Nazi Hunter (54 page)

As a genocidist, Wagner’s career paralleled Stangl’s, though always on a slightly lower level. At Hartheim, he had served as cremator of corpses from the euthanasia programme. As top
sergeant at Sobibor, he started out in charge of ‘accommodations’ (for the ‘work-Jews’, since virtually all ‘guests’ didn’t stay overnight) and later
succeeded Michel as chief of the gas chambers. On his visit to Sobibor, Himmler personally awarded Wagner an Iron Cross for his proficiency in mass murder.

Known to his victims as ‘The Human Beast’, Wagner has been described as an insatiable sadist, a brutal thug who incited others to hang, beat, and kill prisoners (in Robert
Wistrich’s
Who’s Who in Nazi Germany
), and ‘by all accounts a particularly nasty piece of work’ (in Gitta Sereny’s
Into That Darkness
). ‘He
didn’t eat his lunch
if he didn’t kill daily. With an axe, shovel, or even his hands. He had to have blood,’ said one survivor. ‘He was an Angel of
Death. For him, torturing and killing was a pleasure. When he killed, he smiled,’ said another.

‘Wagner was no desk murderer,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘He was a murderer the way you imagine murderers to be: huge shoulders, enormous hands, a real picture-book SS man. Any
Jews who stepped out of line, even on their way to the gas chambers, were killed by Wagner with his own hands. He had the strength to kill any undernourished, emaciated prisoner just by punching
him hard in the stomach or slamming him to the ground. It was the strength of a bully, not of an athlete.’

Franz Stangl may not have known it when he played host to Heinrich Himmler in July 1942, but he was in his last month at Sobibor. Since Wirth claimed never to have elicited an
answer from his superiors to Stangl’s request for reassignment, Stangl had stayed on the job – pending a decision, he pretended to himself. Now that Himmler’s visit had been a
scientific ‘success’, his promotion to a higher command was assured.

More than a third of the 300,000 Jews who died in Sobibor perished during Stangl’s brief tenure there – and the camp was ‘fully operational’ for less than three months of
his rule. Several of the few witnesses who survived Sobibor to testify against Stangl have linked him more intimately to the violent deaths that awaited their arrival than his executive detachment
might suggest. They remember him standing out in the tumult of the unloading platform – where they were stripped of their clothes, baggage, and belongings – because he wore white linen
riding clothes and cracked his whip like a horseman. Washington journalist Richard Rashke, who interviewed eighteen survivors for his book
Escape from Sobibor
(1982), has cited one
man’s impression of Stangl at the scene:

According to Stanislaw ‘Shlomo’ Szmajzner, who was fourteen when he reached Sobibor on 24 May 1942, Stangl shot into the throng of
prisoners
around him, as did the rest of the SS men on hand to usher them to their doom. Szmajzner, who was spared the fate of his family because he was an accomplished goldsmith, was one of several hundred
Jews who escaped from Sobibor in an uprising in October 1943 (long after Stangl had left for Treblinka) and one of only thirty-two to survive the revolt. After the war, still in his teens, he began
a new life in Brazil – only to discover in the 1960s and 1970s that Stangl and Wagner were there too.

Stangl seemed to Szmajzner like a youngish university professor uprooted from his classroom by the war and planted in the sandy soil of Sobibor. Wiry and elegant in bearing, he dressed nattily,
with his white coat buttoned from collar to waist, his slacks pressed to a razor-sharp crease, and, above an inevitable film of dust, his boots polished to a dazzling gleam. He always wore white
gloves. Beneath the silver skull on his SS cap, light brown hair protruded and there was the hint of a dimple on his chin. Though he appeared vain and slightly foppish, his eyes seemed kindly and
he smiled easily. He spoke softly, had good manners, and was always polite – to Jews as well as Germans.

Having kept Shlomo Szmajzner around to melt down gold (from fillings, some with flesh and blood, gums and bone, still on them) and make rings for his SS men, as well as jewellery and monograms
for his and their families back home, Stangl took particular interest in the lad. He even used to bring him a special treat on Friday nights, saying, ‘Here’s some sausage for you to
celebrate the Sabbath.’

The idea of tempting an orthodox Jew with pork somehow perturbed many when Szmajzner testified at Stangl’s trial in 1970 for more than a million murders, but the defendant maintained that
pork sausage was such a luxury in wartime that his well-intentioned gift was ‘most probably a mixture of beef and bread crumbs.’

Stangl was so kind to Szmajzner from the start that Shlomo risked a special request: ‘My parents and sister came here with me. I miss them. When may I see them?’

Stangl avoided his eye, but spoke in fatherly fashion: ‘Don’t worry. They’re fine. They just went to take a shower. They got new clothes and are working in the fields, happy
and well. But they do have to work harder than you do . . . I promise on my word as an officer that soon you’ll join your family.’

Later, Shlomo asked again and Stangl continued the deception: ‘They are in a much better place. They have everything they need. You’ll join them soon, I
promise.’

Not from Stangl, but from a friend who worked in the burial pits and smuggled out first a message and then a letter before perishing there, did Shlomo eventually find out what had happened to
his family and the thousands of others sent through the gate marked
SHOWERS
. His friend’s message read: ‘No one lives . . . Say
Kaddish
’ –
the Jewish prayer for the dead.

28

In Jean-François Steiner’s
Treblinka
(1966) – the best-known book in the literature of this extermination camp – Franz Stangl doesn’t
appear by name. Steiner’s descriptions of the camp commandant as ‘a poor minister gone astray, more sadistic than clever’ and ‘a sadistic intellectual incapable of directing
an undertaking like Treblinka’ would seem to refer to Dr Irmfried Eberl, an SS first lieutenant and physician who supervised construction of the camp in the spring of 1942 and was its first
commandant. When early exterminations failed to keep pace with the rate of arrivals, Eberl was relieved of his command and replaced by the more efficient Stangl, who had proved himself at
Sobibor.

‘Stangl?’ said SS man Otto Horn, who was in charge of burning the bodies (‘The Roasts’, his workplace was called), in an interview years after the war. ‘I only saw
him twice in all the time I was at Treblinka.’ Of a dozen former personnel at Treblinka who were tried for crimes against humanity in Düsseldorf in 1964–5, only Horn, a
professional male nurse, was acquitted.

‘Stangl?’ said Joseph Siedlecki, a prisoner who worked in the undressing rooms at Treblinka and later as a
maître d’hôtel
at Grossinger’s resort in
the Catskills. ‘I never saw him kill or hurt anyone. But why should he have? He didn’t have to. He was no sadist like some of the others and he was the commandant. Why should he dirty
his own hands? It’s like me now in my own job; if I have to fire somebody, I don’t do it – why should I? I tell somebody else to tell the person he’s fired. Why should I do
the dirty job myself?’

Treblinka on the day Franz Stangl arrived in August 1942 was, he
confessed to Gitta Sereny, ‘the most awful thing I saw during all of the Third
Reich. It was Dante’s inferno. It was Dante come to life.’

When his naturalized British Boswell asked what could shock him after several months at Sobibor, he told her: ‘In Sobibor, unless one was actually working in the forest, one could live
without actually seeing; most of us never saw anybody dying or dead. But Treblinka. . .’

Chauffeured by an SS driver, Stangl started to smell where he was going when they were still miles away, following the River Bug. Fifteen or twenty minutes before reaching his destination, he
began seeing corpses along the railroad tracks: first one or two, then two or three, and finally, upon reaching the Treblinka depot, hundreds that had been there for days, rotting in the heat. In
the station stood a train full of Jews: some dead, some still alive, all sealed together for days on end and an eternity to come.

Entering the camp and alighting in the Sorting Square, Stangl ‘stepped knee-deep into money. I didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious
stones, jewellery, clothes. They were everywhere, strewn all over the square. The smell was indescribable; hundreds, no, thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square,
in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls – whores, I found out later, from all over
the countryside – weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music . . . There was shooting everywhere.’

As the pagan bacchanal raged around the inferno, Dr Eberl, the outgoing commandant, greeted his successor, who asked crisply why the treasure they were standing in wasn’t going to
headquarters. With a straight face, Eberl replied that the transports had been ransacked somewhere along the way.

After a few hours, Stangl drove on to Warsaw and reported to the police chief of Poland, General Odilo Globocnik, a fellow Austrian born in 1904 to Croatian parents. A protégé of
Reinhard Heydrich, Globocnik had been removed as the Nazi
Gauleiter
of Vienna in 1939 for embezzling funds and recruiting local débutantes for sex orgies. Himmler, however, had
pardoned him and sent him to Poland to ‘liquidate Jews, aristocracy, intelligentsia, and clerical elements’ there. When Heydrich was assassinated in Prague
in the
spring of 1942, Himmler had put Globocnik in charge of ‘Operation Reinhard’ in Poland, where he publicly pledged a million deaths to honour his mentor. Reporting only to Himmler and no
intermediate authority, Globocnik – whose domain included Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka – tripled his quota and confiscated some $45 million in cash, jewels, and negotiable
securities, pocketing $5 million worth for himself before turning the rest over to the Gestapo. An alcoholic who consumed two quarts of vodka a day, Globocnik often boasted that he needed the money
to keep himself afloat.

Stangl said that when he tried to tell Globocnik that his mission at Treblinka was impossible, Globocnik showed more interest in the valuables he’d seen strewn around. Captain Christian
Wirth – whose jurisdiction as supervisor of death camps in the region included Sobibor and Treblinka – was summoned from Belzec to clean up the mess so Stangl could make a fresh start.
Wirth arrived next morning and, after a long meeting with Globocnik, accompanied Stangl back to Treblinka.

While Wirth conferred with Eberl, Stangl went to the mess for coffee and chatted with some of the camp’s officers, who told him that Treblinka was ‘great fun; shooting was
“sport”; there was more money and stuff around than one could dream of, all there for the taking; all one had to do was help oneself. In the evening, they said, Eberl had naked Jewesses
dance for them, on the tables.’

What was Stangl’s reaction? ‘Disgusting – it was all disgusting.’

Franz Suchomel, the SS sergeant in charge of collecting and processing Jewish gold and valuables, remembers that the first suggestion he heard Stangl make was to put buckets in ‘The
Tube’ – the path, thirteen feet wide and 350 feet long, flanked by ten-foot-high barbed-wire fences – leading directly from the undressing rooms to the gas chamber. The women in
particular, Stangl told Wirth, defecated on their way in, but, in Sobibor, buckets had helped maintain decorum.

‘I don’t give a damn what you did with the shit in Sobibor!’ Wirth said bluntly. ‘Let them shit all over themselves! You can clean it up afterwards.’ Later, two
Jews were assigned to hose ‘The Tube’ between transports.