Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (43 page)

“Glasenbach,” Stangl told me, “was really a conglomeration of six different camps with different categories of prisoners, 18,000 to 20,000 altogether. Some were housed in barracks, others in former ‘boat-houses’, still others in temporary buildings. It was pretty rough, for a long time. I was in Barrack
XVI
, with 2,000 men. [Frau Stangl said Barrack xviii.] From July 1945 to May 1946 we slept on the floor – there were neither bunks nor blankets. Then in May we got permission to build wooden frames with planks, and we lay on those. In the winter of 1946 we built sort of wooden chests in which we slept; in the spring of 1947 we were able to build a stove and after that it really did get better – we got bunks, blankets and were allowed parcels.…”

“It was a long time before I could begin bringing anything to Paul in Glasenbach,” said Frau Stangl. “When we first got back to Wels and to our house, our neighbour opened her door and shouted that I wasn’t allowed in – the ‘Amis’ [Americans] she said, had locked it up and requisitioned it. And anyway, they’d taken out everything that was in it. So I took the children to a friend and went right away to the American
HQ
. They said they certainly had not requisitioned our home, nor did they have the key. It was just as I’d suspected. That woman had always wanted my flat. I asked the Americans to send a soldier back with me and they did – in a jeep. The soldier went to the neighbour and all he said was one word,
‘Schlüssel’
[key], and off she went to get it.

“It was true enough, there was practically nothing left; bare bedboards, a couple of chairs, that was about all. But we managed. First we slept on the floor, then friends lent us blankets, and then, one day not long after, the neighbour’s door happened to be open when I passed by, and I saw my carpet on the floor. Before she had time to shut the door I was in; I went through that flat with a fine-tooth comb; I found our eiderdowns, our bed linen, pots and pans, and all our china. She screamed at me. She said, ‘You can’t take any of that; the Americans gave it to me.’ Well, maybe they did, but I didn’t believe it, and anyway, I didn’t care. You know, that woman – the day the Nazis marched into Wels, she had run out of her house, knelt on the ground, opened her arms wide towards the soldiers marching past and screamed, ‘Oh, my Führer, my Führer.’ The whole of Wels had reacted like that. Of all the women I knew, I was the only one who had refused to join the Frauenschaft and the Party. In my situation now, you know, it really makes no difference whether I was or wasn’t a Nazi. One way or the other I stand and fall with the man I loved, whatever he did. I don’t even want it any other way. But that was the truth. And I wasn’t going to let that woman rob me and my children for whom I was now entirely responsible.

“After this we had a very very hard time; we had terribly little money, only the little I had saved. We got very hungry. I used to go out to pick apples and hike around the farms to scrounge what I could from the peasants. But things went from bad to worse, and it was absolutely essential for me to find work. I finally managed to get an office job in a distillery, Bartl & Co. Hinterschweigergasse, in Wels. In fact it was quite interesting – I ended up doing quite a bit of their fruit-buying. I didn’t earn vast sums, but at least enough to eat modestly, though even then we were often hungry. The children’s health had begun to suffer – they were ten, nine and just under two years old. They’d come every afternoon to pick me up at work and almost every day my heart would sink when I saw them at the gate, looking pale, wan and often freezing cold. Paul tried to help; he made slippers and bags out of old military coats – God knows how he got hold of them, but the finished articles were very good; he’d send them to me in a big package once a month and I sold them. It turned into quite a thriving little business. The wives of other men who were with him in Glasenbach heard from their husbands that Paul was making these things, and they came to me, from as far away as Vienna, to buy them. It really helped.

“As soon as the trains worked again, I went to Glasenbach every week to bring him food parcels; I was so regular with my visits, other wives who couldn’t go so often, gave me parcels for their men. [The round trip took about six hours.] But I never saw Paul in the two and a half years he was in that camp. I didn’t see him until after he was handed over to the Austrians and sent to prison in Linz. After that I was able to see him every week. At first only in the presence of a guard – the Austrians, as you know, were always more Catholic than the Pope about their attitude towards Nazis –
after
the war; they were frightfully strict in that prison.”

*
Not unknown as a symptom of intense emotional stress.

5

I
T APPEARS
that the Americans interned Stangl simply because he had been a member of the
SS.
The routine examination revealed his anti-partisan activities in Italy and Yugoslavia, and he was asked no questions about any other war or prewar assignments.

Much has been written since then about the American occupation authorities and their investigation of Nazi criminals and crimes, a great deal of it critical in one way or another. And it is true that the political attitude of some of the American
civilian
authorities, reflecting as it did that of important factions in the State Department, was often neither consistent nor, to go even further, morally defensible. It is equally true, however, that the occupation authorities were faced with problems of such magnitude as to be almost insuperable (not unlike those confronting the International Red Cross and, to some extent, the Vatican).

As I saw for myself when working for
UNRRA
in Germany from the spring of 1945, the American fighting troops who first took over, while naturally inexperienced in the complexities of European history and politics, lacked nothing in moral indignation at what they found in Germany and elsewhere and were determined to “lock ’em up first and ask questions later”. They were, however, faced with an incredible medley of potential prisoners of war, many of them disguised as civilians, and of displaced persons of all nationalities. To make sense of the stories they were told, they would have needed literally thousands of meticulously trained investigators fluent in many foreign languages and commanding a wide knowledge of recent European political history. In such an intractable situation, any high degree of efficiency was unobtainable, however strong the will to see justice done.

A few months after the end of the war, additional conflict was introduced by a shift in the situation which had been neither foreseen nor guarded against. The fighting troops were very soon replaced by occupation personnel, men who had not experienced the discoveries made by the armies that had actually entered German-held territories at the end of the war. These men, on the whole, had a different attitude towards the Germans, towards other Europeans, whether in Germany or elsewhere, and towards displaced persons, whether Christians or Jews, former slave-workers or concentration-camp prisoners. There were, of course, some specialists among them – mostly of European origin – who were extremely well informed and dealt fairly with all concerned (or not, depending on the extent of their prejudices), but on the whole the
US
personnel soon felt considerably more sympathy for the Germans than for their victims. For the latter they often manifested a condescension bordering on insolence, and a distrust in their individual and collective integrity which – not surprisingly – made many perfectly honourable displaced persons resort to the very behaviour which they knew they were suspected of anyway.

To the demoralization of the displaced persons was added with the passing of time the “amoralization” of the occupation personnel, whose black-market activities in cigarettes, medical supplies, food and transport were soon nothing short of staggering.

The moral quagmire was even more complex in Austria than it was in Germany. There the psychological difficulties of the occupying forces were increased by the fact that Austria, manifestly an “enemy” in the war, had been declared a “liberated country” – a triumph for the Austrian Nazis, which caused bitter disillusionment for those who had suffered at their hands, and total bewilderment for the occupying troops.

In such circumstances anyone who wished to draw a veil over his Nazi activities could do so without the least difficulty, and Stangl’s belief that some sort of last-minute documentation from Berlin, Linz or Vienna might save him turned out to be not quite as naïve as it had appeared. Even without such documentation, there was still the touching faith displayed by the occupation forces in questionnaires, which could be filled in with convenient dishonesty by anyone able to put pen to paper.

In a letter to me written after our conversations in Brazil, Frau Stangl says: “I remember now that in the autumn of 1945 two men from the
CIC
came to see me; one was very ugly with bad teeth, the other was quite nice. The ugly one said, ‘I know your husband from Lublin; he was in Sobibor and Treblinka; I have reported it; he is as good as dead.’ And then they searched the house and took everything there still was belonging to my husband, and left. They knew my husband was at Glasenbach – I think they were looking for some sort of proof and because they didn’t find anything, they just went away and I never heard from them again.” There was, of course, no reason for Frau Stangl to invent this incident, which therefore indicates either that people could pose as
CIC
officials and get away with it,
*
or – even worse – that the American authorities, or some individuals working for them, knew in 1945 that they were holding in Glasenbach the former Kommandant of Sobibor and Treblinka.

It is quite possible that if Stangl had not originally been posted to Schloss Hartheim, he would never have attracted attention (even though, by 1947, Treblinka had come up repeatedly during the Nuremberg trials). The Austrians began their investigation of the Euthanasia Programme at Schloss Hartheim and discovered, as a result of a circular to Allied prisoner-of-war camps that Stangl was at Glasenbach. In the late summer of 1947 they requested he be handed over to them for trial and he was transferred to a civilian prison in Linz.

*
A letter from Frau Stangl shortly before this book went to press confirms her story about the CIC. “I examined their papers,” she writes. “I have no doubt whatever that they were genuine.”

6

“B
Y THIS
time our situation in Wels had also somewhat improved,” said Frau Stangl. “A young Hungarian girl, Maritza Rubinstein, had been billeted on me a few months before. [Later Frau Stangl corrected this name. “Maritza’s name,” she wrote, “was Lebovitch or something like that – her mother’s maiden name was Rubinstein. I remembered this after you left.”]

“First they were going to send me a rabbi, but I went to see the priest and begged him to intercede for me; I was quite prepared to have any number of women, but a man, in that small flat with the four of us, it just seemed impossible. Anyway, they relented and sent me Maritza – and she saved our lives I think. She worked at the
US
library in Wels and had
UNRRA
ration tickets; so she gave them to us and herself ate at the
US
officers’ mess; that’s how I was able to feed the children that terrible year. Even so, the two older ones got
TB
; the little one, thank God, sailed through it all healthy as a cricket. Later I got her into a kindergarten. Maritza – I wish I knew where she is now, she used to call me
Muttilein
– she was a wonderful, wonderful girl. Yes, I told her that my husband had been in the
SS
and in a camp. She had been imprisoned, at Mauthausen I think. When I told her, she said, ‘Show me his photograph. Then I’ll know whether I’ve met up with him.’ But she hadn’t. And we became friends.…”

(The fact that Maritza Lebovitch who was billeted on Frau Stangl worked at the
US
library is incidentally interesting because it throws light on the origin of one item of misinformation concerning Frau Stangl that has appeared in print. On page 313 of Simon Wiesenthal’s
The Murderers Are Among Us,
he says, “After her husband’s escape, Frau Stangl had found a job – at the local American Library.”

“I have never in my life worked in an American library,” Frau Stangl commented on this. “How could I have? I can’t speak English.”)

“But after Maritza had lived with us for a year or so, the arrangement became impossible; if I was to continue working – and I
had
to work – I had to have help with the children. So I found a maid and Maritza moved out.

“It wasn’t long after that, that the Hartheim trial began, in Linz. And one day I read in the paper that it was said at the trial that Franz Stangl had been police chief at Hartheim, and of course what had been done there. I went to see Paul, with the paper in my hand. By this time he had been moved to an open prison and was working in a construction gang. In this prison many prisoners – Paul too – had single rooms and they allowed us to be alone for as long as we liked. It really
was
‘open’ – we could go for walks and everything. He could have walked out of there any time he chose. Anyway, I showed him the paper and said, ‘Is this true? But then, why didn’t you tell me? Didn’t you know I’d stand by you?’ He said, ‘I didn’t want to burden you with it.’

“Well, I must tell the truth: however really terrible I felt about the people they killed in Treblinka and Sobibor, I didn’t feel like that about Hartheim. He told me all about it that day; who they were, how ill they were; how nobody could be killed without the four certificates from the doctors. I never knew exactly how these killings were done – not in Poland either; I somehow thought they assembled people and then exploded a gas-bomb. I thought at Hartheim they had given them injections. But I often imagined how I would have felt if I had had a baby who was so terribly abnormal; I know I would have loved it as much, perhaps even more than my normal children and yet …no, I cannot say in all honesty that I felt as badly about Hartheim.…