Franz Stangl was
born in Upper Austria and took up the trade of weaving. In 1931 he
trained to become part of the police force in Linz, Austria.
After the Anschluss
(the annexation of Austria into Germany by the Nazis in 1938), Stangl
joined the Nazi Party. He served in the T4 (euthanasia) program in the
early war years before becoming the commandant of two Polish death
camps, Sobibor and Treblinka.
After the war, he managed to escape to
Damascus, Syria, and later Sao Paulo, Brazil. Through the efforts of
Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was arrested by Brazilian
authorities in 1967 and returned to the Federal Republic of Germany.
The journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed
Stangl while he was in Brazil about his career and his feelings about
his work during the Nazi era. The following excerpt offers insights
into the attitudes and thinking of Stangl:
-
A. "When I was on a trip once,
years later in Brazil," he said, his face deeply concentrated, and
obviously reliving the experience, "my train stopped next to a
slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train,
trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close
to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence.
I thought then, ‘Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that's just
how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins
. . . .'"
-
"You said tins," I interrupted. "What do you mean?" But he went on without hearing or answering me.
-
A.
"I couldn't eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . which
looked at me . . . not knowing that in no time at all they'd all be
dead." He paused. His face was drawn. At this moment he looked old and
worn and real.
"So you didn't feel they were human beings?"
-
A. "Cargo," he said tonelessly. "They
were cargo." He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair.
Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in these weeks
of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless
grief allowed a moment of sympathy.
-
-
-Gita Sereny, Into That Darkness (Pan Books, 1977), 201.