Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (25 page)

I was given a somewhat different account by
SS
sergeant Franz Suchomel who was posted to Treblinka before Stangl, on August 20. I spent a day talking to him at his house in Bavaria, and after that we communicated by letter because he suffers from a heart condition and said it was too taxing for him to
talk
about it (he did in fact have a second heart attack some time later). After reading the Stangl interviews in the German newspaper
Die Zeit
he wrote to say that it was not true that there were corpses outside the camp, or tents nearby with whores. “It’s true there was a lot of garbage lying about, possibly also paper money, but never gold, diamonds, etc. True enough, thousands of stacked corpses.…”

Against this, however, there is the extraordinary eye-witness account recorded at the time by Hubert Pfoch, then a member of the illegal Austrian Socialist Youth Organization, and now president of the Vienna City Council. As a young soldier moving up to the Eastern front, he saw a transport to Treblinka on August 21, 1942. The photographs he took – at considerable danger to himself (see
this page
of illustrations)-were part of the evidence at the trial often former Treblinka guards in Düsseldorf in 1964.

“Our infantry company is en route from Vienna to Russia, via Mährisch Ostrau, Kattowitz, through the Upper Silesian industrial region to Radom, Lukow and Siedlce where we arrive in the evening and are given soup,” he wrote (he gave me photocopied pages from his wartime diary). “From time to time we can hear shooting, and when I got out to see what was going on, I saw, a little distance from our track, a loading platform with a huge crowd of people – I estimated about 7,000 men, women and children.

“All of them were squatting or lying on the ground and whenever anyone tried to get up, the guards began to shoot.

“The night was sultry, the air sticky and we slept badly.

“Early next morning – August 22 – our train was shunted on to another track, just next to the loading platform, and this was when we heard the rumour that these people were a Jewish transport. They call out to us that they have been travelling without food or water for two days. And then, when they are being loaded into cattle cars, we become witnesses of the most ghastly scenes. The corpses of those killed the night before were thrown by Jewish auxiliary police on to a lorry that came and went four times. The guards – Ukrainian volunteer ss, some of them drunk – cram 180 people into each car [“I counted,” Herr Pfoch told me] parents into one, children into another, they didn’t care how they separated families. They scream at them, shoot and hit them so viciously that some of their rifle-butts break. When all of them are finally loaded there are cries from all cars – ‘Water,’ they plead, ‘my gold ring for water.’ Others offered us 5,000 zloty [2,500 Reichsmark] for a cup of water. When some of them manage to climb out through the ventilating holes, they are shot the moment they reach the ground – a massacre that made us sick to our souls, a blood-bath such as I never dreamed of. A mother jumps down with her baby and calmly looks into a pointing gun-barrel – a moment later we hear the guard who shot them boast to his fellows that he managed to ‘do’ them both with one shot through both their heads.”

Hubert Pfoch told me when I met him in Vienna in 1972 that he and his friends asked their officer – a young first lieutenant – to intervene with the
SS
officer in charge.

“He agreed to do it,” said Herr Pfoch, “but when he suggested to the
SS
officer that this outrageous spectacle was unworthy of Germany and German honour, the
SS
bellowed that if our officer and the rest of us ‘Ostmarkler’ (
Ostmark
was the Nazi term for Austria as a province of the Third Reich) didn’t like it and didn’t shut up about it, he’d be glad to ‘add a special car to the train for us, and we could join the Jews and warmongers and get to know Treblinka.’ ” The next part of the entry in the young Pfoch’s diary would seem to prove Stangl’s memory quite correct.

“When at last our train leaves the station,” Pfoch wrote, “at least fifty dead, women, men and children, some of them totally naked, lie along the track. We saw the Jewish police remove them – all kinds of valuables disappeared into their pockets, too. Eventually our train followed the other train and we continued to see corpses on both sides of the track – children and others. They say Treblinka is a ‘delousing camp’. When we reach Treblinka station the train is next to us again – there is such an awful smell of decomposing corpses in the station, some of us vomit. The begging for water intensifies, the indiscriminate shooting by the guards continues.…Three hundred thousand have been assembled here,” Pfoch continued [and we must remember that this diary was written in
August 1942
]: “Every day ten or fifteen thousand are gassed and burned. Any comment is totally superfluous.…” And then he adds, obviously in a mild attempt to make his diary a trifle less perilous if found: “They say that arms were found in the ghettos and that is the reason for these counter-measures.”

Commenting to me on the photograph on
this page
of the illustrations, Herr Pfoch said that seconds after he had taken it, the tall Ukrainian soldier in the background hit out so hard at the children who were “slow to move” that he split the butt of his rifle in two. Stangl told me that on that first visit to Treblinka he was shown round the camp by Dr Eberl, the Kommandant. “There was shooting everywhere … I asked him what was happening to the valuables, why weren’t they being sent to
HQ
. He said – he said in the face of all the stuff we were wading through – ‘The transports are ransacked before they ever leave Warsaw.’

“I went straight back to Warsaw and told Globocnik that it was impossible: no order such as he had given me could be carried out in that place. ‘It’s the end of the world,’ I said to him, and told him about the thousands of rotting corpses. He said, ‘It’s supposed to be the end of the world for them.’ And he told me to stay in Warsaw that night, that he would call Wirth in for a meeting.…

“I had heard that the new police chief of Warsaw was a man from my wife’s home town in Austria. I went to see him as soon as I left Globocnik and I begged him to help me get a transfer.”

“
Did you tell him about Treblinka?
”

“No, no, you don’t understand: it would have been madness; the secrecy regulations were absolute.”

This was, of course, ridiculous when, as he had put it “whores from Warsaw” had congregated around the camp, not to speak of what we have learned since. But equally, there is ample evidence in the records of rigorous, if obviously fairly futile, security regulations.

“But he said anyway he’d help; he’d try to get me into an anti-partisan unit. He wrote everything down – I really thought this time it would work. But it didn’t. I never heard from him again. Of course, any transfer required Globocnik’s signature – without that it couldn’t be done. And I know now it was stupid of me ever to hope. Globocnik could never have let me go.…

“Wirth came the next morning. And after his meeting with Globocnik we went back to Treblinka. We went into a long meeting with Eberl as soon as we arrived. I went to the mess for some coffee and talked to some of the officers. They said they had great fun; shooting was ‘sport’; there was more money and stuff around than one could dream of, all there for the taking; all one had to do was help oneself. In the evening, they said, Eberl had naked Jewesses dance for them, on the tables. Disgusting – it was all disgusting.”

Suchomel, who is nothing if not a meticulous witness and always eager to – as it were – “defend” the Jews, had his own comments to make on this. “There were never nude Jewesses dancing on tables,” he said, “that’s untrue. What is true is that once Eberl, when he was drunk, made a dancer dance naked in the kitchen. He ordered her to undress – which she did most unwillingly. When Wirth heard of this later, he had the poor girl shot. August Hengst had played the pimp on that occasion.”

Suchomel had another remark to make about Stangl’s arrival in Treblinka. “The first suggestion I heard Stangl make after he arrived,” he said, “was to put buckets in the tube for the women. They all defecated you know, while they ran, or stood there, waiting. Stangl said he had put buckets in the tube in Sobibor and it had proved helpful. Wirth answered ‘I don’t care a damn what you did with the shit in Sobibor. Let them beshit themselves. It can be cleaned up afterwards.’ ” Apparently two men were then assigned to “cleaning up” the road to the gas chambers between transports.

“That night at dinner,” Stangl continued, “Wirth announced that Eberl and four of his staff had been recalled for an important mission and that he, Wirth, would be staying for a while. Eberl and the others left the next morning. Wirth stayed for two weeks or so and reorganized the camp. He tidied it up – I will say that for him. He rang Warsaw and stopped all transports until the place could be cleaned up.”

This whole timetable, as Stangl described it to me, is open to doubt, and not merely because of the slight discrepancy between how his wife remembered the sequence of events, and how he did. The trial evidence appears to prove that Globocnik had been made aware of the breakdown situation at Treblinka “some time in August” – well before the time Stangl describes – and had gone there himself with his aide Oberhauser, who testified to this effect at the trial, and Wirth. According to this account, Globocnik relieved Eberl then and there, put Wirth in charge and himself gave the orders how the camp was to be reorganized. (Suchomel, too, told me that “Eberl was gone by the time Stangl arrived”.) Oberhauser also testified that it was at Treblinka, “leaning against a door [of a barrack] in the square”, that Globocnik decided on Stangl as the replacement for Eberl, and said he would “organize all that from his office the next day” – also Stangl’s replacement (Reichleitner) for Sobibor. It is probable that Stangl altered the sequence of these events for my benefit so as to convey as much as possible the impression that his reassignment to Treblinka had been “a surprise” to him and that, once again, he “didn’t really know” what his function was to be, a myth he kept up throughout his trial and only relinquished in his conversations with me at the very end.

“
What were you doing during the time Wirth was ‘reorganizing the camp
’?” I asked him.

“Well, of course I had my specific orders: to find out about the valuables and the money. On the fifth day I was there, a courier – Felke was his name, I think – came from Sobibor and Lublin. He said that Michel sent his best regards and that my family had left. After that I felt better. I’d got a funny feeling that something fishy had been going on between Wirth and Eberl” – he now spoke with the animation and interest characteristic of the dedicated police officer. “It seemed to me, the chaos – the complete breakdown in security – might almost have been deliberate, so as to make control impossible and enable somebody to by-pass
HQ
in Poland [Globocnik] and send things straight to the Führer Chancellery in Berlin.” He sounded secretive about this even now, indeed to such a degree that what he said became believable. He went on, in this same secretive manner, to mention names of people such as Blankenburg whom he claimed always to have suspected of illegal dealings in Jewish property.

“
But wasn’t there a common interest involved here?
”

“Oh, you have no idea of the rivalries and intrigues between different departments, sections, ministries and individuals. There were enormous – fantastic – sums involved and everybody wanted a piece of it, and everybody wanted control.”

Although the booty from the extermination camps was not, as I have said, so enormous as Stangl seemed to think it, this last claim of his is borne out by the record, which provides a wealth of documentary proof of the greed and jealousies between different departments of the Nazi administration regarding the spoils of the “Final Solution”. One interesting account – later confirmed to me by Suchomel – speaks of a messenger arriving from Berlin with “a suitcase” and orders, from Blankenburg, to return with one million marks. “We crammed a million into it,” said Suchomel, “and he went off with it to Berlin.” Equally, the record speaks on many occasions of Globocnik’s financial unreliability because of which, after being involved in currency speculations, he was originally removed from his job as Gauleiter of Vienna, reduced in rank and only reassigned to his position in Lublin because of his well-known virulent anti-Semitism and his friendship with Himmler (who called him ‘Globus’ – Globe in English).

Stangl, however, quite clearly admired Globocnik and was soon to become “his man”. He had moved into Eberl’s quarters and Wirth, for the two weeks which, according to Stangl, he spent there, had the guest room next to him. One evening during those two weeks in September, Wirth told Stangl that Kurt Franz, whose reputation for ruthlessness had preceded him, was going to arrive shortly “to get this heap moving”. “I went back to see Globocnik,” Stangl said, “and told him that I believed Eberl and Wirth to have conspired about routing the Treblinka valuables to Berlin instead of to the
HQ
in Poland. Globocnik said, ‘Ah, the villains’, as if this had finally explained something that had puzzled him all along. I told him that I was prepared to see that all material as of now would be safely delivered to his office.”

Here again the dates are wrong; for it is known that both Stangl and Kurt Franz (and not Wirth) were in Treblinka on September 11 when an
SS
man (whose name is variously reported as Max Biala or Bielas) was killed by a prisoner – an event rare and heroic enough to be remembered very precisely by a number of people. But dates are only marginally relevant. What the court considered important in the Stangl trial was motivation; and the prosecution later contended that Stangl’s offer to Globocnik was not motivated – as he was attempting to establish – by his desire to limit his function in the camp, but rather, when he learned that Kurt Franz was to arrive (whenever that was), by a wish to protect his superior position in the hierarchy. And this contention seems supported by Stangl’s own confirmation to me, during our second series of conversations nine weeks after the first, that it was from then on that Globocnik considered him “one of his men”, on whose loyalty he relied completely.