[Treblinka was one of the most notorious Death Camps the Nazis built, primarily for murdering Jews]

From interviews of former Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl
by Gitta Sereny

Franz Stangl had been commandant, first of Sobibor extermination camp for 4 months in 1942, then of Treblinka extermination camp for 11 months in 1942-43. He worked for the Nazis in Trieste from 1943-1945. At the end of the War (April of 1945), he fled without concealing his name. He was briefly imprisoned in Austria in 1947, then in mid-1948 helped to escape to Italy He was then helped to move to Syria, where he was joined by his wife and children. In 1951, he moved to Brazil, where he eventually worked for Volkswagen of Brazil. Austria didn’t issue a warrant for his arrest until 1961. Though he was registered at the Austrian consulate in Sao Paulo, Brazil under his own name, he was not actually arrested until 1967, six years later. In 1970, he was tried in West Germany, for the murder of one million people. In late December of 1970 he was found guilty and given the maximum sentence: life imprisonment. British journalist Gitta Sereny repeatedly interviewed him in prison in 1971. He died of heart failure in late April of 1971, less than 24 hours after his final interview, six months into his life term in the Düsseldorf prison.

Some of the responses to the questions Sereny posed are excerpted in this transcription made from audio recordings.

Gitta: “Would it be true to say that you were used to the liquidations?”
Stangl: He thought for a moment. “To tell the truth,” he then said, slowly and thoughtfully, “one did become used to it.”
“In days? Weeks? Months?”
“Months. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. I repressed it all by trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything: barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. There were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind off it; I used them all.”
“Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark, when you couldn’t avoid thinking about it.”
“In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank.”
“I think you are evading my question.”
“No, I don’t mean to; of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work, and again work.”
“Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really human beings?”
“When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil,” he said, his face deeply concentrated and obviously reliving the experience, “my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I thought then, ‘Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked, trustingly, just before they went into the tins . . . ’”
“You said tins,” I interrupted. “What do you mean?” But he went on without hearing, or answering me.
“ . . . I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . which looked at me . . . not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.” He paused. His face was drawn. At this moment he looked old and worn and sad.
“So you didn’t feel they were human beings?”
“Cargo,” he said tonelessly. “They were cargo.” He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy.
“When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere—they weren’t ‘cargo’ to you then, were they?”
“I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [death camp] in Treblinka. I remember [Christian Wirth, the man who set up the death camps] standing there next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity—it couldn’t have; it was a mass—a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’ I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.”
“There were so many children; did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?”
“No,” he said slowly, “I can’t say I ever thought that way.” He paused. “You see,” he then continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth within himself, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But—how can I explain it—they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like . . . ” The sentence trailed off.
. . . “Could you not have changed that?” I asked. “In your position, could you not have stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?”
“No, no, no. This was the system. . . . It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.”

(Sereny is so kind and gentle because she sees, as Stangl only dimly senses, how many lifetimes of blind, unconscious, unrewarded, selfless service to the Creator are inexorably ahead of him.) Lou Gottlieb 9/20/22