Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (42 page)

Stangl’s non-involvement in this particular sort of horror is confirmed by the most credible of witnesses, Richard Glazar, who says, briefly: “Stangl had no boy orderlies.”

Stangl claimed that Frau Kramer had told him that people in Germany weren’t buying Janusz Korczak’s book (with which he had obviously become fascinated) and that she couldn’t understand why not, and would be interested to know what
he
thought the reason was. “I’ve studied it,” he said, opening the big book with its lovely illustrations at a page he had marked with a piece of paper torn out of a notebook. “I know why they don’t want to buy it. Now listen to this …” and he read aloud from the fairy tale in the book. “…  ‘When a soldier gets an order, he must obey it. He must not ask questions, he must not hesitate, and must not think: he must obey.’ ” He closed the book. “Of course parents here don’t want their children to read this. I told that woman that if I liked the book I might even buy it myself as a present for my grandson in Brazil. But I am not buying it. I don’t want my little grandson to read this either. That is exactly the sort of thing they must not read, ever again.”

(Interestingly enough – although I was at a loss to find an explanation for it – Frau Kramer told me later that she had never asked him what he thought the reason was for people in Germany not buying the book. Perhaps he had invented her request – possibly, we thought, to justify an intellectual exercise for himself; or else, more likely, he had misunderstood something she said, although she couldn’t imagine what it might have been.)

After we had gone over several of the points we had previously discussed, Stangl said he wanted to tell me about Trieste. He had obviously looked forward to recounting this inoffensive part of his story, and during the first forty-eight hours of that week spoke so quickly that at times I had difficulty following the innumerable details. It was as if he wanted to compress the whole time of the war into the time he had spent in Italy and Yugoslavia; as if by crowding ever more words at ever greater speed into this part of his story, he could force out of existence all the other words he had spoken, all the awful scenes he had relived.

“I went there in convoy,” he said “with Globocnik, Wirth and 120 other men, ten of them from Treblinka; five non-commissioned officers, and five Ukrainians, and it was to be a very different life.
*
Also in part, because I had finally managed to get rid of the sword of Damocles that Prohaska and Linz represented to me: in the spring of that year [1943] I had applied to Blankenburg at the Führer Chancellery [significantly enough, no longer to T4], requesting that my home station be changed from Linz to Vienna. And in September, very soon after I arrived in Trieste, I heard that this request had been granted and that as of September 1 I was attached to Kripo
HQ
(
CID
), Vienna. [One must assume that this manoeuvre was not to escape from Prohaska, but was a considered, and rather intelligent, move to alter the record which established him as belonging to the Linz Gestapo.]

“My first assignment in Trieste and for the first three months, to December, was ‘Transport Security’. I realized quite well,” he said, “and so did most of us, that we were an embarrassment to the brass: 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. Our new baby,” he said, “was born the first week of January, and I was granted compassionate leave. Reichleitner, who had been on leave over Christmas, was to take over my functions while I was away. I drove from Udine with Franz Höldl (a name which – again quite significantly – was to crop up later in Frau Stangl’s account) and met Reichleitner briefly in Wirth’s office in the Via Martine in Trieste, in the afternoon. I was leaving the next morning. But in the middle of the night someone routed me out of bed with the news that Reichleitner had been killed on a patrol that evening and my leave was cancelled.

“I got twenty-five men and we scoured the whole valley all night. There wasn’t any sense to it: it poured, it was pitch-dark, there could have been a partisan behind every tree and we wouldn’t have known or found them. In fact the next morning we heard that at 8 o’clock the night before, partisans had marched singing through a village; everybody hid them – they were safe as houses.”

In February – by this time he was stationed in Fiume – it appears that Globocnik called him to
HQ
in Trieste and told him that he was approving a two-week home leave for him. “He said, ‘I’ve found the best car for you; go home and look after your wife. But the condition is that you go and visit my fiancée in Klagenfurt.’ She was a big blonde,” said Stangl, “she worked at the hospital. ‘I’ve already ordered roses and all that for you to take,’ said Globocnik. I left at once. It was snowing.…”

And it would appear that Globocnik, for this very special private commission, provided Stangl with more than “the best car” and roses.

“Paul came home on leave at the end of February, beginning of March 1944,” said Frau Stangl. “It was very cold. My baby had been born in January and I’d had a very difficult time – I was in bed. He came, and he brought along a lorry full of things – from the General, he said: priceless things like blankets, down comforters, linen – it was like Christmas in March.
*
Paul stayed about a week, I think. I really don’t know what his work was in Italy, though he told me they had ordered him to be on the lookout for Jews there, too. But he said to me he wouldn’t do it. ‘What do they think I am?’ he said. ‘A headhunter? They can leave me out of this now.’ [And Suchomel, who was also by then in Trieste, quotes Stangl as saying the same words to him.] No,” said Frau Stangl, “I don’t think he had anything more to do with this Jewish business. After that leave, he didn’t come back for a year – he was very ill for a while in Trieste – they sent him to hospital. He had big blue spots all over – they didn’t know why.” (Later it was found that whatever else he had at that time, he had also had a first heart attack.)

During the two full days Stangl talked about his activities in Italy, he only mentioned the death of Wirth in passing. “I saw him dead,” he said. “They said partisans killed him but we thought his own men had taken care of him.” (All histories of the time refer to Wirth as “presumed dead”; Stangl’s statement, therefore, must be considered the only one made by an eye-witness.)

“My biggest and longest assignment in Italy,” he said, “was as special supply officer for the
Einsatz Poll.
†
I was responsible for getting everything; shoes, clothes, food. I was the only one who went about in civilian clothes. Everybody, army and
SS
, had to help me. I carried a paper signed by the General stating that ‘Hauptsturmführer Stangl is authorized to act in uniform or civvies and all services are requested to give him every assistance in the execution of his command’. Globocnik told me, ‘Buy whatever you need; money is no object.’ I had a man with me who had nothing to do except carry trunks with cash … millions.…”

Suchomel confirms all this. The
Einsatz Poll
he says, “was the camouflage-name for the fortification of Istria – the workers were Italians under German command. And the whole thing was under General
SS
Globocnik whose main job was to provide everything needed in the way of materials. Whatever couldn’t be obtained legally, as for instance petrol, tyres, fabrics for uniforms, etc, was bought on the black market.” Suchomel talked about this part of Stangl’s activities with particular reference to Stangl’s later escape. “Through his activities in Udine and especially in Venice-Mestre and Treviso, Stangl had many contacts amongst Italians,” he said. “As I know myself and can testify, he helped a great many people in Italy for which activities in fact a disciplinary action was brought against him [Stangl told me about this]. Stangl and his
Einsatz Poll
staff had a lot of Italian touts, including people from the Italian nobility. In the end practically everything there had to be done through the black market. And he may well have used these connections later to get out. After all, he was aware for a long time before it actually happened that the war was lost. And it’s quite possible that he and Gustl Wagner, with whom he was very close, were already looking into possibilities for hiding out or getting away.…”

*
Who did exist, and – a unique case – was killed by a prisoner on September 11, 1942.

*
All the members of the Aktion Reinhard were transferred to Trieste – their third and last transfer as a group.

*
Later she was to write denigrating these gifts.

†
Strategic construction project in the Po valley involving 500,000 workers.

4

I
T IS
mostly from Frau Stangl that I learnt about their two years following the end of the war. Stangl himself (although I had intended to question him a little further on this subject, the only one I felt we had not sufficiently discussed) was not particularly interested in talking about this period; especially not about the weeks before he was finally imprisoned by the Americans as an
SS
officer.

“I had moved with the children to the mountains,” said Frau Stangl. “To Lembach – that was in August 1944 when the bombings got very bad in Wels. We stayed there with the headmaster of the school – they had been friends of ours. Well, we
thought
they were friends; most of our ‘friends’ remained our friends only so long as Paul had a ‘position’ – they changed faces pretty quickly when he was out in the cold.

“Anyway, it was towards the end of the war that Paul had fallen so ill – you remember, I told you, he had fever and these blue or black spots all over his body
*
and the doctors didn’t know what it was. This illness often hit people who had been in the
Afrika Korps.
He was in the field hospital in Trieste or Fiume and when he recovered was given orders to report to Berlin. When he got there, there was nobody left in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt [Main Reichs Security Office] to report to; things were in an unholy mess. He finally managed to get a lift to Hof [on the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia] and then came on foot to Austria – he got to us in Lembach at the last moment, with the Americans and Russians almost upon us. He said he would try to get himself reassigned to the police in Linz – and he went there. But they didn’t want to know – they said his whole section had been transferred to Vienna and that’s where he now belonged. So he made his way to Vienna, but there too everybody had gone, fled, everything was in disarray. So – believe it or not – he went back to Berlin; he thought if at least he could get an official paper saying that he belonged to the Vienna police.… He didn’t go to T4 – he went straight to the
CID
offices, but there wasn’t anybody there either. So he came back to Lembach.…”

(It seems unlikely that Stangl would have made such desperate attempts to get some sort of valid document – and would have been so naively convinced that such a document could save him – if he had prepared his retreat in advance with the help of some individuals or organization, as has generally been assumed.)

“Our flat in Wels”, said Frau Stangl, “had been bombed and afterwards burgled, and we had very little left of our possessions. But I said, ‘Get out of this uniform; get into a pair of the headmaster’s trousers – put on civvies and stay here. Here we can hide you: it would be best.’ But he said no, if he took the uniform off, the Gauleiter would find out and he’d be hanged as a deserter even at this late date. Yes, the Gauleiter was still sitting in Linz. Anyway, Paul went off and we stayed in Lembach. Later I found out that he had gone to Ebernsee near Salzburg, to his mother. And from there he went to stay with a man in a village on the Attersee – a police officer we had sometimes stayed with on holidays. It was there he was denounced to the Americans. Perhaps not by that policeman himself – though I thought it was probably him – but he claimed it was one of his underlings who told the Americans that there was an
SS
officer at the house. And they came to get him right away. But I knew nothing of this at the time. I was just terrified at the thought of what might be happening to him. One night somebody came and said there was an
SS
officer lying buried down in the valley. There was shooting everywhere, but I slipped out in the night, through the woods, down to the place that had been described, and I dug and dug in the earth until I reached that corpse and I felt his face and hair. It was pitch dark, I had no light, and anyway I wouldn’t have dared light even a match. But I knew – my hands knew it wasn’t Paul. So I covered him up again and climbed back up to the little house where we were staying. A couple of weeks later I couldn’t stand it any more and I decided to go look for him. By that time we knew that the Americans had started to gather people up in camps – some for ordinary soldiers, some for
SS
; and then others in Polish dp [Displaced Persons] camps. I decided just to go from camp to camp, making my way in the direction of where his mother lived, because I did think he just might be there.

“It was quite something; I left the children with the teachers in Lembach and started out, on foot of course – there wasn’t anything else. I walked from camp to camp; some of the Americans were nice, others less. In the end I never did dare to go to the Polish camps, although I had heard that there were soldiers hiding out in those too. Anyway, one day I got to Bad Ischl [near Salzburg] and went to the
CIC
[
US
Counter-Intelligence Corps] there; there weren’t any Americans in there, only Austrians. I said that I was looking for my husband who had been an
SS
officer and that his name was Franz Stangl. And the man I was talking to said at once, ‘Oh yes, he’s here. We’ll get him for you’ – just like that. I thought I’d faint. Anyway, then he came. We couldn’t talk much, but at least he was alive. The prison where he was, was awful. I never saw it, but he told me – it was a real cage. But never mind, at least I knew where he was. I went back to Lembach and not long after that he was transferred to the huge camp at Glasenbach. Then the Russians were getting very close to where we were and I took the children back to Wels.…”