carbon monoxide was being out-performed by the new technology of Zyklon B, which Auschwitz commandant
Rudolf Höss had embraced while building his
Birkenau extermination branch. Zyklon B was also used in the new gas chambers opened at the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin in late 1942, around the time one Hermine Braunsteiner arrived
there as a guard.

Although Höss had been one of Christian Wirth’s tutors in mass extermination, he began referring to Wirth as a ‘sloppy amateur’ and ‘untalented disciple’ for
resisting Zyklon B. Still, there was something positively gruesome to be said for the savage Christian’s recalcitrance; only 114 prisoners – none of them children – survived his
four-camp empire,
⁵⁴
while more than 100,000 outlived the gassings, shootings, hangings, beatings, lethal injections, ‘medical
experiments’, starvation, exhaustion, and disease that took four million lives at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On Wirth’s recommendation in early 1942, Franz Stangl was commissioned to construct and then command Sobibor, in eastern Poland. While Stangl said he was told Sobibor
would be a supply camp for the German Army, his suspicions might have been aroused by the assignment of several other euthanasia alumni to work under him, including Hermann Michel, who had been the
chief male nurse at Hartheim. After the Polish labour on hand proved ‘lackadaisical’, Stangl requisitioned a more driven ‘Work Commando’ of twenty-five Jewish prisoners plus
some Ukrainian guards to drive them. In the beginning, Jews and Ukrainians and Germans all slept in the same hut – the Germans on the kitchen floor; the others in the loft – until more
huts were built.

One day, Michel went for a walk in the woods and came back on the run. ‘I think something fishy is going on here,’ Stangl said Michel told him. ‘Come and see what it reminds
you of.’

Ten or fifteen minutes into the forest, Michel showed Stangl a new brick building, three yards by four, with three rooms. The moment
Stangl saw it, he understood what
Michel meant: ‘It looked exactly like the gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim.’

How could he, as commandant, not have known it was there until Michel stumbled upon it? Stangl claimed the ‘lackadaisical’ Poles must have built it before he fired them, though
‘they wouldn’t have known what it was to be.’ While the structure showed on his blueprints, they didn’t specify what any of the buildings were for.

Stangl drove to Belzec to find out from Wirth what this was about. If he is to be believed, this visit to Belzec was his first physical encounter with extermination, even though it had been his
line of work ever since he had joined the euthanasia programme two years earlier. This is how Stangl described it to Gitta Sereny:

‘As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The commandant’s headquarters were 200 metres
(225 yards) away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell – oh God, the smell! – it was everywhere.

‘Wirth wasn’t in his office. They said he was up in the camp. I asked whether I should go up there and they said, “I wouldn’t if I were you. He’s mad with fury.
It’s not healthy to go near him.” I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had
progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them – oh God, it was awful!
⁵⁵

‘A bit later, Wirth came down. And that’s when he told me that this was what Sobibor was for, too. And that he was putting me officially in charge.’

Stangl protested that he was a police officer, not an exterminator, and simply wasn’t up to such an assignment. Wirth did not argue back, but said his response would be conveyed to higher
headquarters in Lublin. In the meantime, Stangl was to return to Sobibor and continue work.

That night, according to Stangl, ‘Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting; we discussed it
for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?’

Once again, where euphemism failed the finicky Stangl, he sought the comfort of verbal abstraction: it was ‘what
they
were doing’, not what
he
was building. And
Michel reminded him of one of Wirth’s recurring witticisms: ‘If any of you don’t like it here, you’re welcome to leave – but under the earth.’

The next day, Wirth arrived in Sobibor to supervise the installation of what were now five gas chambers. He ignored Stangl, who busied himself with other construction. Leaving Stangl in nominal
charge of the camp, Wirth took Michel into the woods to share his expertise in gassing.

On the third or fourth afternoon, when the machinery seemed in working order and the full force of Jewish prisoners were applying finishing touches, Wirth turned to Michel and said: ‘All
right, we’ll try it out right now with your work-Jews.’ With that, the twenty-five slaves were pushed inside and gassed.

That was the baptism of Sobibor. When it turned out that the doors had been put on backward, Wirth cursed the dead Jewish labour inside and lashed out with his whip at the Ukrainian guards and
everybody in sight, including Michel. Stangl was summoned to the scene of carnage and told to reverse the doors before burying the bodies. Wirth left in a rage which struck Stangl speechless,
though he would later explain that he simply concentrated on completing the camp; Wirth had, after all, put Michel in charge of gassings. Soon after, the first freights of Jews arrived for
‘processing’.

Michel, a staff sergeant with the mellifluous voice of a priest in a pulpit, took to his work so well that his ‘work-Jews’ christened him ‘The Preacher’. He would meet
each shipment of Jews and tell them:

‘Welcome to Sobibor! You will be sent to a work camp. Families will stay together. Those of you who work hard will be rewarded. There is nothing to be afraid of here. We are concerned,
however, about diseases and epidemics. So we ask you to take a shower. Men to the right. Women and children under six to the left.’

Sometimes he would add that Sobibor was ‘just a transit camp for classification and disinfection. From here, you’ll all be going to the Ukraine as soon as the Third Reich can
establish an independent
Jewish state there for you.’ Since they wanted to believe him, his victims would sometimes cheer or applaud his words. Then ‘he would
personally escort the people on the special road . . . to the barbers’ huts and from there to the gas chambers’, one of his ex-‘work-Jews’, Moshe Shklarek, remembers.
‘With his tricks and his slippery-tongued speeches, Michel was more dangerous than his comrades in crime.’
⁵⁶

With Michel doing the meeting and greeting and gassing, Stangl stayed in the background: an executive supervisor presiding over construction and decreeing policy while distancing himself –
intellectually as well as physically – from the consequences of his command. It was during Stangl’s tenure of slightly less than six months in 1942 that workers on the death detail were
forbidden to use such words as
bodies
,
corpses,
or
victims
, and were compelled instead to call them
Figuren
(figures or images, such as puppets or dolls) or
Schmattes
(rags): yet another giant step into the realm of abstraction in which Stangl secluded himself from the reality of his work.

Though Sobibor wasn’t ‘fully operational’ until May 1942, that month it outdid Auschwitz or Belzec or Chelmno by gassing more than 36,000 Jews from nineteen Polish communities.
A sixth gas chamber was added – using the 200-horsepower, eight-cylinder engine of a captured Russian tank to pump a mixture of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide – and the Germans
built a power generator that furnished enough light to allow night gassings. A narrow-gauge railway was built from the unloading platform to haul clothing, suitcases, valuables, and the corpses of
the Dead on Arrival into the bowels of the camp and to transport gold extracted from the teeth of the gassed in the ‘dental workshop’, a shed near the ‘showers’. By July,
Stangl and Michel had streamlined Sobibor into such a showcase for efficient extermination that Heinrich Himmler came from Berlin to see for himself. Prisoner labour – tailors, shoemakers,
goldsmiths, and bricklayers – were detached from their regular duties to make the camp shine like a Swiss ski resort. While Himmler was going on to Lublin for lunch, a team of cooks and
bakers was assigned to prepare canapés to go with his drinks.

Himmler, however, was all business and interested only in extermination. When the luxury cars from Berlin pulled on to the switching-track outside the main gate, Stangl
gave Himmler’s nine-man delegation (three in civilian clothes and six, including Himmler, in SS uniforms) a welcoming salute and greeting. Then ‘Preacher’ Michel and
Stangl’s deputy, Gustav Wagner, gave a brisk tour of the gas chambers, where they and their guests watched a few hundred Jews die.

When they returned to the main gate, Stangl was waiting to answer their questions, welcome their observations, and invite them to stay for a cognac. Himmler asked about many details, but his
whole group’s impression was highly favourable and Stangl was promised expanded help and facilities. After Himmler declined the cognac and canapés, Stangl and his staff consumed them,
but Wagner – in a fit of pique that their culinary efforts had gone unnoticed and untried – dispatched the hors d’oeuvre team to the gas chambers.

A six-foot-four blond Austrian whose bland, handsome face looked as if it had been carved out of soap, Gustav Wagner walked with a distinctive looping lurch and claimed to have participated in
the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a javelin-thrower, though Wiesenthal says ‘we haven’t been able to find his name in any sporting reports or in the Olympics register.’ His
criminal record began when he joined the illegal Nazi Party in 1931. Three years later, when he was caught painting swastikas and putting up Hitler posters, he fled to Nazi Germany and joined the
SA, which posted him on guard duty outside one of its camps.