Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (5 page)

“
Was this ever rectified?”

“Oh yes, a few weeks later. They acknowledged they’d made a mistake and confirmed my status of
Beamter auf Lebenszeit
[established civil servant]. And they promoted me to Kriminal-oberassistent, the German equivalent of what my next promotion would have been in Austria.
*
But Prohaska,” he continued, “had found out that I wasn’t somebody who’d allow himself to be pushed around, and he hated me from that moment on and made my life a misery. It was only very shortly after this that I was ordered to sign a paper certifying that I was prepared to give up my religion.”

“
What exactly did it say on the paper?”

“It said that I affirmed that I was a
Gottgläubiger
[believer in God] but agreed to break my affiliation to the Church.”

“How did you feel about signing that? How strongly did you feel about the Church?”

“Well … of course I’ve always been a Catholic.…”

“
But?”
He didn’t answer.
“Were you a regular church-goer?”

“My wife and children always go.”

“
Yes, but you?”

“No,” he finally said. “I always went at Christmas, of course, and Easter.…”

“
So signing this document wasn’t really all that difficult, was it?”

“I didn’t like to.”

For a man of Stangl’s character, whatever his religious attitude, the Church has a tremendous significance as a symbol of respectability and status. Equally, any official document is something of the greatest import. There is no doubt therefore that signing this document was a decisive step in the gradual process of his corruption. Frau Stangl was later to confirm its importance.

I asked Stangl whether he had seen it as a compromise he had to make in order to keep his job.

“Not just my job,” he said. “Much more than that – as I told you before. By then I had heard that I had originally been on a list of officials to be shot after the Anschluss. And not only that; at that very moment, a disciplinary action had been started against me because I had approved the arrest of a poacher who turned out to be a high Party member.”

“
How did that come within the province of the political police?”

“Because the local police of Güsen – that was the place – had informed the State police that a number of people in the town had accused this area leader of large-scale poaching, and that, as he was a Party member, they didn’t feel competent to act against him. What they meant of course was that they were scared stiff. Anyway, I went over to talk to him and have a look around his house and I found all the paraphernalia – you know, traps and all that: so I arrested him. And immediately found myself in hot water over it with Prohaska in Linz. He had me on the carpet: how dare I accuse a Party member? I told him that for me a villain was a villain, whoever he was. And so they started this disciplinary action against me. It was all Prohaska – he hated my guts.…” He often left sentences incomplete, allowing his tone of voice to indicate his feelings.

Substantiating evidence for the key role attributed to Prohaska by Stangl is meagre. Frau Stangl clearly remembers that “in Linz there was, of course, right away this Prohaska with whom he had trouble from the word go”; but Stangl’s “friend” and colleague, Ludwig Werner, while saying that he had disliked Prohaska, who was “a coarse, rough Bavarian”, could not recall whether he had harassed Stangl. A witness for the defence at Stangl’s trial – a woman called Helene de Lorenzo who, when in trouble with the Nazi authorities in Linz in 1938–9, had found Stangl helpful – had formed “the best impression” of him, and
was
aware that Prohaska was known in Linz as a particularly dreaded member of the Gestapo. Prohaska himself, who at the time of the trial was working in Munich as a commercial traveller, had a (not uncommon) partial failure of memory, and would only say, “I cannot state with certainty today whether the accused was my subordinate in the police. I know I didn’t like him because he was unreliable.”

“After we moved to Linz,” Stangl said, “the whole atmosphere in our offices and in all relationships changed.”

“What was it? Distrust of one another? Jealousy?”

“All that and more. Constant alarmist rumours. Always ‘this one has been arrested, that one shot, this one put on the black list, that one’s walking a tight-rope’. I myself was absolutely certain that they were still plotting against me because of the Eagle. And then – the way people talked, it was – it had become …” he floundered. “How can I explain it to you …?”

“Well, how did it differ from the way they had talked before?”

“Differ? It was like.…” Words failed him. “Before, we had been civil servants and we talked and spoke like civilized people. Now, with the arrival of all these
Piefkes
[Austrian slang equivalent of
Krauts
] all one heard was the gutter language of the barracks. And you see, the people they would discuss in those terms weren’t criminals; they were men we had looked up to, respected. And now, suddenly …” he still sounded bewildered about this “…  they were dirt. There was one time I remember, they were talking about Dr Berlinger, one of our chiefs before the Anschluss [later he was to say he wasn’t sure of this name]; they’d arrested him and one of them – in the duty-room – was describing how he’d been interrogated.…” He stopped, embarrassed.

“They hurt him?
”

He looked away from me. “They laughed and said, ‘He pissed all over himself.’ ” He turned back to me. “Imagine,
Dr Berlinger
. I hate … I hate the Germans,” he suddenly burst out with passion, “for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938.” There was nothing maudlin about the way this was said; he was merely stating a fact. “That’s when it started for me. I must acknowledge my guilt.”

This, on the second day of our talks, was the only time Stangl acknowledged guilt in a direct way until almost the end. In his mind the later events in his life – which we were approaching – were inseparable from these beginnings. When he volunteered an acknowledgment of guilt for his comparatively harmless failings at this stage of his life, it was – I felt – because he wanted and needed to say “I am guilty” but could not pronounce the words when speaking of the murder of 400,000, 750,000, 900,000, or 1,200,000 people (both official and unofficial figures vary, depending on the source). Thus he sought to find an acceptable substitute for which he could afford to admit guilt. Except for a monster, no man who
actually participated
in such events (rather than “merely” organized from far away) can concede guilt and yet, as the young prison officer in Düsseldorf put it, “consent to remain alive”.

*
I have been unable to confirm this claim. G.S.

†
After Stangl’s death I found a piece of paper in his cell on which he had noted a correction: the man’s name was not Schlammer, but Hermann Treidl.

*
The “Night of Broken Glass” in the autumn of 1938 when Jewish shops all over Germany were smashed and synagogues were burnt.

*
October 1938, when the Germans marched into the Czech border province, the Sudetenland.

*
This would appear to indicate that the rank they had originally given him
was
in fact the equivalent of his Austrian rank at the time, and it is interesting to note that in spite of this, his protest was effective.

2

C
AN ANY
man – or his deeds – be understood in isolation from his childhood, his youth and manhood, from the people who loved or didn’t love him, and from the people he loved or needed? Stangl had said that “all he wanted” was to be alone with his wife; and his first deep tears came when he recalled their first serious discord, when she thought he had deceived her about joining the “illegal” Nazi Party. After this, any mention of his wife – and there were many – brought-on helpless tears. There can be no doubt whatever of his deep love for her and need for her love and approbation in return; no doubt at all that he, whatever he became, was capable of love.

Theresa Stangl is small, blonde and attractive. She was sixty–four years old when I visited her in Brazil but looked far younger; her figure had widened a bit but was still trim. She speaks “proper” Austrian–German rather than the colloquial language of her province. It is the speech of a considerably “better than ordinary” provincial school. My first visit to her, on October 7, 1971, coincided with her thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, and her house in Sao Bernardo do Campo, about thirty kilometres from São Paulo, was full of roses which her children – three girls – had given her that morning.

São Bernardo, a tiny Detroit, is Brazil’s automobile town. Mercedes, Rolls-Royce Parts and several other plants are there, but above all Volkswagen
SA
– it is their biggest factory outside Germany, and the place where Stangl worked during part of the time he spent in Brazil before his capture.

Despite the rich industries it houses, and full employment, São Bernardo is shabby and still has the air of a pioneering town. The Stangls’ little pseudo-villa, which they built with their own hands and which is perhaps slightly more solid than most of its neighbours, is one of thirty-odd such houses on a virtually unpaved street. In this working-class neighbourhood, where people range in colour from black through coffee, yellow and cinnamon to white, Frau Stangl – I watched her repeatedly talking with her neighbours – is obviously popular and considered a good neighbour.

The house has three and a half small bedrooms, a narrow living room, a primitive but functional bathroom, a dining room and a kitchenette. The loft of a small building across the courtyard, which Stangl built as a weaving workshop, has been made into a little flat where Renate, the middle daughter, sleeps. The house, pink and white, with bright flowers in the yard, is incongruously reminiscent of the Austrian countryside, and the life the Stangls live in it is simple. They cook with butane gas, purify their water by means of a filter installed on the roof, heat both house and water with difficulty, and their furniture is no more than adequate. There is a television set and two radios, and half a dozen shelves housing about two hundred books. Some of these are in Portuguese, which Frau Stangl and her daughters speak fluently, but most of them are good conventional reading in German: Dumas, Lawrence’s
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
Sonderström, Thomas Mann. There are no political books, although Frau Stangl was to tell me that her husband “was always reading all the books that have been written about camps and all that. He read everything.” There are a number of German magazines on a coffee table in the living room. There is a silver-framed photograph of Stangl there, and another, taken in prison a week before he died, for the
Daily Telegraph Magazine
, in Frau Stangl’s bedroom. In front of both pictures are flowers and candles. On the wall of the living room hangs a pleasant painting of an Austrian landscape; on the TV stands a vase of dried Alpine flowers. Most of the furniture, carpets and books stem from “home”. But aside from a small baroque gold-framed mirror there are no objects of value. It is a well cared-for but frugal upper-working-class household – the house of their beginnings in Brazil.

Theresa Stangl, born Eidenböck in 1907, was the oldest of five children, three boys and two girls, whose parents at the time of her birth ran a well established family business – a
Parfümerie
– in Steyr, a beautiful town in the province of Upper Austria (Oberösterreich). “The shop had always done very well,” Frau Stangl said, “but my father soon ran it into the ground.”

Thea (as her husband called her – she was “Resl” to her family) was closest to her eldest brother Heine, four years her junior. Her sister Helene, two years younger than she, was “different” from her, she said. And her two younger brothers came much later – in 1920 and 1922. “My father was a very good-looking man,” she said. “He took after his French grandfather. But he was a dreamer, a megalomaniac; he ‘invented’ things, took out patents for innumerable ideas none of which ever worked. He didn’t have the technical qualifications ever really to work out any problems. He began to drink heavily. And one day, in a drunken stupor, he signed papers selling the business. By this time he had already sold part of our big house and we lived in the back. Drink turned him into a brute: he was unspeakable to my mother. When he came home drunk, she had to kneel down and ask him to forgive her, God knows for what –
she
never knew – and then he cuffed her into bed. He beat me too.”

After a while his only earnings were from selling cards, sewing thread and that sort of thing “from inn to inn”. Even so, there must have been a little money left, because Thea’s mother, feeling that her eldest daughter was particularly gifted, entered her as a pupil in the Ursuline convent in Linz. “My upbringing was mainly influenced by this exclusive boarding-school and by my grandmother – a wonderfully distinguished woman.” It would appear, however, that she did not remain at this school for the customary length of time, up to matriculation at eighteen. By the time she was seventeen she had already graduated from a commercial college, had a secretarial post at the Steyr car-works and was helping to support the family.

“It was a very cold winter,” she recalled. “Father had been off on one of his dates with one of his many paramours. I had bought myself an anorak. He came home from his fling in the middle of the night and saw the anorak hanging on a peg in the hall, so he realized that I hadn’t handed over all my money. He dragged me out of bed in my night-clothes, stood me up in front of a window and lunged at me with a bayonet he was always fooling around with. Thank goodness, by that time terrified, I had dropped to the floor, and he was so drunk, he wasn’t steady on his feet: he went through the window with his bayonet and wounded himself. I ran away, out into the icy night in my night-dress and ran to our neighbours. They were shoemakers and their daughter was a schoolfriend. He beat up my mother instead of me, till she was black and blue, but I never went back. I rented a room in Steyr and continued to work at the Steyr works until I was twenty. In 1927 I went to Vienna and got a job at the patent office. I was theatre-crazy; I spent all my money on theatre tickets rather than food or clothes. And I sang in the church choir.