The Efficiency Expert

He was known as "the gentleman commandant" because he wore an impeccable white SS jacket and always sported a long riding crop while making the rounds at Treblinka, a Nazi death factory in Poland. He never personally mistreated a prisoner, and often arranged for brass bands to play while groups of 80 to 100 captives, most of them Jews, were herded into a building behind a railroad station for "showers" prior to "resettlement." The showers, of course, turned out to be sprays of gas pumped into the building by the engines from captured Soviet tanks.

Between 1942 and late 1943, a total of 700,000 people were slaughtered at Treblinka, more than half during the single year when Franz Paul Stangl, the gentleman commandant, was running things. Last week, in a West German federal court at Duesseldorf, Stangl, 62, went on trial on charges of supervising the murder of "at least 400,000 per sons" for motives "base, sinister and cruel."

A swaggering, Austrian-born SS Hauptsturmfuehrer (captain), Stangl was captured by American troops in 1945 and turned over to Austrian authorities for trial. He escaped in 1947, made his way to Syria and finally, in 1951, to Brazil. By that time, he had attained most-wanted status in the records of the Jewish Documentation Center, a Vienna-based organization headed by Simon Wiesenthal and dedicated to tracking down Nazi war criminals. In 1967, Stangl was finally extradited. "If I had done nothing else except catch this man," said Wiesenthal, who was in the Duesseldorf courtroom last week, "then I would not have lived in vain."

According to Wiesenthal, Stangl was "a genius" at organizing extermination camps. Trained in euthanasia methods in Berlin, he prepped for Treblinka by running an asylum in Linz, Austria, where as many as 28,000 mentally defective people were killed. His next stop was Sobibor, another camp in Poland, where his efficiency so impressed his Nazi superiors that he was given command of Treblinka. There, the prosecution charges, he eventually raised the daily death toll to an average of 10,000. He oversaw the activities of the reclamation squad that yanked gold teeth from the mouths of corpses (319,000 lbs. of gold from dental fillings, wedding rings and other jewelry were shipped to the Third Reich from Treblinka). He also pioneered the building of a so-called "grill" made of railroad rails that served as a primitive crematorium.

If convicted, Stangl probably will spend the rest of his life in prison. But as the prosecutor read the long indictment, Stangl never once winced. "I have nothing on my conscience," he said. "I did nothing but my duty."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.