Franz Stangl
The early 1930s found Franz Stangl working for the Austrian police in Linz. Though the Nazi party was illegal in Austria at the time, Stangl joined the underground organization in 1931. This early adoption of National Socialist ideology opened doors for him after Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and he was brought into the Gestapo to work in the Linz Jewish Bureau. He would soon prove, though, that his true specialty was the organization of industrial killing.
In 1940 the Nazi regime rolled out its “Euthanasia” program, the cynical name for the murder of mentally ill Germans in several asylums across Germany. Stangl was tapped to act as the deputy at one of these killing facilities, but when popular protest against the “Euthanasia” program prompted Hitler to shut it down Stangl was reassigned in April 1942.
In his new job as the commandant of the Sobibor camp Stangl would apply the techniques that he had been using in the “Euthanasia” program to Jewish deportees. Sobibor was not a concentration camp, it was an extermination camp. Unlike Auschwitz, there would be no selections of Jews capable of working at Sobibor. Each and every one of them went to the gas immediately. Stangl only led Sobibor for four months, but in that time 100,000 Jews perished there. This murderous efficiency earned Stangl a new position as commandant a second death camp, Treblinka, in September 1942.
Despite the tremendous amount of blood on his hands, he would twice come under American custody in the years following the war without ever being charged with a crime. Fearing that the United States would soon realize what he had done, he made contact with Bishop Hudal’s “Ratline” in 1948, escaping first to Syria and then to Brazil. He would live in Brazil for sixteen years, working for Volkswagen for the majority of his time there and all the while using his real name. The Austrian government finally caught on to his whereabouts in 1961, but it would take another six years before Nazi hunters could pressure the Brazilian government to arrest him ad extradite him to Germany. In 1970 he was convicted of war crimes by a German court and sentenced to life in prison, but would die of heart failure less than a year later.