Read Online Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder by Gitta Sereny - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Gitta Sereny
Tags: History, European, Politics & Social Sciences, World War II, Military, Germany, Europe, Holocaust, Jewish, Fascism, World, Politics & Government, International & World Politics, Ideologies & Doctrines
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my new job, I had to be superior in rank to the local police chief of the nearest police authority, Alkoven – it was a man called Hartmann – and I would therefore be transferred to the uniformed branch with the rank of lieutenant.”
“Were you to wear uniform?”
“Yes, the green police uniform [which he continued to wear until Christmas 1942, when – in Poland – he became assimilated to the SS and was given the grey SS field uniform worn by all German SS at Treblinka]. He gave me the name of a village not too far from Linz, and a telephone number; I remember, it was Alkoven 913. I was to return to Linz, pack and tell nobody where I was going. I was to go to an inn on the outskirts of Linz – the Gasthaus Drei Kronen it was, on the Landstrasse – and phone that number. And I’d be given instructions.”
(“Yes, of course I remember when he was first called to Berlin,” said Frau Stangl thirty-one years later in Brazil. “He told me he had to report to Tiergartenstrasse 4. He said, ‘I wonder what that is.’ ”)
“I only stayed at home for a day, I think,” Stangl continued, “and then did what they had told me to do: you know, I went to the Drei Kronen and called Alkoven 913. A man answered, I told him my name and he said, ‘I’ll come and get you’ – and about an hour later a kind of delivery van drove up – the driver was in civvies, a grey suit. When I asked him where we were going he wouldn’t say – he just said, ‘In the direction of Everding.’ And after an hour we got to Schloss Hartheim.”
“How did it look?”
“Oh, it was big you know, with a courtyard and archways and all that. It hadn’t been a private residence for some time: they’d had an orphanage in it I think, and later a hospital. Almost the first person I saw – it was such a relief – was a friend: a colleague from the police, Franz Reichleitner.”
It would appear that Reichleitner, * whose subsequent career paralleled Stangl’s, if on a slightly lower level, was equally glad to see him. “He said they’d told him I was coming and he’d been waiting for me near the entrance. He had arranged for us to share a room. He’d show me around later, he said, but first he had to take me to meet the doctors in charge and Hauptmann [Captain] Wirth.”
This was the first appearance of Stangl’s next bête noire , the notorious Christian Wirth – the “savage Christian”, as he was to be called. It was Wirth who carried out the first gassing of Germans certified incurably insane, in December 1939 or January 1940 at Brandenburg an der Havel. According to Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, “Wirth’s name does not occur in any of the surviving correspondence concerning euthanasia.” It would now appear from Stangl’s account, which is confirmed by one of his former subalterns, Franz Suchomel, that in mid-1940 Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of the dozen or so institutions of this kind in “Greater Germany”. Suchomel says that he came to Hartheim as a “Läuterungs-Kommissar because the place was an undisciplined pigsty”. A little over a year later he was appointed Kommandant of Belsec, the first of the three principal extermination camps to be installed in occupied Poland between March and May 1942. And later again – according to surviving documents–in August 1942 he was designated supervising “Inspector” of these three camps, Belsec, Sobibor and the largest – Treblinka. § This sequence of appointments reconfirms the preparatory role played by the Euthanasia Programme for the “Final Solution”. (In practice, if apparently not, as has also been claimed, as a formal training.)
“Wirth was a gross and florid man,” Stangl said. “My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time, and came back often. Whenever he was there, he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again, this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the
“Were you to wear uniform?”
“Yes, the green police uniform [which he continued to wear until Christmas 1942, when – in Poland – he became assimilated to the SS and was given the grey SS field uniform worn by all German SS at Treblinka]. He gave me the name of a village not too far from Linz, and a telephone number; I remember, it was Alkoven 913. I was to return to Linz, pack and tell nobody where I was going. I was to go to an inn on the outskirts of Linz – the Gasthaus Drei Kronen it was, on the Landstrasse – and phone that number. And I’d be given instructions.”
(“Yes, of course I remember when he was first called to Berlin,” said Frau Stangl thirty-one years later in Brazil. “He told me he had to report to Tiergartenstrasse 4. He said, ‘I wonder what that is.’ ”)
“I only stayed at home for a day, I think,” Stangl continued, “and then did what they had told me to do: you know, I went to the Drei Kronen and called Alkoven 913. A man answered, I told him my name and he said, ‘I’ll come and get you’ – and about an hour later a kind of delivery van drove up – the driver was in civvies, a grey suit. When I asked him where we were going he wouldn’t say – he just said, ‘In the direction of Everding.’ And after an hour we got to Schloss Hartheim.”
“How did it look?”
“Oh, it was big you know, with a courtyard and archways and all that. It hadn’t been a private residence for some time: they’d had an orphanage in it I think, and later a hospital. Almost the first person I saw – it was such a relief – was a friend: a colleague from the police, Franz Reichleitner.”
It would appear that Reichleitner, * whose subsequent career paralleled Stangl’s, if on a slightly lower level, was equally glad to see him. “He said they’d told him I was coming and he’d been waiting for me near the entrance. He had arranged for us to share a room. He’d show me around later, he said, but first he had to take me to meet the doctors in charge and Hauptmann [Captain] Wirth.”
This was the first appearance of Stangl’s next bête noire , the notorious Christian Wirth – the “savage Christian”, as he was to be called. It was Wirth who carried out the first gassing of Germans certified incurably insane, in December 1939 or January 1940 at Brandenburg an der Havel. According to Reitlinger’s The Final Solution, “Wirth’s name does not occur in any of the surviving correspondence concerning euthanasia.” It would now appear from Stangl’s account, which is confirmed by one of his former subalterns, Franz Suchomel, that in mid-1940 Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of the dozen or so institutions of this kind in “Greater Germany”. Suchomel says that he came to Hartheim as a “Läuterungs-Kommissar because the place was an undisciplined pigsty”. A little over a year later he was appointed Kommandant of Belsec, the first of the three principal extermination camps to be installed in occupied Poland between March and May 1942. And later again – according to surviving documents–in August 1942 he was designated supervising “Inspector” of these three camps, Belsec, Sobibor and the largest – Treblinka. § This sequence of appointments reconfirms the preparatory role played by the Euthanasia Programme for the “Final Solution”. (In practice, if apparently not, as has also been claimed, as a formal training.)
“Wirth was a gross and florid man,” Stangl said. “My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time, and came back often. Whenever he was there, he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again, this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the
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