Background
Franz Stangl was born in Altmiinster, Austria, on 26 March 1908, the son of a nightwatchman who had once served in the Habsburg Dragoons.
public official Extermionation camp Commander
Franz Stangl was born in Altmiinster, Austria, on 26 March 1908, the son of a nightwatchman who had once served in the Habsburg Dragoons.
After training as a master-weaver, Stangl joined the Austrian police force in 1931, graduating two years later. In 1935 he was transferred to the political division of the criminal investigation department in the small Austrian town of Weis and a year later he appears to have become a member of the illegal Nazi Party.
In November 1940 Stangl became Police Superintendent of the notorious Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim, where the mentally and physically handicapped and also political prisoners from concentration camps were transferred for liquidation.
In March 1942, after being sent to Lublin to report to his fellow-Austrian, Lieutenant-General Odilo Globocnik,Stangl was given charge of Sobibor death camp, which became operational in May 1942. During Stangl’s period as Commandant, which lasted until September 1942 when he was transferred to Trebhnka, approximately 100,000 Jews were killed.
Soon after the revolt at Treblinka on 2 August 1943 (which contradicted Stangl’s convenient rationalizations), SS Captain Stangl was transferred to Trieste to help organize the campaign against Yugoslav partisans. 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.
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, his earlier record in Poland not being known at the time. He was handed over to the Austrians and transferred to an open, civilian prison in Linz in late 1947 in connection with his involvement in the euthanasia programme at Schloss Hartheim. Stangl simply walked out of the prison and managed to escape to Italy with his Austrian colleague, Gustav Wagner, where he was helped by Bishop Hudal and the Vatican network to escape via Rome on a Red Cross passport, with an entrance visa for Syria. In 1948 he arrived in Damascus where he worked for three years as a mechanical engineer in a textile mill and was joined by his wife and family.
In 1951 the Stangls emigrated to Brazil, where he was given an engineering job and after 1959 he worked at a Volkswagen factory, still using his own name. Only in 1961 did his name appear on the official Austrian list of ‘Wanted Criminals’, though for years his responsibility in the deaths of nearly a million men, women and children had been known to the Austrian authorities.
Tracked down by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Stangl was arrested in Brazil on 28 February 1967. After extradition to West Germany, he was tried for co-responsibility in the mass murder of 900,000 Jews at Treblinka and sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 October 1970.
He died of heart failure in Düsseldorf prison on 28 June 1971.
Following his arrival at Treblinka, the largest of the five Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland, Stangl proved himself a highly efficient and dedicated organizer of mass murder, even receiving an official commendation as the ‘best camp commander in Poland’. Always impeccably dressed (he attended the unloading of transports at Treblinka 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. 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 claimed that his dedication had nothing to do with ideology or hatred of Jews. They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen, to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication - that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did.’