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From the T4 Program<br />

to the Holocaust<br />

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION IN PEDAGOGY, HISTORY, AND PRACTICE 96<br />

Hartheim, the T4 program and the Holocaust are interconnected. So closely are they intertwined that Simon<br />

Wiesenthal called Hartheim a “school for murderers”. For the first time in history, people were systematically<br />

deported to be killed in gas chambers and their bodies burnt. Many of the perpetrators from the T4 later<br />

became leading figures in the Holocaust. Many individuals who started their work in Hartheim later worked<br />

in the extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. These include Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, Franz<br />

Reichleitner, among many others. Perhaps the best known is Franz Stangl.<br />

Franz Stangl ; Profile of a Perpetrator<br />

Stangl was born in 1908 in Altmünster, Austria. Beginning in 1931 he trained at the federal police academy<br />

in Linz. During this time he became a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)<br />

commonly referred to as the Nazi party. He made a career in the police force and became a member of<br />

the SS (Schutzstaffel) in May 1938. In early 1940, Stangl was offered the job as a supervisor in charge of<br />

security at a T4 killing facility. He worked as the deputy office manager of the Hartheim killing facility and<br />

also of Bernburg. In March of 1942, he was given the opportunity of returning to the Gestapo in Linz or<br />

working for Operation Reinhard, the code name given to the secretive Nazi plan to mass-murder Polish<br />

Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland during the Second World War. Stangl chose<br />

to become part of the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was the first commandant of the<br />

Sobibor extermination camp and served from April to August 1942. From there, he went on to become the<br />

commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp.<br />

In 1948 Stangl fled to Syria. He and his family were discovered later to be living in Brazil. It was there that<br />

Simon Wiesenthal, the Austrian Nazi hunter, was able to track him down. Stangl was arrested, brought to<br />

Germany and tried for the killings of 900,000 people. He was found guilty in October 1970 and sentenced<br />

to life imprisonment. He died in prison in June 1971. 3<br />

3<br />

For Franz Stangl see also: Friedlander, Henry: The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (1997) / Sereny,<br />

Gitta: Into That Darkness: from Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, a study of Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka (1974) /<br />

http://www.simon-wiesenthal-archiv.at/02_dokuzentrum/02_faelle/02_stangl.html (May 10th 2015)

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