Read Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder for Free Online

asked.” Mr Hirschfeld denied that he had visited Stangl in his office. He said that Stangl was subordinate to two other officials, Botke and Greil, and that Greil had also been along on the trips to Bohemia. Stangl himself, said Mr Hirschfeld, had no authority, but received his orders from these two. “His office was next to Botke; it was he I went to see and Stangl could hear what I discussed with him.”
    It was suggested by the defence that Mr Hirschfeld had written Stangl a postcard from the USA, but Mr Hirschfeld said that was not true, although he had sent a postcard to Greil with whom he “had good contact” and who had repeatedly helped him. He also said, however, that “Stangl was not impolite to me. He addressed me as ‘Hirschfeld’, but that was the custom; he said neither ‘du’ nor ‘Jew’ to me. Eichmann was different – he always addressed me in the third person.… To describe my relationship with Stangl as ‘amicable’ is certainly exaggerated. I would say, however, that I could converse with him more freely than with other officials of that department.”
    In January 1939, shortly after the political, i.e. security, branch of the police had been absorbed into the Gestapo, that section of the Wels police department was transferred to Gestapo HQ in the provincial capital, Linz. “But we had our lovely flat in Wels,” Stangl said, “so I commuted every day. Our chief now was a German, a terrible reactionary from Munich, Georg Prohaska. I hated him at once. Soon after we were transferred, some man came from Berlin and ‘in the name of the Führer’ [he said it derisively] read out our new ranks. Me, ‘in the name of the Führer’, they appointed Kriminalassistent. But I wasn’t having it: that was a demotion, not a promotion. In Austria a Kriminalbeamter – which is what I had been – is a permanent position; it gives you the right to a pension. A Kriminalassistent in the German police hierarchy is nothing – just a temporary.”
    “ Was this ever rectified?”
    “Oh yes, a few weeks later. They acknowledged they’d made a mistake and confirmed my status of Beamter auf Lebenszeit [established civil servant]. And they promoted me to Kriminal-oberassistent, the German equivalent of what my next promotion would have been in Austria. * But Prohaska,” he continued, “had found out that I wasn’t somebody who’d allow himself to be pushed around, and he hated me from that moment on and made my life a misery. It was only very shortly after this that I was ordered to sign a paper certifying that I was prepared to give up my religion.”
    “ What exactly did it say on the paper?”
    “It said that I affirmed that I was a Gottgläubiger [believer in God] but agreed to break my affiliation to the Church.”
    “How did you feel about signing that? How strongly did you feel about the Church?”
    “Well … of course I’ve always been a Catholic.…”
    “ But?” He didn’t answer. “Were you a regular church-goer?”
    “My wife and children always go.”
    “ Yes, but you?”
    “No,” he finally said. “I always went at Christmas, of course, and Easter.…”
    “ So signing this document wasn’t really all that difficult, was it?”
    “I didn’t like to.”
    For a man of Stangl’s character, whatever his religious attitude, the Church has a tremendous significance as a symbol of respectability and status. Equally, any official document is something of the greatest import. There is no doubt therefore that signing this document was a decisive step in the gradual process of his corruption. Frau Stangl was later to confirm its importance.
    I asked Stangl whether he had seen it as a compromise he had to make in order to keep his job.
    “Not just my job,” he said. “Much more than that – as I told you before. By then I had heard that I had originally been on a list of officials to be shot after the Anschluss. And not only that; at that very moment, a disciplinary action