Franz Stangl

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Franz Stangl

Franz Paul Stangl (born March 26, 1908 in Altmünster ; † June 28, 1971 in Düsseldorf ) was an Austrian administrative director at the Nazi killing center in Hartheim as well as the camp commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps . According to his own statements, he was also active in the Nazi killing center in Bernburg , but there is no evidence of this. In 1970 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the collective murder of at least 400,000 Jews.

childhood and education

Franz Stangl's father was a night watchman and a former kuk - dragoon who did not shed the usual barracks tone at home and let him feel that he was an undesirable child. The military-style upbringing methods allowed him to experience his father only as a frightening authority figure, who, however, died of malnutrition in 1916. Stangl had a sister ten years older than him. In 1917 his mother married a widower who brought two children into the marriage.

Stangl left school at the age of 15 and began an apprenticeship in a weaving mill. After three years he successfully completed his apprenticeship at the age of 18 and became the youngest master weaver in Austria.

In the police force

In 1931 Stangl changed his job for health reasons and applied to the police. He completed his training in the police barracks in Linz . He described his trainers as sadists. After a year of training he was employed in the traffic police, later in the fight against crime. He finished his training in 1933.

In 1931 he met his wife Theresa nee Eidenböck (* 1907), whom he married in October 1935. The first daughter Brigitte was born on July 7, 1936, the second daughter Renate on February 17, 1937 and the third daughter Isolde in 1944.

Finding a stash of weapons by the NSDAP , which is illegal in Austria , earned him the Austrian eagle on a green and white ribbon and a promotion to the criminal police. In the autumn of 1935 he was transferred to the political department of the Kripo in Wels .

Stangl joined the NSDAP in March 1938 ( membership number 6,370,447, backdated to 1936) and the SS (SS number 296,569). In January 1939 the political department was taken over by the Gestapo and moved to Linz . Stangl was appointed chief detective assistant and employed in the Jewish department . In the same year, Stangl complied with his superiors' request to leave the Catholic Church.

In the "Action T4"

In 1940 he was promoted and transferred to the "non-profit society for institutional care". Stangl received instructions for this from a detective Werner at the Reich Criminal Police in Berlin, Werderscher Markt 5. Then he had to go to the headquarters of " Aktion T4 " at Tiergartenstrasse 4 with Viktor Brack , the head of Hauptamt II of the Führer’s office Report. After this personal interview, he received a post as administrative and office manager of the Nazi killing center Hartheim with the rank of lieutenant in the uniformed police. In the Hartheim killing center, where mentally and physically handicapped people were gassed as part of “Aktion T4”, Stangl signed under the cover name “Staudt”. Franz Reichleitner , a police comrade of Stangl, was his deputy.

While the gassing doctor Georg Renno held flute concerts in the courtyard of Hartheim Castle on Sundays , Stangl played the zither .

In October 1941 he was transferred to the Nazi killing center in Bernburg . She was involved in " Aktion 14f13 " under the medical supervision of Irmfried Eberl . In February 1942, Stangl returned to Hartheim to report back to T4 in Berlin. There he received the order to report to the representative for "Aktion Reinhardt", Odilo Globocnik , in Lublin, Poland.

At the "Aktion Reinhardt"

As a participant in " Aktion Reinhardt ", camp commandant Stangl received an order from Globocnik in March 1942 to set up and complete the Sobibor extermination camp . Around 100,000 Jews were killed in Sobibor before Stangl was transferred to the Treblinka extermination camp . Stangl's successor in Sobibor was Franz Reichleitner, who had already represented him in Hartheim.

In September 1942, Stangl replaced the Austrian commander Irmfried Eberl in Treblinka , as he was “overwhelmed” by the large Jewish transports that arrived. At that time, the Treblinka concentration camp was the largest Nazi extermination camp in Poland. In contrast to his predecessor there, Stangl turned out to be the perfect organizer of mass murder .

Regarding Stangl's function in Treblinka, the Düsseldorf Regional Court stated the following in its judgment of December 22, 1970:

“In Treblinka, as in Sobibor, the accused was the highest-ranking member of the German camp team in the rank of lieutenant police officer. In his position as warehouse manager, he was responsible to Globocnik and Wirth for ensuring that the entire warehouse operation, in particular the process of mass killings, ran smoothly within the framework of the orders and guidelines given by them and, above all, that it did not, as under Dr. Eberl came to a standstill in the mass liquidation of the Jews. He was the superior of the German and Ukrainian camp teams and as such was responsible for maintaining military discipline and order in the camp. In the absence of Wirth, he was the highest instance and authority in the camp for the entire camp personnel, including the Jewish workforce. To the outside world he was its representative. His internal term for the German subordinates and the Jewish workers was 'Kommandant'. His job was to monitor the entire camp operations in both parts of the camp, including the course of the mass killings. He had to guide and control the German and Ukrainian camp personnel in their work. On a case-by-case basis, if necessary, he had to make the factual and personal decisions and give orders to ensure the smooth and rapid course of the mass killings. During the first three weeks, during which Wirth was still in Treblinka, the work of the defendant consisted of rebuilding and organizing the camp operations together with Wirth and the witness Kurt Franz, who had been transferred to Treblinka . In the course of the changes made at that time, the new gas house with more and larger gas chambers was built. The course of the mass killings was redefined in detail. The German and Ukrainian staff have been reassigned. Finally, permanent Jewish work detachments were set up in the lower camp as well. The defendant was already involved in the rebuilding of the camp as the camp manager, even though Wirth, as the superior inspector, played the dominant role in everything and made all the important decisions alone. Wirth redistributed the German subordinate leaders himself. He gave his orders to them personally and took care of all the camp areas himself. For example, he showed the witness Mentz with his own hands how the victims in the hospital would be killed by a shot in the neck in future. During this time, the defendant ensured above all that the barracks filled with clothing and other items from the Jews who had been killed so far were emptied, the material sorted and the scattered valuables collected and secured. He took measures to ensure that valuables were properly recorded in the future. He also took care of the removal of the bodies lying outside the camp. Wirth later came to Treblinka for inspections at shorter or longer intervals, but on average about once a month, for one or two days. His visits were more frequent during the period when numerous transports came. In the winter of 1942/43 he was suspended for a long time. In the spring of 1943, when more transports came again, he too came to the camp more frequently. It was his way to take care of all things on the spot himself and to give his instructions to the subordinates personally while the accused accompanied him on his inspection tours through the camp.

When Wirth was absent, that is to say in the vast majority of the time, the defendant, as camp manager, was the decisive man in the camp. Since the witness Franz, the subordinate and later deputy of the defendant, who was ordered to act as a guard in Treblinka, immediately influenced the entire camp and took care of all external operations in both parts of the camp with zeal, the defendant was able to keep the reins in the background Hold hands and deal more with administrative matters. The orders required for handling the transport and in the rest of the camp operations were largely given by the individual command leaders, by the camp leaders Küttner and Matthes, by the 'Spieß' stadium and finally by Franz. Besides, every subordinate knew what to do based on the instructions given by Wirth. The daily routine of the mass killings and the rest of the camp operations were soon established. The defendant could therefore essentially limit himself to monitoring the handling of the transports and the other camp operations through patrols and inspections in both parts of the camp or to observing the entire camp from the embankment. He appeared, if not always, at the ramp to receive the wagon tickets from the transport drivers, to certify the acceptance of the transports and to supervise the unloading of the transports. In the upper camp, for example, he inspected the excavation of the mortuary pits, the emptying of the gas chambers and the burial of the corpses in the pits, and later their cremation on the grate. He checked the members of the German camp staff at least now and then on duty and, if necessary, determined their use. He also tried to keep the Ukrainian security guards disciplined. He took measures to stop the wild and undisciplined shooting by the Ukrainians and provided permanent accommodation for them in the camp. He also looked after the court and working Jews. For the latter, he had the barracks furnished with bunks. He gave orders about the work to be done in the workshops, inspected the workshops and the individual work details and appeared, although not always, at the roll calls. If he was present at roll calls, he was reported to have been reported if he did not wave the hand. From time to time he gave speeches to the working Jews in which, among other things, he warned them not to attempt to escape or, under threat of punishment, for example, to encourage them to do proper work. When he walked through the camp, the working Jews were encouraged by the command leaders to do more intensive work. In connection with the establishment of permanent work detachments, the defendant ordered the construction of a bakery and a kitchen. He had the fortification of the camp improved, among other things, by installing the anti-tank barriers. He also supervised the administration. All correspondence went through his hands. He also took care of the procurement of food. Finally, he supervised the proper registration and delivery of the valuables removed from the Jews. Despite the large numbers of transports, the extermination operations were not disrupted under his leadership, apart from the later uprising, for which he was not held responsible.

The behavior of the defendant towards the working Jews was calm and reserved compared to Franz, Küttner and Rent. No case has been found in which he personally mistreated or even killed a Jew. For the working Jews he did not appear so directly, especially since he was careful to keep his distance from them. But he was known to them as a camp commandant. They called him the 'Oberleutnant' or 'Oberleutnant mit der Feldmütze'. In contrast to the other German SS men in the camp, he often wore a white uniform jacket and a so-called cap, which the working Jews called a 'field cap'. Unlike Franz and the other subordinates, he did not wear a long leather whip, but only a light riding whip. Its pommel was decorated with a monogram which the accused had already had made in Sobibor by a Jewish goldsmith, the ( witness Sma. ), And which, as he knew, was made of gold left behind by the Jews who were killed. "

- From the judgment against the camp commandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl

Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone

On August 2, 1943, there was an uprising in the Treblinka extermination camp . Soon afterwards, SS-Hauptsturmführer Stangl and the majority of the personnel of the " Aktion Reinhardt " were transferred to the Adriatic coastal area (Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone ) to fight partisans and deport the northern Italian Jews. Under Christian Wirth, the inspector of the “ Sonderabteilung Einsatz R ”, he headed the “Unit R III” in Udine , and was involved in the deportation of the Jews from Venice . After Wirth's death in May 1944, he was in charge of "Unit R II" in Fiume . In addition, he was involved as a supply officer in a construction project of the SS in the Po Valley with hundreds of thousands of Italian forced laborers as part of the "Pöll deployment" . With the end of the war approaching , the units of "Einsatz R" withdrew from northern Italy to Germany at the end of April 1945.

Captivity and escape to Syria

After the end of the war in 1945, Stangl was arrested by the US military in Attersee and interned as an SS member in the Glasenbach camp, although nothing was known about his role in the extermination sites at the time. He was also interrogated temporarily by the American military intelligence service CIC in a prison camp in Bad Ischl , but they only learned about his activities in the fight against partisans in Italy. After two and a half years of internment, Stangl was handed over to Austria in 1947, where he was remanded in custody in Linz because of his involvement in " Aktion T4 ". The so-called Hartheim Trial began in Linz in 1948. When Stangl learned from his wife that a former driver of the Hartheim staff had been sentenced to four years in prison, he and Gustav Wagner fled the more or less open remand prison on May 30, 1948 at the insistence of his wife . Wagner had been a close collaborator and personal friend of Stangl since his time in Hartheim and Sobibor. During his escape he used one of the rat lines via Graz, Meran and Florence to Rome on foot. Bishop Alois Hudal got him a Red Cross passport and a visa. Stangl managed to escape to Syria. In Damascus he found employment, initially as a weaver in a company mediated by Hudal, and from December 1949 as a machine technician with the Imperial Knitting Company . In May 1949 he had his family join him.

Emigration to Brazil

In 1951 the Stangls emigrated to São Paulo in Brazil , where he worked again as a weaver and later as an engineer in the Sutema textile company . Just two months after arriving in Brazil, the Stangls built a small house in São Bernardo do Campo. His wife found work in accounting at Mercedes-Benz. A work colleague was able to find her husband a job at Volkswagen do Brasil in October 1959 . In 1965 the Stangls moved into a new, larger house in the Brooklin district of São Paulo and lived there under their real name, registered with the Austrian consulate.

Arrest and conviction

It was not until 1961 that Stangl's name appeared on the wanted list of the Austrian criminal police, although it was known that he was jointly responsible for the deaths of almost a million people. At the instigation of Simon Wiesenthal , the Brazilian authorities arrested Stangl on February 28, 1967. On June 23, 1967, he was extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany. The trial against him began on May 13, 1970. The Düsseldorf Regional Court sentenced him to life imprisonment on December 22, 1970 in one of the Treblinka trials for the collective murder of at least 400,000 Jews.

Stangl appealed against the judgment, but died on June 28, 1971 in the detention center of heart failure.

Interpretations

Franz Stangl was seen by some as an example of a police officer who believes in authority and is obedient in every situation: because of his development in an authoritarian home and an upbringing and training in absolute obedience, he finally carried out the most terrible orders. He may have calmed his conscience with the definition of crime taught to him at the police school:

"In the police school they had taught us - I remember exactly, it was Rittmeister Leiner who always said that - that a crime must meet four basic requirements: the cause, the subject, the act and free will. If any of these four principles were missing, it was not a criminal offense. You see, if the cause was the Nazi government, the object was the Jews, and the act was the extermination, then I could tell myself that for me personally the fourth element, free will, was missing. "

- Franz Stangl

literature

  • Israel Gutman (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews. 3 volumes. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 .
  • Ernst Klee , Willi Dreßen , Volker Rieß (eds.): "Nice times". The murder of Jews from the perspective of the perpetrators and gawkers. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-10-039304-X .
  • Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 215 ff.
  • Heiner Lichtenstein : Franz Paul Stangel. Commander of an extermination camp. In: Heiner Lichtenstein: In the name of the people? A personal balance sheet of the Nazi trials. With a foreword by Robert MW Kempner . Bund-Verlag, Cologne 1984, ISBN 3-7663-0442-9 , pp. 196-210.
  • Tom Segev : The Soldiers of Evil. On the history of the concentration camp commanders (= rororo -Sachbuch. 8826). Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-499-18826-0 .
  • Gitta Sereny : Into that Darkness. An Examination of Conscience. Pan Books, London 1974, ISBN 0-330-25016-7 .
    • German version: On the Abyss: Conversations with the executioner. Franz Stangl and the Treblinka murders. Piper, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-11867-4 .
  • Gerald Steinacher : Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy 1946–1955. Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2008, ISBN 3-7065-4026-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tom Segev: The Soldiers of Evil. On the history of the concentration camp commanders. rororo, Reinbek 1992, p. 248.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, Chapter 10: Austria, p. 218.
  3. ↑ Judicial and Nazi Crimes - Ser. No. 746 (excerpt) ( Memento from September 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). In: jur.uva.nl, accessed on April 22, 2018.
  4. ↑ Simon Levis Sullam: I carnefici italiani. Storia del genocidio degli ebrei, 1943–1945. Feltrinelli, Milan 2015, ISBN 978-88-07-11133-4 , p. 75 (Italian).
  5. ↑ Chris Webb, Carmelo Lisciotto HEART: Franz Paul Stangl. In: Holocaust Research Project. Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, 2007, accessed January 25, 2020 (English; biography).
  6. ↑ The demon of Sobibor . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 1978 ( online - June 5, 1978 ).
  7. ^ Regional Court of Düsseldorf: Judgment of December 22, 1970 Az .: 8 Ks 1/69. Extract from the judgment; see web links .
  8. ↑ Quotation from Stangl, in: Gitta Sereny: Am Abgrund: Conversations with the executioner. Franz Stangl and the Treblinka murders.
personal data
SURNAME Stangl, Franz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stangl, Franz Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian National Socialist, commander of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Altmünster
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1971
Place of death Dusseldorf