Franz Stangl

Franz Paul Stangl (March 26, 1908 – June 28, 1971) was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an Schutzstaffel (SS) commander in Nazi Germany, became commandant of the camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He worked for Volkswagen do Brasil and was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited to West Germany and tried for the mass murder of 1 million people. In 1970, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Quotes

• My guilt is that I am still here...I should have died. That is my guilt.
  • Quoted in "Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder" - Page 364 - by Gitta Sereny - History

• I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass...they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.
  • When asked how he felt about the execution of children. Quoted in "The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections on Germany" - Page 125 - by Gitta Sereny - History - 2001.

• No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.
  • When asked if he could have gone against his orders. Quoted in "The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections on Germany" - Page 125 - by Gitta Sereny - History - 2001.

• Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn't have; it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.
  • About the victims. Quoted in "Good and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today" - Page 96 - by Jack Bemporad, John Pawlikowski, Joseph Sievers - History - 2000.

• He was a Dragoner (one of the imperial elite regiments). Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.
  • About his father. Quoted in "The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections on Germany" - Page 96 - by Gitta Sereny - History - 2001.

• My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty...
  • Quoted in "The Bormann Brotherhood" - Page 182 - by William Stevenson - 1973.