Nazi Hunter (51 page)

By 1933, with more than half a million Austrians out of work and Hitler taking power in Berlin, talk of Anschluss with their German-speaking neighbours tripped off many Austrian tongues. The
domestic Nazi party – hitherto a fringe group that hadn’t elected a single deputy to Parliament – made ominous noises amplified by infusions of propaganda and manpower from Nazi
Germany.
Der Führer
proclaimed that the unification of Austria and Germany was ‘a task to be furthered by every means’. The Austrian province of Styria’s
Heimwehr
went over to the Nazis.

Hitler’s atheistic fascism was distasteful to Dollfuss, who recognized early that the Nazis, while talking of the historic unity of Christian and German culture, were subverting the former
with Teutonic paganism and the latter with racism and terror. Thus, he favoured a more Italian-flavoured, but homegrown, militantly Catholic Austro-fascism – and seized the chance in
parliamentary turbulence on 4 March 1933, by declaring that Parliament had ‘suspended itself’.
To avoid an election that would surely have won the Nazis some
seats, he invoked an obsolete law from 1917 granting the government emergency powers. First, he outlawed the Nazi Party, whose growing numbers, driven underground, turned to grenades, subversion,
and infiltration of government organs. The Communist Party, a negligible factor, was banned too.

Until 1933, the Socialists – who could better be classified as ‘Social Democrats’ – had been
pro
-Anschluss
,
but the transformation of Germany into a
Nazi dictatorship altered their position. Still, such was the mutual detestation between Socialists and Dollfuss that neither side considered uniting against Hitler, who would destroy them both.
Otto Bauer, the brilliant Jewish leader of the Socialists, despised Dollfuss personally as a bastard who had usurped power. After all, in the 1930 elections, the Socialists had won forty-one per
cent of the vote, making them the largest party in Parliament until Dollfuss abolished parliamentary democracy. Besides, they wanted no part of Austro-fascism or any other kind. When Dollfuss
banned the
Schutzbund
, the Socialist militia, as a prelude to forming a one-party regime called the Fatherland Front, Austria was soon as seething a police state as any in the Balkans.

On the morning of 12 February 1934, the inevitable conflict between Reds and Blacks erupted in Linz, where Patrolman Franz Stangl was stationed. Police broke down the doors of a workers’
club on the Landstrasse to confiscate arms from the outlawed Socialist militia. The
Schutzbund
greeted them with a hail of bullets which generated a general strike in the Socialist-ruled
cities of Austria and a three-day civil war across the nation. When it was over, the victorious government forces – including police,
Heimwehr
, and Austrian army – had lost 128
lives, with 409 more wounded; official figures gave
Schutzbund
and Socialist casualties as 137 dead and 399 wounded, though, by counting families trapped in the bombardment of Socialist
housing projects, the roll would come to more than a thousand. The Socialist Party was outlawed. Some of its leaders fled the country. Many of its members were arrested. Nine were executed.

The fighting in Linz lasted just one day, but a rookie cop had his work cut out for him and Stangl could boast: ‘The Socialists entrenched themselves in the Central Cinema and we had to
fight for hours to get them out. I was the one who flushed the last ones
out that night at 11 p.m. – after well over twelve hours. I got the silver Service medal for
that.’

He held no grudge against Socialists and, in the beginning, no bent for the Nazis: ‘The Austrian police were very professional. Our job was to uphold the law of the land’ – by
quelling disturbers of the peace, right or left, and by doing a job that had ‘nothing heinous or very dramatic about it then. It was just a job one tried to do as correctly – as kindly,
if you like – as possible.’

On 1 May 1934 – the Republic of Austria’s first May Day without a Socialist Party – Dollfuss’s puppet Parliament passed a new Constitution transforming Austria into a
‘Christian Corporate State’. By then, Dollfuss had opened detention camps for his opponents: one of them in Wöllersdorf, some thirty miles south of Vienna.

Here, however, any resemblance to Mussolini or Hitler ends. Dollfuss enjoyed neither the power nor the popularity of
il Duce
or
der Führer
. The treatment of political
prisoners at Wöllersdorf never rivalled that in Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp established by Hitler in 1933 on the outskirts of Munich. Dollfuss’s fascism was relatively free
of the imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-clericalism that marked one or both of his neighbours’. And, instead of Anschluss, Dollfuss preached that the Austrians were the better
Germans – defenders of a civilized tradition dating back a thousand years to Babenberg dukes who ruled Austria while Teutonic tribes to the west were subsisting on acorns – and affirmed
a patriotic doctrine of ‘Austrianness’, combining German culture with Austrian tolerance: ‘Living with other nations for centuries has made the Austrian softer, more patient, and
more understanding of foreign cultures, even though he has been and is conscious of maintaining the purity of his own culture and kind.’

These qualities, too, would make Austrians like Stangl excellent exterminators a few years later.

That much-misunderstood historical figure, Dollfuss, was as doomed as his doctrines. On 25 July 1934, in a meticulously bungled putsch called ‘Operation Summer Festival’, no fewer
than 154 Austrian Nazis, wearing military and police uniforms, rode into the courtyard of Dollfuss’s Chancellery on the Ballhausplatz in eight trucks which penetrated security just by tagging
along behind the regular 12.50 p.m. changing of the guard. They seized the building and shot Dollfuss to death, as intended, but failed to arrest his
ministers and install a
new government because the cabinet meeting they thought they were raiding had ended forty minutes earher. Only Dollfuss and his chief of security and the head of the
Heimwehr
were on hand.
While the Austrian Army surrounded the Chancellery and the German ambassador negotiated the surrender of the Nazi invaders, the next Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, thirty-seven, hitherto
Minister of Justice and Education, was convening the cabinet elsewhere in town and promising continuity.

As a concerned citizen and professional policeman, Franz Stangl was appalled by the assassination of Dollfuss. A few days later, he discovered a Nazi arms cache in a forest. This won him, along
with four colleagues, another medal – the Austrian Eagle with green and white ribbon –and enrolment in detective school. In 1935, he was transferred to Wels, an Upper Austrian hot-bed
of Nazism, to investigate illegal political activities.

Since the Nazis, like the Socialists, had enhanced his career, Stangl harboured an occasional kind feeling toward them. He contributed to a Nazi welfare fund to look after relatives of political
prisoners. And, for a Nazi lawyer named Dr Bruno Wille, Stangl and his detective partner, Ludwig Werner, did ‘the sort of thing one was able to do at times before 1938: just warn someone
under suspicion to watch his step.’

In Vienna, the cultured but colourless Schuschnigg governed for nearly four years while Hitler watched Austria’s economy erode under German and Italian pressure, such as economic barriers
to tourism, until he was ready to pounce. German troops crossed into Austria before dawn on Saturday, 12 March 1938; Hitler rode in triumph that day through his native town of Braunau to his home
city of Linz, wildly cheered and welcomed all the way. In Vienna, Schuschnigg was escorted into what became ten weeks of house arrest followed by seven years in Hitler’s prisons and
concentration camps.
⁵⁰
Far more brutally, another 76,000 foes of Nazism were arrested that weekend in Vienna alone.

The first transport of 151 Austrians left Vienna for Dachau on 1 April: Jews, intellectuals, and politicians, including two Schuschnigg supporters who would survive to
become postwar conservative chancellors of Austria: Leopold Figl and Alfons Gorbach. Nine days later, Hitler called a ‘plebiscite’ in Austria and Germany to ratify his Anschluss. With
eighteen per cent of the electorate excluded for political or racial reasons, and the rest either feeling coerced or acceding to the inevitable with varying degrees of enthusiasm, 99.75 per cent of
Austrians and 99.08 per cent of Germans voted yes.

With Anschluss, Austria literally disappeared from the map. Renamed
Ostmark,
it was later christened ‘the Danube and Alpine Reich’s Provinces’. The very word
‘Austria’ was banned. Working in Wels, Franz Stangl was no longer in the province of Upper Austria. Upper and Lower Austria were now called Upper Danube and Lower Danube.

In the bloody purge that followed the bloodless entry of German troops into Austria, the Nazis arrested three of the five detectives who had won Eagles in 1934 for confiscating
their weapons near Linz. As Stangl later recalled: ‘That left only my friend Ludwig Werner and myself. Meanwhile, in Linz, they’d shot two of the chiefs of our department. People
we’d seen just a few days before. No trial, nothing – just shot them. Another one, also a friend of mine, was arrested too.’ When one of their colleagues remarked that
‘you’d better let your Eagle fly out the window’, fear gripped Stangl and Werner. They shredded their whole index-card file of suspected Nazis, communists, and socialists, and
flushed it all down the toilet.

Stangl and Werner were given forms to fill out. One of the questions asked whether they had been Nazi Party members back when it was illegal.

Remembering the little favour they’d once done a Nazi lawyer, they went to Dr Wille and asked him to ‘remember’ that Werner and Stangl had been underground Nazis. Wille obliged
by entering their names on his Nazi Party rolls for the previous two years. Then the two worried detectives completed their questionnaires by saying they’d been Party members since 1936.

When Stangl went home that night, he thought his wife would be relieved, too, but instead she accused him of betraying her with
‘these swine, these gangsters!’
Through his pain, Stangl comprehended that, as an Austrian whose country had just been violated and as a devout Catholic, Theresa hated Nazis with a passion shared by many of her people.

Stangl’s interviewer-biographer, Gitta Sereny, in her profound 1974 book,
Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience
, draws a fascinating parallel between Franz
Stangl’s individual and the Vatican’s institutional ‘step-by-step acquiescence to increasingly terrible acts’ before and during World War II. In both cases, she says,
‘the very first failure to say “No” was fatal, each succeeding step merely confirming the original and basic moral flaw.’ In this morality play, Theresa Stangl emerges as a
tragic figure caught between loyalties to the man she loved and the church she revered.

Franz Stangl, on the other hand, looms large as a master weaver who wove a web of death and deception – eventually, self-deception. Having lost the respect of his wife, Stangl lost his
self-respect a year later when his new boss, a Nazi from Munich, ordered him to sign a paper renouncing his religion. He never told Theresa he’d signed it.

In 1940, Stangl, after receiving several promotions as a Gestapo agent in Wels, was transferred to Berlin. To his own surprise, the Austrian plainclothes detective was given a green uniform with
lieutenant’s rank and named police superintendent of a special institute of the General Foundation for Institutional Care at Tiergartenstrasse (Zoo St.) 4. The foundation’s fancy title
was just a façade for a host of euphemisms which endure today and have even achieved a modicum of respectability:
mercy killing, assisted suicide, euthanasia
. In those days, they
meant the slaughter of those deemed mentally, morally, or physically unfit to participate in the lunacies of the Third Reich.
T4,
as the foundation was nicknamed because of its address,
was the forerunner of the Final Solution.

The programme had begun when Hitler came to power in 1933 with enactment of the Law for Compulsory Sterilization of those suffering from hereditary diseases. Two years later, a Law to Safeguard
the Hereditary Health of the German People legalized abortion where either of the parents had a hereditary disease. At the end of October 1939, a secret decree by Hitler quietly gave his
chancellery

The first gassings of Germans certified as incurably insane were carried out in December 1939 or January 1940 at a ‘ psychiatric clinic’ in Grafeneck castle and at
a former prison in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, after which two other facilities in Germany and another in Austria were opened to cope with the mentally and physically retarded, the incurably sick,
and the very old as well as the insane.

The newly commissioned officer Stangl was sent home to Wels to await further orders. After a day spent relaxing with his wife and two small daughters, he was called for by an unmarked delivery
van with a driver in civilian clothes who took him to Schloss Hartheim, a sixteenth-century Renaissance castle in Alkoven, a dozen miles from Linz.

Simon Wiesenthal first heard of Hartheim when he was in the Mauthausen concentration camp toward the end of the war: ‘The crematoriums were working overtime. Whenever an oven broke down,
the people in charge would send for “an expert from Hartheim” to fix the machinery. Sometimes batches of prisoners were sent over to Hartheim; they never came back. All we were told was
that they’d been “permanently transferred.” So the word
Hartheim
seemed to spell
death
, but I didn’t give it a second thought. Lying on my bunk in the
death block, I was too weak to think.’