Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Samuel Rajzman is another survivor of Treblinka. Sereny visits him in 1972 at his home in Montreal. His story exemplifies how parents were helpless to save their children from the Nazis. In July 1942, Rajzman lived with his daughter and first wife in the Warsaw ghetto. A man whose fellow prisoners helped him escape Treblinka told the ghetto’s residents about the camp. Rajzman believed him, but the ghetto council didn’t; Sereny believes their only option in their relatively powerless position was to reject the truth. Rajzman and his wife tried to hide their daughter, but the Gestapo found her and shipped her to Treblinka.

Stangl talks profusely about his time in Trieste as if trying to blot out the other part of his story. In 1943 after the Nazis had finished exterminating the Polish Jews, all of the SS involved in Aktion Reinhardt were transferred to Trieste. This bulk transfer was intentional: The higher-ups hoped these 120 men would die in the dangerous assignment so they couldn’t tell what they’d done. Partisans killed Wirth in Trieste in 1944.

Stangl’s biggest assignment in Trieste was overseeing the Einsatz Poll, a project for 500,000 Italian workers to fortify Istria. According to Stangl, Theresa, and Suchomel, Stangl avoided orders to be on the lookout for Jews. According to Suchomel, Stangl knew by the time he reached Trieste that the war was lost. Stangl requested his home office be changed from Linz to Vienna. Ostensibly, this was to get out from under his hated supervisor, Prohaska, in Linz, but Sereny suspects it was to erase his record of being a member of the Linz Gestapo. Stangl also developed connections in Italy (through the black-market deals required to obtain materials for the Einsatz Poll) who helped him escape after the war. While in Trieste, Stangl had his first heart attack and became very sick, developing big, blue lesions over his body, which are sometimes a symptom of extreme emotional distress.

When Stangl left the field hospital in Trieste in August 1944 after his sickness, Germany was in disarray. He, Theresa, and their children returned to their flat in Wels, which had been bombed and then burgled by their neighbor.

By then, the war was over. Someone denounced Stangl as SS to the Americans, who arrested him. After searching the camps the Americans established throughout Austria for soldiers and displaced people, Theresa found Stangl in the Glasenbach camp near Salzburg. The Americans held Stangl in this spartan camp from summer 1945 to spring 1947. In 1947, the Americans gave Stangl to the Austrians, who imprisoned him awaiting trial for his role in the T4 euthanasia program.

The American soldiers’ attitudes toward the Germans changed in the months following the war, when those who liberated the country and witnessed Nazi atrocities firsthand were relieved by soldiers who hadn’t. Soon, the American soldiers began sympathizing with Nazis at the expense of their victims.

In the disarray of American occupation after the war, it was easy for those guilty of atrocities to conceal their crimes. Distinguishing between civilians and those disguised as civilians would have required experts who didn’t exist: “they would have needed literally thousands of meticulously trained investigators fluent in many foreign languages and commanding a wide knowledge of recent European political history” (714). The Americans imprisoned Stangl because someone identified him as an SS officer; they didn’t know about his role in Treblinka.

In the year Stangl awaited trial in prison in Linz, Theresa’s situation improved. Unrelated to her husband’s imprisonment, the government sent a young Hungarian Jew who had been imprisoned in Mauthausen, Maritza Lebovitch, to live with her. Despite knowing Stangl worked in a camp, Lebovitch befriended Theresa and helped her feed her children. Theresa credits Lebovitch with preventing her children from starving.

When the Hartheim trial began in Linz, Theresa learned for the first time about the details of the euthanasia program. Despite the facts exposed in the trial, Stangl convinced her that the program only administered mercy killings under careful medical control. Following the sentencing of a driver at Hartheim, Theresa convinced her husband to escape.

Stangl’s prison was open, allowing him to simply walk out. Using money and jewelry his wife gave him and a forged identity card, he escaped across the mountains to Italy to meet Bishop Alois Hudal at the Vatican, who helped former SS officers.

Tales of elaborate Nazi escapes aided by clandestine organizations captured the public imagination in the decades following World War II, but they rarely had a basis in fact. However, two organizations did help Stangl escape: the International Red Cross and the Vatican.

The Red Cross unwittingly aided war criminals such as Stangl by failing to develop an investigative department capable of verifying refugees’ identities. They issued tens of thousands of travel documents, called laisser passers, to refugees, enabling the war criminals hidden among them to flee Europe. Numerous German and Austrian clergymen at the Vatican knowingly helped war criminals like Stangl escape prosecution. Higher-ups at the Vatican likely knew that their own were providing such assistance and either didn’t care or approved. This permissive attitude largely resulted from Pope Pius XII’s passivity towards the Nazis during the war.

There were three main reasons for Pope Pius XII’s passivity. First, he saw the Nazis under Hitler as a bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism, which was ideologically opposed to the Church. Second, he wanted to avoid antagonizing the Nazis, who he feared planned to eradicate Catholicism in Germany (historically a Catholic stronghold in Europe). Third, and connected to the second, the Pope didn’t want to alienate German Catholics—who largely supported National Socialism—by criticizing Nazism. In the pre-war years, many Germans saw National Socialism as offering “a ‘new order’ representing integrity, national self-respect, and economic parity” (745). Finally, there were two background reasons that contributed to the Pope’s silence: He cherished his childhood spent in Germany, and, like most of the Catholic Church at the time, he was antisemitic.

Just as Stangl’s initial acceptance of the T4 assignment initiated a “step-by-step acquiescence to increasingly terrible acts” (746), the Pope’s initial refusal to criticize the Nazis for the T4 euthanasia program started a similar chain of acquiescence. An adamant Papal stand against the Nazis in response to the “Final Solution” could have been significant. Instead, Pope Pius XII did nothing, paving the way for clergymen to help known Nazi criminals after the war with the tacit approval and financial support from the Church.