Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (57 page)

However, the fact remains that during my research in Vienna (for which, incidentally, the Austrian authorities readily gave me all the assistance I requested), I found that from 1961 Stangl
was
on the official Austrian list of “Wanted Criminals” (which is circulated to all embassies and consulates abroad), under the number “34/34 Mord: Tatbestand Treblinka.”
†
And in 1964, according to Frau Stangl, his name was conspicuous in the coverage given to the Treblinka trial by the Brazilian and foreign press. So it seems odd, to say the least, that during the six years between the first appearance of his name on the Austrian “Wanted” list, and his dramatic arrest, the fact that he was residing openly in Brazil never emerged.

The very efficient aliens’ police (
DOPS
) must certainly have had his particulars which, on request from Austrian or German government sources, would have been made available; the “Wanted List” appears never to have been checked by the Austrian consulate in São Paulo, although, as said above, his name figured prominently in press reports of the trial; and not a single person at Volkswagen apparently felt moved to ask any questions, though both his coworkers and the management at least knew his name and presumably read the papers. In the light of all this, one can only be amazed that it was left to the private efforts of Herr Wiesenthal to discover the whereabouts of this man who was never hidden.

*
A fact which had already struck me, considering his extraordinary memory for names.

†
His name was thus listed
thirteen years
after he escaped from an Austrian prison where he was held to be tried for – one would presume at least – complicity in the murders at Hartheim; a fact which, one concludes, must have appeared irrelevant to the Austrian authorities between 1948 and 1960. It appears impossible to ascribe this omission to the well-known Austrian
Schlamperei
, an endearing quality which, incidentally, is certainly responsible for the fact that Stangl’s name was still listed (Consul Heller showed it to me) in 1971 – when Stangl, after four years’ imprisonment in Germany, had already been tried and sentenced, and was dead.

5

“O
N THE
night it happened, February 28, 1967,” said Frau Stangl, “I had seen a lot of cars around. Our street was full of them. But it was only in retrospect I realized that I had noticed this. At the time I thought nothing of it. Renate was already home. Isolde came with Paul – they had stopped on the way for a beer in a bar. I heard a commotion outside and went to the window. Police cars were drawn across the street, blocking it off on each side; our car was surrounded by crowds of police. Paul was pulled out of the car – handcuffed – Isi fell to the ground shouting for us; that’s what I had heard, and rushed to the window; but the police car with Paul in it, followed by a string of others, was off before I could even get out of the door. Isi was almost incoherent with shock. She said Paul’s face went yellow when it happened.

“We phoned Gitta and then we went from police station to police station to look for him, but nobody knew anything. Until finally we got to the
DOPS
. And they said we should be glad they had taken him – if they hadn’t, the Israelis would have picked him up. After that, all we knew was what we read in the papers.

“In May or so we read that he had been moved to Brasilia, so we went up there. He was in a military prison. He looked – oh, just terrible, very very bad. And he said it was dreadful. He cried. I asked him about Treblinka; by this time, you know, we had read so much. ‘I don’t know what pictures you saw,’ he said, ‘perhaps you saw pictures of other camps.…’ He was so distraught, all I could think of was to console him. All I wanted then was to be for him someone he could be sure of, someone he could lean on.

“The children had come up with me, each driving part of the way. He was so wonderful with them, never gave way, never cried while they were in the room, smiled at them, walked them to the gate and waved goodbye to them. But of course, this was the first time it became real to them; seeing him like this, in prison, was a traumatic experience for them. It was after that Brigitte became ill.

“After that I went up there two or three more times. And on June 22 he was extradited.

“The two years at our Brooklin house had been our happiest in Brazil. We had had friends – mostly the children’s friends from Volkswagen, but they were friends for us too: Hungarian, Dutch, Brazilians. No, I don’t remember any Germans we were friends with. I don’t think Dr Schulz-Wenk even knew we existed then,” she said. [Dr Schulz-Wenk, then Director of Volkswagen, SA, was one of the people about whom it was said that he helped former Nazis.]

“After Paul was taken to Germany, we moved back to São Bernardo. It was the only sensible thing to do; we had only the money the two girls were earning, and my small pension – 200 cruzeiros. We knew we were going to need a great deal of money, for Paul’s defence. If we sublet the Brooklin house and went back to live modestly in São Bernardo, there was a chance of being able to manage. We moved back in October 1967.

“Everybody drew away from us after this; everybody we knew at Volkswagen and everybody else. Thank God, the girls were allowed to keep their jobs – we were grateful for that. Dr SchulzWenk is supposed to have said, ‘The girls have nothing to do with it’; that’s when he knew about us, you know, but not before.”

It was about then that Frau Stangl had a visit from the Austrian Gustav Wagner, who had been at Hartheim and Sobibor with Stangl, and had fled with him from Austria. Suchomel had told me that the two men were “close friends”. When Stangl had told me of his distress at Stanislav Szmajzner’s “forty-page” attack on him, I had pointed out that in fact only about two pages of the book were devoted to him, whereas Szmajzner wrote with far greater bitterness and horror about Wagner. “Really?” said Stangl. “And yet they live cheek by jowl in Brazil.” At first Frau Stangl said that she couldn’t understand what he had meant by this remark. Later she said: “Oh, it’s because Wagner went for a while with a girl who later married in Goiania [where Stan Szmajzner lives].” But it would appear that Wagner in fact never lived in Goiania, whereas he did live for a long time thirty kilometres away from the Stangls, in São Paulo.

Frau Stangl was somewhat reluctant to discuss Wagner. This, I think (although I felt differently at first) was primarily because she disliked him and didn’t want to be associated in my mind with such a person – he is by all accounts a particularly nasty piece of work. Finally, however, she admitted that they knew him quite well and that he “dropped in” on them.

“But I didn’t like Paul to associate with him,” she said. “He is a vulgar man – we have nothing in common with him.”

Gustav Wagner evidently felt otherwise. “He came to see me after Paul had been deported,” said Frau Stangl. “He wanted money; he said he was down and out and would I lend him money to bury his wife who had just died. I said I didn’t have any to lend him. He said, ‘Why don’t you and I set up house together? I haven’t got anybody any longer and as for Franz – they are going to do him in anyway over there, and you’ll be alone too.’ ” Frau Stangl said she was outraged and threw him out, and never saw him afterwards – but she did in fact lend him money which, she wrote later, he had never returned.

At Stangl’s trial she was asked about Gustav Wagner and said that she heard he had gone to Uruguay. Later she wrote to me putting it slightly differently. “He informed me of his intention to emigrate to Uruguay,” she wrote. She also told me that she heard, not long before I came to São Paulo in the autumn of 1971, that a woman had seen Wagner in São Bernardo, “looking like a beggar, with torn clothes and shoes”.

“I didn’t see Paul for three years,” said Frau Stangl. “He wrote me once a week. All we did – all we could do – was hope. I still didn’t believe he had been Kommandant; he denied it to me to the end. I know he admitted it to you – but never to me. To me he always spoke of the gold, the construction work, and Wirth – he did that every time, every single time – in Brasilia too.

“On May 8, 1968, I received a summons to testify at his trial and I flew to Germany on the 12th; I had been ready because I knew it was going to happen.

“I went to see Paul at the prison in Duisburg, where he was then; I went with his lawyer, Herr Enders. I found him enormously changed, depressed, terribly controlled.

“I testified on May 22. I didn’t attend the trial because Paul didn’t want me to; he was afraid, he said, I’d be attacked or that people – the public you know – would be rude to me. I was only in the court three times: when I testified; when Szmajzner testified; and the day of the sentencing. But even though I didn’t attend any other day, I went to the building every day and sat outside, just to be near him. I told him, so that he would know while it was going on, that I was there, just outside the door, and thinking of him. I went there, or I went to church.

“When I first arrived in Düsseldorf they had arranged for me to stay at a kind of hostel, but it was horribly depressing – no, not that anyone was unkind to me, it wasn’t that: nobody ever was. It was just that it was a kind of institution and I couldn’t stand it. But then I went to stay with a wonderfully kind woman in her house and it saved my sanity. In the evenings we talked and she became a friend.” Frau Stangl also said, in another conversation, that she went to museums and theatres.

Frau Stangl’s sister Heli commented on this period too. “Resl,” she said. “Yes, I’ve seen her, she stayed with me when she came over last [in 1970]. She went to see all the others in the family. We got closer this time than we had ever been. Still, I never could understand how she could bear to go back to Steyr where everybody knew her.” She shrugged. “Well, she felt she could – it is her business. Last time she was here she was quite gay, chipper.…

“Do I think she could have stopped him?” She shrugged again. “I think she was ambitious too. You see, my life was good too, even though I was alone for so long. But it was so different – so very, very different – it’s difficult for me to understand. But Resl always wanted to get to the top. Well, I suppose in a way she did get there.…”

“My own testimony took two hours,” Frau Stangl said about the trial. “I had never been in a court before and I was horribly nervous. Of course I didn’t tell them that I hadn’t believed Paul’s story about the illegal Party membership and how disappointed I was. How could I have told them? If Paul hadn’t told you about this himself, perhaps I wouldn’t have told you either. They didn’t believe that I hadn’t known about Hartheim, and yet it was true. Yes, they asked me whether I knew what Sobibor was when I was there. I told them that a drunken
SS
man told me about it.…

“When I first arrived,” she said, “they only allowed me to see Paul twice a week, for fifteen minutes with a guard. Later – although the guards were always there – they became much nicer; I could stay longer and sometimes they even allowed me to bring him some beer. What was strange”, she said, “was that often he would hardly talk to me. He’d sit opposite me at the table in that little interview cell, but he’d chat with the guards, not with me; he’d talk to them about their leaves, their excursions, places he knew, had been to. It hurt me, and sometimes I’d say, ’Don’t you want to talk to
me
?”

There was good reason for this: Stangl knew that by this time she had read everything about the trial and him. He desperately wanted her there – she was allowed to kiss and hug him – but he dreaded her questions and, by this nervous chatter with the guards, was avoiding them at all cost. In my conversations with him it emerged very clearly that in the end the only thing that mattered to him was her and his children’s continued loyalty and love; and equally, how aware he was of his wife’s profound aversion to what he had done. He was not sufficiently perceptive to realize how thin the line was – for her too – between rationalization of what he had done and accepting it, and living up to her own fundamental principles – and condemning him. He could only think, with real dread, of the possibility – or, as by that time, he probably knew, the probability – of her rejecting him.

Basically, it was when he came to terms with the realization that she knew – that after what had happened, even if he ever got out of prison, life with his family would be impossible – that he decided to talk to me. I came to understand this in the course of the conversations with him; and he, in a way, confirmed it in letters he wrote to his wife until shortly before he died, about his feelings about these talks.

6

T
HE LAST
time I saw Frau Stangl we talked about causes and effects, reasons beyond reasons.

“The day he was sentenced,” she said, “I know you won’t agree with me about this, as you haven’t agreed about other things, but I must go on being honest with you: those other Germans who sat in judgment over him, what do you think they would have done in his place? One of the jury-men came up to me later and said, ‘I don’t want you to think that it was unanimous – it wasn’t.’

“You see, I can’t help thinking that there has to be a reason for everything, even this terrible thing that happened. The universe isn’t without reason – nothing is. My sister goes to Israel every year, to a kibbutz – she has told me so much about it. I really ask myself, these people who died – they were heroes, martyrs, wasn’t there a reason, a sense in their sacrifice? Could that extraordinary country have been built if it hadn’t been for this catastrophe?”

I could not help but suspect that she and her husband had come to this consoling conclusion together, for he had said something very similar to me. “
In retrospect
” I had asked him, “
do you think there was any conceivable sense to this horror
?”