Therefore, all new arrivals to Sobibor were immediately taken from the station to the so-called "bathhouse" for "sanitary treatment". 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. 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. 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. 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. As a person with experience in the police, Franz was appointed an investigator of the Gestapo in the city of Linz. 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. 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. Therefore, in childhood, Stangl was often beaten about and without.Īfter school, Franz got a job as a worker at a textile factory, but quickly realized that it was not his. Franz's father was a military man, at the same time a drinking man and not too sentimental. The man who made it his job to destroy people was born in the Austrian city of Altmunster in 1908. In total, Stangl had about a million lives on his account and he understood it perfectly. Later, working in Treblinka, the Hauptsturmfuhrer surpassed himself and in just one day sent 22 thousand prisoners to the gas chambers. 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. 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: 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?!". 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. They tried their best to cover their tracks and changed their appearance and surnames. "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.Īfter the Third Reich fell, Nazi criminals scattered all over the world. 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. The question of whether Scott's use of the Walter Mitty metaphor to describe Franz Stangl is better applied to Scott's argument, I will leave to the reader to decide.Franz Stangl was arrested on a grand scale. The story is well worth reading, and the tale was turned into a 1947 motion picture of the same name, starring Danny Kaye in the title role. The character of Walter Mitty is that of a mild-mannered daydreamer, who fantasizes about imaginary derring-do and spectacular exploits. Stangl, Franz Paul (1898 or 1908-1971) - police superintendent, Health Care Institute (HuPa - Heil- und Pflegeanstalten) Schloss Hartheim euthanasia facility 1940 commandant, concentration camp (Konzentrationslager - KL) Sobibor May-Sept 1942 commandant, KL Treblinka Sept 1942-Aug 1943 service, Action Command "Reinhard" (Einsatzkommando Reinhard) at Trieste, Italy įor the readers who may not be familiar with the reference to Walter Mitty, there is a droll short story - "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" - written by James Thurber. Another is that the two trials took place about 20 years apart. Trower - One big difference is that Poland had the death penalty and West Germany did not.
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