Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

Stangl’s interviewer-biographer, Gitta Sereny, in her profound 1974 book, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, draws a fascinating parallel between Franz Stangl’s individual and the Vatican’s institutional ‘step-by-step acquiescence to increasingly terrible acts’ before and during World War II. In both cases, she says, ‘the very first failure to say “No” was fatal, each succeeding step merely confirming the original and basic moral flaw.’ In this morality play, Theresa Stangl emerges as a tragic figure caught between loyalties to the man she loved and the church she revered.

  Franz Stangl, on the other hand, looms large as a master weaver who wove a web of death and deception – eventually, self-deception. Having lost the respect of his wife, Stangl lost his self-respect a year later when his new boss, a Nazi from Munich, ordered him to sign a paper renouncing his religion. He never told Theresa he’d signed it.

  In 1940, Stangl, after receiving several promotions as a Gestapo agent in Wels, was transferred to Berlin. To his own surprise, the Austrian plainclothes detective was given a green uniform with lieutenant’s rank and named police superintendent of a special institute of the General Foundation for Institutional Care at Tiergartenstrasse (Zoo St.) 4. The foundation’s fancy title was just a façade for a host of euphemisms which endure today and have even achieved a modicum of respectability: mercy killing, assisted suicide, euthanasia. In those days, they meant the slaughter of those deemed mentally, morally, or physically unfit to participate in the lunacies of the Third Reich. T4, as the foundation was nicknamed because of its address, was the forerunner of the Final Solution.

  The programme had begun when Hitler came to power in 1933 with enactment of the Law for Compulsory Sterilization of those suffering from hereditary diseases. Two years later, a Law to Safeguard the Hereditary Health of the German People legalized abortion where either of the parents had a hereditary disease. At the end of October 1939, a secret decree by Hitler quietly gave his chancellery

  the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians who are to be designated by name, to the end that patients who are considered incurable in the best available human judgement after critical evaluation of their condition can be granted mercy killing.

  The first gassings of Germans certified as incurably insane were carried out in December 1939 or January 1940 at a ‘ psychiatric clinic’ in Grafeneck castle and at a former prison in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel, after which two other facilities in Germany and another in Austria were opened to cope with the mentally and physically retarded, the incurably sick, and the very old as well as the insane.

  The newly commissioned officer Stangl was sent home to Wels to await further orders. After a day spent relaxing with his wife and two small daughters, he was called for by an unmarked delivery van with a driver in civilian clothes who took him to Schloss Hartheim, a sixteenth-century Renaissance castle in Alkoven, a dozen miles from Linz.

  Simon Wiesenthal first heard of Hartheim when he was in the Mauthausen concentration camp toward the end of the war: ‘The crematoriums were working overtime. Whenever an oven broke down, the people in charge would send for “an expert from Hartheim” to fix the machinery. Sometimes batches of prisoners were sent over to Hartheim; they never came back. All we were told was that they’d been “permanently transferred.” So the word Hartheim seemed to spell death, but I didn’t give it a second thought. Lying on my bunk in the death block, I was too weak to think.’

  When Wiesenthal visited Hartheim as a postwar investigator, his architect’s eye found it forbidding with its four triangular towers, onion dome, and row after row of windows, though he was impressed by its large courtyard surrounded by an ornate colonnade. At the time, it was known only that 7200 inmates from Mauthausen and 3600 from Dachau had been gassed there in the closing months of the war. Less was known about its activities in the early months of the war.

  When the more prosaic Franz Stangl arrived there in late 1940, he found it ‘big, y’know, with a courtyard and archways and all that. It hadn’t been a private residence for some time; they’d had an orphanage in it, I think, and later a hospital.’51 But now Hartheim had become Austria’s ‘euthanasia sanatorium’ – or, as Wiesenthal calls it in his memoirs, a ‘school for mass murder’. He goes on to say:

  No one will ever know exactly how many people were murdered in the Renaissance castle with the beautiful colonnade. No memorial for the victims of Hartheim, most of them Austrian and German Christians, has been built. The records of the registry office have not been found . . . In 1947, people testified that from thirty to forty human guinea pigs were ‘treated’ in the cellars every day. That would account for about thirty thousand people in three years. Toward the end, Hartheim became just another place of extermination.

  Hartheim still retained the pretence of a hospital, though all but its most retarded ‘patients’ might have wondered why it had no wards or overnight accommodation. When even the normally unquestioning Stangl asked why the temperatures of the mentally ill were taken upon arrival, his chief, Captain Christian Wirth, explained that ‘they must not be allowed to realize they’re going to die. They have to feel at ease. Nothing must be done to frighten them.’

  At first meeting, Christian Wirth struck Stangl as ‘a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time and came back often. Whenever he was there, he addressed us daily at lunch.’ By the time Stangl came to work for him, ‘the Savage Christian’ was supervisor of the Reich’s entire euthanasia empire, which performed some 50,000 ‘mercy killings’ between 1939 and 1941.

  What Stangl couldn’t stand about his superior was the way Wirth spoke bluntly about ‘doing away with useless mouths’ and ‘sentimental slobber that makes me puke’ instead of, in Stangl’s words, the ‘humane or scientific terms’ used by the euthanasia doctors and officials, who spoke piously of ‘totally painless release from an intolerable life’. Though his career would be entwined with Wirth’s for the rest of the war, Stangl could never stomach his chief’s directness of phrase.

  Franz Stangl’s job as security officer at Hartheim was euphemistic as well as euthanasic: to produce death certificates that didn’t disclose the truth of how the ‘patients’ had died: ‘It was part of my function to see that, afterwards, families of patients received their effects: clothes and all that and identity papers as well as certificates. I was responsible for everything being correctly done.’ The families were told ‘the patient had died of a heart attack or something like that. And they received a little urn with the ashes.’

  Once, a grieving mother wrote that she had not received, among her late child’s personal effects, a candle she’d sent as a present shortly before the sudden death. To retrieve the candle, Stangl journeyed to the church-run institution from which the child had been ‘selected’ for Hartheim. When he arrived, the Mother Superior, who had found the candle for him, was visiting a ward with a priest. Showing Stangl a small child shrivelled up in a basket, she asked him: ‘Do you know how old he is?’

  ‘No,’ said Stangl, unwilling to hazard a guess.

  ‘Sixteen,’ said the nun. ‘But he looks like five, doesn’t he? He’ll never change, ever. But they rejected him.’ She was referring to the Medical Selection Commission, which examined her patients at regular intervals, marking plus signs on the cards of those who would live (until the next selection) and minus signs on those ticketed for Hartheim. ‘How could they not accept him?’ she complained bitterly while the priest accompanying her on her rounds nodded. ‘Just look at him,’ the Mother Superior went on, pointing to the basket case. ‘No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?’

  Stangl said this episode ‘really shook me. Here were a Catholic nun – a Mother Superior! – and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I, then, to doubt what was being done?’

  Fearing his wife’s certain disapproval, Stangl never told her this self-serving story or anything else about
his work at Hartheim until after the war. When he did, years later, she asked: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you know I’d stand by you?’

  And Stangl said: ‘I didn’t want to burden you with it.’ He never did tell her the truth about Treblinka or his intermediate station, Sobibor, either.

  How close Stangl came to the killings at Hartheim is uncertain, though he must have witnessed some. A defendant in Austria’s 1947 Hartheim trial, driver Franz Höldl, testified that Stangl had nothing to do with the killings and was responsible only for police matters. But Hartheim was more than a death clinic for ‘defectives’; it was a proving-ground for genocidists.

  Simon Wiesenthal says that, at the scientific end, Hartheim was organized like a medical school in which ‘students’ were taught not to save human life, but to destroy it as efficiently as possible. The victims’ deaths were analysed clinically, photographed precisely, and perfected scientifically. Various gas mixtures were tried out for effectiveness. Doctors with stop-watches would observe the dying through a peep-hole in the cellar door, clocking the length of the death struggle to a tenth of a second. Slow-motion pictures were filmed and studied by experts. Victims’ brains were monitored to show exactly when death had occurred. ‘Nothing was left to chance,’ says Wiesenthal.

  In 1961, a woman scorned twenty years earlier by one Bruno Bruckner came to Wiesenthal to even the score. ‘He can tell you about the nice experiments he photographed in Hartheim,’ she assured Simon – and indeed Bruckner did.

  Back in 1940, Bruckner, an amateur photographer working nights as a guard at the Linz stockyards, was asked by the Nazis if he could run a first-class darkroom. After a job interview, he signed a pledge that he would talk to nobody about his work and was delivered to Captain Wirth at Hartheim.

  Bruckner described ‘the savage Christian’ as ‘a nice guy after working hours, but very strict while you were on duty. He wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to shoot you if something went wrong.’ Wirth told him to film three portraits of each patient, which Bruckner found hard work: ‘Some patients were raving mad and had to be restrained by male nurses. Once or twice, a patient got away before being given the lethal injection and jumped at me. It was tough. And the worst part was that I couldn’t eat anything. There was a terrible stench in the air from the cremation ovens. [Hartheim had three.] After a few days, I went to Captain Wirth and said I couldn’t stand it. I asked to be released from the assignment.’

  Wirth offered Bruckner three alternatives: ‘Either you stay here and keep your mouth shut or you’ll be sent to Mauthausen. Or, if you prefer, you’ll be shot here right away.’

  When Bruckner went to his room to think it over, Wirth sent up a bottle of schnapps. Bruckner drank it all and went back to work next day. Later, his duties were expanded to filming close-ups of each victim’s death throes. ‘I didn’t ask any questions,’ he admitted in 1961. ‘It was a good job. I was paid 300 marks a month and made a little money on the side taking pictures of the staff, with Captain Wirth’s permission. The food was good. There was always plenty of liquor. And, at night, lots of parties. Everybody was sleeping with everybody else.’

  A chemical worker twenty years later, Bruckner was still sleeping well. Only one little detail troubled his mind: why did Wirth need at least eighty employees to kill no more than thirty-five patients a day?

  Wiesenthal had the answer a few weeks later. Although the Austrian authorities did nothing to pursue Bruckner’s revelations,52 Wiesenthal found in them his answer to a triple-barrelled pedagogical riddle which still perplexes historians and criminologists, psychologists and philosophers. ‘How were people selected and trained to carry out the murder of eleven million people and how did they keep their secrets so well that they were not known for years after the war?’ he phrased it rhetorically.

  ‘Obviously,’ he went on, ‘men assigned to gas chambers, who had to watch the deaths of tens of thousands of people day after day and week after week, would have to be trained technically and psychologically; otherwise, they might collapse under the continuous stress . . . Machines broke down, but the people handling them never did. How could it be that people operating gas chambers and ovens were more reliable than the machines?’

  These questions had bothered Wiesenthal for years, for ‘all facts pointed toward the conclusion that special cadres of technically skilled and emotionally hardened executioners were trained somewhere.’ With Wirth’s breaking of Bruno Bruckner, Wiesenthal first realized that the overstaffing at Hartheim and the other euthanasia centres held the key.

  Their carefully selected staffs didn’t know they were really students under surveillance; those who qualified would go on to run the gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps. First, they watched the ‘experiments’; later, when they no longer flinched, they carried them out themselves. Security was tight because, Wiesenthal says, ‘the Nazis realized that there must be no slip-up. Germans and Austrians were being killed, and there could be trouble.’

  There was. On 19 March 1940, Theophil Wurm, the Protestant bishop of Württemberg, wrote an irate letter of protest to the Minister of Interior. On 27 November 1940, the Vatican of Pope Pius XII issued a timid proclamation that ‘extinction of unworthy life by public mandate’ was ‘incompatible with natural and divine law’, but, with Benito Mussolini next door in Rome, the Pope’s weak words were disseminated only in Latin and not heard in German or Germany until 9 March 1941, when the courageous Bishop of Berlin, Konrad von Preysing, read them from the pulpit of St Hedwig’s Cathedral. Bishop von Preysing prefaced the Pope’s proclamation with his own ringing words: ‘No justification and no excuse can be found for taking away the life of the weak or the ill for any sort of economic or eugenic reason. With the same devotion to principles with which the Church protects the institution of matrimony – the moral focus of the people – she also protects the individual’s right to life.’

  Then, on Sunday, 3 August 1941, Count Clemens August von Galen, the powerful archbishop of Münster, stood up in St Lambert’s Church in that north-German city and attacked the murder of innocents and disregard for the sanctity of human life. He denounced Hitler’s whole euthanasia programme as ‘plain murder’, giving details of transports of patients, dubious death certificates, and the flouting of Catholicism through cremation. He told his congregation he would sue those responsible for these criminal acts under Paragraph 211 of the Penal Code. Copies of von Galen’s sermon were mimeographed and distributed throughout the Third Reich and smuggled to soldiers in the front lines, where the Bishop’s concern was shared by badly wounded soldiers and their comrades in arms who recognized that they could be killed by their own side if they lost their ‘productive capacity’.

  That summer, too, Adolf Hitler was actually jeered by a crowd in Hof, near Nuremberg, when his special train and some local traffic were stalled by the transfer of a transport of mental patients who were being loaded from a freight train on to trucks.

  In the German towns of Sonnenstein and Grafeneck, there was so much gossip that two of the ‘sanatoria’ had to be closed. The children of Hadamar were known to shout after the blacked-out buses heading into the ‘institute’ there: ‘Here come some more for gassing!’ Only in Hartheim was secrecy sustained – and the credit for that went to security chief Stangl.

  ‘Hartheim graduates later became teachers of future cadres of scientifically trained killers,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘After some practice, the “students” became insensible to the cries of the victims. The “teachers” would watch the reactions of their “students”. It was a brilliant psychological touch to use Germans and Austrians as victims in the basic training for mass murder.’ If a ‘student’ didn’t crack under the strain of killing his own people, he was unlikely to feel any guilt while eradicating ‘sub-humans’ such as Jews. If he did object, he would quickly be reassigned to a front-line suicide squad – or offered Bruno Bruckner’s alternatives.

  Adolf Hitler, too, was pondering his alternatives. After
the outrage in Hof and Bishop von Galen’s sermon – the most effective single religious protest in the whole Hitler era – the Führer resisted advice from his deputy, Martin Bormann, to hang von Galen, and from Himmler to jail ‘the Lion of Münster’, as the courageous Archbishop became known. Instead, Hitler heeded his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, who warned that punishing von Galen might cost the Nazis vital support not just in Münster, but throughout German Catholicism.53 On 24 August 1941, in a surprise move, Hitler decided to discontinue the whole euthanasia programme. But it was just a tactical retreat.

  ‘At Hartheim,’ Franz Stangl told his biographer, Gitta Sereny, ‘the winding-up process ran very smoothly, but not everywhere.’ In October 1941, he was sent to another ‘institute’ in Bernburg, near Hanover, to wind up its affairs; the doctor in charge there, named Eberl, would be Stangl’s predecessor in Treblinka. ‘Bernburg was a mess,’ said Stangl. ‘There were all kinds of things which had to be settled properly in the institutes. I had to look after property rights, insurance, that sort of thing. After all, some of those who died left children who still had to be properly provided for.’

  What Stangl called ‘the winding-up process’, however, was just the curtain falling after a dress rehearsal. With the conquest of Poland, Hitler had found a vast arena in which to perform the Final Solution on a scale that none of his Hartheim puppets – except, perhaps, ‘the savage Christian’ – could have envisioned.

  27

  The man in the white jacket

  Only staff and a few selected slaves stayed overnight at the extermination camps of Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. While Auschwitz did have a gas chamber, the vast complex was primarily a concentration camp for slave labour that had survived ‘selections’ upon arrival (and during subsequent weed-outs) at its extermination annex, Birkenau, a couple of miles away, where multiple ovens, pits, chimneys, and gas chambers worked around the clock. So as not to turn queasy German stomachs into organized opposition, virtually all extermination facilities were installed in the conquered east, where protest was punishable by summary execution. Only toward the end of the war – as the drive to finish the Final Solution outstripped the machinery of death – did such German concentration camps as Buchenwald (which Wiesenthal survived) and Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank died) diversify from starvation, disease, hangings, and firing squads into mass extermination too.