Nazi Hunter (58 page)

Back in Trieste, Stangl assembled twenty-five men ‘and we scoured the whole valley all night. There wasn’t any sense to it. It poured. It was pitch dark. There could have been a
partisan behind every tree and we wouldn’t have known or found them. Only the next morning did we learn that while we were out the night before, partisans had marched through a village,
singing. Everybody hid them. They were safe at home.’

After a brief assignment either hunting partisans in Fiume (now the Croatian port of Rijeka) or, in Wiesenthal’s version, rounding
up Jews in Fiume and Abazia (now
Opatija) for deportation to the extermination camp in Riseria di San Sabba, Stangl was granted a two-week leave at the end of February 1944 to go home and see his new-born third daughter. His wife
was still in bed, recovering from a difficult pregnancy and a cold winter. When Stangl showed up with blankets, down comforters, and bed linens – gifts from the family conscious General
Globocnik, he told her – Theresa Stangl said it was ‘like Christmas in March’. Stangl stayed a week. He didn’t quite say what his work was in Italy, but he did complain that
he’d been ordered to stay on the look-out for Jews. ‘What do they think I am?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘A headhunter? They can leave me out of this now.’

Upon his return to Trieste, he was given his longest and biggest assignment there: as special supply officer for a strategic construction project in the Po Valley which involved some half a
million Italian workers building last-ditch fortifications under German supervision. Not only was the post in the less perilous Italian portion of Globocnik’s command, but it was a position
from which he would feather his nest for a postwar escape. ‘I was responsible for getting everything: shoes, clothes, food,’ Stangl would boast to Gitta Sereny. ‘I was the only
one who went about in civilian clothes. Everybody, army and SS, had to help me. I carried a paper signed by the general stating that “Captain Stangl is authorized to act in uniform or civvies
and all services are requested to give him every assistance in the execution of his command” . . . I had a man with me who had no other job except to carry trunks with millions in
cash.’

‘Buy whatever you need,’ Globocnik had told Stangl. ‘Money is no object.’ He was free to patronize the black market, which was virtually the only source of gas, tyres,
and spare parts. He made many contacts in northern Italy – wheeler-dealers, smugglers, gangsters, and nobility with something to sell – and some of them may have greased his postwar
path across their turf.

When the war ended, Stangl made his way to the Attersee, a lake in Salzburg province, to stay with a village policeman he knew. One of his host’s colleagues, however, notified the US Army
of Occupation that there was an SS officer in town. The Americans sent a car around and hauled Stangl off to the royal spa of Bad Ischl for questioning by US counter-intelligence. He gave his own
name.

His interrogators focused on his anti-partisan activities in Yugoslavia and Italy, but he never mentioned his Polish past. Then they sent him to Camp Marcus W. Orr in
Glasenbach, near Salzburg, for further investigation. He was there for more than two years.

In Glasenbach – less than a hundred miles from Wiesenthal in Linz – Franz Stangl, whose name didn’t enter Simon’s card files until 1948, spent twenty-six months in
relatively tranquil detention by American counter-intelligence. ‘He underwent a routine investigation,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘Nobody knew he was the former commandant of Treblinka. He
was questioned and gave routine answers about his wartime service. Then he went back to his bunk, lay down, smoked an American cigarette, and talked with fellow SS officers about
escaping.’

To an alumnus of Mauthausen like Wiesenthal – who visited Glasenbach several times on behalf of the War Crimes Commission, OSS, and CIC – it was virtually a spa: ‘The internees
were well-fed and sunburned, and they led a pleasant fife. They had amusing company from another part of the camp, where wives of high-ranking Nazis and some women who used to be concentration-camp
guards were interned . . . The internees of the Americans, at least, lived like guests. They got medical care and cigarettes. In many cases, these “prisoners” were living better than
the civilian population outside the gate.’

After more than two years in Glasenbach under very random and casual American investigation, Stangl had not yet been traced beyond Italy and Yugoslavia to Poland; there were so few survivors of
Sobibor and Treblinka and he had stayed so aloof from the dirty details that no witnesses had yet surfaced to identify him by name. He might even have gone free in 1947 if his record hadn’t
shown that, early in the war, he’d worked at Hartheim, the euthanasia castle which was just beginning to interest Austrian authorities. They asked that he be turned over to them for trial
and, late that summer, he was transferred to a civilian prison in Linz.

Not only was his new address closer to home in Wels, but Stangl soon had a single room where his wife could pay him conjugal visits. Still not fully aware of his roles at Sobibor and Treblinka,
Theresa Stangl confronted her husband with press clippings about the first smaller fry from Hartheim who were already on trial. She said that when he told her ‘how ill the patients were; how
nobody
could be killed without four certificates from the doctors . . . I cannot in all honesty say I felt bad about Hartheim.’ Still, she took a day off from her
office job in a Wels distillery to attend one day’s hearings in the Hartheim trial. It happened to be the day when Franz Höldl, the Hartheim chauffeur, was asked by a prosecutor about
Stangl and (in her word) ‘exonerated’ him of any connection with the killings there. ‘I was so happy,’ she recalled. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I
was.’

Upon reading, however, that Höldl had been given a four-year sentence, Theresa Stangl prodded her husband to break out of his comfortable cocoon. ‘If this driver gets four
years,’ she told him, ‘what will you get for having been police superintendent of that place?’ When she gave him her savings (less than twenty dollars) and her jewellery (a ring
and a necklace) to finance his trip, he recognized that these were his marching orders.

‘The prisoners were often sent out to clear away rubble and help rebuild bomb damage,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, who was living in Linz at the time. ‘Later I heard Stangl was with
a group of petty criminals who worked at rebuilding the
VOEST
steelworks in Linz. The prisoners were not heavily guarded. Why would they want to run away? They got more food in the
prison than outside. A few kilometres away, at the Enns bridge, Russian soldiers guarded the frontier of the Soviet Zone of Austria. What prisoner would be fool enough to run away
to
there?’ Nevertheless, on the night of Sunday, 30 May 1948, Franz Stangl and another prisoner named Hans Steiner were not among those who’d marched out in the morning.

Stangl and Steiner had walked away from their work with a rucksack of canned foods and headed south on foot. The next day, an Austrian police officer called on Theresa Stangl and asked if her
husband was at home. That was how she found out that he’d acted upon her advice. She invited her visitor to search her home, but he declined politely, ‘No, no, that won’t be at
all necessary’, and left.

‘No one had seen Stangl escape,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘but no one got very excited about it. A notation was added to his file and the file thrown on top of many other files.
Neither the American authorities nor the Austrian press was informed.’

Stangl said that he and Steiner walked the 150 miles from Linz, the Upper Austrian capital, to Graz, capital of the Austrian province of Styria. In Graz’s Renaissance old town, he sold his
wife’s jewellery
for a tiny sum and then, he later told her, was walking past a construction site where a house was being pulled down when he was recognized – by
a labourer who rushed out shouting ‘
Herr Hauptsturmführer
!’ (‘
Captain!
’) and embraced him. It was ex-Master Sergeant Gustav Wagner, who had served
with him in Hartheim and Trieste as well as Sobibor, and, having been more visible as chief of the gas chamber and second-in-command at the death camp, had already been tried
in absentia
and sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Wagner begged Stangl and Steiner to let him come with them. When they said yes, he walked off his job and joined them on their journey into Italy.

Simon Wiesenthal doubts much of Stangl’s and his wife’s Wizard-of-Oz version of this journey. It is unlikely that Stangl and Steiner would have walked all the way from Linz to Graz,
particularly without a stop-off in Wels, just fifteen miles away. And, despite truth being stranger than fiction, it seems more than ‘purely coincidental’ that two such closely linked
euthanasia and extermination alumni as Stangl and Wagner should get together so accidentally in Graz. ‘I am afraid she led you by the nose,’ Wiesenthal told a visitor who had just
interviewed the Stangl woman.

When the Stangls claimed that he and Steiner and Wagner ‘just walked out of Austria’ over a mountain pass by night, Wiesenthal exclaimed: ‘What nonsense! How could they?
Without papers or passports? What about the frontier? It’s all lies! They obviously had papers provided by
ODESSA
.’ While Frau Stangl insisted that her husband was ‘a
very good mountaineer and knew the Tyrolean mountains well from his youth. It was very difficult for the two others, but he managed to get them across’, Wiesenthal believes they took the
‘monastery route between Austria and Italy. Roman Catholic priests, particularly Franciscan friars, helped pass the fugitives down a long line of “safe” religious
houses.’

Many of these monks and other good Christians had sheltered Jews fleeing for their lives during the war. Of Rome’s 8000 Jews, at least half survived because they were hidden in convents,
monasteries, houses of Catholic orders, and even in the Vatican. (Still others were sheltered by Italian neighbours and friends, but 2000, most of them women and children, died in Auschwitz or in
transit.) For better or for worse, by 1945 some of these good Samaritans had
been in ‘refugee work’ for so long that they no longer discriminated among their
guests, but simply helped any ‘pilgrim’ on his way.

By 1947, the Vatican had become ‘the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants’, including Nazis, according to a US State Department report made that
year by Vincent La Vista, an American Foreign Service officer in Rome. The document was classified as ‘top secret’ until 1984, when, after pressure from both Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna
and his Centre in Los Angeles, it was made available to historian Charles R. Allen, Jnr.

‘In countries where the church is a controlling or dominating factor,’ said the La Vista report, ‘the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign
missions of those Latin American countries taking an attitude almost favouring the entry into their country of former Nazi and former fascist or other political groups, so long as they are
anti-communist.’ La Vista added that ‘the justification of the Vatican for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the faith.’

Whether or not Stangl and his companions reached Rome with church assistance (some of the lay contacts Stangl and Wagner had made during their Italian tours of duty may have helped), he sought
it early on. ‘I heard of a Bishop Hu
lda
at the Vatican who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that’s where we went,’ Stangl told Gitta Sereny. Actually, it was not that
easy, for he had the name wrong and ‘no idea about how one went about finding a bishop at the Vatican’ – or, for that matter, about finding the Vatican. The three
‘pilgrims’ split up, agreeing to rendezvous later. Then, Stangl recalled: ‘I walked across a bridge over the Tiber and suddenly found myself face to face with a former comrade:
there, in the middle of Rome where there were millions of people. He’d been in the security police in France and they wanted to put him on trial there. He’d been extradited from
Glasenbach by the French and escaped in the Tyrol when on the way to France.’

‘Are you on your way to see Hu
dal
?’ his friend asked.

‘Ah, so! Hu
dal
!’ Stangl exclaimed. ‘Yes, but I don’t know where to find him.’

His friend directed him to Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima and father confessor to the German community in the Eternal City. When Stangl reached Hudal’s office
and gave his name, the Austrian bishop came into the waiting-room, held
out both hands, and welcomed him with: ‘You must be Franz Stangl. I’ve been expecting
you.’

The name Stangl had in his head, however garbled, the ‘meet cute’ on the Tiber and Hudal’s welcome all spell
ODESSA
to Wiesenthal. But it is perhaps more edifying
to ponder the philanthropy of Bishop Hudal, who had ingratiated himself with Adolf Hitler, another native Austrian, while helping Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli negotiate a 1933 Vatican concordat with
the Nazis. Throughout the 1930s, Hudal lobbied for a pan-Germanic federation of Austria with Germany and, after Hitler accomplished that overnight in 1938, for closer collaboration between the
Vatican and the Nazis. In all of this, he had the ear of Cardinal Pacelli, a Germanophile who had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria and Berlin from 1917 to 1929 and ascended to the papacy as Pius
XII in 1939.

Hudal’s postwar ‘refugee work’ with thousands of SS men – some eighty per cent of whom would have qualified for death sentences had they appeared before the Nuremberg
tribunal – earned him the unofficial tide of ‘chief Scarlet Pimpernel of Rome.’

Simon Wiesenthal sees red when he discusses how Hudal helped not just Stangl, Eichmann, and possibly Mengele, but also Walter Rauff, who invented the mobile gas chambers used in Riga and Chelmno
and died in Chile in 1984, and, above all, a Viennese named Otto Wächter, who was not only one of the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, but one of the murderers of
Wiesenthal’s mother in 1942.