Nazi Hunter (59 page)

Rewarded for his earlier crime by being made Vienna’s chief of police after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Wächter was sent to Poland with the outbreak of war in September 1939:
first as governor of the Cracow district and then as governor of Galicia. ‘I saw him in early 1942 in the ghetto of Lwów,’ Wiesenthal recalls, adding painfully that, seven months
later, Wächter was ‘personally in charge’ of the transport that sent Simon’s mother to her death.

‘There were 800,000 other people Wächter killed, too,’ Wiesenthal adds matter-of-factly. After the war, Wächter escaped from Bavaria to Italy, carrying his complete
archives with him, but calling himself ‘Otto Reinhardt’. In 1949, when Wächter was dying under an assumed name in a religious college in Rome where he had been given sanctuary, he
confessed his identity and sent for his wife and Bishop Hudal.

Hudal gave the dying man last rites of the Church and took charge of his files. After Wächter’s death, Wiesenthal asked Bishop Hudal to give him his
mother’s murderer’s files. Hudal refused – arguing that Wächter’s records were part of his confessional and had to be respected as secret and sacred. What made
Wiesenthal forever equate the name Hudal with the word
chutzpa
(Yiddish for
gall
) was the bishop’s last word on the matter: ‘I am a priest, not a policeman.’

Simon is certain that the churchman, who died in Rome in 1963, will sizzle for eternity in the hottest reaches of hell. As evidence against Hudal, he cites an excerpt from the
bishop’s postwar diary, made public in 1985:

Of Hudal’s help, Franz Stangl said:

‘First he got me quarters in Rome where I was to stay until my papers came through. And he gave me a bit of money; I had almost nothing left.’ Stangl joined ‘many, many German
civilians’ sleeping on mats in a huge Franciscan convent on the Via Sicilia, just off Rome’s most fashionable boulevard, the Via Veneto. In the morning,
the men
were roused at dawn and, after breakfast, had to leave the convent until evening, though they were given meal tickets for lunch at a mess run by nuns. Since Germans and Austrians without Italian
documents were subject to arrest by the
carabiniere
, Stangl wandered the streets as inconspicuously as he could, loitering on benches in the Pincio and Borghese Gardens, where the big
danger came from dozing off if the police patrolled. Eventually, to keep out of trouble, he volunteered to do maintenance work for the nuns. Visitors to the Vatican in mid-1948 would have paid
little attention to the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka carrying a bucket for a nun as she and he crossed St Peter’s Square together. For his good work, he wrote home, he was given
extra rations and the chance to attend morning mass in St Peter’s Cathedral.

Gustav Wagner faded from sight in Stangl’s story of his stay in Rome, though his path would parallel his ex-chief’s. The third musketeer of their Italian odyssey, Hans Steiner, grew
homesick and escaped back to Austria, where he surrendered to the Americans.

After a few weeks, Bishop Hudal handed Stangl a whitish booklet with a red cross on it. It was an International Red Cross passport, issued in Stangl’s name to the bishop, who had said the
Vatican vouched for Stangl’s identity. Dispensing as many as 500 such documents per day, and pressured by the Italians to expedite the exits of unwanted foreigners, the Red Cross’s
attitude almost forty years later was: ‘How could we refuse to accept the word of priests?’

Stangl had one objection to his new credential. ‘They made a mistake,’ he told Bishop Hudal. ‘The name is incorrect. It says Paul Franz Stangl. My name is Franz Paul
Stangl.’

Hudal, he says, patted him on the shoulder and suggested: ‘Let’s let sleeping dogs lie. Never mind.’

The Bishop also gave Stangl a boat ticket from Genoa (in many cases, transportation was paid by the Catholic welfare organization Caritas) and an entrance visa to Syria, where a job in a textile
mill awaited ‘Paul F. Stangl, weaver’. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq had declared war and invaded the new State of Israel in May 1948, hours after it was proclaimed and the
British had withdrawn, so Stangl was sailing beyond the reach of Israeli and Western intelligence – and Nazi-hunters like Wiesenthal.

Failing to abort the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, her Arab
neighbours tried to pick up where Hitler had left off. Genocide was an idea whose
time had come (not for the first time) to Egypt and Syria, which imported their technicians and technocrats from the ruins of the Third Reich.

Most notorious of these was Alois Brunner, an Austrian born in 1912. Brunner was Eichmann’s right-hand man in Vienna and Prague in 1938–9 and his successor in Vienna, where
Wiesenthal credits him with inventing the Jewish police in the ghettoes to do the work of identification, registration, and deportation of Jews for the SS. Simon also says Brunner conceived the
postcards that deportees were ordered to write home while en route to or upon arriving in extermination camps (‘
I am in good health and feeling well
’); by the time the
postcards reached their destinations, virtually all the senders were dead. ‘Among Third Reich criminals still alive,’ says Simon, ‘Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my
eyes, he was the worst ever’ – even worse than Eichmann, who ‘merely’ made the plans that Brunner implemented so zealously in Vienna, Prague, Bratislava, Paris, and Greece.
Brunner accompanied one of the last transports from Vienna to the east; en route, he personally shot a Jewish banker, Siegmund Bosel, to death. In Greece, Brunner supervised the deportations that
Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim ‘never saw’. Close to 50,000 Jews were shipped from Salonika to Auschwitz in sixteen freight trains. When several hundred Jews from outlying Greek islands
missed the trains, Brunner had them herded into antiquated boats which were then put out to sea and sunk in the Aegean. Surfacing in Damascus after the war as ‘Dr Georg Fischer’,
Brunner became an adviser to the Syrian security services and, well into his eighties, was occasionally consulted on Lebanese affairs and still gave rabid interviews to German and Austrian
journalists.

The first major war criminal tried by a West German court under West German law was Franz Rademacher, ex-head of the Jewish Section of the German Foreign Ministry and Eichmann’s contact
man there. While appealing against a mild sentence of three years and five months for complicity in the murder of 1500 Yugoslav Jews (on his expense account form for a trip to Belgrade, he had
filled in ‘Purpose of Journey’ with ‘liquidation of Jews’), Rademacher jumped bail and escaped to Syria.

So hungry were Israel’s enemies for German expertise, major and minor, that Simon Wiesenthal says ‘the Syrian Embassy in Rome opened
a recruiting office which
worked like the French Foreign Legion: no questions asked, but, in this case, only if you were German. So when it became embarrassing to the French Foreign Legion that they had Nazi criminals in
their midst, certain French officials sold their embarrassments to the Arabs for 350 dollars per man. They were handed over at an Italian port and shipped out on the next boat.’

Walter Rauff’s credentials required no recommendations or negotiations when he contacted the Syrians in Rome. As reported in a forty-three-page investigatory report on ‘SS Colonel
Walter Rauff: The Church Connection 1943–1947’ issued in 1984 by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, the inventor of the mobile gas chamber would later testify (in Chile) that
‘I signed a contract with the Syrian government and went to Damascus as technical adviser to the secret police and the bodyguard of the head of state.’

In the stammer of 1948, when Franz Stangl arrived in Syria, his credentials as a genocidist were not yet so well known as Rauff’s, so he lived frugally and saved every
pound he earned to pre-pay his family’s passage to the Middle East. By the time Wiesenthal ascertained Stangl’s significance a couple of years later and located his home address in
Wels, Theresa Stangl and her three daughters had disappeared too. Neighbours said that the Stangls had left on 6 May 1949, not long after three men from the Viennese movers, Schenker & Co., had
come to the house to pack the belongings Frau Stangl had put out on the front lawn – beds and bedding, sewing-machine, china, chairs, table, even the piano – into two large crates which
they hauled away. There was nothing furtive about Frau Stangl’s departure. After the men had nailed the crates shut, she painted their destination on them in big bold letters:
FRANZ
PAUL STANGL, HELUANIE
14,
DAMASCUS
. When she applied for a passport to emigrate and the police asked why, she told them just as boldly: ‘To join my husband, who
escaped.’

Theresa, Brigitte, Renate, and Isolde Stangl sailed for Syria from Genoa in mid-May 1949. Reunited with the man of the house in Damascus, they first stayed in a pension at 22 rue George Haddat:
an address notorious in
Flight from Nuremberg
⁶³
and other escape
literature as
ODESSA’S
reception centre. Though their first few months together became a struggle when Franz Stangl’s employer died and his textile firm collapsed, they found a flat in the rue de Baghdad, where
they lived for six months until their furniture arrived from Austria. In early December 1949, Paul Franz Stangl, as he was now called, found well-paid work as a mechanical engineer with the
Imperial Knitting Company, and the Stangls moved to larger quarters on the rue de Youssuff in Old Damascus. ‘It was a wonderful house, and with our things we made the flat into a real
home,’ Theresa Stangl later recalled. ‘We were the first German family to have our own home, and
all
the Germans visited us.’

The only fly in their ointment was an open one. The chief of police of Damascus lived in the front of their house – with his harem. The Stangls’ middle daughter, Renate, was twelve
when they arrived in Syria – and, within a year or two, she had caught their neighbour’s lascivious eye. ‘She was very blonde and very pretty and he really had his eyes on
her,’ Frau Stangl told Gitta Sereny. ‘Renate could do anything she liked. She could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. We got into a panic about it. What could we do –
foreigners in Syria – if he took it into his head he wanted her?’ Complain to the police?

The concerned parents decided to move from Syria. There were no South American consulates in Damascus, but they made the rounds in Beirut, where the Brazilian consul said his country welcomed
mechanical engineers and gave them a visa. In 1951, the Stangls sailed from Beirut to Brazil, via Genoa. On their first day in São Paulo, the usually astute Frau Stangl gave all their cash
(worth about forty dollars) to a German woman to exchange on the black market. ‘And then she came back and said she’d given it to a man who’d said he’d get cruzeiros at a
good rate and he’d made off with it. I couldn’t
prove
she was lying’ – and, again, there was no possibility of calling the police.

When she told her husband their money was gone, ‘he wasn’t angry. He was never angry with me, or any of us . . . He never raised his voice, or lost his temper – until much,
much later – and never never did he strike or spank the children.’ No, the benign, mild-mannered Paul Franz Stangl simply said he had to find a job fast – and, within a week, he
was engaged as a weaver by the Sutema textile firm.

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