In 1945 Stangl was captured by the Americans and interned as a member of the SS who had been involved in anti-partisan activities in Yugoslavia and Italy, whilst his earlier service in Poland was not known at the time. His next assignment was in Italy as a special supply officer to the Einsatz- Poll, a strategic construction project in the Po Valley, involving some half a million Italian workers under German command. Soon after the revolt in Treblinka on the 2 August 1943 – SS –Hauptsturmfuhrer Stangl was transferred to Trieste to help organise the campaign against the Yugoslav partisans. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did.” They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication- that is how contempt is born. “They were so weak- they allowed everything to happen – to be done to them. Stangl claimed that his dedication had nothing to do with ideology or hatred of Jews. He came to regard his victims as “cargo to be despatched”, recalling in an interview at the end of his life with the journalist Gitta Sereny that he rarely saw them as individuals – “it was always a huge mass… they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.” Stangl was appointed commandant of the Sobibor death camp, which became operational in May 1942, during Stangl’s period as “Kommandant”, which lasted until September 1942 when he was transferred to Treblinka, approximately 100,000 Jews were killed.įollowing his arrival at Treblinka, the largest of the three “Aktion Reinhard” camps in occupied Poland, Stangl proved himself a highly efficient and dedicated organiser of mass murder, even receiving an official commendation as the “best camp commander” in Poland.Īlways impeccably dressed, he attended the unloading of transports dressed in white riding clothes, soft-voiced, polite and friendly, Stangl was no sadist, but took pride and pleasure in his work, running the death camp like clockwork. In March 1942, after being sent to Berlin, then Lublin, Stangl reported to Odilo Globocnik, his fellow Austrian SS- Brigadefuhrer, the head of “Aktion Reinhard.” The address the man gave was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but this mysterious informant was never seen again.Stangl (seated center) entertains at SobiborĪ year later he became an illegal member of the Nazi Party, and in November 1940 he became the Police Superintendent of the notorious Euthanasia Institute at Scloss Hartheim, where the mentally and physically handicapped and also political prisoners from concentration camps were transferred for liquidation. Following a well-worn ‘ratline’, Stangl escapes to Brazil after the war where for nearly two decades he leads a comfortable existence in exile.Īs you can imagine Franz Stangl was high on Wiesenthal’s list of wanted war criminals, as such he makes a deal with the stranger who came into his office, but it will only be sealed upon Stangl’s capture. Proving to have a knack for mass murder, he eventually finds himself in charge of three Polish extermination camps where he is responsible for the genocide of 800,000 people. Stangl was a fervent believer in Hitler’s theories on race and Aryan superiority, he was an Austrian career policeman who joined the Nazi party and worked his way up the ranks. But on February 22, 1964, there was an unexpected visitor, a drunken man turns up at Wiesenthal’s office and tells him that he will reveal the location of Nazi war criminal Franz Stangl for $7,000. Simon Wiesenthal is the world’s most famous Nazi hunter, in his office at the Jewish Historical Documentation Centre located in Vienna, Austria, he keeps files on hundreds of fugitive war criminals, it is solitary work.
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