Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Stangl arrived in Lublin, Poland in the spring of 1942. He met Odilo Globocnik there, the lieutenant-general who directed Aktion Reinhardt. Stangl sensed that Globocnik was secretly assessing his fitness for his assignment in their casual, hours-long conversation. Stangl says Globocnik assigned him to organize the construction of a supply camp called Sobibor.

At that time in 1942, the planned extermination of the Jews was unknown to the German population and even to many of the highest party members. Those in the party who did know worried whether the SS men would consent to systematically murdering thousands of healthy men, women, and children every day; while there was plausible deniability with the euthanasia program, it would be much harder to convince the men these killings were justifiable. Those who did know, such as Globocnik, carefully selected the personnel for the camps according to their records from the T4 euthanasia program. Many of the SS were intentionally surprised with the true nature of their work upon arrival at the camps. This tactic was intended to shock them into compliance and complicity, and to impress upon them the importance of secrecy: “[T]hey reached their final destination, saw what it was, and by seeing became implicated and aware of the danger their knowledge represented” (274).

Globocnik drove Stangl to work faster, telling him to kill Jewish work commandos if they weren’t working hard enough. Stangl objected, and he and his friend from Hartheim, Michel, decided they needed to find a way to be transferred. However, Globocnik soon tasked Wirth with overseeing Sobibor in addition to the Chelmno and Belzec extermination camps, which he already commanded. Wirth told the German staff at Sobibor that anyone who objected to killing Jews who weren’t working hard enough would be killed, too.

During construction, Wirth summoned Stangl to Belzec to inform him of the camp’s true purpose. In Belzec, Wirth had already invented and implemented some of the killing methods that would later be used at all the camps, such as using engine exhaust in gas chambers and forcing stronger Jews (termed Sonderkommandos) to rob and bury the weaker ones before being killed themselves. In formal German, Stangl recounts his arrival at Belzec to Sereny:

Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere [Wirth] was standing on a hill, next to the pits…the pits…full…they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses…oh God. That’s where Wirth told me — he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge (285).

Stangl refused the assignment; Wirth told him he would have to report his refusal. Stangl returned to Sobibor, where he and Michel discussed how to get out of what they were doing, which they agreed was a crime. Wirth arrived at Sobibor and took over finishing the gas chambers. Meanwhile, Stangl continued with the other construction work. At one point, an enraged Wirth—whipping both the Jewish work commandos and his own men—ordered 25 work commandos into the gas chamber to test it. Subsequently, Wirth put Michel in charge of the gassings. The chambers’ distance from the main camp meant Stangl could avoid seeing the actual gassings while he continued the other construction. He tried in vain to get Globocnik’s approval for a transfer. Two months later, Globocnik granted Stangl’s family permission to visit him in Poland as a way to mollify him.

Stangl administered Sobibor for its first two months of full operation, during which time an estimated 100,000 people were killed.

In 1972, Sereny visits the memorial at the former Sobibor site in eastern Poland. The official plaque states that 250,000 Russian, Polish, Jewish, and Roma prisoners were killed in the camp. Sereny notes in a footnote that the number is likely more than double that, and survivors state that non-Jewish Poles were not killed there.

The custodian of the site, Wladzimier Gerung, lives with his wife in the forester’s hut where Stangl used to live. The hut overlooks the railway station, meaning Stangl would have seen the transports of prisoners as they arrived. The inside of the camp was fenced in a way that prevented prisoners from seeing anything other than the corridor they were being forced through. Sereny is jolted out of the peacefulness of the site when she realizes that even 30 years later she must be walking on ashes.

Sereny struggles to connect the known antisemitism of this part of Poland with the Gerungs’ friendliness. Mrs. Gerung, who as a girl lived near Chelm during the war, says the people there knew what was happening in Sobibor because even though it was 20 miles away, they could smell the rancid air and see the crematoria fires at night. Her neighbors in Chelm hid a five-year-old Jewish girl throughout the war. During the occupation, any Pole who was caught helping a Jew was shot without question. Some Poles, including some Catholic nuns, risked their lives to hide their Jewish countrymen, but most were unwilling to take the risk.

Stangl wasn’t tried in Düsseldorf for his role at Sobibor, but his conduct there went on record through the testimonies of the camp’s survivors. Those survivors testified that at Sobibor, Stangl often wore white, linen riding clothes to oversee prisoners unloading from the trains. With a blank expression, Stangl explains to Sereny that he had few clothes and wore linen riding clothes because they were good in the heat, and he rode a lot for transport.

Stanislaw Szmajzner was the only survivor of Sobibor (or Treblinka) who testified in Stangl’s trial and who Stangl remembers. Szmajzner’s testimony was widely publicized in Brazil because, like the Stangls, he emigrated to Brazil after the war. The Stangls were bitter about his testimony because it hurt their reputations in Brazil and because Stangl claims he treated the boy well in Sobibor. Sereny interviews Szmajzner in Brazil.

Szmajzner came from an orthodox Jewish family and was 14 when the Nazis deported him and his family to Sobibor. He saved himself and his younger brothers from gassing by convincing the SS man in charge of removing skilled tradesmen from the gassing queue, Gustav Wagner, that they were goldsmiths (he was; his brothers were not). Subsequently, Szmajzner survived by making gold and silver jewelry for the SS men, including Stangl, from the gold taken from the mouths and possessions of murdered Jews.

Stangl was impressed that a boy of only 14 was a proficient goldsmith and often came to the smithing area to watch Szmajzner work. Stangl struck Szmajzner as soft-spoken, kind, and polite—unlike the other SS men. However, Stangl was also arrogant and displayed immense pleasure in his station and work. Szmajzner holds little animosity toward Stangl; by contrast, he vows to kill Wagner upon learning that he, too, is living in Brazil. Sereny dissuades him from doing so.

In Stangl’s trial, the prosecution focused on an eyewitness account that, along with other SS men, he fired his pistol into a crowd of arriving prisoners. Stangl is unusually adamant that he never did this. Sereny believes it’s irrelevant whether he did or didn’t: The prisoners died hours later anyway in a process under his control. Sereny thinks it’s a mistake to measure Stangl’s responsibility according to momentary acts, such as shooting into a crowd; instead, she asserts that Stangl should be held responsible for who he was, day in and day out, as the commandant of Sobibor and later Treblinka.

Stangl shares an account of a family vacation near Sobibor that conflicts with Theresa’s, indicating that he is consciously or subconsciously manipulating events to absolve himself of guilt.

During this vacation, Theresa learned that Sobibor was an extermination camp from one of Stangl’s men, who was drunk. When she confronted her husband, Stangl denied being the commandant, claiming he only oversaw the camp’s construction. Her response was similar to when she discovered the nature of his work at the Hartheim: She wouldn’t let him touch her for days. However, she softened after their hosts and the man who would replace Stangl as commandant both assured her that Stangl was a good man and wasn’t involved in the gassings.

Toward the end of the vacation, Globocnik abruptly summoned Stangl to Lublin. In Stangl’s telling, Globocnik left him in doubt about his family’s safety to pressure him into accepting an assignment to Treblinka. Consequently, Stangl arranged for a friend to help his family “escape” back to Germany. Theresa says nothing like that happened. Instead, she says that Stangl returned a day after he left and told her he’d been transferred to Treblinka.

By the summer of 1942, after Stangl left Sobibor, numerous eyewitnesses had reported details of the extermination camps to the outside world. However, the US State Department and the Vatican suppressed, dismissed, or downplayed the reports for months.

In July 1942, Szmul Zygielbojm, who fled Poland after his wife and children were killed, appeared on BBC and beseeched the world to acknowledge the report that the Nazis had already killed 700,000 Jews in their extermination plan. On August 1, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, a German philosopher working for the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, informed the American and British governments that, according to someone with access to Hitler’s circle, Hitler had ordered the extermination of all European Jews. The State Department dismissed the report and blocked Riegner’s telegram of the same report to the head of the American Jewish Congress. Not until Christmastime 1942—already past the peak of the extermination of Polish Jews—did the Allied nations officially condemn the Nazi’s extermination of Jews. The Vatican maintained its silence, explaining to the US State Department that they were unable to verify the number of Jews who were killed.