Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

What I felt above all was fear. You remember that medal I’d been given – the Eagle? Well, five people had received that at that time. The Nazis took over on March 13; on the 14th they arrested two of those five and a few days later a third. That left only my friend Ludwig Werner and myself. Meanwhile in Linz they had shot two of the chiefs of our department. People we’d seen just a few days before. No trial, nothing – just shot them. Another one, also a friend of mine, was arrested too. And Dr Bayer – the former minister – he was sent to a concentration camp. I helped to get him out of Buchenwald later. * One of our chiefs used to make open remarks against the Nazis. We all used to wonder amongst ourselves how we could stop him. But how could we take it upon ourselves to warn a superior? I remember, one of the other men in my section – his name was Schlammer – he said to me, ‘You’d better let your Eagle fly out of the window’. † Ludwig Werner and I were becoming frantic. We had all been given a questionnaire to fill out. One of the questions – the most important one, we thought – was whether we had been illegal Nazi Party members. Werner said we had to do something – we couldn’t just sit and wait for them to take us. We decided that the first thing to do was to get rid of our file cards; we had this index, you know, with an annotated card for each person in our district who had been suspected of Nazi, Sozi [Socialist] or Communist sympathies. So the first thing we did was to flush the cards down the lavatory.”
    “All the cards?”
    “No, just the ones referring to Nazis. And then Werner remembered a lawyer who had been an illegal Nazi and whom he, I and another colleague had helped a bit not long before.…”
    “What do you mean helped?”
    “It’s the sort of thing one was able to do at times before ’38 – just warn someone who was under suspicion to watch his step.”
    “Nazis?”
    “Not necessarily. Anybody nice – decent, you know.”
    This was not a very likely explanation. But I had felt from the beginning that, except on the rarest occasions, it would be essential to let him develop his story in his own way, without showing obvious scepticism or interrupting with critical comments.
    “Werner thought,” he said, “that we could ask this lawyer – Dr Bruno Wille was his name – to say that he knew we had been illegal members.”
    “Diditmdrk?”
    “Yes. Werner went to see him and he said he’d arrange for our names to appear on the illegal Party lists for the previous two years. So after that we filled out the questionnaire and said that we’d been Party members since 1936.”
    “And that wasn’t true?”
    He shook his head. “No.”
    The question of whether or not he had been an illegal Party member had been the subject of considerable discussion at Stangl’s trial; and what was particularly discussed was the prosecution’s contention that before the Anschluss he had contributed to a fund for the aid of Nazi detainees, and that this went a long way to prove his illegal Party membership.
    “How about these contributions you are supposed to have paid to a Nazi aid-fund?”
    “Well yes, I did contribute to an aid-fund. The first week I was transferred into the cm the chief came around one day with a young girl and introduced her to Werner and me as someone who was collecting for the relatives of political prisoners.”
    Ludwig Werner, questioned in Austria in 1968, shortly before he died of natural causes, was evasive regarding the extent of his “friendship” with Stangl and his knowledge of his opinions or actions. He himself, he said, had been relieved of his duties on October 22, 1939, and was arrested on November 14 and accused of being an opponent of the Nazi Party and of having had illegal financial dealings with a Jew. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and kept there until April 1941, when he and his family (as was the custom for political