The Escape and Capture of Franz Stangl | The Brutal End of the Commandant of Treblinka

Franz Stangl, a commissioner of the Austrian criminal police and an SS officer, served as the organizational head of the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre between 1940 and 1941, and subsequently as the commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps under Aktion Reinhardt—the program responsible for the deaths of nearly 1,700,000 people in occupied Poland. Following the German surrender in May 1945, he was detained by US forces and held in the Glasenbach internment camp near Salzburg. In May 1948, upon receiving the formal indictment for crimes committed at Hartheim, he escaped from Linz prison and embarked on a flight across the Alps into Italy. In Rome, the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the German national church Santa Maria dell'Anima, facilitated his stateless documentation through a relief network linked to the Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza and the International Red Cross. Armed with these papers, Stangl traveled to Syria in 1948 and later to Brazil in 1951, settling in São Bernardo do Campo under his real name and eventually finding employment as a mechanic at Volkswagen do Brasil. In 1964, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal obtained details regarding Stangl's location through two independent sources. After years of diplomatic negotiations between Austria, West Germany, and Brazil, Stangl was arrested in São Paulo on February 28, 1967, and extradited to the Federal Republic of Germany. On October 22, 1970, a Düsseldorf court sentenced him to life imprisonment for his role in the mass murder of 900,000 people at Treblinka. He died in prison in June 1971.