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Franz Stangl, the son of a night-watchman, was born in Altmuenster, Austria, on 26th March, 1908. After working as a weaver Stangl joined the Austrian police in 1931 and soon afterwards the illrgal Nazi Party.

After Anschluss Stangl was quickly promoted through the ranks. In 1940 Stangl became superintendent of the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically handicapped people were sent to be killed.

In 1942 he was transferred to Poland where he worked under Odilo Globocnik. Stangl was commandant of extermination camps in Sobibor (March, 1942 - September, 1942) and Treblinka (September, 1942 - August, 1943). Always dressed in white riding clothes, Stangl gained a reputation an an efficient administrator and was described as the "best camp commander in Poland".

During the Second World War he stole vast sums of money from the inmates and deposited it in Schutzstaffel (SS) bank deposits. This included 145 kilograms of gold from rings and 4,000 carats of diamonds.

At the end of the war Stangl managed to conceal his identity and although imprisoned in Linz in 1945 he was released two years later. Stangl lived in Syria for three years before moving to Brazil in 1951. With the help of friends Stangl found work at the Volkswagen plant in Sao Paulo.

Austria did not issue a warrant for Stangl's arrest until 1961. It took another six years before he was tracked down and arrested in Brazil.

At his trial it was claimed that Stangl was responsible for the deaths of around 900,000 people. He admitted to these killings but argued that: "My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty." Found guilty on 22nd October, 1970, Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. Franz Stangl died of a heart attack in prison on 28th June, 1971.

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(1) Franz Stangl, evidence at his trial for war crimes in 1970.

We agreed that what we were doing was a crime. We considered deserting - we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families? We also knew what had happened in the past to other people who said no. The only way out that we could see was to keep trying in various and devious ways to get a transfer.

(2) Franz Stangl was interviewed by Gitta Sereny in 1970. Stangl's comments later appeared in the book Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (1983)

"Would it be true to say that you got used to the liquidations?"

He thought for a moment. "To tell the truth," be 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," be 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 real.

"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 in Treblinka. I remember Wirth 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. Bu t- 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. Wirth had invented it. It worked and because it worked, it was irreversible."