Nazi Hunter (55 page)

After dinner on his first night there, Wirth announced he would be staying a while. Eberl and four of his officers left the next day for
a
Waffen SS
unit on the
Russian front.
⁵⁷
Wirth rang Warsaw and stopped all transports until Treblinka could be tidied up, which took him and Stangl two weeks before a
technocrat called Sergeant Heckenholt could be summoned from Belzec to expand the existing gas chamber with a dozen more cottage-like ‘bath-house’ annexes which all led to the same
end.

Early in the clean-up, the two partners in crime, Wirth and Stangl, stood at the rim of the burial pits filled with black-and-blue bodies. ‘It had nothing to do with humanity – it
couldn’t have,’ Stangl said later. ‘It was just a mass of rotting flesh.’ At the time, though, Wirth asked him, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’, and it was
his wording, Stangl insisted later, that ‘unconsciously started me thinking of them as cargo.’

Almost beside herself, interviewer Sereny said to Stangl: ‘There were so many children! Did they ever make you think of
your
children, of how you would feel in the position of
those parents?’

‘No,’ Stangl replied, ‘I can’t say I ever thought that way. You see, I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass.’ Inmates of Treblinka have
described Stangl standing atop the earthen wall dividing what were actually called ‘Death Camp’ and ‘Living Camp’ (Roll-Call Square; housing for ‘work-Jews’;
stables, textile store, bakery, and coal pile) in his white jacket and riding-pants and boots, ‘like Napoleon surveying his domain.’ Under questioning from Sereny, Stangl conceded that,
as soon as the living were naked in the undressing barracks, they ceased to be human beings to him: ‘I avoided [them] from my innermost being. I couldn’t confront them. I couldn’t
lie to them. I avoided at any price talking to those who were about to die. I couldn’t stand it.’ But he was not too squeamish to stand on the wall and ‘watch them in “The
Tube” . . . naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. . .’

‘Could you have changed that?’ Sereny asked. ‘In your position, couldn’t you have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?’

‘No, no, no,’ Stangl answered. ‘This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.’
Stangl’s
propensity for euphemism travelled with him from Hartheim to Sobibor to Treblinka, where ‘resettlement’ meant death within hours and ‘The Tube’ was termed ‘The Road to
Heaven’. Woven into ‘The Tube’s’ barbed wire soon after Stangl took command were pine branches changed daily by a camouflage squad of twenty ‘work-Jews’. For it
was truly at Treblinka that Stangl emerged as a Master of Illusion in an underworld whose every gateway was inscribed with the myth of ‘
Arbeit macht frei
’ (‘Work gives
freedom’).

For the Christmas season of 1942 – the only Christmas in the camp’s year and a quarter of existence – Stangl presented Treblinka with a ‘railway station’ to enrich
the solitary platform at the end of the line where the tracks disappeared into a mound of sand. Adjoining the platform was the windowless rear wall of the Sorting Barracks, where the victims’
valuables, clothes, and women’s hair (used for stuffing mattresses and insulating submarines) were readied for shipping. On to this wooden wall, Stangl had fake doors and windows painted in
pleasing pastels. The ‘windows’ were lined with cheerful curtains and framed by green blinds: all painted. The ‘doors’ were stencilled with signs saying ‘
STATION MASTER
’, ‘
TOILET
’, ‘
INFIRMARY
’ (with a red cross), and even ‘
FIRST
CLASS
’ and ‘
SECOND CLASS
’ waiting-rooms. The ‘station’s’ ticket window has been appraised by an artist as a triumph of
trompe
l’oeil
which tricked the eye with the false perspective of its painted ledge and vertical grillework barred by a horizontal ‘
CLOSED
’ sign. Next to the
window, a large timetable announced departures to Warsaw, Bialystok, and Wolkowysk, but the one true destination, Death, wasn’t posted. Only the flowers on the front façade were
real.

To enhance the mirage of a transit camp, two arrows pointing in opposite directions led to real doors, but both were death’s doors. The arrow pointing left ‘To
BIALYSTOK
’ took thousands to the undressing rooms to be shorn of all earthly belongings, including female hair, before being put through ‘The Tube’. The arrow pointing
right ‘To
WOLKOWYSK
’ led to one final fatal illusion: a fake ‘hospital’ with a red cross on its front, but no roof. The old and sick as well as the
very young – all those deemed unfit to make their way through the undressing barracks and ‘The Tube’ – were dispatched to this ‘hospital’, where nurses undressed
them and seated them on the rim of a continuously burning pit. There, an executioner named August Miete shot them in the neck and let them topple in;
the SS called this
‘curing with a single pill’. Rather than waste precious bullets on children, Miete might throw them in alive, but more ‘humane’ SS men would sometimes smash tiny heads
against the wall first. That was how the milk of human kindness trickled through Stangl’s Treblinka.

Although it took longer to shear the women who went through ‘The Tube’, a hundred or more females from every transport were sent up ‘The Road to Heaven’ ahead of the
first men who stood naked and shivering in the Undressing Square. ‘Men won’t burn without women’ was one of the ‘scientific’ truths of Treblinka. Because the female
layer of subcutaneous fat is more highly developed than that of males, women’s bodies were used to kindle the fires from the bottom. Blood, too, was found to be first-rate combustion
material. And young corpses burned faster than old ones, for their flesh was softer, as veal is to beef. At Stangl’s request, an instructor in incineration – Herbert Floss, an SS
technical sergeant in his forties with a solicitous smile of perpetual care on his face – was sent over from Auschwitz. He was nicknamed
Tadellos
(Perfect) for his favourite
expression – ‘Thank God, now the fire’s perfect’ – when, ignited by gasoline, the pyre of corpses would burst into flames.

‘Today we burned 2000 bodies,’
Tadellos
told the ‘work-Jews’ at roll-call one night. ‘This is good, but we must not stop here. We will set ourselves an
objective and devote all our efforts to reaching it. Tomorrow we will do 3000, the day after tomorrow 4000, then 5000, then 6000, and so on until 10,000. Every day we will force ourselves to
increase output by one thousand units. I count on you to help me.’

And, driven by the law of supply and demand – enforced by whipping and killing – they did.

Cosmetically, the finishing touch to the all-important first impression of Treblinka came when Stangl’s deputy, Kurt Franz – a former boxer known as ‘The Doll’ for his
puffy, pouty good looks – had a realization that ‘a station without a clock is not a station.’ The camp carpenters painted the face of a clock on to a wooden cylinder eight inches
thick and twenty-eight inches in diameter. The ‘hands’ of the ‘clock’ were painted to read three o’clock. Time stood still in Stangl’s Treblinka on the edge of
eternity.

Some arrived in airless boxcars, defecating on their dead and licking the sweat from each others’ skins to slake their thirst. Polish and
Russian
Jews travelled in cattle cars; Czechs and Western Jews in passenger coaches or sometimes – as with a trainload of rich Bulgarian Jews – in sleepers with a special baggage car for their
valuables. No sooner had they dismounted and disrobed, however, than they were just cattle to be butchered into meat and bones and then burned to ashes and reduced to dust in 120 minutes of
orchestrated violence and delusion that gave them no time to think – or resist.

‘Faster! Faster!’ they were commanded in a rain of clubs and whips punctuated by thunderclaps of pistol shots. Men who lingered for a last look at loved ones were commended to the
voracious mercies of a dog called Barry, a mongrel St Bernard which, when presented by Stangl to his deputy, ex-boxer Kurt Franz, was already trained to bite off male genitals on command. All
‘The Doll’ had to say to his dog was a mocking ‘Look, man, that dog isn’t working!’ and Barry would emasculate the victim, whom Kurt Franz would usually finish off
with a bullet. At least three such canine attacks inside and outside ‘The Tube’ were documented at ‘The Doll’s’ 1964–5 trial in Düsseldorf, where he
received a life sentence. Also introduced as evidence was his scrapbook of photos from Treblinka. The album was titled ‘The Best Years of My Life’.

‘Faster!’ and ‘Faster!’ the victims of Treblinka climbed over each other just to escape from frying-pan to fire, from the terrors of ‘The Tube’ to
annihilation in the thirteen ‘bath-houses’ (one of them disguised as a synagogue) which disposed of 12,000 Jews in a typical day, but could – and, on occasion,
did
– kill 30,000
per diem
by working around the clock. To Herbert Floss’s perfection of the technology was added Kurt Franz’s pugilistic insight into primitive physical
medicine: if you make a man run all the way to the gas chamber, he will not only get there sooner, but, already gasping for breath, he will die faster.

On busy days, children, naked and barefoot, stood shivering in ‘The Tube’ waiting to be gassed. When their feet froze, they had to be ripped from the ground – or torn in half
by ‘Sepp’, a ferocious SS guard who specialized in killing children. Sometimes ‘Sepp’ couldn’t wait until his small ‘clients’ were in ‘The
Tube’. He would seize them by the feet upon arrival at Treblinka and smash their heads against boxcars. ‘Sepp’, later identified as Josef Hirtreiter, was the first Treblinka
‘Hangman’ to be brought to trial. In Frankfurt in 1951, he was given life in prison.

Most of Treblinka’s executioners, however, were not German, but Ukrainian, for Stangl’s staff, aside from slave labour, varied from thirty to forty SS and 200
to 300 Ukrainian guards, with the ideal ratio being five Ukrainians to each German. The Ukrainians, who had been at war with the Jews for most of the nearly 2000 years they had been living
together, took to the task with unsurpassed zeal. One of them, Fyodor Fedorenko – later of Waterbury, Connecticut
⁵⁸
– not only whipped
prisoners as he herded them into gas chambers, but shot those who knelt at his feet begging for mercy.

Above the entranceway to the main gas chamber was carved, in gold Hebrew letters, ‘
THIS IS THE GATE OF THE LORD. THE RIGHTEOUS SHALL ENTER THROUGH IT
’. Behind
the doors was no Gentile St Peter, but Ivan and Nikolai, two Ukrainians who had joined the SS and operated the machinery of death. Ivan was the taller of the two. He had close-cropped blond hair
and grey eyes that seemed kind and gentle until you looked into them – but, if you did, he would shatter your skull with a six-foot-long gas pipe he carried as a club. Nikolai, a pallid
miniature of Ivan, brandished a sabre, but he was merely a brute while Ivan was a sadist who recurs in the annals of Treblinka as ‘Ivan the Terrible’.

Whenever they needed more bodies for a full load before turning on the gas (throughout its brief history, Treblinka stuck with Wirth’s outmoded, but effective, carbon monoxide technology,
using motors from captured Soviet tanks and other dismantled equipment), Ivan and Nikolai would step out into ‘The Tube’ to hurry their victims along. Once, in a fit of frenzy, Ivan the
Terrible borrowed Nikolai’s sabre and slit open the bellies of a group of women from the Warsaw ghetto. Then, after piling the disembowelled women at the end of the ‘Road to
Heaven’, he forced some male prisoners to mount and have sex with them.

Even before the war had ended, in a 1944 memoir called
One Year in Treblinka,
a 1943 escapee named Yankel Wiernik wrote how Ivan ‘enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often
pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us lie down on the floor and whip us brutally. While he did
this, his face showed sadistic
satisfaction and he laughed and joked. He finished off the victims according to his mood at the moment.’

At the age of fifty-two, Wiernik had worked in the body-disposal detail. Written in hiding and published underground, his account of life and death at Treblinka was the first to reach England
and America and shock the world. He wrote:

‘Even in death,’ Wiernik noted, ‘mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends or foes. There was no more jealousy. All were
equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they were all yellow from the gas.’

At Treblinka, Chiel Rajchman, a textile merchant from Lodz, had worked as a ‘dentist’ – tearing open the corpses’ mouths with pliers and extracting any gold or silver
dental work. Escaping in August 1943, he hid in a bunker in Warsaw and jotted his recollections of Treblinka until the Red Army entered in early 1945 and freed him of everything but his
recollections: