Franz Stangl

Franz Stangl was the commandant of Sobibór from April to August 1942 and of Treblinka from September 1942 to August 1943. The two camps killed around 1.1 million Jews under his command. He escaped through the Catholic ratline to Brazil in 1948 and lived openly there for two decades. He was extradited to West Germany in 1967, tried in Düsseldorf in 1970, sentenced to life imprisonment, and died of heart failure in his cell on 28 June 1971, hours after completing a series of detailed taped interviews with the Austrian-British journalist Gitta Sereny that became the book Into That Darkness, one of the central perpetrator documents of the Holocaust.

Sobibór

Stangl was assigned to Sobibór in March 1942 and oversaw the construction of the gas chambers and crematoria. The camp opened in May 1942 and ran under his command until late August. Around 100,000 people were murdered at Sobibór during his four months as commandant. The killing method was carbon monoxide from a captured Soviet diesel engine piped into sealed chambers. Stangl supervised the daily operation. He met the trains. He observed the gassings. He filed the reports.

Treblinka

Treblinka opened in July 1942 under the original commandant Irmfried Eberl, an Austrian SS doctor who had run a T4 killing centre at Brandenburg before the war. Eberl proved unable to manage the operational scale and the camp was overwhelmed within weeks. Bodies piled up. The arrival operation collapsed. Stangl was transferred from Sobibór to take over in September 1942. He restored order. He redesigned the receiving area. He installed the false station with the painted timetables and the wooden clock to maintain the illusion of resettlement up to the moment of the gas chambers. He scheduled the trains tighter. He doubled the rate of killing. Around 800,000 people were murdered at Treblinka under his command between September 1942 and August 1943. He was the most operationally effective of the Operation Reinhard commandants.

The Treblinka revolt of 2 August 1943, in which around 200 prisoners broke out and around 70 ultimately survived, took place under his command. He was personally present in the camp during the revolt. The camp was substantially damaged. He oversaw the dismantling of Treblinka in the autumn of 1943, after the killing was largely complete. The site was levelled and planted with trees.

Trieste and the escape

Stangl was transferred to Trieste in October 1943, with the rest of the Operation Reinhard veterans, to serve under Globocnik in anti-partisan operations and the deportation of northern Italian Jews. He was captured by American forces at the end of the war and held in an open camp in Austria. He escaped from custody in 1948 and made his way through Italy on the Catholic ratline operated by Bishop Alois Hudal at the Pontificio Collegio Teutonico in Rome. He reached Damascus and worked in a Syrian textile mill for several years, then moved to Brazil in 1951.

He lived openly in São Paulo for sixteen years under his own name. He worked as an engineer at the Volkswagen do Brasil factory. The Austrian Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal located him in 1967 through a tip from an unidentified Austrian informant. The Brazilian government, under international pressure, arrested Stangl and extradited him to West Germany in 1967.

The trial and the Sereny interviews

Stangl was tried in Düsseldorf in 1970 along with several other former camp staff. He was convicted of co-responsibility for the murder of 900,000 people and sentenced to life imprisonment. The case is one of the major German trials of the late twentieth century.

While in prison awaiting and during his trial, Stangl agreed to a series of long taped interviews with the journalist Gitta Sereny. Sereny had been an Austrian-Jewish refugee child in the Kindertransport era and had become one of the most thoughtful interviewers of senior perpetrators. The interviews ran over many sessions and total around seventy hours of tape. Stangl talked openly. He described the camps in detail. He described the men who had run them. He described his own role. The transcripts, edited and contextualised by Sereny, became the book Into That Darkness, published in 1974, which is now standard reading in Holocaust historiography.

The interviews ended on 27 June 1971 with Stangl finally acknowledging, after Sereny had pressed him over many sessions, that he carried personal responsibility for what had been done. He died in his cell of heart failure nineteen hours later. The timing has produced sixty years of historical argument about whether the conversation with Sereny had broken something in him. Sereny believed it had. The acknowledgement, on the recording, is one of the few cases in the perpetrator literature of a senior figure explicitly accepting moral responsibility for what he had done. He died the next morning.

What he was

Stangl was the operational manager who could make the killing machinery run efficiently when others could not. He had no particular ideological enthusiasm. He took pride in his administrative competence. The Sereny interviews record him explaining how he had managed the camps in terms that would not have been out of place in any industrial management context, except for the product. He had restored order at Treblinka when it was failing. He had improved the throughput. He had filed the reports on time. The Holocaust would have been smaller, more chaotic, and less efficiently murderous without commandants of his kind. He was the model of the Operation Reinhard professional.

See also

Sources

  • Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, McGraw-Hill, 1974
  • Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Indiana University Press, 1987
  • Düsseldorf trial transcripts, 1970
  • USHMM: Franz Stangl