by Alan Levy
By 1947, the Vatican had become ‘the largest single organization involved in the illegal movement of emigrants’, including Nazis, according to a US State Department report made that year by Vincent La Vista, an American Foreign Service officer in Rome. The document was classified as ‘top secret’ until 1984, when, after pressure from both Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna and his Centre in Los Angeles, it was made available to historian Charles R. Allen, Jnr.
‘In countries where the church is a controlling or dominating factor,’ said the La Vista report, ‘the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those Latin American countries taking an attitude almost favouring the entry into their country of former Nazi and former fascist or other political groups, so long as they are anti-communist.’ La Vista added that ‘the justification of the Vatican for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the faith.’
Whether or not Stangl and his companions reached Rome with church assistance (some of the lay contacts Stangl and Wagner had made during their Italian tours of duty may have helped), he sought it early on. ‘I heard of a Bishop Hulda at the Vatican who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that’s where we went,’ Stangl told Gitta Sereny. Actually, it was not that easy, for he had the name wrong and ‘no idea about how one went about finding a bishop at the Vatican’ – or, for that matter, about finding the Vatican. The three ‘pilgrims’ split up, agreeing to rendezvous later. Then, Stangl recalled: ‘I walked across a bridge over the Tiber and suddenly found myself face to face with a former comrade: there, in the middle of Rome where there were millions of people. He’d been in the security police in France and they wanted to put him on trial there. He’d been extradited from Glasenbach by the French and escaped in the Tyrol when on the way to France.’
‘Are you on your way to see Hudal?’ his friend asked.
‘Ah, so! Hudal!’ Stangl exclaimed. ‘Yes, but I don’t know where to find him.’
His friend directed him to Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of Santa Maria dell’Anima and father confessor to the German community in the Eternal City. When Stangl reached Hudal’s office and gave his name, the Austrian bishop came into the waiting-room, held out both hands, and welcomed him with: ‘You must be Franz Stangl. I’ve been expecting you.’
The name Stangl had in his head, however garbled, the ‘meet cute’ on the Tiber and Hudal’s welcome all spell ODESSA to Wiesenthal. But it is perhaps more edifying to ponder the philanthropy of Bishop Hudal, who had ingratiated himself with Adolf Hitler, another native Austrian, while helping Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli negotiate a 1933 Vatican concordat with the Nazis. Throughout the 1930s, Hudal lobbied for a pan-Germanic federation of Austria with Germany and, after Hitler accomplished that overnight in 1938, for closer collaboration between the Vatican and the Nazis. In all of this, he had the ear of Cardinal Pacelli, a Germanophile who had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria and Berlin from 1917 to 1929 and ascended to the papacy as Pius XII in 1939.
Hudal’s postwar ‘refugee work’ with thousands of SS men – some eighty per cent of whom would have qualified for death sentences had they appeared before the Nuremberg tribunal – earned him the unofficial tide of ‘chief Scarlet Pimpernel of Rome.’
Simon Wiesenthal sees red when he discusses how Hudal helped not just Stangl, Eichmann, and possibly Mengele, but also Walter Rauff, who invented the mobile gas chambers used in Riga and Chelmno and died in Chile in 1984, and, above all, a Viennese named Otto Wächter, who was not only one of the assassins of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, but one of the murderers of Wiesenthal’s mother in 1942.
Rewarded for his earlier crime by being made Vienna’s chief of police after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Wächter was sent to Poland with the outbreak of war in September 1939: first as governor of the Cracow district and then as governor of Galicia. ‘I saw him in early 1942 in the ghetto of Lwów,’ Wiesenthal recalls, adding painfully that, seven months later, Wächter was ‘personally in charge’ of the transport that sent Simon’s mother to her death.
‘There were 800,000 other people Wächter killed, too,’ Wiesenthal adds matter-of-factly. After the war, Wächter escaped from Bavaria to Italy, carrying his complete archives with him, but calling himself ‘Otto Reinhardt’. In 1949, when Wächter was dying under an assumed name in a religious college in Rome where he had been given sanctuary, he confessed his identity and sent for his wife and Bishop Hudal.
Hudal gave the dying man last rites of the Church and took charge of his files. After Wächter’s death, Wiesenthal asked Bishop Hudal to give him his mother’s murderer’s files. Hudal refused – arguing that Wächter’s records were part of his confessional and had to be respected as secret and sacred. What made Wiesenthal forever equate the name Hudal with the word chutzpa (Yiddish for gall) was the bishop’s last word on the matter: ‘I am a priest, not a policeman.’
Simon is certain that the churchman, who died in Rome in 1963, will sizzle for eternity in the hottest reaches of hell. As evidence against Hudal, he cites an excerpt from the bishop’s postwar diary, made public in 1985:
Ultimately, the war of the Allies against Germany had nothing to do with ideals. This war was not a crusade, but a rivalry between economic complexes . . . using catchwords like democracy, race, religious liberty, and Christianity as bait for the masses. This is why I felt duty bound after 1945 to devote my charitable work mainly to former National Socialists and fascists, especially the so-called ‘war criminals’ who had been persecuted by communists and Christian Democrats.61
For this, I was soon known in the Roman Curia62 as a ‘Nazi fascist bishop’ who was ‘troppo tedesco’ (too German) and faulted as incompatible with Vatican policy. But I thank God that He opened my eyes and blessed me with the undeserved ability to visit and comfort many victims of the postwar period in their prisons and concentration camps and that I could also rescue some of them from their tormentors by helping them escape with false identity papers into more favourable countries.
Of Hudal’s help, Franz Stangl said:
‘First he got me quarters in Rome where I was to stay until my papers came through. And he gave me a bit of money; I had almost nothing left.’ Stangl joined ‘many, many German civilians’ sleeping on mats in a huge Franciscan convent on the Via Sicilia, just off Rome’s most fashionable boulevard, the Via Veneto. In the morning, the men were roused at dawn and, after breakfast, had to leave the convent until evening, though they were given meal tickets for lunch at a mess run by nuns. Since Germans and Austrians without Italian documents were subject to arrest by the carabiniere, Stangl wandered the streets as inconspicuously as he could, loitering on benches in the Pincio and Borghese Gardens, where the big danger came from dozing off if the police patrolled. Eventually, to keep out of trouble, he volunteered to do maintenance work for the nuns. Visitors to the Vatican in mid-1948 would have paid little attention to the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka carrying a bucket for a nun as she and he crossed St Peter’s Square together. For his good work, he wrote home, he was given extra rations and the chance to attend morning mass in St Peter’s Cathedral.
Gustav Wagner faded from sight in Stangl’s story of his stay in Rome, though his path would parallel his ex-chief’s. The third musketeer of their Italian odyssey, Hans Steiner, grew homesick and escaped back to Austria, where he surrendered to the Americans.
After a few weeks, Bishop Hudal handed Stangl a whitish booklet with a red cross on it. It was an International Red Cross passport, issued in Stangl’s name to the bishop, who had said the Vatican vouched for Stangl’s identity. Dispensing as many as 500 such documents per day, and pressured by the Italians to expedite the exits of unwanted foreigners, the Red Cross’s attitude almost forty years later was: ‘How could we refuse to accept the word of priests?’
Stangl had one objection to his new credential. ‘They made a mistake,’ he told Bishop Hudal. ‘The name is incorrect. It says Paul Franz Stangl. My name is
Franz Paul Stangl.’
Hudal, he says, patted him on the shoulder and suggested: ‘Let’s let sleeping dogs lie. Never mind.’
The Bishop also gave Stangl a boat ticket from Genoa (in many cases, transportation was paid by the Catholic welfare organization Caritas) and an entrance visa to Syria, where a job in a textile mill awaited ‘Paul F. Stangl, weaver’. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq had declared war and invaded the new State of Israel in May 1948, hours after it was proclaimed and the British had withdrawn, so Stangl was sailing beyond the reach of Israeli and Western intelligence – and Nazi-hunters like Wiesenthal.
Failing to abort the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, her Arab neighbours tried to pick up where Hitler had left off. Genocide was an idea whose time had come (not for the first time) to Egypt and Syria, which imported their technicians and technocrats from the ruins of the Third Reich.
Most notorious of these was Alois Brunner, an Austrian born in 1912. Brunner was Eichmann’s right-hand man in Vienna and Prague in 1938–9 and his successor in Vienna, where Wiesenthal credits him with inventing the Jewish police in the ghettoes to do the work of identification, registration, and deportation of Jews for the SS. Simon also says Brunner conceived the postcards that deportees were ordered to write home while en route to or upon arriving in extermination camps (‘I am in good health and feeling well’); by the time the postcards reached their destinations, virtually all the senders were dead. ‘Among Third Reich criminals still alive,’ says Simon, ‘Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my eyes, he was the worst ever’ – even worse than Eichmann, who ‘merely’ made the plans that Brunner implemented so zealously in Vienna, Prague, Bratislava, Paris, and Greece. Brunner accompanied one of the last transports from Vienna to the east; en route, he personally shot a Jewish banker, Siegmund Bosel, to death. In Greece, Brunner supervised the deportations that Lieutenant Kurt Waldheim ‘never saw’. Close to 50,000 Jews were shipped from Salonika to Auschwitz in sixteen freight trains. When several hundred Jews from outlying Greek islands missed the trains, Brunner had them herded into antiquated boats which were then put out to sea and sunk in the Aegean. Surfacing in Damascus after the war as ‘Dr Georg Fischer’, Brunner became an adviser to the Syrian security services and, well into his eighties, was occasionally consulted on Lebanese affairs and still gave rabid interviews to German and Austrian journalists.
The first major war criminal tried by a West German court under West German law was Franz Rademacher, ex-head of the Jewish Section of the German Foreign Ministry and Eichmann’s contact man there. While appealing against a mild sentence of three years and five months for complicity in the murder of 1500 Yugoslav Jews (on his expense account form for a trip to Belgrade, he had filled in ‘Purpose of Journey’ with ‘liquidation of Jews’), Rademacher jumped bail and escaped to Syria.
So hungry were Israel’s enemies for German expertise, major and minor, that Simon Wiesenthal says ‘the Syrian Embassy in Rome opened a recruiting office which worked like the French Foreign Legion: no questions asked, but, in this case, only if you were German. So when it became embarrassing to the French Foreign Legion that they had Nazi criminals in their midst, certain French officials sold their embarrassments to the Arabs for 350 dollars per man. They were handed over at an Italian port and shipped out on the next boat.’
Walter Rauff’s credentials required no recommendations or negotiations when he contacted the Syrians in Rome. As reported in a forty-three-page investigatory report on ‘SS Colonel Walter Rauff: The Church Connection 1943–1947’ issued in 1984 by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, the inventor of the mobile gas chamber would later testify (in Chile) that ‘I signed a contract with the Syrian government and went to Damascus as technical adviser to the secret police and the bodyguard of the head of state.’
In the stammer of 1948, when Franz Stangl arrived in Syria, his credentials as a genocidist were not yet so well known as Rauff’s, so he lived frugally and saved every pound he earned to pre-pay his family’s passage to the Middle East. By the time Wiesenthal ascertained Stangl’s significance a couple of years later and located his home address in Wels, Theresa Stangl and her three daughters had disappeared too. Neighbours said that the Stangls had left on 6 May 1949, not long after three men from the Viennese movers, Schenker & Co., had come to the house to pack the belongings Frau Stangl had put out on the front lawn – beds and bedding, sewing-machine, china, chairs, table, even the piano – into two large crates which they hauled away. There was nothing furtive about Frau Stangl’s departure. After the men had nailed the crates shut, she painted their destination on them in big bold letters: FRANZ PAUL STANGL, HELUANIE 14, DAMASCUS. When she applied for a passport to emigrate and the police asked why, she told them just as boldly: ‘To join my husband, who escaped.’
Theresa, Brigitte, Renate, and Isolde Stangl sailed for Syria from Genoa in mid-May 1949. Reunited with the man of the house in Damascus, they first stayed in a pension at 22 rue George Haddat: an address notorious in Flight from Nuremberg63 and other escape literature as ODESSA’S reception centre. Though their first few months together became a struggle when Franz Stangl’s employer died and his textile firm collapsed, they found a flat in the rue de Baghdad, where they lived for six months until their furniture arrived from Austria. In early December 1949, Paul Franz Stangl, as he was now called, found well-paid work as a mechanical engineer with the Imperial Knitting Company, and the Stangls moved to larger quarters on the rue de Youssuff in Old Damascus. ‘It was a wonderful house, and with our things we made the flat into a real home,’ Theresa Stangl later recalled. ‘We were the first German family to have our own home, and all the Germans visited us.’
The only fly in their ointment was an open one. The chief of police of Damascus lived in the front of their house – with his harem. The Stangls’ middle daughter, Renate, was twelve when they arrived in Syria – and, within a year or two, she had caught their neighbour’s lascivious eye. ‘She was very blonde and very pretty and he really had his eyes on her,’ Frau Stangl told Gitta Sereny. ‘Renate could do anything she liked. She could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. We got into a panic about it. What could we do – foreigners in Syria – if he took it into his head he wanted her?’ Complain to the police?
The concerned parents decided to move from Syria. There were no South American consulates in Damascus, but they made the rounds in Beirut, where the Brazilian consul said his country welcomed mechanical engineers and gave them a visa. In 1951, the Stangls sailed from Beirut to Brazil, via Genoa. On their first day in São Paulo, the usually astute Frau Stangl gave all their cash (worth about forty dollars) to a German woman to exchange on the black market. ‘And then she came back and said she’d given it to a man who’d said he’d get cruzeiros at a good rate and he’d made off with it. I couldn’t prove she was lying’ – and, again, there was no possibility of calling the police.
When she told her husband their money was gone, ‘he wasn’t angry. He was never angry with me, or any of us . . . He never raised his voice, or lost his temper – until much, much later – and never never did he strike or spank the children.’ No, the benign, mild-mannered Paul Franz Stangl simply said he had to find a job fast – and, within a week, he was engaged as a weaver by the Sutema textile firm.
30
The Stangl extradition
For Simon Wiesenthal, the case of Franz Stangl was a classic example of why retribution is always to be favoured over revenge.
‘Once I located where Stangl was,’ says Simon, ‘I could have had him killed for 500 dollars before he was ever extradited. In South America, it is only a matter of money. So many people disappear. Even one of the officials I was bothering hinted to me that I could just write the cheque and soon I would receive Stangl’s ears. But this wasn’t what I was after. So we ended up with Stangl on trial for six months and, each day, it was in the papers and millions of people were reading about it. If I’d had him killed, Stangl wou
ld have amounted to just a corpse, a few lines in the press, and, later, nothing.
‘With Stangl, though, it was always a matter of money.’
The first breakthrough came on Friday, 21 February 1964, when Simon, who had been trumpeting Stangl’s sins to the press, was visited in his office by a woman in tears. ‘Mr Wiesenthal,’ she said, ‘I had no idea my cousin Theresa was married to such a terrible man.’
‘What terrible man?’ he asked.
‘Franz Stangl.’
Without showing the excitement he felt, Wiesenthal asked almost casually: ‘And where is Theresa now?’
‘Why, in Brazil, of course,’ the woman replied. Then her mouth clamped shut and she took a step back, realizing she had said too much.
Having told the press that Stangl had left Damascus for an unknown destination, Wiesenthal attempted ‘to draw the woman out, but she wouldn’t say another word, no matter how hard I tried. And I couldn’t break my rule and ask her name. It was already well known in Vienna that I never demand the name or address of anyone who comes voluntarily to give me information. So I had to let her go away anonymous.’
To this day, nobody knows who this cousin was. Theresa Stangl’s younger sister, Helene, was already living in Vienna: a restaurant cook and second wife of a Viennese Jewish construction engineer who had escaped to Shanghai in 1939 and returned after the war. They had met at a swimming-pool in 1959 and they visited his daughter and grandchildren on a kibbutz in Israel every year until he died in 1969; she was still doing so when Franz Stangl’s biographer, Gitta Sereny, dropped in on her unannounced in 1972. Neither Helene Eidenböck nor her husband had any idea of her brother-in-law’s past until they read in the papers in 1964 that Wiesenthal was looking for him. Her husband ‘hardly spoke for a week’, she told Sereny. ‘He was totally shattered by it. I suppose it was worse – even worse – for him than me, because here he was, with me, loving me, and this man, accused of these awful, awful things was my brother-in-law . . . He used to read the papers and then just sit, shaking his head. “You can’t really understand,” he’d say to me. “Imagine, just imagine, it was your child, your baby they took, and slammed against a wall, shattering its head. Your child before your eyes. . .” Perhaps I didn’t understand the way he did, but I felt it. I felt the horror of it all through my body.’
