Nazi Hunter (61 page)

On Friday night, 24 February 1967, Wiesenthal phoned the politician in Rio and asked him to pay a call on the Austrian ambassador on Monday morning to tell him privately what to expect in the
mail. When he did, on Monday the 27th, the ambassador had just received the packet. It was delivered to the Brazilian Foreign Office the same day. A few hours later, the chief of the federal
police visited the Austrian ambassador, studied additional documents (including Wiesenthal’s), and flew to São Paulo to meet with its governor, Abreu Sodre.

The next night, Tuesday, 28 February, family man Paul Franz Stangl stopped for a beer in a bar with his youngest daughter, Isolde, twenty-three, nicknamed Isi, on their way from work at the
Volkswagen plant. Then they drove home.

From their two-storey house in Brooklin that day, Frau Stangl had noticed there were no parking places on the street where they lived, but had thought nothing more of it. ‘I heard a
commotion and went to the window,’ she recalls. ‘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’d heard when I rushed to the window – but the police car with him in it, followed by a
string of others, was off before I could even get out the door. Isi was almost incoherent with shock. She said her father’s face went yellow when it happened.’

Unlike the Eichmanns, the Stangls chased around from police station to police station right away, but nobody knew anything until they went to the São Paulo Office of Public Security,
where they were told yes, he was in custody, and no, they couldn’t see him. ‘And they said we should be glad they’d taken him,’ Frau Stangl remembers. ‘If they
hadn’t, the Israelis would have picked him up.’ Wiesenthal, too, says his sources told him Stangl was ‘terrified. He was certain he was being kidnapped by Jewish commandos
pretending to be Brazilian police. He was visibly relieved when he was brought to a police prison. He remembered what had happened to Eichmann and considered himself lucky.’

The next morning, 1 March, Simon’s Brazilian contact left for Europe, as scheduled, but phoned him first to assure him that Stangl was safely under lock and key. He would be transferred to
Brasilia, the country’s remote inland capital, to forestall any rescue or escape attempt. That night, the governor of São Paulo officially announced Stangl’s arrest. West Germany
and Poland immediately asked for his extradition, too.

Lawyers all over the world began wrangling over various statutes of limitations – most notably, Brazil’s, which set a twenty-year limit on arrests for murder. But Brazil had signed
the International
Convention Against Genocide,
⁶⁵
which excludes that most heinous of crimes from any statute of limitations.
Besides, Germany’s arrest warrant had been issued in 1960, so Stangl was culpable until 1980, by this definition. Austria argued that Stangl’s escape from prison in Linz interrupted the
statute of limitations. Most significantly, Wiesenthal, who had been heading for New York when he received word of Stangl’s capture, made an appointment with Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In
Simon’s presence, the former US Attorney General weighed in with a phone call to the Brazilian ambassador in Washington stating that he – a potential presidential candidate in the next
year’s election – would view any evasion of extradition with disfavour. ‘What’s at stake is justice for enormous crimes,’ said Kennedy. ‘Brazil now has an
opportunity to gain millions of friends.’

In the spring of 1967, when Stangl’s family read in the papers that he was in a military prison in Brasilia, they drove there, taking turns behind the wheel. Alone with his wife, he cried
and, when she asked about Treblinka, because by this time she’d read so much he hadn’t told her, he said: ‘I don’t know what pictures you saw. Perhaps you saw pictures of
other camps.’ With his daughters, however, his wife recalls that ‘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.’

On 8 June 1967, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Franz Stangl should be extradited to West Germany. Two weeks later, he was flown to Frankfurt and put in a prison in Duisburg
to await trial. His family moved back to São Bernardo do Campo and rented the house in Brooklin to diplomatic families to help finance his defence and his wife’s attendance at the
three years of trials in Düsseldorf. She flew there, but went to court only thrice: to testify that he had never told her what was happening at Hartheim; on the day Stanislaw Szmajzner, the
Sobibor goldsmith, testified against her husband, and on Tuesday, 22 December 1970, when she saw her husband sentenced to life in prison for having ‘supervised the murder of at least 900,000
men, women, and children.’

Simon Wiesenthal was in the courtroom that day, too. On his way out, he took from his wallet a photo of the man he had stalked for twenty years and tore it up. It had been
sandwiched between snapshots of Wiesenthal’s wife and daughter as a reminder of Franz Stangl’s innocent victims. In finding Franz Stangl – accused of 1,200,000 murders and
convicted of more than three-quarters of them – and winning his extradition from Brazil to Germany more than two decades after the Second World War ended, Simon Wiesenthal claims to have
given Germany ‘its most significant criminal case of the century.’

During her stay in Düsseldorf, Theresa Stangl visited her husband several times a week. ‘What was strange,’ she says, ‘was that often he would hardly
talk to me. He’d sit opposite me at the table . . . but he’d chat with the guards, not with me. He’d talk to them about their leaves, their outings, places he knew, had been to.
It hurt me, and sometimes I’d say, “Don’t you want to talk to
me
?”’

Of course he didn’t. To talk about his work from 1940 to 1943 would have been to confess his infidelity to her values and upset the delicate equilibrium of his relationship with her and
his family. She, more than he, had long looked the other way. His war crimes were like a mistress that everybody knows the head of the house has, but to openly acknowledge her existence would
disturb the harmony of Sunday dinner. So it is perhaps fitting that the only time Stangl ever acknowledged his guilt, in private or in public, was to another woman, Gitta Sereny, on Sunday, 27 June
1971, the day before he died.

In his final interview with her, after reiterating his usual ‘I have never intentionally hurt anyone myself, he added, ‘But I was there. So yes, 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 –
my guilt
is that I am still here. That is
my guilt
.’

Those words ‘
my guilt
’ were so foreign to his tongue and mind that it took him almost half an hour to speak those few fragmented sentences, which hit his body like a series
of blows to the solar plexus, making him sag before Sereny’s eyes. ‘Still here?’ she repeated gently.

‘I should have died. That was my guilt.’

‘Do you mean you should have died or you should have had the
courage
to die?’

‘You can put it like that,’ he said.

‘Well, you say that now,’ said Sereny. ‘But then?’

‘That
is
true,’ he replied slowly. ‘I did have another twenty years – twenty good years. But believe me, now I would have preferred to die rather than this . .
.’ Looking around at the little prison visiting-room, he added: ‘I have no more hope.’ His parting words to her were: ‘Let there be an end.’ He died of heart failure
in his cell nineteen hours later – shortly after noon on 28 June 1971.

* * *

Hard-working, resilient, pulling together rather than apart in times of adversity, and asking little or nothing of their neighbours or their nationalities, the Stangls even more
than the Eichmanns embodied the work ethic to which so many still hew and adhere in a fragmenting world. ‘Never, never did he strike or spank the children,’ Theresa Stangl said of her
husband; nor did he ever soil his white riding uniform by laying a hand on any of the more than a million prisoners who perished under his administrations at Sobibor and Treblinka. He was, Frau
Stangl went on, ‘an incredibly good and kind father. He played with the children by the hour. He made them dolls, helped them dress them up. He worked with them; he taught them innumerable
things. They adored him – all three of them. He was sacred to them.’

In Düsseldorf, Gitta Sereny had asked Stangl: ‘Did your children know?’ His face went red with anger as he replied: ‘My children believe in me.’

Sereny persisted: ‘The young all over the world question their parents’ attitudes. Are you saying that your children knew what you had been involved in, but never asked
questions?’

‘They – they – my children believe in me,’ he insisted. ‘My family stands by me.’ Then he began to cry.

After Stangl died in 1971, Sereny visited his widow and daughters in Brazil to research her invaluable book,
Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience
. Driving her back to
São Paulo one night, daughter Renate, by then divorced, told Sereny how her father once said to her that ‘if you ever need help, I’ll go to the end of the moon for
you.’

If his cell in Düsseldorf was the end of the moon for Franz Stangl, then what was Treblinka? Merely the end of the earth for more
than a million mortals, many of them
as good parents as or even better than he was. Examining his conscience through Gitta Sereny’s ears and eyes, we can’t help confronting the monster within each of us and asking
ourselves what we might have done in his situation. Sereny comes to this conclusion:

Is it enough, then, to say, as Simon Wiesenthal said at Stangl’s trial, that ‘
if I had done nothing else in my life but bring this wicked man to justice, I
would not have lived in vain
’? Yes, it is truth for Wiesenthal – and we can only admire his giving Stangl and his victims their day in court. When Stangl died barely half a year
after sentencing, Wiesenthal told me:

‘That is enough for a life sentence. The important thing is that he was brought to trial. The spirit of the law is that every person who is killed has the right to a trial of his killers.
Now, if a man is responsible for 10,000 deaths, you cannot make 10,000 trials. So you make one trial. And imprisonment is not only a sentence, it is a symbol of justice. Even if it is of short
duration, every son or daughter of his murder victims can at least take a pencil and calculate that, “for killing my mother, he spent two minutes or two days in prison.” It is not much,
but it is something that helps the survivors to live.’

For each of the 900,000 murders of which Franz Stangl was convicted, then, he served eighteen seconds in jail.

31

While Franz Stangl, deported to West Germany, had been awaiting trial there, his wife Theresa was called upon in Brazil by Gustav Wagner, her husband’s former colleague
at Hartheim, deputy at Sobibor, and fellow escapee from Austria into Italy. Wagner had settled some thirty miles from the Stangls and was in the habit of dropping in unannounced. Franz Stangl had
always welcomed Wagner, though his wife found him ‘vulgar’ and obtrusive.

After a brief expression of sympathy for the Stangls’ plight, Wagner told his involuntary hostess that his own wife had just died and would she lend him money to bury her? At first, she
refused, but, when he told her he was down and out and worried about Wiesenthal looking for him next, she relented – even though every cent the Stangls could spare was going for her
husband’s defence.