by Alan Levy
Belzec (where Wiesenthal’s mother perished), Sobibor, and Treblinka – the three camps opened by Christian Wirth in Poland in 1942 – were entrusted to alumni of the aborted euthanasia programme. Thanks to his success at Chelmno in 1941, ‘the savage Christian’ was named supervising inspector of the four extermination camps, all of which used diesel exhausts: Wirth’s preferred method of extermination.
Though none of them lasted more than a year at a time, together they destroyed some two and a half million Jews. They shut down only when the extermination of East European Jewry was nearly complete and because carbon monoxide was being out-performed by the new technology of Zyklon B, which Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had embraced while building his Birkenau extermination branch. Zyklon B was also used in the new gas chambers opened at the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin in late 1942, around the time one Hermine Braunsteiner arrived there as a guard.
Although Höss had been one of Christian Wirth’s tutors in mass extermination, he began referring to Wirth as a ‘sloppy amateur’ and ‘untalented disciple’ for resisting Zyklon B. Still, there was something positively gruesome to be said for the savage Christian’s recalcitrance; only 114 prisoners – none of them children – survived his four-camp empire,54 while more than 100,000 outlived the gassings, shootings, hangings, beatings, lethal injections, ‘medical experiments’, starvation, exhaustion, and disease that took four million lives at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On Wirth’s recommendation in early 1942, Franz Stangl was commissioned to construct and then command Sobibor, in eastern Poland. While Stangl said he was told Sobibor would be a supply camp for the German Army, his suspicions might have been aroused by the assignment of several other euthanasia alumni to work under him, including Hermann Michel, who had been the chief male nurse at Hartheim. After the Polish labour on hand proved ‘lackadaisical’, Stangl requisitioned a more driven ‘Work Commando’ of twenty-five Jewish prisoners plus some Ukrainian guards to drive them. In the beginning, Jews and Ukrainians and Germans all slept in the same hut – the Germans on the kitchen floor; the others in the loft – until more huts were built.
One day, Michel went for a walk in the woods and came back on the run. ‘I think something fishy is going on here,’ Stangl said Michel told him. ‘Come and see what it reminds you of.’
Ten or fifteen minutes into the forest, Michel showed Stangl a new brick building, three yards by four, with three rooms. The moment Stangl saw it, he understood what Michel meant: ‘It looked exactly like the gas chamber at Schloss Hartheim.’
How could he, as commandant, not have known it was there until Michel stumbled upon it? Stangl claimed the ‘lackadaisical’ Poles must have built it before he fired them, though ‘they wouldn’t have known what it was to be.’ While the structure showed on his blueprints, they didn’t specify what any of the buildings were for.
Stangl drove to Belzec to find out from Wirth what this was about. If he is to be believed, this visit to Belzec was his first physical encounter with extermination, even though it had been his line of work ever since he had joined the euthanasia programme two years earlier. This is how Stangl described it to Gitta Sereny:
‘As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The commandant’s headquarters were 200 metres (225 yards) away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell – oh God, the smell! – it was everywhere.
‘Wirth wasn’t in his office. They said he was up in the camp. I asked whether I should go up there and they said, “I wouldn’t if I were you. He’s mad with fury. It’s not healthy to go near him.” I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them – oh God, it was awful!55
‘A bit later, Wirth came down. And that’s when he told me that this was what Sobibor was for, too. And that he was putting me officially in charge.’
Stangl protested that he was a police officer, not an exterminator, and simply wasn’t up to such an assignment. Wirth did not argue back, but said his response would be conveyed to higher headquarters in Lublin. In the meantime, Stangl was to return to Sobibor and continue work.
That night, according to Stangl, ‘Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting; we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?’
Once again, where euphemism failed the finicky Stangl, he sought the comfort of verbal abstraction: it was ‘what they were doing’, not what he was building. And Michel reminded him of one of Wirth’s recurring witticisms: ‘If any of you don’t like it here, you’re welcome to leave – but under the earth.’
The next day, Wirth arrived in Sobibor to supervise the installation of what were now five gas chambers. He ignored Stangl, who busied himself with other construction. Leaving Stangl in nominal charge of the camp, Wirth took Michel into the woods to share his expertise in gassing.
On the third or fourth afternoon, when the machinery seemed in working order and the full force of Jewish prisoners were applying finishing touches, Wirth turned to Michel and said: ‘All right, we’ll try it out right now with your work-Jews.’ With that, the twenty-five slaves were pushed inside and gassed.
That was the baptism of Sobibor. When it turned out that the doors had been put on backward, Wirth cursed the dead Jewish labour inside and lashed out with his whip at the Ukrainian guards and everybody in sight, including Michel. Stangl was summoned to the scene of carnage and told to reverse the doors before burying the bodies. Wirth left in a rage which struck Stangl speechless, though he would later explain that he simply concentrated on completing the camp; Wirth had, after all, put Michel in charge of gassings. Soon after, the first freights of Jews arrived for ‘processing’.
Michel, a staff sergeant with the mellifluous voice of a priest in a pulpit, took to his work so well that his ‘work-Jews’ christened him ‘The Preacher’. He would meet each shipment of Jews and tell them:
‘Welcome to Sobibor! You will be sent to a work camp. Families will stay together. Those of you who work hard will be rewarded. There is nothing to be afraid of here. We are concerned, however, about diseases and epidemics. So we ask you to take a shower. Men to the right. Women and children under six to the left.’
Sometimes he would add that Sobibor was ‘just a transit camp for classification and disinfection. From here, you’ll all be going to the Ukraine as soon as the Third Reich can establish an independent Jewish state there for you.’ Since they wanted to believe him, his victims would sometimes cheer or applaud his words. Then ‘he would personally escort the people on the special road . . . to the barbers’ huts and from there to the gas chambers’, one of his ex-‘work-Jews’, Moshe Shklarek, remembers. ‘With his tricks and his slippery-tongued speeches, Michel was more dangerous than his comrades in crime.’56
With Michel doing the meeting and greeting and gassing, Stangl stayed in the background: an executive supervisor presiding over construction and decreeing policy while distancing himself – intellectually as well as physically – from the consequences of his command. It was during Stangl’s tenure of slightly less than six months in 1942 that workers on the death detail were forbidden to use such words as bodies, corpses, or victims, and were compelled instead to call them Figuren (figures or images, such as puppets or dolls) or Schmattes (rags): yet another giant step into the realm of abstraction in which Stangl secluded himself from the reality of his work.
Though Sobibor wasn’t ‘fully operational’ until May 1942, that month it outdid Auschwitz or Belzec or Chelmno by gassing more than 36,000 Jews from nineteen Polish communities. A sixth gas chamber was added – using the 200-horsepower, eight-cylinder engine of a capture
d Russian tank to pump a mixture of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide – and the Germans built a power generator that furnished enough light to allow night gassings. A narrow-gauge railway was built from the unloading platform to haul clothing, suitcases, valuables, and the corpses of the Dead on Arrival into the bowels of the camp and to transport gold extracted from the teeth of the gassed in the ‘dental workshop’, a shed near the ‘showers’. By July, Stangl and Michel had streamlined Sobibor into such a showcase for efficient extermination that Heinrich Himmler came from Berlin to see for himself. Prisoner labour – tailors, shoemakers, goldsmiths, and bricklayers – were detached from their regular duties to make the camp shine like a Swiss ski resort. While Himmler was going on to Lublin for lunch, a team of cooks and bakers was assigned to prepare canapés to go with his drinks.
Himmler, however, was all business and interested only in extermination. When the luxury cars from Berlin pulled on to the switching-track outside the main gate, Stangl gave Himmler’s nine-man delegation (three in civilian clothes and six, including Himmler, in SS uniforms) a welcoming salute and greeting. Then ‘Preacher’ Michel and Stangl’s deputy, Gustav Wagner, gave a brisk tour of the gas chambers, where they and their guests watched a few hundred Jews die.
When they returned to the main gate, Stangl was waiting to answer their questions, welcome their observations, and invite them to stay for a cognac. Himmler asked about many details, but his whole group’s impression was highly favourable and Stangl was promised expanded help and facilities. After Himmler declined the cognac and canapés, Stangl and his staff consumed them, but Wagner – in a fit of pique that their culinary efforts had gone unnoticed and untried – dispatched the hors d’oeuvre team to the gas chambers.
A six-foot-four blond Austrian whose bland, handsome face looked as if it had been carved out of soap, Gustav Wagner walked with a distinctive looping lurch and claimed to have participated in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a javelin-thrower, though Wiesenthal says ‘we haven’t been able to find his name in any sporting reports or in the Olympics register.’ His criminal record began when he joined the illegal Nazi Party in 1931. Three years later, when he was caught painting swastikas and putting up Hitler posters, he fled to Nazi Germany and joined the SA, which posted him on guard duty outside one of its camps.
As a genocidist, Wagner’s career paralleled Stangl’s, though always on a slightly lower level. At Hartheim, he had served as cremator of corpses from the euthanasia programme. As top sergeant at Sobibor, he started out in charge of ‘accommodations’ (for the ‘work-Jews’, since virtually all ‘guests’ didn’t stay overnight) and later succeeded Michel as chief of the gas chambers. On his visit to Sobibor, Himmler personally awarded Wagner an Iron Cross for his proficiency in mass murder.
Known to his victims as ‘The Human Beast’, Wagner has been described as an insatiable sadist, a brutal thug who incited others to hang, beat, and kill prisoners (in Robert Wistrich’s Who’s Who in Nazi Germany), and ‘by all accounts a particularly nasty piece of work’ (in Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness). ‘He didn’t eat his lunch if he didn’t kill daily. With an axe, shovel, or even his hands. He had to have blood,’ said one survivor. ‘He was an Angel of Death. For him, torturing and killing was a pleasure. When he killed, he smiled,’ said another.
‘Wagner was no desk murderer,’ says Simon Wiesenthal. ‘He was a murderer the way you imagine murderers to be: huge shoulders, enormous hands, a real picture-book SS man. Any Jews who stepped out of line, even on their way to the gas chambers, were killed by Wagner with his own hands. He had the strength to kill any undernourished, emaciated prisoner just by punching him hard in the stomach or slamming him to the ground. It was the strength of a bully, not of an athlete.’
Franz Stangl may not have known it when he played host to Heinrich Himmler in July 1942, but he was in his last month at Sobibor. Since Wirth claimed never to have elicited an answer from his superiors to Stangl’s request for reassignment, Stangl had stayed on the job – pending a decision, he pretended to himself. Now that Himmler’s visit had been a scientific ‘success’, his promotion to a higher command was assured.
More than a third of the 300,000 Jews who died in Sobibor perished during Stangl’s brief tenure there – and the camp was ‘fully operational’ for less than three months of his rule. Several of the few witnesses who survived Sobibor to testify against Stangl have linked him more intimately to the violent deaths that awaited their arrival than his executive detachment might suggest. They remember him standing out in the tumult of the unloading platform – where they were stripped of their clothes, baggage, and belongings – because he wore white linen riding clothes and cracked his whip like a horseman. Washington journalist Richard Rashke, who interviewed eighteen survivors for his book Escape from Sobibor (1982), has cited one man’s impression of Stangl at the scene:
Shooting into the air from a platform, while supervising the organized chaos, was a Nazi in . . . a white jacket. He seemed oddly out of place, almost as if he had interrupted his dinner to greet the Jews and was eager to get back to it before it turned cold.
According to Stanislaw ‘Shlomo’ Szmajzner, who was fourteen when he reached Sobibor on 24 May 1942, Stangl shot into the throng of prisoners around him, as did the rest of the SS men on hand to usher them to their doom. Szmajzner, who was spared the fate of his family because he was an accomplished goldsmith, was one of several hundred Jews who escaped from Sobibor in an uprising in October 1943 (long after Stangl had left for Treblinka) and one of only thirty-two to survive the revolt. After the war, still in his teens, he began a new life in Brazil – only to discover in the 1960s and 1970s that Stangl and Wagner were there too.
Stangl seemed to Szmajzner like a youngish university professor uprooted from his classroom by the war and planted in the sandy soil of Sobibor. Wiry and elegant in bearing, he dressed nattily, with his white coat buttoned from collar to waist, his slacks pressed to a razor-sharp crease, and, above an inevitable film of dust, his boots polished to a dazzling gleam. He always wore white gloves. Beneath the silver skull on his SS cap, light brown hair protruded and there was the hint of a dimple on his chin. Though he appeared vain and slightly foppish, his eyes seemed kindly and he smiled easily. He spoke softly, had good manners, and was always polite – to Jews as well as Germans.
Having kept Shlomo Szmajzner around to melt down gold (from fillings, some with flesh and blood, gums and bone, still on them) and make rings for his SS men, as well as jewellery and monograms for his and their families back home, Stangl took particular interest in the lad. He even used to bring him a special treat on Friday nights, saying, ‘Here’s some sausage for you to celebrate the Sabbath.’
The idea of tempting an orthodox Jew with pork somehow perturbed many when Szmajzner testified at Stangl’s trial in 1970 for more than a million murders, but the defendant maintained that pork sausage was such a luxury in wartime that his well-intentioned gift was ‘most probably a mixture of beef and bread crumbs.’
Stangl was so kind to Szmajzner from the start that Shlomo risked a special request: ‘My parents and sister came here with me. I miss them. When may I see them?’
Stangl avoided his eye, but spoke in fatherly fashion: ‘Don’t worry. They’re fine. They just went to take a shower. They got new clothes and are working in the fields, happy and well. But they do have to work harder than you do . . . I promise on my word as an officer that soon you’ll join your family.’
Later, Shlomo asked again and Stangl continued the deception: ‘They are in a much better place. They have everything they need. You’ll join them soon, I promise.’
Not from Stangl, but from a friend who worked in the burial pits and smuggled out first a message and then a letter before perishing there, did Shlomo eventually find out what had happened to his family and the thousands of others sent through the gate marked SHOWERS. His friend’s message read: ‘No one lives . . . Say Kaddish’ – the Jewish prayer for the
dead.
28
Stangl’s inferno
In Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka (1966) – the best-known book in the literature of this extermination camp – Franz Stangl doesn’t appear by name. Steiner’s descriptions of the camp commandant as ‘a poor minister gone astray, more sadistic than clever’ and ‘a sadistic intellectual incapable of directing an undertaking like Treblinka’ would seem to refer to Dr Irmfried Eberl, an SS first lieutenant and physician who supervised construction of the camp in the spring of 1942 and was its first commandant. When early exterminations failed to keep pace with the rate of arrivals, Eberl was relieved of his command and replaced by the more efficient Stangl, who had proved himself at Sobibor.
‘Stangl?’ said SS man Otto Horn, who was in charge of burning the bodies (‘The Roasts’, his workplace was called), in an interview years after the war. ‘I only saw him twice in all the time I was at Treblinka.’ Of a dozen former personnel at Treblinka who were tried for crimes against humanity in Düsseldorf in 1964–5, only Horn, a professional male nurse, was acquitted.
‘Stangl?’ said Joseph Siedlecki, a prisoner who worked in the undressing rooms at Treblinka and later as a maître d’hôtel at Grossinger’s resort in the Catskills. ‘I never saw him kill or hurt anyone. But why should he have? He didn’t have to. He was no sadist like some of the others and he was the commandant. Why should he dirty his own hands? It’s like me now in my own job; if I have to fire somebody, I don’t do it – why should I? I tell somebody else to tell the person he’s fired. Why should I do the dirty job myself?’
