Nazi Hunter (60 page)

For Simon Wiesenthal, the case of Franz Stangl was a classic example of why retribution is always to be favoured over revenge.

‘Once I located where Stangl was,’ says Simon, ‘I could have had him killed for 500 dollars before he was ever extradited. In South America, it is only a matter of money. So
many people disappear. Even one of the officials I was bothering hinted to me that I could just write the cheque and soon I would receive Stangl’s ears. But this wasn’t what I was
after. So we ended up with Stangl on trial for six months and, each day, it was in the papers and millions of people were reading about it. If I’d had him killed, Stangl would have amounted
to just a corpse, a few lines in the press, and, later, nothing.

‘With Stangl, though, it was always a matter of money.’

The first breakthrough came on Friday, 21 February 1964, when Simon, who had been trumpeting Stangl’s sins to the press, was visited in his office by a woman in tears. ‘Mr
Wiesenthal,’ she said, ‘I had no idea my cousin Theresa was married to such a terrible man.’

‘What terrible man?’ he asked.

‘Franz Stangl.’

Without showing the excitement he felt, Wiesenthal asked almost casually: ‘And where is Theresa now?’

‘Why, in Brazil, of course,’ the woman replied. Then her mouth clamped shut and she took a step back, realizing she had said too much.

Having told the press that Stangl had left Damascus for an unknown destination, Wiesenthal attempted ‘to draw the woman out, but she wouldn’t say another word, no matter how hard I
tried.
And I couldn’t break my rule and ask her name. It was already well known in Vienna that I never demand the name or address of anyone who comes voluntarily to
give me information. So I had to let her go away anonymous.’

To this day, nobody knows who this cousin was. Theresa Stangl’s younger sister, Helene, was already living in Vienna: a restaurant cook and second wife of a Viennese Jewish construction
engineer who had escaped to Shanghai in 1939 and returned after the war. They had met at a swimming-pool in 1959 and they visited his daughter and grandchildren on a kibbutz in Israel every year
until he died in 1969; she was still doing so when Franz Stangl’s biographer, Gitta Sereny, dropped in on her unannounced in 1972. Neither Helene Eidenböck nor her husband had any idea
of her brother-in-law’s past until they read in the papers in 1964 that Wiesenthal was looking for him. Her husband ‘hardly spoke for a week’, she told Sereny. ‘He was
totally shattered by it. I suppose it was worse – even worse – for him than me, because here he was, with me, loving me, and this man, accused of these awful, awful things was my
brother-in-law . . . He used to read the papers and then just sit, shaking his head. “You can’t really understand,” he’d say to me. “Imagine, just imagine, it was your
child, your baby they took, and slammed against a wall, shattering its head. Your child before your eyes. . .” Perhaps I didn’t understand the way he did, but I felt it. I felt the
horror of it all through my body.’

Whoever the woman was who’d called upon Wiesenthal, her visit was followed a few days later by one from a sleazy man with shifty eyes who rubbed his chin whenever he spoke. ‘I
wasn’t surprised when he admitted he’d worked for the Gestapo,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘but I found him harder to believe when he told me he’d done “nothing bad. They
made me join. What else could I do? I’m just a little guy.” I said nothing. It was the usual preface.’

Wiesenthal’s visitor came to the point: ‘I read your story in the papers. About Stangl. It’s the big bastards like Eichmann and Stangl who’ve made it hard for us little
guys . . . Look, I know where Stangl is. But it’s going to cost you money.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five thousand dollars.’

‘You might as well ask for two million dollars,’ Wiesenthal responded. ‘I don’t have that kind of money.’

The informer shrugged: ‘All right . . . I’ll make you a special price. How many Jews did Stangl kill?’

Wiesenthal guessed that some 700,000 died in Treblinka while Stangl was the commandant.

‘I want a penny for each of ’em,’ the man said. ‘Let’s see. That’s 7000 dollars. A real bargain!’

Wiesenthal, who had already seen and heard enough to make him shockproof for life, had to clutch his desk to keep from slapping the man in the face: ‘His arithmetic was too much for
me.’ But he contained his rage, decided to throw him out, stood up – and then sat down again. This might be his only chance to find Stangl.

‘Well?’ said the man.

‘Well, I won’t give you one cent now,’ Wiesenthal said. ‘But if Stangl is arrested on the basis of your information, you’ll get the money.’

‘Who guarantees you’ll keep your word?’

‘Nobody. And if you don’t like it, get out!’

‘All right . . . Stangl works as a mechanic in the Volkswagen factory in São Paulo, Brazil.’

* * *

In retrospect, Stangl should not have been hard to find. He and his family had travelled from Syria to Brazil, via Italy, under their own names in 1951. He always gave his name
as either Paul Franz Stangl, to conform to the identity the Italian Red Cross had issued him, or Franz Paul Stangl, to be perfectly honest with others. In 1954, his wife registered the entire
family with the Austrian consulate in São Paulo. When he or she or their daughters wrote ‘home’ to Austria, they put their names and return address on the envelopes. In the
mid-1960s, Stangl remarked to his wife: ‘You know, if that clever man Wiesenthal is looking for me, surely all he has to do is ask the police or the Austrian Consulate. He could find me at
once. I am not budging.’

In his first two years in South America with the Sutema textile firm, Stangl’s organizational ability was recognized early and he rose from weaver to chief planner: practically an
engineering position. Since it involved frequent travel within Brazil, another of his assets was that he had picked up Portuguese swiftly and easily.

On one of his trips (he confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train,
trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, “Look at this; this reminds me of
Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the cans . . .”’

‘You said “cans”,’ Sereny interrupted. ‘What do you mean?’ But Stangl wasn’t listening to her as he continued:

‘I couldn’t eat canned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . looking at me . . . not knowing that in no time at all, they’d all be dead.’ His wife, too, remembered that
‘he suddenly stopped eating meat at one point.’

Despite such qualms of the flesh, Stangl prospered – nearly tripling his salary when he left Sutema’s employ after a couple of years for similar work with another firm. Over a
nine-year period, beginning within weeks of their arrival in South America, he and his family built with their own hands a rambling pink-and-white middle-class chalet in a multi-racial
working-class neighbourhood of São Bernardo do Campo. Some twenty miles from São Paulo, São Bernardo do Campo was the Detroit of Brazil: home of a Rolls-Royce parts factory, a
Mercedes Benz factory, and Volkswagen’s largest plant outside Germany. Starting from scratch, Stangl put in the plumbing and his daughters did the painting. ‘We built room after room,
first just camping outside, then moving into one room after another, as the house grew,’ Theresa Stangl recalls.

There was a serious interruption in late 1955, when Franz Stangl took sick. Though his symptoms were rheumatism and weakness that rendered him unable to walk more than a block or two, or even
stand on his feet for more than a few minutes, it proved a prelude to a major heart attack in 1966. While he lay idle in the second half of the 1950s, his women constructed a small workshop across
the courtyard and, when he had recovered somewhat but was still unfit to hold a steady job, he bought some second-hand machine parts, built some weaving machines, and soon was making elastic
bandages for hospitals. His family took over the selling while Frau Stangl found work at Mercedes Benz as a secretary, working her way up to chief of book-keeping by 1962, with ‘seventy girls
under me.’

Renate, the middle daughter who had caught the roving eye of the Damascus police chief, married an Austrian in 1957, as did her older sister Brigitte a year later. In
1959, Franz Stangl’s health had improved enough that he could rejoin the salaried work force as a mechanic for Volkswagen. As usual, his diligence and competence caught the eye of his
superiors and, with rapid promotions, he wound up in charge of preventative maintenance for the entire plant at three times the salary he’d been earning when he fell ill.

With two of the daughters working too, as secretaries in the Volkswagen works, the Stangls were doing so well that, aided by financing from Mercedes Benz, they bought land on Frei Gaspar in
Brooklin, one of the best residential districts of São Paulo, and this time had a house built for them by professionals: more Danish-modern than Austrian-rustic, with picture windows and a
two car garage. When they moved in there in 1965, Stangl bought a car and became a commuter.

The two years they spent in Brooklin were ‘our happiest in Brazil’, Frau Stangl said, despite her husband’s heart attack in 1966, from which he recovered fairly rapidly. Back
in Austria, however, another heart was pounding as Simon Wiesenthal closed in slowly on his quarry.

Having learned in early 1964 where Stangl was, Wiesenthal had no trouble asking a Brazilian contact to run a ‘credit check’ on him which ascertained his address and lifestyle without
alerting anybody. Then, however, he waited nearly three years before making his next move. He explains:

‘By 1964, Stangl was wanted by Austria not just from the Hartheim trials and for escaping from custody, but for his work in Sobibor and Treblinka, too. If I’d gone to the Austrian
Ministry of Justice, a dozen people there and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have known about it. And then in Brazil, at least double that number in the Austrian Embassy, the Brazilian
ministries, and the Brazilian police would have had advance notice of Stangl’s arrest. Now you don’t have to believe in
ODESSA
to be absolutely certain that Stangl would
have been warned and even people who didn’t know him personally would have helped him to disappear. And then there would be – and, as I told you, there were! – others who wanted
to make him disappear for me and just bring me his ears. But I wanted him alive!

‘To do that, I knew I would have to go to someone highly reliable in the Ministry of Justice to catch Stangl. But first I had to lay the groundwork in Brazil. I
alerted my friends in Rio de Janeiro that I was looking for someone influential and sympathetic to our cause, though I didn’t specify it was about Stangl. It wasn’t until December 1966
that they sent word a Very Important Personality was travelling in Europe and could receive me in Zurich. I flew there to meet him.’

The Brazilian who welcomed him to his Swiss hotel suite was described by Wiesenthal as ‘middle-aged, good-looking, with thoughtful eyes’ and a good listener who was clearly well
informed. Even before Simon told him where Stangl was working, he guessed: ‘I’ll bet he’s got a job with some German firm. They all do.’ Simon remembers that the politician
‘gave me his assurance that he would be of assistance in this case. The main difficulty was to find a way to shorten the procedure of the extradition request coming from Austria to Brazil and
then, in the normal course of events, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of justice, the office of the Governor, the main police headquarters, the local police, and, eventually, the
Supreme Court. This would mean that about forty persons would have to know about the extradition request – and very likely Stangl would be Number Forty-one.

‘We agreed that a success would only be possible if one could cut down the number of the people let into the secret. So we reduced with the help of that politician the number of those
persons down to six.’ Knowing how many eyes and ears would be open, the politician’s farewell words to Simon were: ‘Write me briefly when I’m back in Rio, but don’t
send any evidence in the mail.’

Wiesenthal did better than that. In early 1967, he went directly to the Austrian Minister of Justice, Dr Hans Klecatsky, a trustworthy Tyrolean, and, working with just a handful of loyal aides,
they assembled excerpts from the thousand-page dossier on Stangl as well as a compilation of the warrants out for him. When they were nearly ready, while Wiesenthal was awaiting further
documentation from Düsseldorf, where the ‘Treblinka trials’ of twelve Stangl subordinates had been held in 1964–5,
⁶⁴
he
sent his own courier – a
young woman, born in Brazil and living in Vienna, who worked part-time for him – to Rio with the Jewish Documentation Centre’s own
dossier on Stangl.

Upon arrival, she couldn’t get near Wiesenthal’s high-level political connection. It was Carnival time in Rio and nobody was working. Eventually, she made contact with him and handed
the dossier to him personally. By the time she left Rio in mid-February, he had a police friend shadowing Stangl unofficially – but he sent her back with a warning to Wiesenthal that
he’d be leaving Brazil for Europe again on 1 March, so Stangl had better be in firm custody by then or anything could happen.

Wiesenthal had to move fast. Less than a fortnight remained to February. Phoning Klecatsky, he explained the urgency to the Minister of Justice, who called him to his office on Wednesday, 22
February. The abridged case against Stangl had just been translated into Portuguese. It was delivered the next day to the Austrian Foreign Ministry, which had a trusted official of the Brazilian
Embassy verify and notarize the translation. Now it was ready to cross the Adantic.

But how? Wiesenthal offered to pay the plane fare of a diplomatic courier, but was told the Foreign Ministry had none for South America. Nor were there direct radio or telex links with
Austria’s embassies there. Any official trip by a Foreign Ministry employee lasting more than three days had to be approved in advance by the Council of Ministers, which met on Tuesdays; this
would mean sharing the secret with twelve more officials. No, thank you, said Wiesenthal. The simplest solution, everybody agreed, was to send the warrant, the extradition request, and the
translated dossier excerpts via express air mail in a special envelope signifying to embassy employees that it was to be opened only by the ambassador.