Franz Stangl was the Austrian police officer who opened the Sobibor extermination camp in the spring of 1942 and then commanded Treblinka, the largest of the camps built for the destruction of the Jews of occupied Poland, until the late summer of 1943. He left Europe after the war, settled in Brazil and lived there for sixteen years before he was arrested in São Paulo in February 1967. Brazil's Supreme Federal Court sent him to West Germany that June. On December 22, 1970, after a trial of more than seven months, the jury court of the Düsseldorf Regional Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for participation in the murder of at least 400,000 people at Treblinka, most of them Jews.
He was the first commandant of a Nazi extermination camp to be tried by a West German court. The court found that it could not be proven that he had personally killed anyone, and that he had directly participated in the deaths of the 400,000. He never served the sentence as a final one. He died in Düsseldorf on June 28, 1971, while the judgment was still open to review, and the case closed with his death.
Stangl was born on March 26, 1908, in Altmünster, in Upper Austria. He trained as a weaver and worked at the trade before he applied to join the police. He entered the Austrian police in 1931 and was posted to the political department of the criminal police in Wels, the office that dealt, among other duties, with the illegal National Socialist movement in Austria.
He joined the Nazi Party in 1936, while serving in the police and at a time when the party was banned in Austria. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938 he moved into the Gestapo, and his police career carried on under the new state.
In November 1940 Stangl was transferred to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, one of the killing facilities of the Nazi "euthanasia" program known as T4. He served there as deputy office manager and was responsible for security. In October 1941 he went to the T4 facility at Bernburg on the Saale, where prisoners from the concentration camps were being murdered, and then returned for a short time to Hartheim.
Hartheim led directly to his posting in occupied Poland, where his deputy at Sobibor was another Hartheim man. After the war it was also the first part of his record that Austrian investigators reached, and the matter that first put him in an Austrian jail.
In March 1942 Stangl was sent to Lublin, the center of the program later called Operation Reinhard. He completed the construction of the Sobibor camp in the Lublin District and became its first commandant. Regular operations at Sobibor began in early May 1942. His deputy there was a man who had also worked with him at Hartheim, and in August 1942 that deputy succeeded him as commandant. The deputy was never brought to trial.
Stangl moved to Treblinka in the late summer of 1942. The camp's first commandant had been dismissed on August 26, 1942, and Stangl, transferred from Sobibor, took his place; by September he was in command. Treblinka II had been completed only that July, and it became the largest of the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard.
He commanded the camp for close to a year. The mass murder at Treblinka had begun in late July 1942 and went on into the following year. On August 2, 1943, prisoners rose against the camp staff, and some of them escaped. On August 23, 1943, his deputy succeeded him as commandant. Stangl began the work of dismantling the camp and in September 1943 was transferred to the Trieste region in northern Italy. Treblinka II was ordered dismantled that fall and was closed in November 1943.
The court that tried him in 1970 set the number of people murdered at Treblinka under his command at no fewer than 400,000. Survivors of the 1943 escape were among the witnesses who came to Düsseldorf to testify against him.
Stangl survived the war. The United States military police interned him at the Glasenbach camp because he had belonged to the SS. In 1947 Austrian authorities connected his name with Hartheim. He was handed over to the Austrian courts and held on remand in Linz.
He escaped from the Linz jail in late May 1948. A former Sobibor colleague went with him. The two men made their way to Rome, where a bishop helped Stangl obtain a Red Cross travel document, and from Italy he traveled to Damascus. In 1951 he moved to São Paulo, Brazil.
In Brazil he worked as a technician and later at an automobile plant in the São Paulo area. He lived under his own name. West German prosecutors were looking for him from the late 1950s, and an investigating judge in Düsseldorf took a formal step in the case in 1960 that would later prove decisive in the Brazilian court. For years nothing more happened.
The break came through an informant, a former member of the Gestapo, who first offered Stangl's address in 1964 to the director of a Nazi war crimes documentation center in Vienna and in the end sold it for a price tied to the arrest. That information was passed to the authorities. With the help of Austria's Minister of Justice, a fifty-page summary of a thousand-page Austrian accusation went to Brazil, and Austria asked Brazil to detain him. On February 28, 1967, agents of the Brazilian political police arrested Stangl in São Paulo as he returned from work. He was held under a preventive arrest order issued at Austria's request.
The arrest was announced on March 3, 1967. Brazilian officials moved him between jails, held him under maximum security and kept him from the press; the Supreme Court barred a planned news conference on the ground that it might harm his defense. He told investigators that he knew nothing of any organization that protected former Nazis. Brazil's Minister of Justice placed the case before the Supreme Federal Court, and the Federal Police opened a wider inquiry into former Nazis living in the country. In the weeks after the arrest the heads of the Foreign Ministry, the Supreme Court, the Justice Ministry and the Federal Police all changed with a new government, and the reorganized court refused a habeas corpus petition to free him. His lawyers complained that no foreign government had yet produced documentary evidence of his guilt. Israel and other countries backed the extradition requests.
Three governments wanted him. Austria filed its extradition request first, dated February 27, 1967, and it reached the Supreme Federal Court on April 7. West Germany and Poland filed theirs on April 18. The West German request had been set in motion by the chief prosecutor in Düsseldorf, and Bonn announced it in March, although no extradition treaty existed between the two countries. Poland asked for him as the state where the crimes had been committed. Its request relied on the 1948 Genocide Convention and on Polish law, including a decree of April 22, 1964, that suspended the limitation period for crimes of the war years, but it showed no court proceeding against Stangl in Poland. Stangl himself was said to prefer Austria to either of the other two countries.
From the first week there was a question whether any of the requests could succeed. A spokesman for the Brazilian Justice Ministry said in March that Stangl might have to be released, because Brazilian law barred prosecution for homicide after twenty years and the war had ended more than twenty years earlier. The defense took up the same point. Its counsel argued that the twenty-year limit had expired on every charge, that the requests described the facts too vaguely, that Brazil and the requesting states lacked reciprocity, and that the arrest request was invalid because a prosecutor rather than a judge had signed it. A former chief justice of the court, the author of the Brazilian penal code, publicly backed the limitation argument. The court postponed its hearing in late April because the Polish and West German papers had arrived only days earlier, and it extended his detention by two weeks over a technical defect.
On April 27, 1967, the justice assigned as rapporteur questioned Stangl himself. Stangl admitted that he had worked at Sobibor and at Treblinka. He said that his role had been to build the camps.
The Supreme Federal Court decided the three requests together on June 7, 1967, and the vote was unanimous. Stangl, then 59, was not required to attend. One justice at first disagreed with the order in which the countries should receive him and then joined the rapporteur, and the rest of the bench followed. The Prosecutor General had advised the court that the Polish request should be refused because the crimes it described had lapsed under the statute of limitations. The court agreed.
The reasoning turned on the law in force when the crimes were committed. The rapporteur held that the acts could not be treated as genocide in a Brazilian court, because genocide did not exist as an offense in 1942 and 1943. They had to be judged as qualified homicide, which under Brazilian law lapsed after twenty years. Treblinka had stopped operating in 1943, and Poland had opened no judicial proceeding against Stangl, so the period had run out in 1963. The West German request survived because the act of the Düsseldorf investigating judge in 1960 had interrupted the running of time.
The West German request charged him with murder, with twenty-three counts of individual murder and with responsibility for the murder of 400,000 Jews at Treblinka, where he had commanded from August 1942 to August 1943. Lawyers for each government had argued for priority: Austria because Stangl was still an Austrian citizen, Poland because the crimes had been committed on its territory, and West Germany because both countries had been under German rule at the time. The court gave West Germany the first claim and ordered that Stangl be handed to Austria afterward. It attached a condition. The West German government had to undertake to convert any sentence of life imprisonment into a term of years.
The Brazilian ruling shaped the German trial. Because of the time limits Brazil applied, the charges he faced in Düsseldorf were confined to Treblinka. He was handed over to West Germany in 1967.
The prosecutors in North Rhine-Westphalia had already tried members of the Treblinka staff. The first Treblinka trial at the Düsseldorf Regional Court ran in 1964 and 1965 and ended with a life sentence for Stangl's former deputy. Stangl's own case built on that work and on witnesses scattered across several continents.
Some of the witnesses could not travel. In February 1969 a Düsseldorf judge went to Caracas to take the testimony of a former Polish Jewish prisoner of Treblinka who had escaped from the camp in 1943 and was too ill to come to Germany. Other survivors lived in Israel and the United States.
In October 1969 the Düsseldorf prosecutor filed the indictment. It charged Stangl with the murder of at least 400,000 Jews at Treblinka. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The trial opened before the jury court of the Düsseldorf Regional Court on May 13, 1970. Stangl was 62. The court expected the trial to last until the end of September. Forty witnesses from the United States and Israel were expected, and the court heard many eyewitnesses in the months that followed, survivors of Treblinka among them. Some of those survivors had been part of the group that broke out of the camp during the uprising of August 1943.
On the first day Stangl told the court that he had never harmed anyone. His defense followed the same line throughout. He said that he had only done his duty. He said that he had not chosen his postings and had acted under orders, and he presented himself as an administrator rather than a man moved by hatred. The trial was interrupted once when he fell ill.
On December 3, 1970, after almost seven months of evidence, the state prosecutor for North Rhine-Westphalia asked the court for a life sentence, and the verdict was set for December 18. When the court adjourned in the middle of December, Stangl spoke again. He asked the judges and jurors for understanding, saying that whatever he had done, he had done under orders.
The court pronounced its judgment on Tuesday, December 22, 1970. It found Stangl guilty of participation in the murder of at least 400,000 people at Treblinka, most of them Jews, and sentenced him to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty German law allowed. The court held that it could not be proven that Stangl had personally killed a single person, and that as commandant he had directly participated in the deaths of the 400,000.
Stangl said nothing when the sentence was read. The presiding judge ordered that he remain in custody even if he lodged an appeal. The Austrian government, for its part, was preparing its own case against him under the Brazilian ruling, which had named Austria as the next country to receive him.
Stangl died in Düsseldorf on June 28, 1971, about six months after the sentence. The judgment had not become final. With his death the proceedings against him ended, and the Austrian case never came to trial.
The Düsseldorf conviction covered Treblinka alone. Stangl was never tried for Sobibor, where he was the first commandant, or for his service at Hartheim and Bernburg. The Brazilian court's reading of its own statute of limitations removed the Polish request and confined the West German case, and the Austrian proceedings that were to follow ended with his death.
The figure in the judgment, at least 400,000 people, is a minimum set by the court for the period of his command. The charges filed in different countries and at different stages, in 1967, 1969 and 1970, stated other totals, and the court's finding is the figure that carries legal force.
The life sentence and the Brazilian condition do not sit together. Brazil had required West Germany to undertake to turn any life sentence into a term of years. The Düsseldorf court imposed life imprisonment. Because Stangl died before the judgment became final, the question of how the undertaking would have been honored was never settled.
His own account was rejected. He told the Brazilian rapporteur that he had only built the camps, and he told the Düsseldorf court that he had never harmed anyone and had acted under orders. The court did not find that he had killed anyone with his own hands. It found that he had directly participated, as commandant, in the murder of at least 400,000 people.
March 26, 1908: Born in Altmünster, Upper Austria.
1931: Joins the Austrian police; later posted to the political department of the criminal police in Wels.
1936: Joins the Nazi Party, then banned in Austria.
March 1938: Germany annexes Austria; Stangl moves into the Gestapo.
November 1940: Transferred to the T4 facility at Hartheim Castle near Linz as deputy office manager.
October 1941: Sent to the T4 facility at Bernburg, then briefly back to Hartheim.
March 1942: Sent to Lublin; completes the Sobibor camp and becomes its first commandant.
Early May 1942: Regular operations begin at Sobibor.
August 1942: Succeeded at Sobibor by his deputy; transferred to Treblinka after the first commandant's dismissal on August 26.
August 2, 1943: Prisoner uprising at Treblinka.
August 23, 1943: Succeeded as Treblinka commandant by his deputy.
September 1943: Transferred to the Trieste region.
After the war: Interned by the United States military police at Glasenbach.
1947: Handed to the Austrian courts over Hartheim; held on remand in Linz.
Late May 1948: Escapes from the Linz jail; travels to Rome and on to Damascus.
1951: Settles in São Paulo, Brazil.
1960: A Düsseldorf investigating judge's act interrupts the limitation period in the West German case.
1964: A former Gestapo member first offers Stangl's address to a Nazi war crimes documentation center in Vienna.
February 28, 1967: Arrested in São Paulo.
April 18, 1967: West German and Polish extradition requests filed, after Austria's request of February 27.
April 27, 1967: Questioned by the rapporteur of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court.
June 7, 1967: The Supreme Federal Court unanimously grants extradition to West Germany, refuses Poland's request and names Austria as the next state.
1967: Handed over to West Germany.
February 1969: A Düsseldorf judge takes testimony from a Treblinka survivor in Caracas.
October 1969: Indicted in Düsseldorf for the murder of at least 400,000 Jews at Treblinka.
May 13, 1970: Trial opens before the jury court of the Düsseldorf Regional Court.
December 3, 1970: The prosecution asks for a life sentence.
December 22, 1970: Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.
June 28, 1971: Dies in Düsseldorf before the judgment becomes final.