Nazi Hunter

by Alan Levy

  Whoever the woman was who’d called upon Wiesenthal, her visit was followed a few days later by one from a sleazy man with shifty eyes who rubbed his chin whenever he spoke. ‘I wasn’t surprised when he admitted he’d worked for the Gestapo,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘but I found him harder to believe when he told me he’d done “nothing bad. They made me join. What else could I do? I’m just a little guy.” I said nothing. It was the usual preface.’

  Wiesenthal’s visitor came to the point: ‘I read your story in the papers. About Stangl. It’s the big bastards like Eichmann and Stangl who’ve made it hard for us little guys . . . Look, I know where Stangl is. But it’s going to cost you money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars.’

  ‘You might as well ask for two million dollars,’ Wiesenthal responded. ‘I don’t have that kind of money.’

  The informer shrugged: ‘All right . . . I’ll make you a special price. How many Jews did Stangl kill?’

  Wiesenthal guessed that some 700,000 died in Treblinka while Stangl was the commandant.

  ‘I want a penny for each of ’em,’ the man said. ‘Let’s see. That’s 7000 dollars. A real bargain!’

  Wiesenthal, who had already seen and heard enough to make him shockproof for life, had to clutch his desk to keep from slapping the man in the face: ‘His arithmetic was too much for me.’ But he contained his rage, decided to throw him out, stood up – and then sat down again. This might be his only chance to find Stangl.

  ‘Well?’ said the man.

  ‘Well, I won’t give you one cent now,’ Wiesenthal said. ‘But if Stangl is arrested on the basis of your information, you’ll get the money.’

  ‘Who guarantees you’ll keep your word?’

  ‘Nobody. And if you don’t like it, get out!’

  ‘All right . . . Stangl works as a mechanic in the Volkswagen factory in São Paulo, Brazil.’

  * * *

  In retrospect, Stangl should not have been hard to find. He and his family had travelled from Syria to Brazil, via Italy, under their own names in 1951. He always gave his name as either Paul Franz Stangl, to conform to the identity the Italian Red Cross had issued him, or Franz Paul Stangl, to be perfectly honest with others. In 1954, his wife registered the entire family with the Austrian consulate in São Paulo. When he or she or their daughters wrote ‘home’ to Austria, they put their names and return address on the envelopes. In the mid-1960s, Stangl remarked to his wife: ‘You know, if that clever man Wiesenthal is looking for me, surely all he has to do is ask the police or the Austrian Consulate. He could find me at once. I am not budging.’

  In his first two years in South America with the Sutema textile firm, Stangl’s organizational ability was recognized early and he rose from weaver to chief planner: practically an engineering position. Since it involved frequent travel within Brazil, another of his assets was that he had picked up Portuguese swiftly and easily.

  On one of his trips (he confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, “Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the cans . . .”’

  ‘You said “cans”,’ Sereny interrupted. ‘What do you mean?’ But Stangl wasn’t listening to her as he continued:

  ‘I couldn’t eat canned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . looking at me . . . not knowing that in no time at all, they’d all be dead.’ His wife, too, remembered that ‘he suddenly stopped eating meat at one point.’

  Despite such qualms of the flesh, Stangl prospered – nearly tripling his salary when he left Sutema’s employ after a couple of years for similar work with another firm. Over a nine-year period, beginning within weeks of their arrival in South America, he and his family built with their own hands a rambling pink-and-white middle-class chalet in a multi-racial working-class neighbourhood of São Bernardo do Campo. Some twenty miles from São Paulo, São Bernardo do Campo was the Detroit of Brazil: home of a Rolls-Royce parts factory, a Mercedes Benz factory, and Volkswagen’s largest plant outside Germany. Starting from scratch, Stangl put in the plumbing and his daughters did the painting. ‘We built room after room, first just camping outside, then moving into one room after another, as the house grew,’ Theresa Stangl recalls.

  There was a serious interruption in late 1955, when Franz Stangl took sick. Though his symptoms were rheumatism and weakness that rendered him unable to walk more than a block or two, or even stand on his feet for more than a few minutes, it proved a prelude to a major heart attack in 1966. While he lay idle in the second half of the 1950s, his women constructed a small workshop across the courtyard and, when he had recovered somewhat but was still unfit to hold a steady job, he bought some second-hand machine parts, built some weaving machines, and soon was making elastic bandages for hospitals. His family took over the selling while Frau Stangl found work at Mercedes Benz as a secretary, working her way up to chief of book-keeping by 1962, with ‘seventy girls under me.’

  Renate, the middle daughter who had caught the roving eye of the Damascus police chief, married an Austrian in 1957, as did her older sister Brigitte a year later. In 1959, Franz Stangl’s health had improved enough that he could rejoin the salaried work force as a mechanic for Volkswagen. As usual, his diligence and competence caught the eye of his superiors and, with rapid promotions, he wound up in charge of preventative maintenance for the entire plant at three times the salary he’d been earning when he fell ill.

  With two of the daughters working too, as secretaries in the Volkswagen works, the Stangls were doing so well that, aided by financing from Mercedes Benz, they bought land on Frei Gaspar in Brooklin, one of the best residential districts of São Paulo, and this time had a house built for them by professionals: more Danish-modern than Austrian-rustic, with picture windows and a two car garage. When they moved in there in 1965, Stangl bought a car and became a commuter.

  The two years they spent in Brooklin were ‘our happiest in Brazil’, Frau Stangl said, despite her husband’s heart attack in 1966, from which he recovered fairly rapidly. Back in Austria, however, another heart was pounding as Simon Wiesenthal closed in slowly on his quarry.

  Having learned in early 1964 where Stangl was, Wiesenthal had no trouble asking a Brazilian contact to run a ‘credit check’ on him which ascertained his address and lifestyle without alerting anybody. Then, however, he waited nearly three years before making his next move. He explains:

  ‘By 1964, Stangl was wanted by Austria not just from the Hartheim trials and for escaping from custody, but for his work in Sobibor and Treblinka, too. If I’d gone to the Austrian Ministry of Justice, a dozen people there and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have known about it. And then in Brazil, at least double that number in the Austrian Embassy, the Brazilian ministries, and the Brazilian police would have had advance notice of Stangl’s arrest. Now you don’t have to believe in ODESSA to be absolutely certain that Stangl would have been warned and even people who didn’t know him personally would have helped him to disappear. And then there would be – and, as I told you, there were! – others who wanted to make him disappear for me and just bring me his ears. But I wanted him alive!

  ‘To do that, I knew I would have to go to someone highly reliable in the Ministry of Justice to catch Stangl. But first I had to lay the groundwork in Brazil. I alerted my friends in Rio de Janeiro that I was looking for someone influential and sympathetic to our cause, though I didn’t specify it was about Stangl. It wasn’t until December 1966 that they sent word a Very Important Personality was travelling in Europe and could receive me in Zurich. I flew there to meet him.’

  The Brazilian who welcomed him to his Swiss hotel suite was described by Wiesenthal as ‘middle-aged, good-looking, with t
houghtful eyes’ and a good listener who was clearly well informed. Even before Simon told him where Stangl was working, he guessed: ‘I’ll bet he’s got a job with some German firm. They all do.’ Simon remembers that the politician ‘gave me his assurance that he would be of assistance in this case. The main difficulty was to find a way to shorten the procedure of the extradition request coming from Austria to Brazil and then, in the normal course of events, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of justice, the office of the Governor, the main police headquarters, the local police, and, eventually, the Supreme Court. This would mean that about forty persons would have to know about the extradition request – and very likely Stangl would be Number Forty-one.

  ‘We agreed that a success would only be possible if one could cut down the number of the people let into the secret. So we reduced with the help of that politician the number of those persons down to six.’ Knowing how many eyes and ears would be open, the politician’s farewell words to Simon were: ‘Write me briefly when I’m back in Rio, but don’t send any evidence in the mail.’

  Wiesenthal did better than that. In early 1967, he went directly to the Austrian Minister of Justice, Dr Hans Klecatsky, a trustworthy Tyrolean, and, working with just a handful of loyal aides, they assembled excerpts from the thousand-page dossier on Stangl as well as a compilation of the warrants out for him. When they were nearly ready, while Wiesenthal was awaiting further documentation from Düsseldorf, where the ‘Treblinka trials’ of twelve Stangl subordinates had been held in 1964–5,64 he sent his own courier – a young woman, born in Brazil and living in Vienna, who worked part-time for him – to Rio with the Jewish Documentation Centre’s own dossier on Stangl.

  Upon arrival, she couldn’t get near Wiesenthal’s high-level political connection. It was Carnival time in Rio and nobody was working. Eventually, she made contact with him and handed the dossier to him personally. By the time she left Rio in mid-February, he had a police friend shadowing Stangl unofficially – but he sent her back with a warning to Wiesenthal that he’d be leaving Brazil for Europe again on 1 March, so Stangl had better be in firm custody by then or anything could happen.

  Wiesenthal had to move fast. Less than a fortnight remained to February. Phoning Klecatsky, he explained the urgency to the Minister of Justice, who called him to his office on Wednesday, 22 February. The abridged case against Stangl had just been translated into Portuguese. It was delivered the next day to the Austrian Foreign Ministry, which had a trusted official of the Brazilian Embassy verify and notarize the translation. Now it was ready to cross the Adantic.

  But how? Wiesenthal offered to pay the plane fare of a diplomatic courier, but was told the Foreign Ministry had none for South America. Nor were there direct radio or telex links with Austria’s embassies there. Any official trip by a Foreign Ministry employee lasting more than three days had to be approved in advance by the Council of Ministers, which met on Tuesdays; this would mean sharing the secret with twelve more officials. No, thank you, said Wiesenthal. The simplest solution, everybody agreed, was to send the warrant, the extradition request, and the translated dossier excerpts via express air mail in a special envelope signifying to embassy employees that it was to be opened only by the ambassador.

  On Friday night, 24 February 1967, Wiesenthal phoned the politician in Rio and asked him to pay a call on the Austrian ambassador on Monday morning to tell him privately what to expect in the mail. When he did, on Monday the 27th, the ambassador had just received the packet. It was delivered to the Brazilian Foreign Office the same day. A few hours later, the chief of the federal police visited the Austrian ambassador, studied additional documents (including Wiesenthal’s), and flew to São Paulo to meet with its governor, Abreu Sodre.

  The next night, Tuesday, 28 February, family man Paul Franz Stangl stopped for a beer in a bar with his youngest daughter, Isolde, twenty-three, nicknamed Isi, on their way from work at the Volkswagen plant. Then they drove home.

  From their two-storey house in Brooklin that day, Frau Stangl had noticed there were no parking places on the street where they lived, but had thought nothing more of it. ‘I heard a commotion and went to the window,’ she recalls. ‘Police cars were drawn across the street, blocking it off on each side. Our car was surrounded by crowds of police. Paul was pulled out of the car – handcuffed. Isi fell to the ground shouting for us – that’s what I’d heard when I rushed to the window – but the police car with him in it, followed by a string of others, was off before I could even get out the door. Isi was almost incoherent with shock. She said her father’s face went yellow when it happened.’

  Unlike the Eichmanns, the Stangls chased around from police station to police station right away, but nobody knew anything until they went to the São Paulo Office of Public Security, where they were told yes, he was in custody, and no, they couldn’t see him. ‘And they said we should be glad they’d taken him,’ Frau Stangl remembers. ‘If they hadn’t, the Israelis would have picked him up.’ Wiesenthal, too, says his sources told him Stangl was ‘terrified. He was certain he was being kidnapped by Jewish commandos pretending to be Brazilian police. He was visibly relieved when he was brought to a police prison. He remembered what had happened to Eichmann and considered himself lucky.’

  The next morning, 1 March, Simon’s Brazilian contact left for Europe, as scheduled, but phoned him first to assure him that Stangl was safely under lock and key. He would be transferred to Brasilia, the country’s remote inland capital, to forestall any rescue or escape attempt. That night, the governor of São Paulo officially announced Stangl’s arrest. West Germany and Poland immediately asked for his extradition, too.

  Lawyers all over the world began wrangling over various statutes of limitations – most notably, Brazil’s, which set a twenty-year limit on arrests for murder. But Brazil had signed the International Convention Against Genocide,65 which excludes that most heinous of crimes from any statute of limitations. Besides, Germany’s arrest warrant had been issued in 1960, so Stangl was culpable until 1980, by this definition. Austria argued that Stangl’s escape from prison in Linz interrupted the statute of limitations. Most significantly, Wiesenthal, who had been heading for New York when he received word of Stangl’s capture, made an appointment with Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In Simon’s presence, the former US Attorney General weighed in with a phone call to the Brazilian ambassador in Washington stating that he – a potential presidential candidate in the next year’s election – would view any evasion of extradition with disfavour. ‘What’s at stake is justice for enormous crimes,’ said Kennedy. ‘Brazil now has an opportunity to gain millions of friends.’

  In the spring of 1967, when Stangl’s family read in the papers that he was in a military prison in Brasilia, they drove there, taking turns behind the wheel. Alone with his wife, he cried and, when she asked about Treblinka, because by this time she’d read so much he hadn’t told her, he said: ‘I don’t know what pictures you saw. Perhaps you saw pictures of other camps.’ With his daughters, however, his wife recalls that ‘he was so wonderful with them, never gave way, never cried while they were in the room, smiled at them, walked them to the gate and waved goodbye to them. But, of course, this was the first time it became real to them. Seeing him like this, in prison, was a traumatic experience for them.’

  On 8 June 1967, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Franz Stangl should be extradited to West Germany. Two weeks later, he was flown to Frankfurt and put in a prison in Duisburg to await trial. His family moved back to São Bernardo do Campo and rented the house in Brooklin to diplomatic families to help finance his defence and his wife’s attendance at the three years of trials in Düsseldorf. She flew there, but went to court only thrice: to testify that he had never told her what was happening at Hartheim; on the day Stanislaw Szmajzner, the Sobibor goldsmith, testified against her husband, and on Tuesday, 22 December 1970, when she saw her husband sentenced to life in prison for having ‘supervised the murder of at
least 900,000 men, women, and children.’

  Simon Wiesenthal was in the courtroom that day, too. On his way out, he took from his wallet a photo of the man he had stalked for twenty years and tore it up. It had been sandwiched between snapshots of Wiesenthal’s wife and daughter as a reminder of Franz Stangl’s innocent victims. In finding Franz Stangl – accused of 1,200,000 murders and convicted of more than three-quarters of them – and winning his extradition from Brazil to Germany more than two decades after the Second World War ended, Simon Wiesenthal claims to have given Germany ‘its most significant criminal case of the century.’

  During her stay in Düsseldorf, Theresa Stangl visited her husband several times a week. ‘What was strange,’ she says, ‘was that often he would hardly talk to me. He’d sit opposite me at the table . . . but he’d chat with the guards, not with me. He’d talk to them about their leaves, their outings, places he knew, had been to. It hurt me, and sometimes I’d say, “Don’t you want to talk to me?”’

  Of course he didn’t. To talk about his work from 1940 to 1943 would have been to confess his infidelity to her values and upset the delicate equilibrium of his relationship with her and his family. She, more than he, had long looked the other way. His war crimes were like a mistress that everybody knows the head of the house has, but to openly acknowledge her existence would disturb the harmony of Sunday dinner. So it is perhaps fitting that the only time Stangl ever acknowledged his guilt, in private or in public, was to another woman, Gitta Sereny, on Sunday, 27 June 1971, the day before he died.