A Penny a Head

Two years ago, a nattily dressed German climbed three flights of stairs to a shabby, document-cluttered flat in Vienna's Rudolfplatz, sat down to face Simon Wiesenthal. Said the visitor, an ex-Gestapo agent: "I know where you can find Franz Stangl--but it is going to cost you $25,000."

Stangl, the wartime chief of the Treblinka concentration camp, was obviously of interest to Wiesenthal, a man possessed with chasing down escaped Nazi war criminals. When Wiesenthal protested that his Jewish Documentation Center did not have anything like $25,000, the Gestapo veteran began to dicker: "How many people did Stangl murder?" Wiesenthal's answer: about 700,000, including 400,000 Jews and the rest Christians and assorted anti-Nazis. "All right," said the visitor. "I'll give you a special price. How about a penny a head? That makes $7,000."

Trembling with rage, Wiesenthal replied: "It's a deal."

Last week, in the comfortable Sao Paulo suburb of Brooklin, Brazilian plainclothes police, acting on information provided by Wiesenthal, picked up Stangl. He had just returned home from his mechanic's job at a Volkswagen plant, was relieved to discover that the cops were not Israeli agents, like the ones who had nabbed Adolf Eichmann. Said Stangl: "I knew I would be captured." Sighed his wife: "Franz was always an excellent head of the family, although a little too austere."

Second Eichmann. Now jailed in Brasilia, Stangl, 58, will probably be shipped back to his native Austria. West Germany, as well, wants him to stand trial. He is charged with killing 30,000 infirm and mentally defective Germans and Austrians early in the war at Hartheim Palace, near Linz, which was used as a "training center" to prepare SS men for work in concentration camps. Later, as chief of the camps at Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland, he earned Wiesenthal's name for him: "the second Eichmann."

Stangl was one of 800 such killers so far tracked by the Jewish Documentation Center, Wiesenthal's one-man operation. A Polish-born architect, Wiesenthal survived five years at Mauthausen and other concentration camps, helped forge his wife's "Christian" papers to spirit her out of the Warsaw ghetto; together, they lost 87 relatives to the Nazis. Since the war's end, he has carried on his search, helped by cash contributions from many parts of the world. In his new book, The Murderers Among Us (to be published this month in the U.S. by McGraw-Hill), Wiesenthal meticulously documents the fevers and frustrations of hunting Nazis. His search for Stangl followed much the same painstaking process that Wiesenthal had earlier used to help track Adolf Eichmann and Karl Silberbauer, the captor of Anne Frank.

Wiesenthal came across Stangl's name in 1948, when he saw the signature scrawled on a gruesome list of "deliveries" from Treblinka to Berlin: "25 freight cars of women's hair . . . 248 freight cars of clothing, 319,000 pounds of gold wedding rings . . . several thousand strings of pearls." Soon Wiesenthal's Stangl file bulged with newspaper clips and anonymous postcards, as well as recorded conversations with the fugitive's relatives, friends and neighbors. Conflicting reports were checked and rechecked, sources investigated for reliability and motive. From an Austrian forwarding agent, Wiesenthal learned that Stangl's furniture had been shipped to Damascus, Syria. In the early 1960s, the trail grew cold until a relative unwittingly confessed that Stangl and his family had moved from Syria to Brazil. Almost 20 years after the search began, the mosaic was completed by the paid ex-Gestapo informer.

Where's Bormann? Stangl was only No. 4 on Wiesenthal's most-wanted list of war criminals whom he believes to be still alive. The others: Josef Mengele, the clean-cut doctor who decided which prisoners were to be gassed at Auschwitz; Martin Bormann, Hitler's chosen successor; and Heinrich Mueller, who succeeded Himmler as chief of the Gestapo. Wiesenthal says he has evidence that Mengele and Bormann are well guarded in Latin America; Mueller has been reported in several places, including Albania.

Stangl weighed so heavily on Wiesenthal's mind that he constantly carried a photo of the fugitive in his wallet. Last week Wiesenthal removed the picture and tore it to bits.

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