Franz Stangl

Franz Paul Stangl (March 26, 1908 – June 28, 1971) was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Early life and Nazi affiliations

Stangl was born on March 26, 1908 in Altmünster, located in the Salzkammergut region of Austria. He was the son of a night-watchman and had such an emotionally distressing relationship with his father that he was deeply frightened by and hated the sight of the elder Stangl's Habsburg Dragoons uniform. Stangl claimed that his father died of malnutrition in 1916. To help support his family Franz learned to play the zither and earned money giving zither lessons. Stangl completed his public schooling in 1923.

In his teens he secured an apprenticeship as a weaver, qualifying as a master weaver in 1927. Concerned that this trade offered few opportunities for advancement – and having observed the poor health of his co-workers – Stangl sought a new career. He moved to Innsbruck in 1930 and applied for an appointment in the Austrian federal police. Stangl later suggested that he liked the security and cleanliness that the police uniforms represented to him. He was accepted in early 1931 and trained for two years at the federal police academy in Linz.