Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (22 page)

“We were rowing on the lake with the children that day when Michel arrived on the shore. This was the only time I saw him. No,
he
never did anything for us after Paul left. I don’t know what Paul meant when he told you it was Michel who ‘got us out’. Michel called to us across the lake and said that a message had come through to say that Paul was to report to Globocnik. We rowed back to the shore and Michel said, ‘They mean now, at once; you have to come with me right away.’

“We went back to the house and I remember, I helped him get changed and then he left.

“After he had gone that day I got terribly depressed: you see, although I had allowed him to convince me that he wasn’t really part of what was happening, I couldn’t forget it; how could I have? That night Countess Chelmicki found me crying. In my terrible need to talk to somebody I told her what I had found out.

“ ‘Don’t you think we know?’ she asked. ‘We’ve known about it since the beginning. But you must calm yourself; it is dreadful, but there is nothing to be done. We are convinced that your husband is a decent man.’ She really cared. She spoke to me – you know – like a friend, intimately and warmly. I was very comforted by her kindness.

“The next day Paul came back, just for a day, or even less. He said he was being transferred, to Treblinka – a place, he said, that was in a terrible mess, where the worst
Schweinereien
were being done, and where it was necessary to make a clean sweep with an iron broom. I said, ‘My God, I hope not another place like this one here,’ and he said no, he didn’t think so – for me not to worry. I said I wanted to go home.”

I asked Frau Stangl whether it had not been her husband who told
her
he wanted them to go home.

“No, I told
him.
And, well … then he left. I’d told him I wanted to leave as quickly as possible – I didn’t want to impose on the Chelmickis a moment longer than necessary. Anyway, the next day Reichleitner came to the fish-hatchery.”

Franz Reichleitner, who had been with Stangl at Hartheim, took over as Kommandant of Sobibor after Stangl left. “He said he wanted to have a look around the fish-hatchery,” Frau Stangl continued. “Well, of course I knew him, you know, because he had married my friend Anna Baumgartner from Steyr and so I felt I had something in common with him; I trusted him you know, so I said, ‘You know, if I thought that my Paul had anything to do with the awful things which are being done at Sobibor, I wouldn’t stay with him another day.’

“He answered quite spontaneously, you know, not thinking it over at all. He said right away, ‘My God, Frau Stangl,’ he said, ‘but your husband has absolutely
nothing
to do with that. That’s all Wirth. You don’t think, do you, that he would allow anyone to rob him of the pleasure of doing away with the Jews? You know how he hates them. Your husband’s part in this is purely administrative.’ ” (Before Frau Stangl told me this, she had already testified at the trial, that after the war, in Brazil, Gustav Wagner had also told her that her husband had had nothing to do with the extermination of the Jews in Sobibor.) “Well,” she went on, “to be truthful, that really did relieve my mind and lighten my spirits. After all, unless Paul and Reichleitner had carefully planned it together – and to tell the truth, the possibility did occur to me – the fact that they told me exactly the same thing, in the same words, had to mean it was true. Why otherwise should Reichleitner have bothered to tell me?”

It didn’t occur to Frau Stangl then or now that Reichleitner, who had just taken the job over from Stangl, could have found this conversation with his friend’s wife awkward on his own account, and might conceivably have been indirectly stating, or justifying, his own case.

“I left a very few days after that,” she said. “I think it was Reichleitner who brought me the travel documents signed by Globocnik – it may have been just two or three days after Paul left. I think Reichleitner also drove us to the train in Chelm. And so I went home. I had a letter from Paul soon after, but it said nothing about Treblinka; he had told me I must
never
mention Treblinka nor anything about it, or make any of my ‘remarks’ in my letters – he knew me so well – as all letters were censored.… I didn’t see him after that for months.…”

“Resl and the two girls came to stay with me overnight on their way back from Poland,” said Helene Eidenböck in Vienna. “I went to meet them at the East Station. No, she didn’t seem very depressed, not that I remember. She said they’d been staying at a fish-hatchery and I saw all their photographs … was it then or later, I am not sure – of him too, yes, in that white jacket, with the children, and a big dog too I remember.…Later, of course, when we read what he was – I thought of that photo and thought, ‘It only needed the riding crop and there he was, just as they described him at the trial.…’ ”

*
Probably best translated as “tousle-heads”.

6

B
Y THE
time Stangl left Sobibor a lot of information about the Nazi death-camps in Poland was beginning to reach the outside world.

In July 1942 the Polish government in exile in London, in an officially released report from underground sources, had detailed the massacre of 700,000 Jews since the German invasion, including the use of gas-vans at Chelmno. Szmul Zygielbojm, a leader in the Jewish Socialist Bund, who escaped from Poland after his wife and children had been killed and after fighting in the defence of Warsaw, broadcast on the BBC, world-wide, to bear witness to the awful facts and to beg the world, “to ponder over the undiluted horror of the planned extermination of a whole people.… The governments of Great Britain and America,” he said, “must be compelled to put an end to this mass murder. For if we do not try to find a means of stopping it, we shall bear part of the moral responsibility for what is happening.”

On July 17 the Berlin radio announced the round-up of 18,000 Jews in Paris, saying they would “all be deported to the East, as previously announced”. German radio, throughout the war, was minutely monitored by the Allies and this announcement must certainly have been noted. On July 22 began the “resettlement” of the 380,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and again the. Allied Governments were informed by the Polish Government in exile.

A detailed account of American and British reaction to these events has been given by Arthur D. Morse in
While Six Million Died.
*
Here there is only space to mention that on August 1, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, in Switzerland for the World Jewish Congress, learned from a leading German industrialist with access to Hitler’s immediate circle that many months earlier Hitler had ordered the extermination of all the Jews in Europe. Mr Riegner sent a cable to Rabbi Wise in the United States, via the us State Department: “Received alarming report … plan all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering from three and a half to four million excluding Jews in the Soviet Union [a significant sentence showing the extent of the informant’s knowledge] should after deportation and concentration in East be exterminated at one blow to resolve once and for all the Jewish question in Europe.…”

This cable was apparently suppressed by the State Department – the first of many similar political decisions – and only reached Rabbi Wise, via the British Foreign Office and the London branch of the World Jewish Congress, on August 28. And Dr Wise was persuaded by Sumner Welles to refrain from any public announcement of the extermination order until “official confirmation” could be obtained. Myron Taylor, the President’s Special Envoy to the Holy See, was asked to check these allegations with the Vatican.

Between August 4 and September 14 the governments of Brazil (who initiated this step), Great Britain, Belgium, Poland, Uruguay, Yugoslavia and the United States all sent notes to the Vatican Secretary of State calling the attention of the Holy See to the “cruel and inhuman treatment by the Hitler forces of the civil population in areas occupied by the Germans”, and suggesting that “a
similar condemnation of these atrocities by the Holy Father would have … a helpful effect … in bringing about some check on the unbridled and uncalled-for actions of the forces of the Nazi regime.”

This – in line with diplomatic custom – was still in fairly general terms. On September 26 Myron Taylor delivered a far more explicit note to Cardinal Maglione, communicating information received by the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine from “two reliable eye-witnesses (Aryans),”
*
one of whom came on August 14 from Poland:

“(1) Liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto is taking place. Without any distinction all Jews, irrespective of age or sex, are being removed from the ghetto in groups and shot. Their corpses are utilized for making fats and their bones for the manufacture of fertilizer. Corpses are even being exhumed for these purposes.
†

“(2) These mass executions take place, not in Warsaw, but in specially prepared camps for the purpose, one of which is stated to be in Belsec.…”

The letter ends, after making three more points, by asking for any confirmation or additional information the Vatican might have, and for suggestions “as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion would be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities”.

This communication was not to be answered until October 10 when Harold Tittman, the American Representative at the Holy See, transmitted the following reply to the State Department:

“Holy See replied today to Mr Taylor’s letter regarding the
predicament
of the Jews in Poland in an informal and unsigned statement handed me by the Cardinal Secretary of State. After thanking Ambassador Taylor for bringing the matter to the attention of the Holy See, the statement says that reports of
severe measures
taken against non-Aryans also reached the Holy See from other sources but that, up to the present time, it has not been possible to verify the accuracy there. However, the statement adds, it is well known that the Holy See is taking advantage of every opportunity offered in order to mitigate the sufferings of
non-Aryans
.…”
*

Late October finally saw the formation of a War Crimes Commission in the United States; but the official statement announcing it included the President’s exemption from guilt of all but the Nazi leadership.

This was followed on December 17 by an official condemnation by all the Allied nations of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. The Allies served notice that those responsible would not escape punishment, reaffirming “their solemn resolution to insure that those responsible for these crimes shall not escape retribution and to press on with the necessary practical measures to this end.”

On Christmas Eve, 1942 – when what Richard Glazar was to call the “peak period” of the extermination of the Jews in Poland was already past and more than a million had been killed in the four extermination camps in Poland – Mr Tittman sent Secretary of State Hull another cable. He had had – no doubt at one of the Vatican’s Christmas receptions – another conversation with the Cardinal Secretary of State in which Cardinal Maglione, with reference to the mass extermination of the Jews, said that “although deploring the cruelties that have come to his attention, the Holy See was unable to verify Allied reports as to the number of Jews exterminated.…”
†

*
Seeker and Warburg, 1968.

*
Myron Taylor’s brackets; as other us and British documents of the time prove, information obtained from Jews was considered unreliable.

†
This information was not exact in detail. They were, as we know, not “shot”; and the universally accepted story that the corpses were used to make soap and fertilizer is finally refuted by the generally very reliable Ludwigsburg Central Authority for Investigation into Nazi Crimes. The Authority has found after considerable research that only one experiment was made, with “a few corpses from a concentration camp. When it proved impractical the idea was apparently abandoned.”

*
Author’s italics.

†
The extent of the Vatican’s knowledge of the facts by December 1942 is documented on
this page
–
this page
.

Part III

1

T
HE MAIN
impression I had carried away from Sobibor was one of beauty: the quiet, the loneliness, above all the vastness of the place, which left everything to the imagination. Treblinka was different.

The Poles have spared no effort to reconstruct the whole of the camp as a national monument which, while adequately portraying the horror, can also leave one with some feeling of human dignity. But it doesn’t work. All one can think of is the terrible smallness of the place.

We
know
that more than a million human beings were killed and lie buried in these few acres, but it cannot be believed. The main reason why it is so difficult to visualize lies in nature itself: where there used to be huts, barbed wire, tank traps and watch-towers, there are now hundreds of bushes and young pine trees which the Germans planted to camouflage the site when, having accomplished what they set out to do, they obliterated the camp at the end of 1943. The trees have grown to a respectable height and lend a misleading air of normalcy and space. There were, of course, some trees while the camp was in operation – carefully left standing where they could deceive the eye, or decorate the staff’s living quarters. But, unlike Sobibor with its massive forests, in Treblinka the means of camouflage were mostly man-made: tall fences of barbed wire interwoven with branches of pine and evergreen which shut off the four sub-sections of the camp from view, but certainly not from hearing. What they called “the tube” which led from the “undressing barracks” in the lower camp – Camp I – to the gas chambers in the upper camp – Camp II – was a fenced-off path no more than a hundred yards long, with a right-angled turn near the end. And the earthen wall and ten-foot fence between the two main parts of the camp again created only a visual barrier – no more than that. Not a single soul in the place could have been oblivious of the monstrous carnage which took place here most mornings of that year.