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Franz Stangl

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Also known as Franz Paul Stangl, The White Death

Austrian-born SS officer, commandant at first Sobibór extermination camp and then Treblinka extermination camp (1908-1971)

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
DE

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Quotes

  • My guilt is that I am still here...I should have died. That is my guilt.
  • I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass...they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.
  • No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible.
  • 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.
  • He was a Dragoner (one of the imperial elite regiments). Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.
  • My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty...

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
Franz Paul Stangl , ( 1908-03-26 ) 26 March 1908, Altmünster , Austria-Hungary
Died
28 June 1971 (1971-06-28) (aged 63), Düsseldorf , West Germany
Allegiance
Nazi Germany
Branch
Schutzstaffel
Service years
1931–1945
Rank
SS-Hauptsturmführer
Service number
NSDAP #6,370,447 , SS #296,569
Unit
SS-Totenkopfverbände
Commands
Sobibor , 28 April 1942 – 30 August 1942 Treblinka , 1 September 1942 – August 1943

via Wikipedia infobox

~18 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Franz Paul Stangl ( German: [ˈʃtaŋl̩]; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka in World War II.

Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi Germany, became commandant of the camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. After the war he fled to Brazil for 16 years. In those 16 years he worked for Volkswagen do Brasil before he was arrested in 1967, extradited to West Germany, and tried there for the mass murder of one million people. In 1970, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Franz Stangl” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.