Word: treblinka
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...known as "the gentleman commandant" because he wore an impeccable white SS jacket and always sported a long riding crop while making the rounds at Treblinka, a Nazi death factory in Poland. He never personally mistreated a prisoner, and often arranged for brass bands to play while groups of 80 to 100 captives, most of them Jews, were herded into a building behind a railroad station for "showers" prior to "resettlement." The showers, of course, turned out to be sprays of gas pumped into the building by the engines from captured Soviet tanks...
Between 1942 and late 1943, a total of 700,000 people were slaughtered at Treblinka, more than half during the single year when Franz Paul Stangl, the gentleman commandant, was running things. Last week, in a West German federal court at Düsseldorf, Stangl, 62, went on trial on charges of supervising the murder of "at least 400,000 per sons" for motives "base, sinister and cruel...
...alive today. "Oh no, says he, "that was in Europe." His attitude then explains, I think, a great deal about his writing now: the glib, absurd equation of Hitler's factories of death and the war in Vietnam; the facile postmortem advice to the Jews of Auschwitz and Treblinka (they should have fought, he thinks, precisely because it would have made no difference) from someone who writes that the only reason he wouldn't blow up the Center for International Affairs is that he might get caught...
Author Levin ranges skillfully through Berlin ministries, where Nazi bureaucrats enthusiastically pursued their policy of Endlosung ("final solution") for the Jews, to Warsaw's Umschlagplatz, a transfer point to Treblinka, where a child's tongue was cut out "with a pocket knife for making a face at a guard." One chilling passage portrays Eichmann himself, standing over a killing pit near Minsk and watching a pleading Jewish mother hold up her baby just before the bullets strike. "I was so close that later I found bits of brains splattered on my long leather coat," Eichmann said afterward...
Since the Nurnberg trials, hundreds of former Nazi officers, soldiers, industrialists, physicians and other civilians have been convicted of war crimes in German courts. The Germans have just tracked down Treblinka Camp Commander Franz Stangl, who has been extradited from Brazil. They still have hopes of finding Josef Mengele, the camp doctor accused of experimenting on thousands of people at Auschwitz, and the biggest quarry of all, Hitler Deputy Martin Bormann. Yet the men who knowingly gave many of Hitler's acts their legal veneer, the Nazi judges, have escaped prosecution, claiming that they were simply upholding the laws...