"Our dear Franz": the Nazi who killed hundreds of thousands lived at the resort under his own name

Franz Stangl was arrested on a grand scale. Several police cars and armored vehicles with machine guns, raising dust, surrounded a chaise longue in which a middle-aged man with a neat haircut and a cocktail glass in his hand was basking. "Guys, why make such a fuss? I will go with you without resistance, and you'll see, you'll let me go later," the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka said with a smile and got into the car himself.

After the Third Reich fell, Nazi criminals scattered all over the world. They tried their best to cover their tracks and changed their appearance and surnames. But the commandant of the two death camps, Franz Stangl, was so confident in his invulnerability that he did not even consider it necessary to change his name.

Perhaps the Nazi really believed that there could be no complaints against him, because it was not for nothing that at the very first interrogation he nervously asked the investigator: "Now, you say, it is necessary to punish everyone who served honestly?!". When the investigation was completed and the former commandant of the death camps Sobibor and Treblinka, Hauptsturmfuhrer SS Franz Stangl was accused of crimes against humanity, he was genuinely surprised:

Yes, in fact, Stangl performed his work qualitatively — in just 4 months of his work in the Sobibor death camp, 100 thousand Jews were destroyed under his strict leadership. Later, working in Treblinka, the Hauptsturmfuhrer surpassed himself and in just one day sent 22 thousand prisoners to the gas chambers. In total, Stangl had about a million lives on his account and he understood it perfectly.

The man who made it his job to destroy people was born in the Austrian city of Altmunster in 1908. Franz's father was a military man, at the same time a drinking man and not too sentimental. Therefore, in childhood, Stangl was often beaten about and without.

After school, Franz got a job as a worker at a textile factory, but quickly realized that it was not his. After graduating from the police academy in 1931, he began working as a detective in a small town where the most common crimes were drunken brawls and chicken thefts.

When the Anschluss took place in 1938 and Austria was annexed to the Third Reich, Stangl realized that his finest hour had struck and immediately joined the NSDAP and the SS. As a person with experience in the police, Franz was appointed an investigator of the Gestapo in the city of Linz.

In April 1942, when the Second World War was in full swing, and the Wehrmacht was winning one victory after another, Obersturmfuhrer Stangl was sent to Poland, where by order of Himmler he was appointed commandant of the Sobibor camp. It was a classic death camp, the task of which was exclusively the destruction of people.Franz Stangl decided to justify the high trust and approached his work as seriously as possible. As soon as he accepted the camp, he ordered new equipment for killing prisoners, since the performance of the old one did not suit him. The authorities made it clear to the new commandant that the camp does not need Jews as a labor force, so they all need to be disposed of as quickly as possible.

Sobibor Concentration Camp today

Therefore, all new arrivals to Sobibor were immediately taken from the station to the so-called "bathhouse" for "sanitary treatment". People were locked indoors, and then decommissioned tank engines installed on the street were started, which filled the "showers" with exhaust gases through connected hoses.

In order to be guaranteed to kill everyone inside, it took only an hour. Stangl was very proud of his productive work, because he had only 30 SS men and 100 guards recruited from prisoners of war under his command. None of Commandant Sobibor's subordinates sat idle — some escorted those doomed to death, others killed, others tore out gold crowns from corpses and sorted the belongings of the deceased. The conveyor of death worked flawlessly.

Franz Stangl's zeal did not go unnoticed and on August 28, 1942, he was transferred by the commandant to a more promising place — to the large Treblinka death camp. There were many more prisoners here and such an approach as in Sobibor was inappropriate. The prisoners were destroyed gradually and organizational issues took a lot of effort.

But Stangl did not get this position in vain — he knew how to organize everything in the best way. The executioner realized that if people waiting for death are given hope, they will not create problems and will obediently wait for their turn. By order of the commandant, pavers were laid in Treblinka, bushes were planted and even flower beds were broken.

Stangl in his white uniform inspects the camp

Stangl himself never had any contact with his victims — he moved around the camp in a custom-made white SS uniform, waving a long whip. The prisoners nicknamed the commandant "White Death" and this nickname fully corresponded to the state of things.

Later, during interrogations, Franz constantly insisted that he did not feel not only hatred, but even dislike for Jews, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war.

Despite the fact that the work brought satisfaction to the executioner, stress could not be avoided. Because of this, Stangl became addicted to alcohol. The Hauptsturmfuhrer quickly "got involved" and soon began the morning not with tea or coffee, but with one or two glasses of schnapps.

Franz Stangl and his "colleagues" are waiting for the next train with the doomed

Already at the beginning of the day, the commandant appeared near the gas chambers completely drunk and actively participated in the "production process". Yes, for Stangl, murder was production, and he did not call people anything other than "cargo for disposal." Once in prison, the Nazi distinguished himself in the first interview with the West German press. He told about his impressions and how he saw his victims:

From 3 to 12 thousand people were killed every day in Treblinka. During the 11 months that Franz Stangl was in charge of the camp, 810,000 prisoners were killed there. To understand the scale, it must be said that in Auschwitz, which was several times larger in size, about the same number of prisoners died in five years. It is no exaggeration to say that the Treblinka death camp in the XX century was one of the most terrible places on Earth.

August 2 , 1943 in There was an uprising in Treblinka, during which about 300 prisoners were able to break through the fence. Most of them were killed during the search or given away by local residents loyal to the Nazis. Despite the fact that the consequences of the riot were quickly eliminated, the high authorities in Berlin remained dissatisfied with the work of Stangl and the camp was disbanded.

Treblinka prisoners and their executioners

Franz received a severe reprimand, but his merits covered all the mistakes in the position of commandant. Therefore, the monster was immediately sent to Italy, where his experience was needed as air for the destruction of the Jews of Trieste and Venice. Having completed all the tasks assigned to him, Stangl returned to Vienna in 1945, shortly before the German surrender.

In Austria, Franz Stangl fell into the hands of the Americans and they seriously took up the investigation of his crimes. The investigation dragged on until 1948, when the ex-commandant managed to escape from prison with the help of his wife and former colleague in Sobibor, SS Gustav Wagner.

While most of the Nazis tried to run away from Europe and dozens fell into the hands of American and British intelligence, the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka headed to Italy, where he was not expected. The Vatican Bishop Alois Hudal was waiting for him there, who helped the criminal get a Red Cross passport, which removes all suspicion from the owner.

Having reliable documents, Stangl nevertheless went not overseas, but in a completely different direction — to Syria. There, the Nazi settled in Damascus and served the local regime faithfully for three years, advising executioners on how to properly torture Israeli prisoners.

After the war, Franz was still young and full of energy

When Shtangl got tired of Syria, he and his wife left the Middle East and went to Brazil, which attracted all the "exes" like a magnet. Across the ocean, Franz finally remembered his first profession and got a job at a factory as a weaver. He worked at the factory as diligently as in the death camps entrusted to him, so he was able to reach the position of engineer.

Later, in 1959, Franz managed to get a job at the Volkswagen plant, where he was waiting for a higher salary. Very soon he and his wife bought a large beautiful house in Sao Paulo and enjoyed life on a full scale. On weekends, the couple went to the beach, where they basked in the sun and swam in the warm ocean.

The neighbors on the street could not imagine that an elderly man with a military bearing and a soft German accent was one of the most sinister Nazi criminals, who had hundreds of thousands of deaths on his conscience.

Beach in Sao Paulo, which loved to visit "dear Franz" with his wife

"Did our dear Franz kill a million people and live quietly under palm trees?" - once during an interview, a colleague of Stangl at the Volkswagen plant asked journalists. Yes, he lived quite calmly and no one was looking for him. Moreover, Franz did not even bother to change the documents and lived under his real name.The Nazi criminal was registered at the Austrian Consulate in Sao Paulo, as an Austrian by birth, did not know any worries until 1961, until he was suddenly remembered in his distant homeland. Austria issued an arrest warrant for the SS man and Germany and the Brazilian authorities actively joined the search.

The arrest on the beach was a real surprise for Stangl, but he felt confident until the last moment. "They don't judge for perfect work. I did my job well and everyone knows about it," the monster never tired of repeating during interrogations. His wife hired the best lawyers and until June 23, 1967, until the Nazi criminal was deported from Brazil to Germany, he was sure that everything would end well and he would be released with apologies.

Franz Stangl in court. He still does not believe that he will never be released

On December 22 of the same 1967, the court of the city of Dusseldorf announced the sentence - life imprisonment. Franz could not believe until the last moment that they would do this to him. He immediately appealed the verdict and actively began giving interviews to the press. The ex-commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka told journalists:

It was obvious that the executioner did not repent a bit for his crimes against humanity and, on the contrary, felt like a victim of judicial arbitrariness. It was only after spending several years behind bars that Stangl felt some weak pricks of conscience. In one of his last interviews, shortly before his death, the former Nazi said:

One of the last interviews of an old Nazi

Exactly 19 hours after these words, on June 28, 1971, the killer of a million prisoners of the two most terrible death camps died of acute heart failure in his cell. He was 63 years old and he died, albeit in prison, but by his own death. Before his heart stopped, he did not experience humiliation, chilling fear and hopeless despair like hundreds of thousands of his victims.