Killing the SS Page 17

  Unlike Stangl’s old friend, Adolf Eichmann, the former SS commandant does not live in poverty. Stangl and his family reside in São Paulo’s well-to-do Brooklin residential district. He owns a car, in which father and daughter commute the fifteen miles to and from the Volkswagen facility each day.

  The beer is cold and the time with Isolde, in her early twenties, a welcome respite. Afterward, the two pull up to the house and park, knowing Theresa has a hot meal waiting inside.

  But something is not right.

  As he opens his car door, Stangl hears footsteps. In a flash, a half-dozen strong hands grab him, throwing him onto the street. Isolde is also being wrenched from the car, but the attackers now ignore her—she cries out in panic as she falls to the side of the road.

  Stangl tries to fight back. Although a strong man in his youth, with a square jaw and imposing physique, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack last year. The aging Nazi is easily pinned to the ground. His arms are yanked behind his back and he feels steel handcuffs tightening around his wrists. Inside the house, Theresa Stangl has heard the shouting of men’s voices and the screams of her daughter. She now looks on helplessly as her husband is pushed into the back of a black-and-white Volkswagen police car and driven away.

  Incredibly, this is not a moment of shock to Franz Stangl. “I wasn’t surprised,” he will later admit. “I had always expected it.”

  Ever since the Israelis executed Eichmann, Stangl feared this day might come. As the former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibór death camps, the Austrian was personally complicit in the deaths of nine hundred thousand Jews. His tactics while commanding Treblinka are now known worldwide, having been detailed in Kalman Teigman’s eyewitness testimony at the Eichmann trial.

  At first, Stangl could not come to terms with the daily mass executions he oversaw. Before going to bed at night, he would drink a large glass of brandy in order to sleep. But after a few months on the job, that changed. Stangl grew to consider Jews nothing more than “cargo” and marveled at the enormous trust he saw in their eyes before they went to their deaths.

  “I rarely saw them as individuals,” he will explain to a journalist. “It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But—how can I explain it—they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.… This was the system.… It worked and because it worked, it was irreversible.”

  Cramped in the backseat of the police vehicle, Stangl believes he has been kidnapped by Mossad agents, who have disguised themselves as Brazilian cops. Everything from their uniforms to their Portuguese is perfect. It’s almost as if they’re real police officers.

  Franz Stangl is terrified. He knows he was foolish to continue living in Brazil under his real name, particularly after what happened to Eichmann. Relatives back home in Austria even have the Stangl mailing address. The former Nazi never told his wife the truth about his wartime activities; thus, changing his name would have caused Theresa to ask too many uncomfortable questions.

  Now Stangl is regretting his mistake.

  As the VW patrol car slows and turns into the São Paulo Office of Public Security, the Nazi grows confused. The Mossad would never drive him to the federal police who are not sympathetic to Israel.

  Right now, Franz Stangl desperately wants the answer to one simple question: who has captured him?

  * * *

  If there is one man in the world who annoys Mossad director Isser Harel more than any other, it is a fifty-nine-year-old death camp survivor living in Austria. The man’s name is Simon Wiesenthal, and he is currently taking full public credit for the capture of Adolf Eichmann. Even though he was not part of the abduction plot, Wiesenthal claims he located Eichmann for the Mossad. Even though it’s not true, there is nothing Harel can do about it.

  For political reasons, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion has prohibited the Mossad from acknowledging their role in the Nazi’s kidnapping—a period of silence set to last fifteen years.

  So Wiesenthal has stepped boldly into that void, basking in the acclaim. His sensational tell-all book, I Chased Eichmann: A True Story, was published in Hebrew six weeks before the trial began. Wiesenthal survived several Nazi death camps and has endured the near-death experience of being stripped naked in preparation for being shot dead at point-blank range. While attending the trial, he unfailingly spoke to reporters about his role in the kidnapping. Privately, Israeli officials disparage Wiesenthal as a “publicity hound.”

  Some even call him “Sleazenthal.”

  But most galling of all to Harel is that while Simon Wiesenthal promotes himself as the world’s greatest Nazi hunter, he is secretly on the Mossad payroll, using the code name Theocrat. It is the undercover nature of Wiesenthal’s role that allows him to take credit, even as the true spies cannot even tell their spouses what they have done.

  The Nazi hunter’s penchant for embellishment is well known. For instance, the number of death camps in which Wiesenthal claims to have resided seems to increase with every passing year. But in truth, no other individual has been more devoted to finding and prosecuting the SS than Simon Wiesenthal, and for good reason. An architect before the war, he was irrevocably changed by his own experiences during the Holocaust. One such moment came while he was interned at the Mauthausen death camp. SS leader Heinrich Himmler arrived to pay a visit. In an effort to entertain him, the camp guards engaged in an activity they liked to call Fallschirmspringen—parachute jumping. Wiesenthal bore witness to the sight of more than one thousand Dutch Jews being thrown over the edge of a quarry, falling 165 feet to their deaths.

  Another horror occurred on April 12, 1943, when SS guards lined up Wiesenthal and forty other men along the side of a burial pit. Just a few feet away, six other SS men aimed submachine guns at the group. Wiesenthal and the captives were ordered to strip. But just before they were all shot, a corporal came running to the edge of the pit to pull Wiesenthal away. With Adolf Hitler’s birthday coming up, the camp commandant needed someone to paint a large mural celebrating the Führer. Wiesenthal, thanks to his drawing prowess, was that man. He quickly dressed and raced away from the burial pit, even as the sound of submachine gunfire quickly announced the death of his fellow inmates.

  As Wiesenthal learned, no atrocity was considered too vile. Wiesenthal witnessed fellow camp inmates being lashed with bullwhips, knifed, pushed into pits of hot lime, burned alive in bonfires, or simply shot for allegedly trying to escape. If a prisoner actually did escape, twenty-five men were shot as retribution.

  But the true turning point for Simon Wiesenthal came in the waning days of the war. A German corporal named Merz asked how Wiesenthal would describe the atrocities to those who had not witnessed them.

  “I believe I would tell people the truth,” Wiesenthal replies.

  “You know what would happen, Wiesenthal?” Merz responds with a smile. “They wouldn’t believe you. They’d say you were crazy. Might even put you into a madhouse. How can anyone believe this terrible business—unless they lived through it?”

  Thus inspired, Wiesenthal spent the first few years after the war working with American prosecutors building evidence for the Nuremberg Trials. But that was just the beginning. Working first out of an office in Linz, Austria, a few blocks from Eichmann’s prewar residence and just miles from the former Mauthausen death camp, Wiesenthal became the self-proclaimed voice of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Throughout Europe, there is a growing belief that reconciliation and forgiveness are the best way to deal with Nazi atrocities. Yet Wiesenthal and his wife, Cyla, have roundly rejected this philosophy. He has devoted his postwar life to tracking down as many Nazi war criminals as possible. Shortly after the Eichmann trial in 1961, Wiesenthal relocated his headquarters to Vienna. There, in a three-room office cluttered with card files, yellowing newspapers, and photographs of Nazi killers, he keeps track of hundreds of missing war criminals. His secretary simply refers to Wiesenthal as “the Engineer,�
�� in a nod to his former life as an architect. He lives off donations coming in from around the world and off his small Mossad stipend. For Simon Wiesenthal, this meager living is enough.1

  Wiesenthal often depends upon tips from informants to crack a case. Most suspects are simple men: camp guards, police, functionaries. Their capture might create a local stir, such as that of Karl Silberbauer, the Austrian police inspector and former SS official who personally arrested the family of Anne Frank in 1944.2

  But Wiesenthal is most obsessed about catching the top echelon of the SS. On that list is Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s personal secretary. Long before President Harry Truman signed an order on June 16, 1948, authorizing America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation to track down this Nazi villain, Wiesenthal had been investigating his whereabouts. The Nazi hunter is convinced that Bormann escaped from Berlin in the final days of the war and has been living in South America. There is no doubt that Bormann’s plan to resurrect the German economy following the war is succeeding brilliantly, with German businesses around the world prospering at record levels. Since 1948, there have been a number of unverified Bormann sightings in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay. In 1961, allegedly masquerading under the last name of Bauer, Bormann was reportedly spotted at the Ali Baba nightclub in Asunción. At his side was Josef Mengele.3

  Bormann’s current location is unknown to Simon Wiesenthal. He is thought to have massive landholdings in the cattle-growing region of Argentina, and to be fond of visiting the resort city of Bariloche, where he operates under a Jewish alias, believing this will throw any Israeli commando off the scent.

  * * *

  Of all the high-ranking SS still at large, Simon Wiesenthal is most obsessed with capturing Dr. Josef Mengele—and feels he is getting closer by the day.

  Just prior to the start of the Eichmann trial in 1961, Wiesenthal received a tip from his network of global informants that the Angel of Death was vacationing on the Greek island of Kythnos with his wife, Martha—with whom Mengele had allegedly split two years earlier.

  In an unusual move, though one suiting his fondness for publicity, Wiesenthal did not inform Greek officials. Instead, he told editors at the German magazine Quick about the Mengele sighting. Two days later, a reporter arrived, only to find no trace of Mengele. In the six years since, Wiesenthal has had reason to believe the Angel of Death has been sighted in Peru, Brazil, and Chile.

  By 1967, Wiesenthal has publicly stated that he knows Mengele’s location “quite exactly.” In a separate statement, Wiesenthal will claim that Dr. Mengele and Martin Bormann are actually neighbors.

  In truth, the Nazi hunter is chasing rumors and hunches. He has absolutely no proof of anything. Simon Wiesenthal is not any closer to capturing the elusive Josef Mengele or Martin Bormann in 1967 than he was in 1948.

  * * *

  The same cannot be said for Franz Stangl.

  Simon Wiesenthal has been pursuing the death camp commandant for three years. Stangl’s middle daughter, Renate, married an Austrian named Herbert Havel in 1957. The marriage ended badly—so terribly, in fact, that Havel sought revenge against the Stangl family. After reading in the Vienna newspapers about the horrors of Treblinka, Havel went to Wiesenthal’s office and revealed Stangl’s location.

  It took three years, but Wiesenthal convinced the Austrian Ministry of Justice and officials in West Germany to work with Brazilian authorities to arrest and extradite Franz Stangl. There would be no Israeli-style kidnapping.

  When Brazil balked, Wiesenthal enlisted the aid of New York senator Robert F. Kennedy to apply pressure. “What’s at stake is justice for enormous crimes,” Kennedy said in a phone call to Brazil’s U.S. ambassador. “Brazil now has an opportunity to gain millions of friends.”

  On June 8, 1967, the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that Franz Stangl should be extradited to West Germany to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

  Two weeks later—now having his answer as to who arrested him—Stangl leaves Brazil forever.

  He is taken to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he stands trial for war crimes. The incarceration and trial drag on for three years. Stangl is convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

  Within six months, a heart attack kills him.

  19

  DECEMBER 7, 1972

  BERLIN, GERMANY

  MORNING

  It has been twenty-eight years since aerial bombing by the British and Americans, as well as artillery fire from the Soviet army, destroyed the main hall of the Lehrer railway station in Berlin and rendered its tracks useless. Construction workers now pick through the rubble, selecting bricks and other items that can be utilized in the ongoing rebuilding of Berlin. It was here, just north of the river Spree, where Adolf Hitler’s chief aid, Martin Bormann, was last seen alive in 1945. Time and again, investigators searched for his remains. No stone or track was left unturned. Yet the Bormann mystery remains unsolved.

  Berlin has changed dramatically since the Reichsleiter disappeared. A stone wall twelve feet high now divides the city into east and west—Communist and capitalist. More than three hundred East German sentry towers line the wall. Those trying to escape from the austerity of East Berlin to the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll lifestyle of West Berlin are shot on sight. This division is a visible scar reminding the Germans that they are a conquered people. It seems unlikely the Berlin Wall will ever come down, but the emotional resolution of solving the Bormann mystery might mitigate some of the frustration the people of Berlin feel about this division of their city.1

  Yet on December 13, 1971, the West German government declared the hunt for Martin Bormann over. Chancellor Willy Brandt was tired of reliving the Nazi past. Jewish groups, led by Simon Wiesenthal, were outraged, declaring that the search would not end until Bormann was found, dead or alive. At the same time, neo-Nazi radicals inside Germany used the announcement to push propaganda that Bormann was indeed alive, preparing to launch a Fourth Reich.

  The chaos surrounding the announcement shook the West German government in Bonn, causing the hunt for Bormann to be reopened.

  Which is why, despite the mundane nature of sifting through rocks and dirt, the Berlin workmen press their shovels into the earth with a glimmer of hope. This rail yard is famous for being the site of Bormann’s disappearance. In July 1965, West German officials had authorized yet another hunt for his remains on this very spot. Once again, nothing was found, despite two days of digging. So the odds of finding Bormann’s body are slight. The ground is hard, thanks to the autumn frost. Progress is slow.

  Suddenly, one worker is shocked to unearth a human skull. Then another. All work stops as the crew wipes away the soil from their discoveries. The skulls are exhumed first, followed by the remainder of the skeletons. Curiously, though the Berlin dirt is known for being a unique pale yellow color, the corpses are encased in clay of a deep red hue. Both skulls also contain glass shards embedded in the jaw, a possible sign of the use of cyanide capsules.

  Then, another extraordinary find: a military pass is discovered near the taller of the two skeletons, identifying it as the remains of Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s personal physician—the same man who had fled the bunker with Martin Bormann that May night in 1945. Somehow this document remains intact and legible after more than a quarter century in the dirt—but there is little trace of the clothing or shoes the men must have worn. Those garments have disappeared.

  Also suspicious is that the skeletons are discovered just yards from the site of the very thorough 1965 excavation. Nevertheless, at a press conference in Frankfurt two weeks after the find, West German authorities are quick to proclaim that the smaller of the two skeletons does indeed belong to Martin Bormann. In the future, police throughout Germany are informed, “If anyone is arrested on suspicion that he is Bormann we will be dealing with an innocent man.”

  But there is doubt. Simon Wiesenthal attends the official press conference and states that the skull does not look like that of Bormann. Ame
rican reporter Paul Manning, who has been tracking the Bormann case for years, writes that the bodies are not that of the dead Nazi and Hitler’s doctor but of two hapless inmates from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Manning opines that the men were killed because the shapes of their skulls were a perfect match for Bormann and Stumpfegger. He further claims that the bodies were disguised in Nazi uniforms, then buried in secret by a special SS team on April 30, 1945, anticipating that the remains would be located at some future date.2

  Another question lingers. In the mid-1960s, a retired German mailman named Albert Krumnow emerged from anonymity to make the startling claim that upon the fall of Berlin, he was forced by the Soviets to bury the corpses of two high-ranking Germans. This confession is what led to the fruitless July 1965 excavation. The veracity of Krumnow’s story has never been disproved. But his reasons for emerging to tell it almost twenty years later are unclear, leading some to believe that it is fiction as part of an ongoing Nazi conspiracy.

  * * *

  On April 4, 1973, the Frankfurt State Prosecution Office releases their final report on Martin Bormann.

  “Although nature has placed limits on human powers of recognition, it is proved with certainty that the two skeletons found on the Ulap fairgrounds in Berlin on December 7 and 8, 1972, are identical with the accused Martin Bormann and Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger.

  “The search for Martin Bormann is officially terminated.”

  But instead of handing the bones over to Bormann’s remaining relatives, including his namesake son who serves as a Jesuit priest, the skeleton of Martin Bormannn is locked in a cabinet, and there it will remain for more than a quarter century.

  Unguarded.

  * * *

  Even as the skeleton and skull molder over the years, there is one detail that West German officials cannot explain: the dental work. In May 1945 Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Adolf Hitler’s personal dentist, dictated the contents of Bormann’s dental history by memory to Allied interrogators who were trying to locate Bormann.