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After the Third Reich fell, Nazi criminals scattered around 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 actually believed that there could be no claims against him, because it was not without reason that at the very first interrogation he nervously asked the investigator: “Now, you will say that everyone who served honestly should be punished?!?”.
When the investigation was completed and the former commandant of the death camps Sobibor and Treblinka, SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Paul Stangl was accused of crimes against humanity, he was genuinely surprised:
I agree that I installed gas chambers. But my conscience is clear. I just honestly did my job. Is this now considered a crime?
Yes, in fact, Stangl performed his work with high quality - in just 4 months of his work in the Sobibor death camp, under his strict guidance, 100 thousand Jews, gypsies and Soviet people were destroyed. Later, while working in Treblinka, the Hauptsturmführer outdid himself, and in just one day sent 22,000 prisoners to the gas chambers. In total, Stangl had about a million lives on his account, and he understood this very well.
The man who made it his job to exterminate people was born in the Austrian city of Altmünster in 1908. Franz's father was a military man, but a drinker and not too sentimental. Therefore, in childhood, Stangl was often beaten with or without reason. After school, Franz got a job as a worker in a textile factory, but quickly realized that it was not for him. 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 fights and stealing chickens. When the Anschluss occurred in 1938 and Austria was annexed to the Third Reich, Stangl realized that his finest hour had struck, and immediately joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and the SS.
As a person with experience in the police, Franz was appointed Gestapo investigator in the city of Linz. In April 1942, when World War II was in full swing, and the Wehrmacht was winning one victory after another, Obersturmführer 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 took over 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 did not need Jews as a labor force, so all of them must be disposed of as quickly as possible.
All newcomers to Sobibor were immediately taken from the station to the so-called "bathhouse" for "sanitary treatment". People were locked in the room, 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. None of the subordinates of the commandant of Sobibor sat idle - some escorted those doomed to death, others killed, others pulled out golden crowns from corpses and sorted the things of the dead. The conveyor of death worked what is called flawlessly.
The zeal of Franz Stangl did not go unnoticed, and on August 28, 1942, he was transferred as commandant to a more promising place - to the large death camp Treblinka. 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 strength. But Stangl did not get this position in vain - he knew how to organize everything in the best possible way. The executioner realized that if people who were waiting for death were given hope, they would not create problems and would dutifully wait for their turn. By order of the commandant in Treblinka, sidewalks were laid out of paving stones, bushes were planted, and even flower beds were planted.
Stangl himself never made contact with his victims - he moved around the camp in a custom-made white SS uniform, and brandishing a long whip. The prisoners nicknamed the commandant "White Death" and this nickname fully corresponded to the state of affairs. Later, during interrogations, Franz constantly repeated that he