Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Stangl’s demeanor changes dramatically when he begins talking about Treblinka, just as it had when he talked about Hartheim: “His voice became slurred and again his face thickened, coarsened and turned dark red” (400). When Stangl first traveled to Treblinka, corpses lay putrefying along the railway for miles leading up to the camp. Photos secretly taken by a soldier transported through Treblinka village (which are reproduced in the book) support this story.

Sereny suspects Stangl knew the nature of his job at Treblinka before he arrived. The story he tells Sereny about his shock upon arrival and his subsequent trip to see Globocnik and refuse the job seems designed to minimize his complicity, as much to himself as to others.

Stangl claims that when he first arrived at Treblinka, he investigated why the plundered valuables weren’t going to Globocnik in Warsaw, as Globocnik asked him to do. Globocnik sent another SS man, Kurt Franz, who was known for his cruelty, to Treblinka to expedite the clean-up and reorganization of the camp. Stangl feared for his position, thinking that Globocnik was going to replace him with Franz. Stangl suspected that Wirth and the camp’s former commandant were rerouting the transport of valuables to Berlin for their benefit. Stangl told Globocnik of his suspicions and promised to reroute the transports to him. Subsequently, Globocnik trusted Stangl as one of his men; this secured Stangl’s position at Treblinka over Franz.

Stangl constructed his section of the camp to look like the main street of a small village, complete with a barbershop and gas station bordered by flowers and shrubs. He commissioned an expert from Vienna to design a park and a zoo, in which they kept exotic birds. The Polish girls who worked as cooks in the German mess came and went every day through this section’s entrance as if they were working a normal day job.

Stangl claims he awoke every day at five o’clock to do rounds, which included visiting the upper extermination section of the camp. Franz Suchomel and Otto Horn, SS men who worked in the camp, dispute Stangl’s account. In Sereny’s extensive interviews with Suchomel, he exhibits a prodigious memory of his time at Treblinka and doesn’t appear to change the past for reasons of conscience (This is according to Sereny’s assessment of his character and her verification of his stories with other sources). Horn was acquitted at the Treblinka trial and according to survivors of the camp was a kind man. Neither Horn nor Suchomel saw Stangl up that early or in the upper camp. Suchomel says that if Stangl did get up early, it was to check on his main concern: that the gas chambers were ready to deal with new transports of 5,000 people every hour. Suchomel also disputes Stangl’s story that he never left his room at night; he claims that Stangl had a friend in a nearby village who he’d leave to drink heavily with, sometimes having to be carried back to camp.

Stangl says the only time he talked to one of the people from the transports was when a man complained to him that one of the guards hadn’t given him the cup of water he’d promised in exchange for his watch. Stangl said that he forbid pilfering and ordered the Lithuanian guards to empty their pockets in front of everyone. When Sereny asks what happened to the complainant, Stangl replies blankly that he doesn’t know. Stangl avoids referring to the people in the transports as people and to the gassing and burning in the upper camp as such, instead referring to processing transports and completing the “work” every day in the upper camp.