I have just read the most chilling book. Once I finished it I could not stop thinking about it, to the point where I had to start reading it again. It is the story of a fairly ordinary man, who did extraordinary things. Normally this story inspires, but not this one. This man was Franz Stangl, the commandant of the death camps Treblinka and Sobibor, and co-responsible for the death of 900 000 people. This astonishing book is called Into that darkness: From mercy killing to mass murder by Gitta Sereny.
Gitta Sereny is a Austrian-born writer whose career in part has been dedicated to trying to understand the German mind of WWII. As a school child she was forced to watch one of Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies. After the war, she was part of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and encountered the victims of various Nazi programs, as well as attending the Nuremburg Trials. She wanted to interview someone who was part of the administration, someone with enough intelligence and self-awareness to provide some insight to their own thoughts and actions. After the war Stangl escaped to Brazil, and was finally arrested there in 1967 and deported back to Germany to stand trial. Convicted, he was sentenced to life in prison. The Chief Prosecutor who knew of Sereny’s wish, alerted her that this might be that person. Watching him Sereny thought that this might be a man with a conscience, however repressed.
Stangl is no monster. He’s actually likeable, as his guards attest. There is no rabid anti-semitism, no mad devotion to the Nazis or Hitler. Indeed, as far as can be told, he never whipped, hurt or touched one of the prisoners. He had a lonely youth, married happily, was a good father, and became a policeman. He was ambitious, and weak. He was first assigned to the Euthanasia program, checking death certificates and making sure families received the personal effects. Then he was transferred to the army and into Poland.
There is a difference between concentration camps and the death camps. Neither were a guarantee of a long life and while millions died in the concentration camps, the five death camps had no purpose except to kill the Jews. Victims arrived by the trainload and were whipped, stripped, all their goods stolen, and then they were gassed, shot or injected. Within hours of arrival, every man woman and child on a train would be dead. And Franz Stangl ran the most efficient camps in the system.
How can you do that and not become bestial? How can you live with such knowledge? The short answer seems to be to focus on his immediate task – running the camp; administration, inspections, building, all the time repressing somehow the knowledge of what it all led to. And yet he would, as part of his job, supervise the unloading of the trains, and the movement of the now naked prisoners, with their heads shaved, into the wire tunnel that led to the gas chambers. He could not bear, he said, to be in the hut where they were stripped of their clothes and other possessions and had their heads shaved. As Sereny observes, he could watch the people come off the train, and he could see the dehumanized mass walking to their death, but he could not watch the transition from people to, as he called them, cargo. And he drank – who would not?
The book is full of such nightmare imagery as seeing piles of rotting corpses, or the ground erupting as frozen corpses in mass graves thaw and release pent up gasses. When Stangl arrived at Treblinka, he had to drive along a road littered with bodies and then actually wade through piles of money and other valuables stolen from the arrivals and not yet sorted. That was his job and his triumph, to make Trebilinka an efficient place for killing the Jews disposing of the bodies and distributing their goods. And he aided the psychological deception, beautifying Treblinka until it looked like a spa, with spruce train station and attractive landscaping. (The clock on the station tower was painted on. Who would ever have time to notice?) He was awarded an Iron Cross for his efforts.
And the book explores the system further. If you want to know how the Holocaust worked in practice, this book tells you. The Nazis had a collective genius for horror. They played off the divisions within the Jewish people, Eastern Jews and Western Jews. The whippings and other degradations were part of the system devised by people higher up the administrative scale. A cowered people, naked and anonymous, half-starved, covered in their own filth, were easier to herd to their deaths, and easier for the guards to avoid thinking of them as people. And though Stangl would say how horrible he found it all, he never took any steps to alleviate it.
And it was not just the dead who were denigrated. The work-Jews were a small group who lived in the camp and sorted out the belongings and building, sewing, goldsmithing and other skilled tasks. Their lives depended on the trains coming. Imagine that, if you can – your life dependent on thousands of others dying, thousands whose only crime was the same as yours, to be born into a particular religion. One talks about his relief when the trains resumed after a break. The work-Jews in two camps eventually rebelled, and Treblinka was burned to the ground. (So much for the myth the Jews went uncomplaining to death.) Many of the work-Jews were killed either in the outbreak or afterwards but some did escape - the only Jews to survive the death camps.
Sereny also interviews Stangl’s wife, his sister, his daughter, other camp guards and survivors, their stories often contradictory or conflicting, either from genuine lapse of memory or the tendency or need to remember things differently. This is a book of creeping horror. And all the time, Sereny is asking Stangl, could you have said no? He says not, but he also breaks down into tears often. I am not trying, nor was Sereny, to excuse Stangl. He was a large part of this monstrous crime. He was lucky to be sentenced to life and not hung. Perhaps if he had been tried in the immediate aftermath of the war, he would have been. He knew what was happening, was helping it to happen, and did nothing to change the situation, and not much to get out of it. But I cannot with confidence say I would not have been equally cowed or frightened or conditioned enough to do the same thing in the same circumstances.
Sereny also looks at the twenty years Stangl spent on the run. He was aided by Catholic Clergy through Rome to Damascus to Brazil. It’s possible they didn’t know who he was or what he had done, but it’s also possible that at least one key figure, Bishop Hudal, did. Stangl never stopped using his real name, registered at the Austrian Embassy in Brazil with his wife and family, worked under his real name and yet it took decades before Austria issued an arrest warrant and it took Simon Wiesenthal to ‘discover’ where Stangl was. Very strange indeed.
It is only at the conclusion of his interviews with Sereny that Stangl, almost thirty years after the events, and six months after being convicted, is able to go beyond his argument that he was merely doing his job and following orders and say out loud that he was responsible for the deaths of almost a million people. Nineteen hours later, his heart, already scarred from previous heart attacks, stopped. There was no evidence of suicide. When he was able to admit to himself and to someone else what he had done, his body gave up. How can you live with this knowledge? Perhaps you cannot.
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