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guilt.”
    This, on the second day of our talks, was the only time Stangl acknowledged guilt in a direct way until almost the end. In his mind the later events in his life – which we were approaching – were inseparable from these beginnings. When he volunteered an acknowledgment of guilt for his comparatively harmless failings at this stage of his life, it was – I felt – because he wanted and needed to say “I am guilty” but could not pronounce the words when speaking of the murder of 400,000, 750,000, 900,000, or 1,200,000 people (both official and unofficial figures vary, depending on the source). Thus he sought to find an acceptable substitute for which he could afford to admit guilt. Except for a monster, no man who actually participated in such events (rather than “merely” organized from far away) can concede guilt and yet, as the young prison officer in Düsseldorf put it, “consent to remain alive”.
* I have been unable to confirm this claim. G.S.

† After Stangl’s death I found a piece of paper in his cell on which he had noted a correction: the man’s name was not Schlammer, but Hermann Treidl.

* The “Night of Broken Glass” in the autumn of 1938 when Jewish shops all over Germany were smashed and synagogues were burnt.

* October 1938, when the Germans marched into the Czech border province, the Sudetenland.

* This would appear to indicate that the rank they had originally given him was in fact the equivalent of his Austrian rank at the time, and it is interesting to note that in spite of this, his protest was effective.

2
    C AN ANY man – or his deeds – be understood in isolation from his childhood, his youth and manhood, from the people who loved or didn’t love him, and from the people he loved or needed? Stangl had said that “all he wanted” was to be alone with his wife; and his first deep tears came when he recalled their first serious discord, when she thought he had deceived her about joining the “illegal” Nazi Party. After this, any mention of his wife – and there were many – brought-on helpless tears. There can be no doubt whatever of his deep love for her and need for her love and approbation in return; no doubt at all that he, whatever he became, was capable of love.
    Theresa Stangl is small, blonde and attractive. She was sixty–four years old when I visited her in Brazil but looked far younger; her figure had widened a bit but was still trim. She speaks “proper” Austrian–German rather than the colloquial language of her province. It is the speech of a considerably “better than ordinary” provincial school. My first visit to her, on October 7, 1971, coincided with her thirty-sixth wedding anniversary, and her house in Sao Bernardo do Campo, about thirty kilometres from São Paulo, was full of roses which her children – three girls – had given her that morning.
    São Bernardo, a tiny Detroit, is Brazil’s automobile town. Mercedes, Rolls-Royce Parts and several other plants are there, but above all Volkswagen SA – it is their biggest factory outside Germany, and the place where Stangl worked during part of the time he spent in Brazil before his capture.
    Despite the rich industries it houses, and full employment, São Bernardo is shabby and still has the air of a pioneering town. The Stangls’ little pseudo-villa, which they built with their own hands and which is perhaps slightly more solid than most of its neighbours, is one of thirty-odd such houses on a virtually unpaved street. In this working-class neighbourhood, where people range in colour from black through coffee, yellow and cinnamon to white, Frau Stangl – I watched her repeatedly talking with her neighbours – is obviously popular and considered a good neighbour.
    The house has three and a half small bedrooms, a narrow living room, a primitive but functional bathroom, a dining room and a kitchenette. The loft of a small building across the courtyard, which Stangl built as a