Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

After working in Damascus for a year, Stangl saved enough money by 1949 to buy tickets for Theresa and their children to move there. As required by law, Theresa registered her departure with the Austrian police, telling them she was joining her husband who escaped. Sereny verifies that this account is true.

In Damascus, Theresa found that Stangl was once again the nice man he’d been before the war. After their arrival, Stangl lost his job and Theresa found work as a masseuse. Within months, Stangl found a well-paying job as a mechanical engineer at another textile company. With his new job, Stangl moved his family out of the boarding house they’d been staying in, the address of which is mentioned in several books about Nazi escape networks, into a nice apartment.

After a year in that apartment, Stangl decided they had to leave the country. Their landlord and neighbor—the Damascus police chief—became interested in having their 14-year-old daughter, Renate, join his harem. The Stangls worried they would be powerless to prevent that and obtained visas to the first South American country that accepted them: Brazil. The police chief wasn’t angry they planned to leave.

They made the trip to Brazil with money they saved in Damascus and legitimate Syrian documents. Sereny confirms this would’ve been possible and that they wouldn’t have needed money from a secret Nazi organization; that trip for a family of five cost about $1,200 in 1951, about $17,000 in 2022 dollars.

They arrived in São Paulo broke from the trip, but Stangl quickly found work as a weaver at a textile company, managing with German, Italian, and some English before he learned Portuguese. He was quickly promoted to an organizational role. Over the following years, he moved to other companies to make more money. In 1955, he fell ill with an undiagnosed illness and couldn’t work; Theresa suspects it was connected to the stress from Poland. She found work at Mercedes-Benz and worked her way up the secretarial pool. In 1957, two of their daughters married—both to Austrians. By 1959, Stangl’s health improved, and Theresa found him work at Volkswagen.

Sereny believes it’s unlikely that the two German companies—Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen—employed the Stangls because of Franz’s Nazi past, though she confirms that type of thing did happen. She reasons that if Stangl were able to leverage his Nazism for a job, it seems unlikely he’d wait eight years to do so. Additionally, by 1959, executives with Nazi loyalties were retiring, replaced by people without these ideologies.

Stangl started as a mechanic at Volkswagen but was soon promoted to a managerial role, earning him a large salary. With the money, they built a modern house in a German neighborhood. The Stangls rarely mentioned the “terrible times” in Poland, as Theresa calls them, to their neighbors. Despite doubtlessly seeing reports about the Nazi camps, Theresa convinced herself that only men who were enemy combatants were killed in them: “If my thinking—as I know now […] was illogical, then it was because that was how I wanted, how I needed, how I had to think in order to maintain our life as a family and, if you like—for I know this also now—my sanity” (960).

Stangl explains that he just wanted to start a new life with his family after the war: “All I could think of […] was Knut Hamsun’s novel Segen der Erde (Growth of the Soil). That was all I wanted; to start from the beginning, cleanly, quietly, with only my family whom I loved, around me” (965). He becomes angry, then cries, when Sereny asks him whether his daughters know of his crimes.

Despite fleeing prosecution in Austria for his role at the Hartheim euthanasia institute, Stangl did not attempt to hide his whereabouts once abroad. According to Theresa, he was fatalistic about eventually being caught. In 1964, Stangl learned from a Viennese newspaper that Wiesenthal was looking for him.

Despite doing nothing to disguise his identity or whereabouts after he walked out of Austrian prison, Stangl lived for over 20 years without being arrested. In Damascus, Theresa informed the Austrian police of their movements. In 1951, the Stangls traveled to Brazil via Italy under their own names. They claim to have registered at the Austrian consulate in Brazil under their own names in 1954. The Austrian consul denies registering Stangl himself but confirms Theresa and Renate’s registrations. In 1957, when the Stangls needed a copy of Stangl’s birth certificate for Renate to marry, the consulate provided it.

Austria didn’t list Stangl as a wanted criminal until 1961, 13 years after his escape. In 1964, Stangl’s name was prominent in both Brazilian and foreign press coverage of the Treblinka trial. Despite this, no one at the Austrian consulate, the Austrian police, or any of Stangl’s coworkers at Volkswagen in Brazil connected the Stangl on the news with the Stangl in Brazil. He was only arrested in 1967 after Wiesenthal’s “search” for him: “one can only be amazed that it was left to the private efforts of Herr Wiesenthal to discover the whereabouts of this man who was never hidden” (979).

On February 28, 1967, Brazilian police arrested Stangl near his house in São Paulo on a tip from Wiesenthal; his arrest was widely reported. In June of that year, Brazil extradited Stangl to Germany. The Stangls’ former friends in Brazil distanced themselves from Theresa and her children. In 1968, Theresa traveled to Düsseldorf to testify at his trial.

During Theresa’s frequent visits to Stangl in prison, she noticed that after a while he would stop talking to her and would instead talk to the guards. By then, he knew she’d heard about everything he’d done and was desperate to avoid her questions. Stangl never admitted to his wife he’d been the commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. At the end of his life, the only thing that matters to him is that his family continues loving him. Sereny believes that Stangl only agreed to the interviews when he realized that even if he ever made parole, his family would never look at him with the same love they used to.

Sereny asks Eidenböck whether she thinks her sister could’ve convinced Stangl to leave Sobibor or Treblinka; she responds, “Resl [the family nickname for Theresa] always wanted to get to the top […] I suppose in a way she did get there” (990).

On the day of Stangl’s sentencing, Theresa wondered what the Germans pronouncing the judgment would have done in Stangl’s place. Sereny asks both Stangls, separately, whether they saw any meaning to the Holocaust. Their responses indicate that they came to a consoling conclusion together: Without the Holocaust, there would be no Israel and no unified Jewish identity. Sereny is outraged by these responses but nevertheless sees an attempt to tell the truth in them.

In her final conversation with Theresa, Sereny asks whether Theresa thinks Stangl would’ve left Treblinka if she’d given him an ultimatum between his family and his ambition. Sereny asks Theresa to take time alone to think about her answer. Theresa returns after thinking and crying for an hour: She believes he would have chosen her over his job.

The following morning, Sereny receives a letter from Theresa, written in the middle of the night, retracting her response. Sereny calls to say that her first response seemed like the truth and asks what she wants to do; Theresa cries in despair—she doesn’t know what to do. Sereny says she will publish both responses. She remarks that sometimes the truth is too terrible to bear.

Stangl arrives chipper to his (unbeknownst to him) final talk with Sereny. Sereny brings him a restorative, Austrian soup his wife used to make. He speaks pensively about how to best teach children, “what children should, and should never again, be taught” (1000).

Then he begins talking about “stupidity,” and his whole demeanor becomes brusque and harsh. He rails against some of the people he worked with at Volkswagen: “There were idiots amongst them—morons. I often opened my mouth too wide and let them have it. ‘My God,’ I’d say to them, ‘euthanasia passed you by, didn’t it?’” (1001). Theresa recalls being frightened when, in Brazil during the two years before his arrest, this coarse personality surfaced as road rage against “stupid” drivers.

Sereny asks Stangl whether he agreed to her interviews to reconcile himself with his guilt. He responds automatically, as he did many times prior, that he was not guilty. For the first time, Sereny says nothing in response. Over the following 30 minutes, she sits in silence while Stangl wrestles aloud with his conscience:

“I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself […] But I was there […] So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the guilt.… Because my guilt…my guilt…only now in these talks…now that I have talked about it all for the first time…” He stopped. (1003)

He explains that he feels hopeless and would have preferred to have died than become what he did. Their time for the day ends; suddenly, Stangl becomes almost jubilant, joking with Sereny and the guard as she leaves. He dies the next day from heart failure.

In his cell, which is in perfect order, he left detailed notes for more things he wanted to discuss with Sereny, including a book of fairy tales they’d been discussing concerning children’s education. Sereny suspects Stangl died when he did because he had finally faced the truth of his actions.

In the epilogue, Sereny briefly outlines her moral philosophy. She believes that the essential core of someone’s personality is their ability to take responsibility for their actions. As you grow up, you become increasingly more responsible for your actions; however, external forces can corrupt this growth. We are moral when we are aware that our actions affect others and act with accountability to ourselves and others.