Nazi Hunter (57 page)

‘This is a page of glory in our history which never has and never will be written.’

Even the shadowy Stangl, who avoided most contact with Jews at Treblinka, had his own ‘decent’ Jew: a Viennese named Blau, whom he made a cook because ‘I always tried to give
as many jobs as possible to Viennese Jews . . . After all, I was Austrian . . . Blau was the one I talked to the most; him and his wife . . . He knew I’d help whenever I could.’

One day, Blau asked Stangl’s help. Blau’s eighty-year-old father had arrived on that morning’s transport. Was there anything Stangl could do?

‘Really, Blau, you must understand,’ Stangl responded in a kindly voice. ‘It’s impossible. A man of eighty!’

Blau said of course he understood his father couldn’t be put to work and would therefore be a useless mouth. But could he take him to the fake ‘hospital’ for execution rather
than let him be run through The Tube to the gas chamber? And could he maybe take his father first to the kitchen and give him a meal?

Stangl said magnanimously: ‘You go and do what you think best, Blau. Officially, I don’t know anything; but unofficially you can tell the
Kapo
[prisoner squad leader] I said
it was all right.’ That afternoon, according to what Stangl told Sereny in 1971, ‘when I came back to my office, Blau was waiting for me. He had tears in his eyes. He stood to attention
and said: “
Herr Kommandant
, I want to thank you. I gave my father a meal. And I’ve just taken him to the
hospital
; it’s all over. Thank you very much.” I
said, “Well, Blau, there’s no need to thank me, but of course if you want to thank me, you may.”’

While the son’s wish to show his doomed father how well he was doing under the worst of circumstances may be comprehensible to some, to Gitta Sereny ‘this story and the way it was
told represented to me the starkest example of a corrupted personality I had ever encountered and came very near to making me stop these conversations. I broke off early that lunchtime and went to
sit for nearly two hours in a pub across the street, wrestling with the most intense
malaise
I’d ever felt at the thought of listening further.’ Fortunately, she did return and
historians probing the depths of the Final Solution are indebted to her intestinal fortitude.

To Sereny, Stangl also described how ‘a beautiful reddish-blonde Jewess’ was sent up to substitute for an ailing maid who cleaned his living quarters. Just to make chit-chat, Stangl
asked her if she had chosen a room for herself in the servant barracks.

The girl stopped dusting and stood very still, looking Stangl in the eye before responding quietly: ‘Why do you ask?’

Taken aback by her breach of master-slave etiquette, Stangl blustered: ‘Why shouldn’t I ask? I can ask, can’t I?’

The girl looked right through him for a few seconds before saying: ‘Can I go?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Stangl said. Years later, he recalled how ‘I so admired her for facing up to me’, but could not remember what
became of her.
Apparently, the girl, Tchechia Mandel, an industrialist’s daughter from Wiesenthal’s home city of Lemberg, was still alive and working in the camp kitchen at the time of a 2 August 1943
uprising when 200 militant young Jews (including Richard Glazar and Grossinger’s maître d’ Siedlecki, ‘dentist’ Rajchman and lumberman Rajzman) – armed with
rifles, revolvers, and hand grenades stolen from the SS arsenal – cut all wires, set fire to the camp, and escaped into the woods with another 400 ‘work-Jews’. (Four hundred more
who couldn’t or wouldn’t flee were killed in the camp.) Most of the escapees were hunted down and murdered by the Germans, Ukrainians, Polish peasants, and even Polish partisans. Only
fifty survived the war.

No women were in a position to escape on that heroic Monday and hardly a handful of them survived the German reprisals. The spirited Tchechia Mandel did, but she was not to be spared.

In the very last days of Treblinka, a sergeant stood up after a good lunch and said to Tchechia and the two other women who had served it to him: ‘Well, girls, it’s your turn
now.’

The other two cringed, but Tchechia laughed in his face and said: ‘I never did believe your fairy-tale promises, you pigs. Go ahead and kill us. Just do me one favour. Don’t ask us
to undress.’ When one of the other girls began to weep, Tchechia told her: ‘Don’t cry. Don’t do them the favour. Remember, you are a Jew.’ Such people died prouder
than Stangl ever lived.

After the revolt, transports continued coming to Treblinka for another fortnight and were liquidated in whatever facilities remained in operation. Stangl produced plans to
rebuild the camp more efficiently than ever, but orders came down from Berlin through Globocnik to obliterate Treblinka. The machinery of the Final Solution was running low on Jews to process, and
Zyklon B at Auschwitz and Majdanek had more potential than Treblinka’s low-grade carbon-monoxide technology. Transports ticketed for Treblinka would be diverted to Sobibor, though not for
long: On 14 October 1943, a revolt closed Sobibor. A dozen SS men and more than a dozen Ukrainians perished, as did 200 Jews shot or blown up by mines while trying to escape. Of the 400 who did
escape Sobibor, a hundred were later captured and killed. Others joined Soviet partisan units, with which most of them died in combat.
Others died of typhus or were killed by
Poles. Only thirty survived the war, among them the leader of the revolt, Alexander Pechersky, a Jewish soldier in the Red Army who would testify to Simon Wiesenthal against his tormentor Gustav
Wagner, nearly four decades later.

The last transport –
Pj
(for Polish Jews) 204 – to reach Treblinka arrived on Thursday, 19 August 1943, and its passengers were destroyed the same day. Then
Treblinka’s remaining buildings were demolished. The grounds were planted with pine trees, which grew astonishingly fast. Bricks of the dismanded ‘bath-houses’ went to build a
farmhouse for a Ukrainian named Strebel who was put in there with his family and told to pretend they had been farming there since 1939. But no lie could long conceal the bones of more than a
million men, women, and children. The liquefaction of their imperfectly burned bodies caused the earth to shift. Gases released by putrefaction blew the cosmetic top-soil off the burial pits. The
Strebels fled before the Red Army came in late 1944.

Toward the end of August 1943, however, Franz Stangl had at last been able to tell his wife that her wish had come true: he was done with the death camps of Poland and about to be transferred to
Trieste, considerably closer to home, for anti-partisan combat duty.

29

If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it made monsters of mediocrities like Mengele, Eichmann, and Stangl. If Hitler embodied evil as few, if any, in
history ever did, his mastery lay in his grasp and manipulation of power, but did he pose any greater physical danger to individuals and whole societies (Jews, gypsies, freemasons) than did these
devoted servants of his who soldiered so zealously to translate his every fevered, far-fetched rant into unspeakable reality for millions? To paraphrase Shakespeare, some are born to power, some
achieve power, and others have power thrust upon them. To the man in the street and the Jew in the ghetto of the Third Reich, those
others
were the ones to watch – and watch out
for.

Mengele was ‘a man who believed in nothing but power, the ultimate cynic’, says his unwilling ‘Aryan’ underling, Dr Ella Lingens-Reiner, holder of law as well as medical
degrees from the University of Vienna. ‘The trouble with Eichmann,’ writes Hannah Arendt, ‘was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor
sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.’ And Stangl, says Gitta Sereny, had an infinite capacity to manipulate and repress his own moral scruples, which,
she insists, unquestionably existed.

If, unlike Mengele’s, the names of Eichmann and Stangl were unknown to Wiesenthal during his concentration-camp odyssey, this was because Eichmann worked mainly behind the scenes with
fellow Nazis and Gentile collaborators as well as through the Jewish Councils he created and later liquidated. For facelessness, however, none of the others in Wiesenthal’s gallery could
match Franz Stangl, whose name was unknown to the million and a quarter who passed
through Treblinka or even to most of the sixty who survived his inferno.

By late 1943, he was a non-person to Hitler’s high command, too. SS Captain Stangl had left Poland for Trieste that September in a convoy with his chiefs, General Odilo Globocnik and Major
Christian Wirth, and 120 other men. ‘I realized quite well, and so did most of us, that we were an embarrassment to the brass,’ he later told Gitta Sereny. ‘They wanted to find
ways and means to “incinerate” us. So we were assigned the most dangerous jobs. Anything to do with anti-partisan combat in that part of the world was very perilous.’

Yugoslav partisans took no prisoners. Simon Wiesenthal confirms that, in Berlin headquarters’ jargon, ‘incineration’ meant eliminating their own men by sending them to a front
from which they were not expected to return. This was the cynical Nazi solution to the problem these technicians of mass extermination posed to their superiors, who called them
‘secret-bearers, first class’, meaning that they knew too much for their own or the Party’s good. After blowing up the camps and planting farms and other cosmetic disguises atop
them, as many expert witnesses as possible had to be removed.

With Wirth, it worked. ‘The savage Christian’ was killed in street fighting on the Istrian Peninsula on 26 May 1944. ‘I saw him dead,’ Stangl said with some satisfaction.
‘They said partisans killed him, but we thought his own men had taken care of him.’ A third theory, propounded by British historian Robert Wistrich in his invaluable
Who’s Who
in Nazi Germany
(1982), suggests that ‘he may also have been the victim of a Jewish vengeance squad organized to hunt down Nazis mass murderers.’

Globocnik survived his Adriatic exposure; he had, after all, been born in Trieste and knew the treacherous territory. But the chief exterminator of Polish Jewry had three strikes against him: he
was an alcoholic, a plunderer, and, worst of all, a bachelor turning forty. Since it was not considered ‘natural’ for one to rise so high in the SS without mating and breeding for the
future of the ‘Master Race’, Globocnik was given leave to find a bride. His military travel orders from the highest headquarters deserve partial quotation:

Put out to stud, Globocnik went a-courting in his home province of Carinthia (in what had been southern Austria) and found himself a hefty
Hausfrau
named Hannelore.
According to Stangl, ‘she was a big blonde who was working in a hospital in the city of Klagenfurt’, where Globocnik married her in a civil ceremony in October 1944. When the war was
over, he made his way back across the Dolomites to reach his Hannelore, but was stopped by a British patrol on 31 May 1945 along the banks of the Weissensee, a pristine mountain lake in Carinthia.
There, according to most accounts, Globocnik committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule a few minutes after he was apprehended, though Wistrich again adds that ‘according to other
versions, Globocnik was hunted down and killed either by partisans or by a Jewish vengeance squad in June 1945.’

For his first three months in the port of Trieste, Franz Stangl was assigned to Transport Security – in charge of guarding the closely watched trains headed north in late 1943 with
passengers, plunder, and occasional prisoners. He had one narrow escape at the very end of this stint. Granted Christmas leave, he turned over his reins to Franz Reichleitner, the
‘secret-bearer’ who had succeeded him at Sobibor. That night, on a regular rural security patrol that Stangl would have made, Reichleitner was ambushed and assassinated by partisans.
Intercepted in Udine in northern Italy, Stangl was recalled to hunt Reichleitner’s killers and his furlough was cancelled.