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had been started against me because I had approved the arrest of a poacher who turned out to be a high Party member.”
    “ How did that come within the province of the political police?”
    “Because the local police of Güsen – that was the place – had informed the State police that a number of people in the town had accused this area leader of large-scale poaching, and that, as he was a Party member, they didn’t feel competent to act against him. What they meant of course was that they were scared stiff. Anyway, I went over to talk to him and have a look around his house and I found all the paraphernalia – you know, traps and all that: so I arrested him. And immediately found myself in hot water over it with Prohaska in Linz. He had me on the carpet: how dare I accuse a Party member? I told him that for me a villain was a villain, whoever he was. And so they started this disciplinary action against me. It was all Prohaska – he hated my guts.…” He often left sentences incomplete, allowing his tone of voice to indicate his feelings.
    Substantiating evidence for the key role attributed to Prohaska by Stangl is meagre. Frau Stangl clearly remembers that “in Linz there was, of course, right away this Prohaska with whom he had trouble from the word go”; but Stangl’s “friend” and colleague, Ludwig Werner, while saying that he had disliked Prohaska, who was “a coarse, rough Bavarian”, could not recall whether he had harassed Stangl. A witness for the defence at Stangl’s trial – a woman called Helene de Lorenzo who, when in trouble with the Nazi authorities in Linz in 1938–9, had found Stangl helpful – had formed “the best impression” of him, and was aware that Prohaska was known in Linz as a particularly dreaded member of the Gestapo. Prohaska himself, who at the time of the trial was working in Munich as a commercial traveller, had a (not uncommon) partial failure of memory, and would only say, “I cannot state with certainty today whether the accused was my subordinate in the police. I know I didn’t like him because he was unreliable.”
    “After we moved to Linz,” Stangl said, “the whole atmosphere in our offices and in all relationships changed.”
    “What was it? Distrust of one another? Jealousy?”
    “All that and more. Constant alarmist rumours. Always ‘this one has been arrested, that one shot, this one put on the black list, that one’s walking a tight-rope’. I myself was absolutely certain that they were still plotting against me because of the Eagle. And then – the way people talked, it was – it had become …” he floundered. “How can I explain it to you …?”
    “Well, how did it differ from the way they had talked before?”
    “Differ? It was like.…” Words failed him. “Before, we had been civil servants and we talked and spoke like civilized people. Now, with the arrival of all these Piefkes [Austrian slang equivalent of Krauts ] all one heard was the gutter language of the barracks. And you see, the people they would discuss in those terms weren’t criminals; they were men we had looked up to, respected. And now, suddenly …” he still sounded bewildered about this “…  they were dirt. There was one time I remember, they were talking about Dr Berlinger, one of our chiefs before the Anschluss [later he was to say he wasn’t sure of this name]; they’d arrested him and one of them – in the duty-room – was describing how he’d been interrogated.…” He stopped, embarrassed.
    “They hurt him? ”
    He looked away from me. “They laughed and said, ‘He pissed all over himself.’ ” He turned back to me. “Imagine, Dr Berlinger . I hate … I hate the Germans,” he suddenly burst out with passion, “for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938.” There was nothing maudlin about the way this was said; he was merely stating a fact. “That’s when it started for me. I must acknowledge my