Franz Stangl
Franz Stangl | |
---|---|
SS-Hauptsturmführer | |
Service number | NSDAP #6,370,447 SS #296,569 |
Unit | SS-Totenkopfverbände |
Commands held | Sobibor, 28 April 1942 – 30 August 1942 Treblinka, 1 September 1942 – August 1943 |
Franz Paul Stangl[1] (German: [ˈʃtaŋl̩]; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka in World War II.[2]
Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi Germany, became commandant of the camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. After the war he fled to Brazil, where he worked for Volkswagen do Brasil before he was arrested in 1967, extradited to West Germany and tried there for the mass murder of one million people. In 1970, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.[3][4]
Early life and Nazi affiliations
Stangl was born in 1908 in
In his teens, he secured an apprenticeship as a weaver, qualifying as a master weaver in 1927. Concerned that this trade offered few opportunities for advancement – and having observed the poor health of his co-workers – Stangl sought a new career. He moved to Innsbruck in 1930 and applied for an appointment in the Austrian federal police. Stangl later suggested that he liked the security and cleanliness that the police uniforms represented to him. He was accepted in early 1931 and trained for two years at the federal police academy in Linz.[6]
Stangl became a member of the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 when it was an illegal association for an Austrian police officer at that time.[3] After the war, he denied having been a Nazi since 1931 and claimed that he had enrolled as member of the party only to avoid arrest following the Anschluss of Austria into Nazi Germany in May 1938. Records suggest that Stangl contributed to a Nazi aid fund but he disavowed knowing about the intended party purpose of the fund. Stangl had Nazi Party number 6,370,447 and SS number 296,569.[citation needed]
In 1935, Stangl was accepted into the
T-4 Euthanasia program, 1940 – March 1943
After the onset of
Through a direct order from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler issued in November 1940, Stangl became the deputy office manager (Police Superintendent) of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, and in late summer 1941 at Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, where people with mental and physical disabilities, as well as political prisoners, were sent to be killed.[5][9][page needed]
At Hartheim, Stangl served under
Extermination camps
Sobibor, April – August 1942
Stangl was appointed by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to be the first commandant of Sobibor extermination camp. Stangl was Sobibor's commandant from 28 April until the end of August 1942, at the rank of SS-Obersturmführer. He claimed that Odilo Globočnik initially suggested that Sobibor was merely a supply camp for the army and that the true nature of the camp became known to him only when he himself discovered a gas chamber hidden in the woods. Globočnik told him that if the Jews "were not working hard enough" he was fully permitted to kill them and that Globočnik would send "new ones".[citation needed]
Stangl studied the camp operations and management of
Stangl avoided interacting with his victims, and he was rarely seen except when he greeted arriving prisoner transports.
Around 100,000 Jews are believed to have been killed there while Stangl was the administrator until the furnaces broke down in October, by which time Stangl had left.[5] Stangl was succeeded as Sobibor commandant by his Hartheim Euthanasia Center colleague, Franz Reichleitner.
Erich Bauer later remarked:[18]
I estimate that the number of Jews gassed at Sobibor was about 350,000. In the canteen at Sobibor I once overheard a conversation between
Sobiborand expressed their regret that Sobibor "came last" in the competition.
Also according to Bauer, Stangl participated in gang rapes of female prisoners prior to killing them:
I was blamed for being responsible for the death of the Jewish girls Ruth and Gisela, who lived in the so-called forester house. As it is known, these two girls lived in the forester house, and they were visited frequently by the SS men.
Steubel. I lived in the room above them and due to these celebrations could not fall asleep after coming back from a journey....[19]
Treblinka, September 1942 – August 1943
On 28 August 1942,
Stangl assumed command of Treblinka on 1 September 1942. Stangl wanted his camp to look attractive, so he ordered the paths paved and flowers planted along the sides of Seidel Street, near camp headquarters and SS living quarters. Despite being directly responsible for the camp's operations, Stangl said he limited his contact with Jewish prisoners as much as possible. Stangl rarely intervened with unusually cruel acts (other than gassing) perpetrated by his subordinate officers at the camp. He usually wore a white uniform and carried a whip, which caused prisoners to nickname him the "White Death".[1]
He claimed while in prison that his dedication had nothing to do with ideology or hatred of Jews.[5] He said he matter-of-factly viewed the prisoners as material objects rather than people, including their extermination: "That was my profession. I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won't deny it."[20] Stangl accepted and grew accustomed to the killings, perceiving prisoners not as humans but merely as "cargo" that must be destroyed. Stangl accepted the extermination of the Jews as a fact. At about this time, Stangl began drinking heavily.[21] He is quoted as saying:
To tell the truth, one did become used to it ... they were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [extermination area] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity – it could not have. It was a mass — a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said "What shall we do with this garbage?" I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo ... I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the "tube" – they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips...[20]
In September 1942, Stangl supervised the building of new, larger gas chambers to augment the existing gas chambers. The new gas chambers became operational in early autumn 1942. It is believed that these death chambers were capable of killing 3,000 people in two hours, and 12,000 to 15,000 victims easily every day,[1] with a maximum capacity of 22,000 deaths in 24 hours.[22][page needed] According to Jankiel Wiernik: "When the new gas chambers were completed, the Hauptsturmführer [Stangl] came and remarked to the SS men who were with him: 'Finally the Jewish city is ready' (German: Endlich ist die Judenstadt fertig)".[20]
Trieste, August 1943–1945
In August 1943, along with Globočnik, Stangl was transferred to Trieste, where he helped organize the campaign against Yugoslav partisans and local Jews. Due to illness, he returned to Vienna in early 1945, where he served in the "Alpine Fortress" (Alpenfestung).[7]
Post-war escape, 1945–1961
At the end of the war, Stangl fled without concealing his name. He was detained by the United States Army in 1945 and was briefly imprisoned in Linz, Austria, in 1947, pending investigation. He was suspected of complicity in the T-4 euthanasia programme.[citation needed]
On 30 May 1948, he escaped to Italy with his colleague from Sobibor, SS sergeant
Stangl was joined by his wife and family, and lived in Syria for three years. In 1951, they moved to Brazil. After years in other jobs, he found work with the help of friends, at the Volkswagen do Brasil plant in São Bernardo do Campo, still using his own name.[24]
Arrest, trial and death
Although Stangl's role in the mass murder of men, women and children was known to the Austrian authorities, a warrant for his arrest was not issued until 1961. Despite being registered under his real name at the Austrian consulate in São Paulo,[25][page needed] it took another six years before he was tracked by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and arrested by Brazilian federal police on 28 February 1967. He never used an assumed name during his escape, and it is not clear why it took so long to apprehend him. After his extradition to West Germany by Brazilian authorities, he was tried for the deaths of around 1,000,000 people. He admitted to these killings but argued: "My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty..."[26]
Stangl's attempt to justify his actions as non-criminal in the face of
What I had to do while I continued my efforts to get out was to limit my own actions to what I – in my own conscience – could answer for. At police training school they taught us that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action and intent. If any of these four elements is missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offence ... I could apply this to my own situation – if the subject was the government, the "object" the Jews, and the action the gassing, I could tell myself that for me, the fourth element, "intent", (I called it free will) was missing.[20]
Philosopher John Kekes discussed Stangl and the degree of his responsibility for war crimes in chapter 4 of his book The Roots of Evil.[27] The Schwurgericht Düsseldorf court found Stangl guilty on 22 December 1970 and sentenced him to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment.[9][page needed] While in prison, Stangl was interviewed extensively by Gitta Sereny for a study of him, published under the title Into That Darkness.[28]
She wrote, quoting him:
"My conscience is clear about what I did, myself", he said, in the same stiffly spoken words he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. "I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself," he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. "But I was there", he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. "So yes," he said finally, very quietly, "in reality I share the guilt ... Because my guilt ... my guilt ... only now in these talks ... now that I have talked about it all for the first time..." He stopped.
In his prison interview with Sereny, she later wrote:
Stangl had pronounced the words "my guilt": but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face. After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. "My guilt," he said, "is that I am still here. That is my guilt."[29]
He died of heart failure 19 hours after the conclusion of that interview in a Düsseldorf prison on 28 June 1971.[5]
See also
Notes
- ^ a b c d Treblinka Death Camp, with photographs Archived 22 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Ounsdale, PDF (2.2 MB)
- ^ Mikaberidze, Alexander (2019). Behind Barbed Wire: An Encyclopedia of Concentration and Prisoner of War Camps. ABC-CLIO. p. 261.
- ^ a b "SOME SIGNIFICANT CASE – Franz Stangl". Simon Wiesenthal Archiv. Simon Wiesenthal Center. Archived from the original on 3 May 2014. Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ Sobibor – The Forgotten Revolt Archived 24 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b c d e f g Robert S. Wistrich (1982). Who's Who in Nazi Germany, pp. 295–96.
- ^ ISBN 0-8078-2208-6
- ^ ISBN 0-02-897502-2
- ISBN 3-10-039309-0
- ^ ISBN 978-1-56852-133-6.[page needed]
- ISBN 0-02-897502-2
- ^ Arad 1987, pp. 141–143.
- ^ Arad 1987, pp. 117–118.
- ^ a b Webb 2016, p. 314.
- ^ Sereny 1974, pp. 117–118.
- ^ a b Schelvis 2007, p. 113.
- ^ Sereny 1974, pp. 122–124.
- ^ Sereny 1974, p. 131.
- ^ Klee, Dressen & Riess 1991, p. 232.
- ^ Yitzhak Arad (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 116-117.
- ^ ISBN 9780253342935.
- ISBN 978-0712674478.
- ISBN 0-256-01421-3.[page needed]
- ^ Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust[page needed]
- ^ Komplizen? – VW und die brasilianische Militärdiktatur. DasErste, ARD, 24 July 2017
- ^ Sereny, Gitta Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka (1974)[page needed]
- ^ "Sobibor, SS Commandant Franz Stangl". auschwitz.dk. Archived from the original on 5 August 2012. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
- ^ Kekes, John. Roots of Evil excerpt via Google.com; accessed 5 March 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-7126-7447-8.
- ^ Sereny (1974), p. 364
Works cited
- ISBN 978-1-84520-419-8.
- ISBN 0-07-056290-3.
- Webb, Chris (2016). Sobibor Death Camp: History, Biographies, Remembrance. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-3-8382-6966-5.
External links
- Franz Paul Stangl, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team