The three SS men travelled 250 miles west to Merano in the Italian Tyrol, traversing the Alps. The journey was terrible, and it was only Stangl’s pre-war mountaineering experience that enabled them to survive a dangerous traverse on foot of some of the bleakest and most wearying terrain in Europe.
Stangl ventured alone into the Italian resort town of Merano to try to make contact with Bishop Hudal’s representatives, but the police took one look at his dishevelled and dirty appearance and arrested him for vagrancy. Stangl, ever a cunning fox, was able to talk his way out of the local police station after giving the local Carabinieri a fabricated story about how he had travelled south seeking work to support his wife and children back in Austria. In summer 1948, Stangl and Wagner arrived safely in Rome. Steiner had chosen to return to Austria, where he soon gave himself up to the Americans.
In 1950, Adolf Eichmann also went to Italy, posing as a German refugee named Riccardo Klement, having finally left his agricultural bolthole in northern Germany. In Italy, he was assisted by a Franciscan friar who worked for Bishop Hudal of the Vatican ratline escape route. The friar handed him a Red Cross passport and an Argentinian visa in the name of Klement. With these documents it was shockingly easy for Eichmann to book passage on a ship sailing to South America.5 On 14 July 1950, Eichmann did just that, and for the next ten years he effectively disappeared below the radar of Western intelligence services and Nazi hunters, leading an unassuming life with a series of nondescript jobs.
Franz Stangl made it to Damascus in Syria in September 1948. Bishop Hudal had already lined up a job for the former death camp commandant in a textile mill. Gustav Wagner also arrived in Damascus at the same time and quickly settled into a quiet life. Working hard and saving money, Stangl was able to pay for his wife and three daughters to join him in May 1949. For the time being, everything looked rosy for Franz Stangl. He was in the Middle East, living in a country without fear of extradition and he had regular employment. But shortly after Theresa’s arrival in Syria, Stangl lost his job when the owner of the textile mill died. Stangl found it very difficult to find suitable work for some time, but in December 1949, things changed for the better when he found a job as an engineer with the Imperial Knitting Company. The family was able to move into a large and comfortable flat in the old part of Damascus. Stangl had decided by now to move on to South America, and Theresa was dispatched to visit the various South American consulates to discover which nation would accept Stangl and his family.
Brazil proved the most welcoming, and Stangl, calling himself an engineer, applied to emigrate. His application was duly accepted, and the Stangl family sailed for Santos in Brazil via Genoa in Italy under their real names. Stangl had to pay for the relocation out of his personal savings, which meant that when the Stangls arrived in Brazil they were once again almost broke. Swallowing his pride, the man who had once been a senior SS officer and camp commandant with the power of life and death over hundreds of thousands of people instead went to work in another textile mill for the next two years, while building a house in the Sao Paulo suburb of Sao Bernardo do Campo.
Justice finally caught up with Adolf Eichmann on the evening of 11 May 1960, outside the entrance to his modest house on Garibaldi Street, Buenos Aires. Amidst dramatic scenes, a crack squad of Israeli secret agents kidnapped him. He had been actively hunted by the Jews throughout the 1950s, and in particular by Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. In 1954, Wiesenthal received reliable information that Eichmann was living and working in Buenos Aires. Information had also been received by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence organization, and on this basis they launched a long drawn out operation to identify and then kidnap Eichmann so that the administrative brain of the Holocaust could be placed on trial in Jerusalem.6
Eichmann, after travelling to Brazil on documents provided by Bishop Hudal, had found good employment and managed, like Stangl, to bring over his wife and family from Europe. But he lost his job in 1953 and in April he moved his family back to Buenos Aires, where he rented a bungalow in the rather shabby Olivos district of the city. Times were tough for the Eichmanns, and each business that Adolf tried failed, including a laundry, a fabric shop and a rabbit farm. Eichmann’s despair was only lifted by the birth of his fourth son, Ricardo, in 1953.7
After struggling for many years, Eichmann gained a job in March 1959 as a mechanic at the Mercedes-Benz plant that was located in the north of Buenos Aires. In 1960, the family moved into a small, one-storey house that Adolf and his sons had built with their own hands on Garibaldi Street after Eichmann had purchased a plot of land there. It was extremely basic accommodation, lacking running water and electricity. A man of routine, each evening Eichmann would alight at a bus stop 100 metres from his house and walk home. Before going into the house for his supper, Eichmann would inspect his vegetable garden and walk once around the outside of his house. It was this precise routine that gave the Mossad agents who had been sent from Israel to kidnap him ample opportunity to plan their operation. On the evening of 11 May 1960, Eichmann alighted from a bus slightly later than normal. As he walked towards his front gate, he noticed an American car was parked about 20 metres from his house, the bonnet was up and several men were tinkering with the engine. As he drew level with the car, one of the men turned and asked him something in Spanish – as Eichmann paused to reply, the man grabbed his arms and the two men fell writhing into a nearby ditch. The other Mossad agents quickly hauled the terrified Eichmann into the back of the car and sped away. Within seconds, Eichmann realized that his kidnappers were Jews. He had reached the end of the road.8
Smuggled out of Argentina aboard a specially chartered El Al aircraft, Eichmann was placed on trial in Jerusalem for his crimes. On 1 June 1962, the 56-year-old was hanged, his body cremated and his ashes scattered over the sea to make sure that there would never be any memorial to the man who had killed millions of Jews with a signature.
As Franz Stangl was an Austrian, it was primarily the responsibility of the Austrian authorities to hunt him down and bring him to justice. But the Austrians did nothing until 1961, when an arrest warrant was finally issued. By this time, the crimes that Stangl had committed at the Sobibor and Treblinka camps were very well known because of legal trials, during which many of the lesser SS functionaries at these camps had received hefty prison sentences. Strangely, Stangl had made absolutely no attempt to hide his real identity since he had arrived in Brazil from Syria. In August 1954, Stangl had even registered his details with the local Austrian Consulate. The reason why the Austrians failed to spot Stangl was probably because his surname was quite common, and although the crimes that had been committed in the camps that had been under his command were generally well known, the name of the commandant was not.
So the Austrian authorities sat on their hands and did nothing to further the apprehension of Franz Stangl. Instead, it was Simon Wiesenthal who again provided the authorities with proof that a major Nazi war criminal was living and working in Brazil. In October 1959, Stangl’s wife got him a job with Volkswagen through her contacts in the local German motor trade, where she had been working as a secretary. Stangl began as an engineer, but was soon promoted to head of preventative maintenance, and earned a commensurate high salary. Both salaries enabled the Stangl family to move to the better Brooklin district of Sao Paulo, where Stangl built another house. His attitude to being captured was fatalistic: ‘If it comes to it, I want to give myself up – I don’t want to run away,’9 Stangl had declared to his wife. Between October 1964 and August 1965, the Treblinka Trial was held in Düsseldorf, West Germany. The event was widely reported, and at the conclusion of the trial eight former SS men were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four years to life. Stangl’s name was obviously at the forefront throughout the trial. But even though he was living under his own name in Brazil, had registered his name and personal details with the Austrian Consulate in Sao Paulo and kept a regular correspondence with friends and family back in Austria, no one repor
ted the location of the man who was responsible for the deaths of 900,000 people. Stangl had followed the Eichmann trial with great interest. But Eichmann’s death sentence did not cause Stangl to go fully into hiding.
Simon Wiesenthal doggedly pursued Stangl. He claimed later that his first tip-off about Stangl’s location had come from a cousin of Stangl’s wife, Theresa, whom Wiesenthal claimed visited him at his office in Vienna. Some historians doubt the story, and believe that Wiesenthal fabricated it in order to cover up the more mundane reality of where the tip-off had actually come from. The story goes that this relative of Stangl had accidentally ‘said too much’, and told Wiesenthal that Stangl was alive and well and working as a mechanic in the Volkswagen factory in Sao Paulo. Wiesenthal also claimed that another former Nazi came to see him, seeking money in exchange for information. After negotiations, the seedy former Gestapo man told Wiesenthal that Stangl was living in Sao Paulo. In all probability, the person who really tipped Wiesenthal off about Stangl’s location was Stangl’s former son-in-law, Herbert Havel, who had already threatened Stangl with exposure in the early 1960s after an unhappy break-up with one of Stangl’s daughters.
With Wiesenthal popularizing the case against Stangl, the West German government asked the Brazilians to extradite Stangl to stand trial, and the Brazilians fully cooperated. Federal police arrested the former Nazi on 28 February 1967, ignominiously dragging him from his car outside his house after he returned from a bar with one of his daughters. On 22 June, he was extradited to West Germany to stand trial for mass murder. During the course of the trial, Stangl admitted his role in the killings, but he mounted what has come to be known as the ‘Nuremberg Defence’. ‘My conscience is clear,’ stated Stangl confidently in court in 1970. ‘I was simply doing my duty.’10 Unfortunately for Stangl, at Nuremberg this form of defence had been ruled inadmissible. Unsurprisingly, Stangl was found guilty on 22 October 1970 and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 28 June 1971, Stangl died of heart failure at the age of 63 whilst he was serving his sentence inside Düsseldorf Prison.
Franz Stangl’s former subordinate in mass murder, SS-Oberscharführer Gustav Wagner, the second-in-command at Sobibor, had escaped from Europe to the Middle East with his old commanding officer just after the war. On 12 April 1950, Wagner had become a permanent resident of Brazil under the name Gunther Mendel, after he too had chosen to move to South America.11
Whereas Stangl was arrested, extradited, tried and imprisoned, Wagner led a more charmed existence. He remained at large in Brazil for most of the 1970s, but on 30 May 1978, the police finally arrested him too. Extradition requests had been received from Israel, Austria and Poland, but surprisingly the Brazilian authorities had rejected these. On 22 June 1979, the Brazilian government had also rejected a request from West Germany. Wagner was fully aware of all of these legal machinations against him, and he endeavoured to remain one step ahead of the law. In October 1980, Gustav Wagner was found dead in an apartment in Sao Paulo with a knife wound to his chest.12 His lawyer claimed that Wagner had committed suicide, though due to the nature of the fatal wound murder has not been ruled out. Whether Wagner died by his own hand or by another’s, it was a judicial failure that he was never placed on trial for his crimes and properly held to account.
Wagner’s subordinate at Sobibor, Karl Frenzel, held command responsibility for the deaths of 150,000 Jews who were gassed, shot or died of a variety of other ‘punishments’ during his tenure in charge of Camp I at Sobibor. Frenzel also personally murdered at least six Jews, according to witness testimonies, and had organized the SS response to the uprising. Frenzel had subsequently helped to dismantle Camp III, the extermination area, after the revolt was over. Transferred along with most Aktion Reinhard operatives to the partisan fighting unit Sondertruppe R in northern Italy, he was taken prisoner by the US Army near Munich in 1945 and released soon after. He worked as a lighting stage technician in Frankfurt until arrested on 22 March 1962. He was brought to trial in September 1965. On 20 December, Karl Frenzel was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released on a technicality in 1982, he was re-arrested and re-tried, again being sentenced to life imprisonment. But the sentence was not imposed due to ill health.13 Incredibly, Frenzel was later interviewed by survivor Thomas Toivi Blatt about Sobibor, probably a unique occurrence in the history of the Holocaust. Frenzel lived out the rest of his life in a retirement home near Hannover, where he died peacefully on 2 September 1996, aged 85.
For the masterminds behind the Aktion Reinhard atrocities, fate dealt them differing hands. Odilo Globocnik, who had command responsibility for the Reinhard death camps, also oversaw Generalplan Ost, the Nazi expulsion of Poles from their lands and the settlement of those emptied territories with Germans. In one region alone, Zamosc, this policy resulted in over 110,000 Poles and Jews being expelled from 297 villages.
When Italy capitulated and Mussolini formed the Italian Social Republic rump state from the remaining northern Italian provinces still under German control, Globocnik and nearly all of the significant Aktion Reinhard personnel were reassigned to anti-partisan duties around the cities of Trieste, Udine and Fiume. Globocnik received the exalted title of ‘Higher SS and Police Leader of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral of Italy’. His actual job was the liquidation of Italian Jews, captured partisans and all other enemies of the state, and to this end Globocnik, Franz Stangl and Christian Wirth established Risieri di San Sabba, a special interrogation and execution centre inside an old rice mill near Trieste. The site incorporated a crematorium for the disposal of the murdered. During the remaining German occupation of northern Italy, thousands of people were murdered in Globocnik’s prison.
Christian Wirth was one of several Aktion Reinhard veterans who were killed in Italy. In May 1944, he was travelling Heydrich-style in an open staff car when he was ambushed and shot dead by Yugoslav partisans.
Odilo Globocnik unfortunately survived his service in Italy, retreating with German forces into Austrian Carinthia, and eventually, in company with several other war criminals, going into hiding in a high alpine hut near Weissensee. The British Army’s 4th Queen’s Own Hussars captured Globocnik’s group on 31 May 1945. Identified, Globocnik was sent to Paternion for detailed interrogation, but he managed to commit suicide using a carefully concealed cyanide ampoule, cheating the hangman just like his former boss Heinrich Himmler. Justice for Globocnik’s millions of victims was cruelly denied in this case. Today, his remains lie in unconsecrated ground after the Church refused to accept them.14
I leave the last words to a survivor:
I come from a people who gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.
Yehuda Bauer, Berlin, 1998
Appendix 1
SS Ranks
SS
British Army
Commissioned Officers
Reichsführer-SS
Field Marshal
SS-Oberstgruppenführer
General
SS-Obergruppenführer
Lieutenant General
SS-Gruppenführer
Major General
SS-Brigadeführer
Brigadier
SS-Oberführer
–
SS-Standartenführer
Colonel
SS-Obersturmbannführer
Lieutenant Colonel
SS-Sturmbannführer
Major
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Captain
SS-Obersturmführer
Lieutenant
SS-Untersturmführer
Second Lieutenant
Non-Commissioned Officers
SS-Sturmscharführer
Regimental Sergeant Major
SS-Hauptscharführer
Company Sergeant Major
SS-Oberscharführer
<
br /> Staff Sergeant
SS-Scharführer
Sergeant
SS-Unterscharführer
Corporal
Enlisted Men
SS-Rottenführer
–
SS-Sturmann
Lance Corporal
SS-Oberschütze
–
SS-Schütze
Private
Notes
Chapter 1: The Road to Auschwitz
1. Jon E. Lewis (ed.), Voices from the Holocaust: First-hand Accounts from the Frontline of History (London, Constable & Robinson, 2012), ix.
Holocaust Heroes Page 20
