“I was simply doing my duty.”
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
Franz Stangl was a regular guy. He was a weaver in Altmunster, Austria, the son of a night-watchman. Altmunster is a lovely little town on the shores of Taunsee Lake in the alpine region of Austria, and one can easily imagine a childhood of swimming and hiking and adventuring for young Franz. But in 1931, at the age of 23, young Franz developed a fascination with the Nazi Party. It was still illegal to affiliate with the Nazis in Austria, but that carried little weight it seems with young Franz. He became a policeman, and when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, Franz was willing and able.
By 1940, he was superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically handicapped people were sent to be killed. From there, he was given the command of two death camps, first of Sobibor and later of Treblinka. He was known as an efficient administrator and gained the reputation as the “best camp commander”.
Like many war criminals, he was briefly jailed and released and ultimately made his way, with his family, to São Paulo, Brazil where he worked in the Volkswagen factory. The Austrian government knew of his whereabouts for many years, but in the end it was Simon Wiesenthal who tracked him down in 1968. He was extradited to West Germany and found guilty on October 22, 1970 in the murders of 900,000 people. He died eight months later in Düsseldorf Prison.
I give you this background because Franz Stangl was extensively interviewed during his short incarceration, and his comments were recorded in Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1983).
It is beyond brutal to read his words, and I will share only one small insight here. When asked if he ever got used to his job and how long it took, his response was this:
“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.”
“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.”
“Of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself concentrate on work, work and again work.”
And so, in the end, the boy who ran and played in the beautiful hills of Austria became a mass murderer on an unimaginable scale.
He said of himself, “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty ...”. He also said that the “cargo” he received wasn’t human. One wonders if he was…
