Franz Stangl, the Nazi commander who ran the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps where nearly one million people were murdered, was hunted across three continents for more than two decades by a Holocaust survivor who refused to let the world forget.
Stangl’s capture in Brazil in 1967 and his subsequent conviction in West Germany marked one of the most significant Nazi war crimes trials of the twentieth century, the culmination of a relentless pursuit led by Simon Wiesenthal, himself a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp system.
The story of how a meticulous Austrian police officer became one of history’s most prolific mass murderers, and how one man’s memory brought him to justice, remains a defining chapter in the pursuit of accountability for genocide.
Between 1942 and 1943, the Nazis carried out the systematic extermination of Jews across occupied Poland at secret death camps whose names would become synonymous with industrial murder. At Treblinka alone, the killing apparatus could consume 12,000 lives in a single day.
By the time the camps were closed in 1943, more than one and a half million Jews from across Eastern Europe had been eliminated. Stangl was in command at both Sobibor and Treblinka, helping to perfect the machinery of death.
His path to evil began in May 1938, when Hitler’s forces crossed into Austria to a tumultuous welcome. Within months, 70,000 Austrians were rounded up and many executed. For the thirty-year-old Stangl, this was a time of opportunity.
Raised as a traditional Austrian Catholic with a strong belief in decency and family values, Stangl had already abandoned one promising career as a master weaver. His passion for detail and discipline led him to join the Austrian police, and after 1938, loyalty to the party became the price he was prepared to pay for advancement.
The good Catholic became a good Nazi. In 1939, Hitler launched the so-called euthanasia program, and Stangl accepted an administrative post at Schloss Hartheim, one of the regime’s killing centers for the disabled.
Thousands of men, women, and children were secretly executed by injection or gas. But Hartheim served an even more ghastly purpose. It was a school for mass murder, where gassing by engine exhaust fumes was perfected as a forerunner to the extermination camps.
In early 1942, Stangl was sent as commandant to what would become Sobibor camp in eastern Poland. He would later claim he thought he had been sent to construct an army supply camp, but the grim reality was that the Nazis were building a gas chamber in the forest.
The lethal technique perfected in the euthanasia program was now deployed in the industrial mass murder of Jews. The process involved a succession of cruel deceptions, beginning with Germans collecting money from Jews in the ghettos to convince them their journey was worth taking.
Arrivals at Sobibor were told they were at a transit camp and needed to undress and shower to prevent disease. The bewildered, starving, and exhausted Jews stripped naked, their possessions set aside. Women had their heads shaved, their hair a valuable commodity for the Nazis.
Then the victims, now minutes from death, were forced down a narrow barbed wire path called the tube, leading not to showers but to the gas chambers. From arrival to death could take as little as an hour.
In the three months Stangl commanded Sobibor, about 100,000 Jews were killed. Survivors remember his passionate attention to detail. He was always dressed immaculately in a white linen jacket, his boots polished like mirrors, every detail perfect, as if in denial of the carnage around him.
But at night, he sought refuge in drink. His superiors, including Himmler himself, the architect of the Final Solution, saw only the efficiency of Stangl’s killing machine.
In late summer 1942, the extermination of the Jews was moving into its industrial phase. Those in the Warsaw ghetto were being rounded up and sent to an extermination camp near the village of Treblinka. But the camp was in chaos, its staff overwhelmed by the sheer numbers.
Hundreds of tons of stolen Jewish money, jewelry, clothes, and possessions were piling up. The Nazis needed someone to establish order, and they had the perfect man for the job. Stangl was sent to sort out Treblinka.
He later described what he found as Dante’s inferno. Photographs taken by a young Austrian soldier at a railway station near the camp show bodies of Jews lying along the tracks leading to Treblinka. Stangl was determined to turn it into a highly efficient killing operation.
He created a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 railway station, even commissioning a painted clock whose hands were permanently fixed to deceive the Jews arriving at what they thought was a transit camp. German and Ukrainian guards led them to barracks where they were forced to undress in preparation for a shower.
From there, a barbed wire path of death, cynically known by the Nazis as the road to heaven, led to the building containing the gas chambers. By October 1942, about 3,000 people could be gassed there at one time.
Beyond the chambers were the burial pits. Later, to hide the evidence, mechanical diggers were used to move the corpses to the so-called roasting area where they were laid out on racks for cremation in the open air.
Some 750,000 people were sent to Treblinka. About 70 would make it out alive. One survivor described Treblinka as a factory of horror whose sole product was bodies.
By the winter of 1942, Commandant Stangl was processing up to 12,000 victims a day. He admitted later, “I got used to the convoys. It was hard to see them as individuals.
I saw them as masses, as baggage or cargo.” Every delivery was meticulously recorded.
By the spring of 1943, there were very few Jews left alive in the Warsaw ghetto. Stangl’s job was done. His crime was not just killing.
He had supervised the stealing of Jewish possessions on a staggering scale. As a reward, he was named best commandant in Poland and received the Iron Cross.
But his loyalty was repaid with a one-way ticket to northern Italy to fight in the bloody battle with Italian and Yugoslav partisans. In his view, his superiors hoped he would be killed because he knew too much. Many of his former comrades died in the vicious fighting, but Stangl survived to witness the defeat of Nazi Germany.
In the confusion of the last days of the war, Stangl made his way back to Austria. As a former SS officer, he was a marked man. He was soon picked up by the Americans and detained in their camp near Salzburg for the next two and a half years.
But they had no idea of his former role as a death camp commandant.
In 1943, the Nazis had attempted to hide the gruesome evidence by dismantling all their extermination camps in Poland. The terrible reality of what they had done was finally revealed to a horrified world when the victorious Allied armies swept into Germany and Austria in 1945.
When the concentration camp at Mauthausen was finally liberated by the Americans, Simon Wiesenthal was among the survivors. In the day of liberation, he could not walk, but he wished to see the American tank and the American flag.
Incredibly, Wiesenthal learned that his wife had survived. They were finally reunited. For several years, both had thought the other had died.
But his own experience of the camps left him with a determination never to forget what had happened to his people. And he had a phenomenal memory.
On May 25, 1945, he wrote a report for the American War Crimes Investigators listing 91 Nazi criminals. He didn’t know then, but it was the start of his Nazi hunting career. He searched the displaced persons camps for witnesses who could testify against the Nazi war criminals.
Wiesenthal was soon frustrated by the attitude of his American colleagues. They just didn’t seem to care as much as he did about bringing the war criminals to justice. So with 30 survivors, he set up what he called the Jewish Documentation Center in the Austrian city of Linz and began preparing evidence.
In 1948, he spotted that a certain SS officer, Franz Stangl, had been rewarded for special services to the Reich, a Nazi code for a role in the extermination camps. He had no idea that the man he would hunt for 20 years had only recently been in the same city of Linz.
What seems to have happened is that Stangl had remained undetected in an American detention camp until 1947, when his work at Schloss Hartheim on the euthanasia program finally attracted the attention of the Austrian authorities. Unknown to Wiesenthal, they sent Stangl to prison in Linz to await trial.
But extraordinarily, he was allowed to walk free and begin a life on the run. On May 30, 1948, Franz Stangl began a roundabout journey through Austria and over the mountains into Italy, finally looking for help in Rome, headquarters of the Catholic Church.
Along the way, he had met up again with Gustav Wagner, his former deputy from Sobibor extermination camp. They had been told to contact a Catholic bishop, Alois Hudal, who made no secret of his Nazi sympathies.
Within two weeks, Stangl was in the port of Genoa with a ticket for a ship leaving for Syria. A job in a textile factory had been arranged for him. The bishop had taken care of everything.
Before long, Stangl was using his organizational skills at the Imperial Knitting Company in Damascus.
After a year in Syria, he had saved enough money to send for his wife and daughters. But for a man on the run, he seems to have taken remarkably few precautions. His wife’s neighbors could clearly see their destination painted on her packing cases.
In the early 1950s, the growing tension between Russia and America meant that hunting Nazi war criminals was no longer a priority for the Allies. The Cold War assisted the Nazis tremendously. They realized that through the difficulties between East and West, they could escape or even remain in Germany or Austria without being punished.
In 1954, exhausted by the indifference of the Allies and short of money, Simon Wiesenthal closed down his office in Linz. His hunt for war criminals appeared to be over. But for the man on the top of his list, life was good.
After three years in Syria, Stangl had made enough money to immigrate. Once again, the Stangls made their way to the Italian port of Genoa. As an experienced textile engineer, Stangl found it easy to obtain a visa for Brazil.
Despite making no attempt to hide his name, the whole family was looking forward to a new life in South America.
Once in Sao Paulo, the Stangls continued to use the family name, even registering with the Austrian consulate. But in his mind, Stangl had still not escaped the past. One day in Brazil, traveling past a slaughterhouse for cattle, all the horror of random executions and mass killings came back to haunt him.
For months, he was unable to eat meat.
By the end of the 1950s, Stangl was working for Volkswagen and his wife for Mercedes-Benz. But it was not all good times for ex-Nazis hiding out in South America. The Austrian SS officer Adolf Eichmann had arranged the transportation of millions of Jews dispatched for extermination.
His capture in Argentina on May 11, 1960, made headline news.
The Israeli government, aware that the operation was politically sensitive, wanted to play down their role. Instead, they allowed much of the credit and congratulations to go to Simon Wiesenthal, who had also been searching for Eichmann. It meant that during the trial, Wiesenthal was the center of attention.
However, reliving the events of the Holocaust was taking its toll. The international publicity from the Eichmann trial triggered a new wave of funding which meant Wiesenthal could relaunch the Jewish Documentation Center, this time in Vienna. He was back in the hunt for war criminals.
Straight away, he began looking for Commandant Franz Stangl. He was determined to bring him to trial. Wiesenthal realized from the very beginning the importance of trials because only in a trial in a court of law can you really expose the whole truth, the whole awfulness of what had happened in the Holocaust.
The first sign that the net was closing on Stangl came with the start of a war crimes trial in West Germany in 1964. In the dock were 10 guards who had worked for Stangl at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. These were men who had carried out their daily atrocities under his command.
In court, an album containing pictures of his camp at Treblinka taken by Stangl’s deputy Kurt Franz was produced as evidence. It was entitled “Schoene Zeiten” or Pleasant Days. Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment.
West Germany had banned the death penalty in 1949.
His trial was swiftly followed by the prosecution of another set of Stangl’s former colleagues, this time from Sobibor extermination camp. Simon Wiesenthal actively used both trials to publicize his hunt for the missing Franz Stangl. His history of war crimes was now public knowledge in Austria.
It was too much for the family of Stangl’s wife, Theresa. In 1964, one of them revealed to Wiesenthal that Theresa and Franz were living somewhere in Brazil. They wouldn’t say exactly where, but a breakthrough came a few days later when an unexpected visitor made his way up the stairs towards Wiesenthal’s office.
An ex-Gestapo officer, down on his luck, had heard about the search for Commandant Stangl and he had information to sell. His price, he said, was one cent for each of the Jews killed at Stangl’s camp in Treblinka. Estimating the number at 700,000, Wiesenthal would have to pay $7,000 to find out where Stangl was now working.
Though disgusted by the deal, Wiesenthal finally agreed, realizing he had no other way to get his man. Now he could really focus his hunt for Stangl on the suburbs of Sao Paulo, home to the Volkswagen factory.
Using the code name Uncle Otto, Wiesenthal began to correspond with local contacts in Brazil. Their research soon identified Stangl’s home address. The net was closing, but Wiesenthal had to be careful.
Secretly, he prepared the evidence needed for Stangl’s potential extradition, knowing that South America’s community of ex-Nazis could help his man disappear at any time.
In fact, Stangl had no idea he had been found. He once said to his wife, “If that clever man Wiesenthal wanted to get me, he would have done it by now.”
At the end of 1966, Wiesenthal’s long game began to pay off. In December, he traveled to Switzerland to meet a high-ranking Brazilian politician prepared to act as an anonymous go-between to push through the formal request for extradition. With his Brazilian fixer now on board, Wiesenthal prepared a detailed dossier on Stangl, working directly with the Austrian Minister of Justice.
It was now February 1967, Carnival time in Brazil. Unfortunately, everything stops for Carnival. Wiesenthal had to get the dossier to his secret go-between before the end of the month.
It was a race against time. With just a day to spare, contact was finally made.
On the evening of Tuesday, February 28, Stangl and his daughter returned home from a drink after work. Within a few seconds, the trap was sprung by a team of plainclothes Brazilian police. Stangl was taken completely by surprise, just as Simon Wiesenthal had planned.
To avoid any risk of escape or rescue, Stangl was secretly removed to the capital, Brasilia, while the authorities publicly announced his arrest. Wiesenthal immediately sent press releases around the world to build up pressure for Stangl’s deportation.
He even persuaded Senator Robert Kennedy, former US Attorney General and future presidential candidate, to use his influence on the Brazilians. On June 8, 1967, Wiesenthal’s campaign paid off. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Franz Stangl should be extradited.
In the end, he was extradited to Germany. It took a huge effort and it was entirely Wiesenthal’s effort. No one else did as much as he did.
Within two weeks, Stangl was in Germany. He would wait nearly three years before the authorities were ready to bring him to trial.
Eventually, on May 13, 1970, Franz Stangl entered the courtroom. For Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, this was to be West Germany’s most significant criminal case of the century. It was the last stage in a journey that had begun 22 years before.
Over the next seven months, Stangl was forced to confront the reality of what he had done. On December 22, 1970, Wiesenthal’s faith in justice was rewarded. Commandant Franz Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment for joint responsibility in the murder of approximately 900,000 men, women, and children.
In prison, he finally admitted, “My guilt is that I am still here. I should have died. That was my guilt.”
Six months later, Stangl died of heart failure.
For Wiesenthal, Stangl’s arrest and deportation from Brazil was one of his greatest achievements, but he still had unfinished business in South America. Stangl’s brutal colleague, Gustav Wagner, was still on the run. Before he died, Stangl had revealed that Wagner was hiding in Brazil.
Once again, Wiesenthal played a waiting game. In the 1970s, Wagner was just one more Nazi war criminal on a list that included Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. Then in 1978, Wiesenthal saw a Brazilian newspaper report of a celebration for Hitler’s birthday.
It was a chance to trick Wagner into the open.
Wiesenthal made a public statement accusing one man in the photo of being the Nazi war criminal Wagner. This triggered a search for the real Wagner, who had been living on a farm just outside Sao Paulo. With the police on his tail, Wagner handed himself in.
Shlomo Szmajzner, one of the few survivors from Sobibor extermination camp, was then living in Brazil. He publicly identified Wagner, but the Supreme Court refused the request for Wagner’s deportation on a legal technicality. Wagner himself showed little remorse for his actions.
In 1980, Wagner was found dead at his farm in Brazil. His lawyer claimed it was suicide. But the fact that a man, 37 years after the crime and 10,000 miles from the place of the crime, was arrested and expected to face trial is a warning for the murderers of tomorrow, that no time and no distance can save them.
The case was now closed on two war criminals Wiesenthal had pursued for over 30 years. He had been driven by the memory of those who died in all the Nazi camps. He once declared that if he were to meet the victims in the afterlife, he wanted to be able to say, “I did not forget you.”