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

unreliables) were compulsorily moved to Bohemia where he worked in a civilian job until he was called up in 1943 for service on the Eastern front. He was a prisoner of war in Russia from 1944 until 1948, after which he again worked as a CID officer in Leoben, Austria, until his retirement in 1965. He would not say that he had been a friend of Stangl’s, but neither had they been enemies. He had no memory whether he and Stangl had ever discussed political matters. Therefore he couldn’t say what Stangl’s attitude towards National Socialism had been. “All of us, though,” he said, “at that time – just before the Anschluss – sympathized with the Nazi Party. I don’t mean just the participants of that police course, but the population in general.”
    Regarding the questionnaire, many officials, he said, “wrote more than was strictly true. Because one was afraid of being sacked.” Yes, he remembered Dr Bruno Wille. “He was a member of a legal firm,” he said tersely, and refused to be drawn beyond that. Regarding the aid-fund, he couldn’t say whether Stangl had paid contributions to such a fund. Nor did he even remember if such a fund had existed, so he was unable to comment on whether or not it was for the purpose of supporting political detainees who were Nazis, or detainees of other political persuasions.
    “I went home that day after we got that business organized with Dr Wille,” Stangl said, “you know, terrifically relieved. I was so grateful to Ludwig Werner for finding that solution – you have no idea. Anyway, the moment I got home, I told my wife: I thought she’d be as relieved as I.…” Suddenly he began to cry again, but differently this time: the deep sobs of a man reliving a pain long suppressed.
    “What happened?”
    “She hated them you see,” he finally went on. “We are Catholics of course, and she is very devout, always was. She was so terribly, terribly angry. ‘You betrayed me with these swine,’ she said, and I suddenly realized that she didn’t believe me. She thought I really had been an illegal Nazi. Oh my God.…” He went on crying for many minutes.
    “Did you end up by convincing her?”
    “A long time – it took a long time.” It was clear he was still not sure that he had ever convinced her.
    And he had not. It was not only the Düsseldorf court thirty-two years after the event who disbelieved Stangl’s assurance that he had not been an “illegal” Nazi. Months after I had first seen Stangl, his wife, in Brazil, was to repeat to me that she had not believed him.
    “No, of course I didn’t tell them that when I had to testify at his trial – how could I have?” she said. “If my husband hadn’t told you about it himself, perhaps I wouldn’t have admitted it to you either. But as it is, because he told you – and the way he told you – today is the very first time that I feel perhaps he did tell me the truth then – perhaps he wasn’t an illegal after all.” And she too cried.
    Frau Stangl’s sister, Helene Eidenböck, who lives in Vienna, had no doubts. “Oh yes,” she said, “I think he was an ‘illegal’ – they all were, you know, in that part of Austria. If he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have got on so fast. And that’s what they wanted, both of them – to get on.”
    And former ss Franz Suchomel, who worked under Stangl at Treblinka, and now, after four years in prison, lives in southern Germany, said, “Stangl told me himself that he had been an ‘illegal’. He wore on his uniform jacket the chevron of the ‘Old Fighters’, which wasn’t that easy to obtain.”
    Neither of these last two opinions is necessarily proof that Stangl was lying, since obviously if his story to me was true, the fact that his name had been entered on the “illegal” list would have allowed him to establish his membership as part of his record and would thus automatically have given him the privileges that went with such a record; while he could