by Alan Levy
In his final interview with her, after reiterating his usual ‘I have never intentionally hurt anyone myself, he added, ‘But I was there. So yes, in reality I share the guilt. Because my guilt – my guilt – only now in these talks – now that I have talked about it all for the first time – my guilt is that I am still here. That is my guilt.’
Those words ‘my guilt’ were so foreign to his tongue and mind that it took him almost half an hour to speak those few fragmented sentences, which hit his body like a series of blows to the solar plexus, making him sag before Sereny’s eyes. ‘Still here?’ she repeated gently.
‘I should have died. That was my guilt.’
‘Do you mean you should have died or you should have had the courage to die?’
‘You can put it like that,’ he said.
‘Well, you say that now,’ said Sereny. ‘But then?’
‘That is true,’ he replied slowly. ‘I did have another twenty years – twenty good years. But believe me, now I would have preferred to die rather than this . . .’ Looking around at the little prison visiting-room, he added: ‘I have no more hope.’ His parting words to her were: ‘Let there be an end.’ He died of heart failure in his cell nineteen hours later – shortly after noon on 28 June 1971.
* * *
Hard-working, resilient, pulling together rather than apart in times of adversity, and asking little or nothing of their neighbours or their nationalities, the Stangls even more than the Eichmanns embodied the work ethic to which so many still hew and adhere in a fragmenting world. ‘Never, never did he strike or spank the children,’ Theresa Stangl said of her husband; nor did he ever soil his white riding uniform by laying a hand on any of the more than a million prisoners who perished under his administrations at Sobibor and Treblinka. He was, Frau Stangl went on, ‘an incredibly good and kind father. He played with the children by the hour. He made them dolls, helped them dress them up. He worked with them; he taught them innumerable things. They adored him – all three of them. He was sacred to them.’
In Düsseldorf, Gitta Sereny had asked Stangl: ‘Did your children know?’ His face went red with anger as he replied: ‘My children believe in me.’
Sereny persisted: ‘The young all over the world question their parents’ attitudes. Are you saying that your children knew what you had been involved in, but never asked questions?’
‘They – they – my children believe in me,’ he insisted. ‘My family stands by me.’ Then he began to cry.
After Stangl died in 1971, Sereny visited his widow and daughters in Brazil to research her invaluable book, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. Driving her back to São Paulo one night, daughter Renate, by then divorced, told Sereny how her father once said to her that ‘if you ever need help, I’ll go to the end of the moon for you.’
If his cell in Düsseldorf was the end of the moon for Franz Stangl, then what was Treblinka? Merely the end of the earth for more than a million mortals, many of them as good parents as or even better than he was. Examining his conscience through Gitta Sereny’s ears and eyes, we can’t help confronting the monster within each of us and asking ourselves what we might have done in his situation. Sereny comes to this conclusion:
I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all other things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. They depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom . . . A moral monster, I believe, is not born, but is produced by interference with this growth.
Is it enough, then, to say, as Simon Wiesenthal said at Stangl’s trial, that ‘if I had done nothing else in my life but bring this wicked man to justice, I would not have lived in vain’? Yes, it is truth for Wiesenthal – and we can only admire his giving Stangl and his victims their day in court. When Stangl died barely half a year after sentencing, Wiesenthal told me:
‘That is enough for a life sentence. The important thing is that he was brought to trial. The spirit of the law is that every person who is killed has the right to a trial of his killers. Now, if a man is responsible for 10,000 deaths, you cannot make 10,000 trials. So you make one trial. And imprisonment is not only a sentence, it is a symbol of justice. Even if it is of short duration, every son or daughter of his murder victims can at least take a pencil and calculate that, “for killing my mother, he spent two minutes or two days in prison.” It is not much, but it is something that helps the survivors to live.’
For each of the 900,000 murders of which Franz Stangl was convicted, then, he served eighteen seconds in jail.
31
Wearing down Wagner
While Franz Stangl, deported to West Germany, had been awaiting trial there, his wife Theresa was called upon in Brazil by Gustav Wagner, her husband’s former colleague at Hartheim, deputy at Sobibor, and fellow escapee from Austria into Italy. Wagner had settled some thirty miles from the Stangls and was in the habit of dropping in unannounced. Franz Stangl had always welcomed Wagner, though his wife found him ‘vulgar’ and obtrusive.
After a brief expression of sympathy for the Stangls’ plight, Wagner told his involuntary hostess that his own wife had just died and would she lend him money to bury her? At first, she refused, but, when he told her he was down and out and worried about Wiesenthal looking for him next, she relented – even though every cent the Stangls could spare was going for her husband’s defence.
As he pocketed the money, Wagner looked her over appreciatively and said: ‘Say, why don’t you and I set up house together? I haven’t got anybody any more and, as for Franz, well, they’re going to do him in anyway over there and you’ll be alone, too.’
She threw him out of the house.
He never repaid the loan, but, according to Wiesenthal, he paid a condolence call on Theresa Stangl after her husband died in jail in 1971. And, this time, he proposed marriage. Again, she threw him out.
‘My husband was a decent, proper man who did his duty,’ she told some friends with pious sincerity. ‘He never laid hands on inmates; at the most, he had to shout at one or two of them. But that Wagner was a notorious sadist. And now he has the nerve to call on me and ask me to marry him!’ She told Gitta Sereny that Wagner, at their last meeting, looked ‘like a beggar, with torn clothes and shoes’, and told her he was going to try his luck in Uruguay.
Simon Wiesenthal had picked up Wagner’s trail while chasing after Franz Stangl in the 1960s. Retracing Wagner’s escape route, he discovered that, after the two fugitives had parted in Rome, Wagner had travelled to Beirut and then Brazil. By 1967, when Stangl was extradited, Wiesenthal had copies of Wagner’s postwar Red Cross passport and his first Brazilian identification card in his possession (’so we had a fair picture of what he might still look like’) as well as an early Brazilian address. Elated by the Stangl capture, friends of Wiesenthal put him in touch with a Jewish millionaire who was also a concentration-camp survivor. After Simon explained that a discreet search, which wouldn’t alarm Wagner into fleeing Brazil, would be costly, the man pressed all of fifty dollars into his hand.
Wiesenthal was outraged. ‘If I could get Gustav Wagner arrested for fifty dollars, I wouldn’t have to come to you,’ he said as he stalked out of the room.
The man ran after him and spent a quarter of an hour explaining his recent financial reverses. ‘If you’re so poor,’ Wiesenthal told him angrily, ‘I can give you a hundred dollars.’ He went away thinking that ‘if Gustav Wagner has many enemies like such a survivor, then he doesn’t need friends.’
For ten years after that, says Wiesenthal, ‘I laid low and, in whatever material I gave the media, never mentioned Wagner’s name as being on our wanted list. Several times, we try to locate him with help from friends in various Brazilian cities, but no results.’
Then, in the spring of 1978, on a flight from New York to Amsterdam, Wiesenthal was thumbing through the New York Daily News when he came across an item about a reunio
n of old Nazis that had taken place on 20 April to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s eighty-ninth birthday. Under the slogan of ‘WE ARE NOT THE LAST OF YESTERDAY, BUT THE FIRST OF TOMORROW’, this Fourth Reich celebration had lasted three days at the Hotel Tyll in Italiata in the Brazilian province of São Paulo.
From Amsterdam, where his daughter Pauline and her family were living at the time, Wiesenthal contacted a Brazilian foreign correspondent he’d met in Israel, Mario Chimanovich of Jornal do Brasil, the country’s biggest daily, and asked for photos from the party. A few days after Simon’s return to Vienna, Chimanovich phoned to say he had not just a giant photo of all the assembled guests, but also the invitation list. And, suspecting that Simon was on to a story, he agreed to fly to Vienna to deliver them in person.
Wiesenthal had been playing a hunch that Wagner was at the event. Disappointed not to find Wagner’s name or recognizable face in the new material, he decided to bluff his trusting friend, Chimanovich, by pretending that a Nazi with big ears in the photograph was his quarry. ‘If it wasn’t quite kosher, well, I owe this try to a quarter of a million Jews who died in Sobibor,’ Simon told himself even as he told Chimanovich: ‘Do you see this one here? He’s Gustav Wagner and he’s showing himself publicly at a celebration of Hitler’s birthday in Brazil without anybody paying any notice. And I should think your police know where to find him.’
Armed with Wiesenthal’s dossier and documents on Wagner, Chimanovich wrote a story that appeared on the front page of Jornal do Brasil on 27 May 1978. Public reaction was fierce upon learning that the deputy commandant of Sobibor was living as a free man among millions of Brazilians. Pleading his innocence and seeking protection, the long-eared Nazi who wasn’t Wagner turned himself in to the police. And so did the real Gustav Wagner, whose Red Cross and Brazilian ID photos made him a marked man too. He even told the police nobody had died in Sobibor.
With Wagner in custody and expensive lawyers engaged to set him free, Wiesenthal had forty-eight hours to supply evidence that would ‘show cause’ for detaining the suspect and to persuade a government to ask for his extradition. Israel responded first, then a reluctant Austria, then Germany and Poland. A dossier of depositions went air-freight to Brazil, while Wiesenthal held his breath about connecting flights and customs delays.
Simon could have breathed easy. In the town of Gojana, 550 miles from São Paulo, Stanislaw Szmajzner, the teenaged Jewish goldsmith who had melted down fillings to make jewellery at Sobibor and testified against Stangl, heard the news and heaved a huge sigh of relief. A few years earlier, when Gitta Sereny had told him Gustav Wagner was still alive and probably in Brazil, ‘Shlomo’ Szmajzner had gone pale and sat down hard. ‘This is the worst, most terrible shock you give me,’ he told her, gasping. ‘That man! Here in Brazil? To think that I am now breathing the same air as him makes me feel terribly, terribly ill . . . I wouldn’t know how to find words to describe to you what a terrible – what a truly terrible man that is! Stangl, he is good by comparison – very good. But Wagner, he should be dead.’ Sereny says Szmajzner kept repeating, ‘I must do something.’
Now that he had the chance, Szmajzner, by then only fifty, hastened to São Paulo to confront Wagner in a police station.
‘How are you, Gustl?’ he greeted Wagner.
Wagner looked at him blankly, then recognized him: ‘Yes, yes, I remember you well. I must have picked you out of the transport and saved your life.’
‘That’s right,’ Szmajzner replied, ‘but you didn’t save the lives of my sister, my brothers, my mother and my father. And if you’re saying that you saved my life, then you’re also saying you had the power to kill the others.’
Whether the authorities accepted this logic, they now rejected Wagner’s blanket denials that he’d had anything to do with deaths at Sobibor, where ‘nobody died’ anyway. Now the question was where to extradite him.
Germany took the lead because, from the Stangl case, it had the best evidence and a solid claim to put Wagner on trial. Transferred to a cell in the capital, Brasilia, he tried to commit suicide by eating his eyeglasses, which he’d crushed with a shoe. A guard intercepted him seconds after he started chewing the ground glass. Treated at a prison hospital and then examined at a psychiatric hospital, Wagner was sent back to jail, where he then suffered a series of heart attacks which Simon says were ‘kosher’, and attempted suicide again. He went on telling Brazilian authorities that ‘I knew what was happening there [in Sobibor], but I never went to see. I only obeyed orders.’ Later, in a television interview, Wagner acknowledged the nature of his work, but insisted: ‘I had no feelings . . . It just became another job. In the evening, we never discussed our work, but just drank and played cards.’
In June 1979, the Supreme Court in Brasilia threw out the West German extradition request because of a typing error in its Portuguese translation, which said Wagner had been on the wanted list since ‘1974’ instead of ‘1947’. Brazil’s statute of limitations specifies that charges must be preferred within twenty years after commission of a crime. Wagner was set free.
But he was not a free man. With the heinous revelations in the press, even Nazi doors in Brazil were closed to him. He tried suicide twice more in São Paulo: once by stabbing himself with a knife, once by throwing himself in front of a car. Then, around the time West Germany presented the Brazilian court with a properly typed translation of the accusations against him, Wagner vanished – but he didn’t go far. At a remote farm fifty miles from São Paulo on 4 October 1980, he finally succeeded at suicide by hanging himself. He was sixty-nine years old.
‘For me,’ says Simon Wiesenthal, ‘Wagner’s suicide must serve as a confession. But I wonder whether he felt guilt – or just fatigue.’
32
The mare of Majdanek went to Germany
Created in 1979, the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations pinpointed several hundred Nazis and their collaborators residing in the US and deported (including Ivan Demjanjuk of Cleveland and Andrija Artukovic of Surfside, California, to death sentences in Israel and Yugoslavia,66 and Feodor Fedorenko to a Soviet firing squad) in the eighties. But it owes its existence to the day in 1964 when Simon Wiesenthal pointed an accusing finger at Mrs Russell Ryan, wife of a Queens construction worker. Nine years later, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan became the first war criminal ever to be deported from the US into custody of a country where she had committed some of her crimes. ‘I fought for nine years to extradite her to Germany,’ says Wiesenthal. ‘It was worth it just for her case alone, but it opened the door to dozens of other deportations from the US since then.’
Wiesenthal’s foot in the US’s revolving door took its first step in April 1964, when a woman recognized him in a Tel Aviv café and told him: ‘I was at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. There was a guard there named Hermine Braunsteiner who used a vicious dog and a whip weighted with lead on women prisoners. She enjoyed flogging us, she enjoyed it when we screamed and even more when we fainted. She was a complete sadist. When mothers with children were brought to the camp, she’d tear the children away. She hated children. Mr Wiesenthal, in Majdanek I saw cruel men and cruel women. The women were worse – and Hermine Braunsteiner was the most vicious of them all. I don’t know what’s become of her, but she must answer for her crimes. Please try to find her.’
Simon had never heard of Hermine Braunsteiner, but, his interest piqued, he looked up the name upon his return to Vienna. She was, in fact, born in his adopted city in 1919 and had worked as a Viennese housemaid before moving to Berlin when Austria became part of Germany in 1938. In August 1939, she joined the SS and was assigned to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin. There she rose rapidly to guard supervisor and head of the clothing detail by the time she was twenty. In October 1942, she was transferred to Majdanek, a new extermination camp on the outskirts of Lublin. When she left there in early 1944, she was a supervising warden. Reassigned to Ravensbrück, she served as director of
a satellite labour camp in nearby Genthin until the Allied armies approached in 1945, when she fled home to Austria.
On 6 May 1946, she was arrested by Austrian authorities on charges of assassination, manslaughter, infanticide, torture, and ‘injuring and offending the human dignity of inmates’ – but just at Ravensbrück. Released from jail on 18 April 1947, she came to trial in 1948 in Austria’s second-largest city, Graz, where she received a three-year sentence. With credit for time served awaiting trial, she was set free on 22 November 1949 and granted an amnesty from further prosecution in her native Austria. According to Wiesenthal: ‘Of her activity at Majdanek only little was known. Except for the letter of a Polish woman, which didn’t figure in the Graz proceedings, nothing was known. The matter of Majdanek was not mentioned.’
Having told a Viennese neighbour that ‘there isn’t enough to eat in the city. I think I’ll go to live with my relatives in the country’, Hermine Braunsteiner had vanished from view right after her release fifteen years earlier. From the neighbour, Wiesenthal obtained the name and village of her country cousins in Carinthia. Since a cosmopolitan foreign-born Jew like Wiesenthal would stand out in an inbred rural society even if he weren’t recognized as a celebrity, Simon dispatched one of his many volunteers: the guilt-ridden twenty-four-year-old son of an unrepentant Nazi family. The young man took his vacation in the mountain village and, on the third day, knocked on the relatives’ door and told them they had the same last name as his relatives in Salzburg province. They never did link their kin, but he ingratiated himself with them and was invited back for several meals. Over lunch one day, he mentioned a ‘poor uncle’ who had ‘done no harm’ worthy of his fifteen-year sentence.
