The Hunt For The Mass Murdering Police Chief | Nazi Hunters | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video franz stengel was in charge of a massive killing machine he was responsible for the deaths of eight hundred thousand people these entire starts getting on his case his plan was to smoke him out they were fiercely loyal to the old germany to the reich he was an enormous fish for the germans to bring back he had trainees one of whom was gustav wagner he was called the beast [Music] [Music] simon wiesenthal is the world's most famous nazi hunter in his office at the jewish documentation center he keeps files on hundreds of fugitive war criminals it is solitary work but today brings an unexpected turn a drunken man turns up in his office and tells him if you give me seven thousand dollars i will tell you where to find france tangle [Music] stengel was in charge of a massive killing machine responsible for the death of eight hundred thousand people that's big time mass murder wiesenthal is intrigued franz stengel is high on his list of wanted war criminals but he can't help but be suspicious of the unusual offer stengel was a monster but wiesenthal wanted to make sure that he had a man that he could trust wiesenthal does a deal with a stranger but it will only be sealed with stengel's capture [Music] he does find out from the man where he's working and his address stangle and his family are in sao paulo brazil [Music] simon wiesenthal never sees the mysterious informant again he's carried a photo of franz stengel in his wallet for years now it's time to bring the nazi to justice france dangle was a career policeman he was an austrian and with the arrival of narcism he joined the nazi party and he also became a member of the ss [Music] then he worked his way up the nazi party ranks stengel was drafted into a special program in austria at hartheim castle he takes part in the t4 program people who are crippled or mentally handicapped are gassed to death on the grounds that they are under mentioned they are inferior beings it was a training school for mass murderers they were carefully groomed can you stand there and watch people being injected can you stand there and watch 150 people being gassed in the chamber he enjoyed murdering people in hard time he was a passionate believer in hitler's theories of race and the superiority of the aryans himmler who was the head of the ss personally selected franz stengel to supervise this place he appointed him to that post because he knew that he could handle it by the time they finished they had murdered around thirty thousand people after the war franz stangle found refuge in brazil he built a comfortable life for his wife and three daughters there's a big german community in san paolo he's like home from home he's happy [Music] they got their wurst and their wienerschnitzels they used to celebrate hitler's birthday sing old german drinking songs [Music] they were good neighbors productive members of the community he worked in a car factory he started to make quite a bit of money [Music] the war criminal is eventually able to move his family into a spacious new home and he finally thinks that's it i put the old world all my crimes behind me i'll be forgotten [Music] but wiesenthal has not forgotten like other victims of nazi cruelty he cannot forget he and his wife cilla also a survivor lost 89 relatives to the holocaust anyone who'd gone through the holocaust they will never be able to remove that image wiesentar went through it and he had to keep the calls going with a new lead in hand wiesenthal reaches out to brazilian contacts to confirm his target's location but finding stengel is just a first step bringing him to europe to face justice is a much more difficult task after wiesenthal's discovery of stangle he didn't just want to phone up the brazilians to try and get the extradition in place because he knew that things would leak and stangle would just flee [Music] to maintain secrecy wiesenthal deals only with a network of trusted contacts he cannot risk alerting the nazi sympathizers in brazil every major country in south america had huge pockets of germans they were fiercely loyal to the old germany to the reich nazi loyalty could jeopardize wiesenthal's plan franz stengel may have friends willing to protect him friends ready to do whatever it takes to stop a famous nazi hunter from his vienna headquarters simon wiesenthal works to set a trap for nazi war criminal franz stangle he consults government sources and scours historical archives for buried information the public had to have one hero keeping the hunt going in the days where everyone was uninterested and wiesentar was that man years after the war wiesenthal is one of the very few people tracking down nazis people were sick and tired of war stories nazi hunters like simon wiesenthal were interested but i tell you the rest of the world was not they were more interested in finding the communists under the bed despite the lack of public interest wiesenthal continues the hunt he digs deeper into stango's wartime career a career which took him from one atrocity to the next he impresses his betters at schloss time and stangle eventually takes part in the next new nazi extermination program called operation reinhardt operation reinhardt was the code name for the mass murder of polish jews at death camps the purpose of a death camp is solely to kill and there were three in eastern poland belseck sobibor treblinka they were just processing centers for slaughter and stangle found himself running these places you had a hope of surviving outfits you had no hope of surviving these extermination camps only a handful of people ever escaped wiesenthal tracks some of them down as witnesses to genocide they expose the inner workings of the nazi killing operation and stangle's central role in it the jews would be packed on trains through the wastelands of that part of poland and they'd arrive at this station in the middle of nowhere and the station would have flowers and a clock and a timetable if you're a jew coming off this tortuous horrid journey from warsaw you think maybe there's some normality returning maybe things aren't too bad and there would be france dangle his job was to be in charge of the processing he dressed to the nines white coat and white gloves and perfectly pressed pants and polished shoes behind the station was the scene of utter horror they were funneled down a tunnel they were stripped and then they were gassed and then they were burnt from the whistle to the smoke 30 minutes so you'll be arriving at the station and before the hour was gone you'd be dead wiesenthal promises each survivor that he will never stop hunting the former camp commandant until justice is served meanwhile in germany an historic trial underscores the urgency of wiesenthal's mission ten former ss men who worked at treblinka stand accused of war crimes stangle is not among them he was responsible at treblinka for the deaths of 800 000 people but if you look through the war crimes lists there's no stangle in there he was the chief he didn't get his hands dirty he didn't have to go on slit throats [Music] during the course of the ten-month-long trial stango's crimes along with those of his former colleagues are finally exposed to the world but in brazil he remains a free man visental puts a lot of pressure on the brazilian authorities to get something done finally in january 1967 the effort begins to pay off brazilian authorities promise to arrest stangle if germany sends a formal extradition request [Music] wiesenthal assists prosecutors by assembling a detailed dossier of stengo's crimes in brazil sao paulo police chief romeo tuma lays the groundwork for the nazis arrest they map out the area and they work out what they need to do the core of their mission is to stake out the house and by doing that they watch his family they try to work out what time he comes back home [Music] unaware of the police surveillance the threat of arrest is something stangle thought he'd left far behind after the war stangle spent two years in an american pow camp but the allies were largely unaware of his horrific crimes he's interned by the americans but they don't know who he is dangle knows that there's a noose if he doesn't escape you like to think that stangle you know had to devise some incredibly cunning means of escaping from the camp but of course he basically just walks out security around these internment camps is pretty lacks [Music] so he made his way through austria down to the austrian town of gratz and with another man decides to use the catholic church as their means of escape these escape routes were called rat lines rat like rats leaving the ship the most famous rat line was called the vatican rat line in rome and he heard there was an austrian bishop in rome by the name of alois hudal hudal is at the heart of this nazi escape network and who dao welcomes them and says i've been expecting you who dal says could you fill out a little cv a little um resume of your career during the war funnily enough you can't find the words either treblinka or sobibor on them he got immigration cards for stengel to go to syria from syria in 1951 stangle and his family sail for a new life in south america 16 years later stangle's world is about to crumble this man was responsible for so much death it was unmolested for so many years it's time to get this guy [Music] february 1967 sao paulo police make final preparations for the takedown of former nazi death camp commandant franz stengel [Music] chief tuma receives the crucial extradition document that green lights the mission stangle's picked up just on an ordinary day for him he's come back from work and he's decided to meet up with his daughter for a beer at a little bar not too far from his house and he comes back home suddenly a squad car turns up policemen get out there was just no contest there was no chance of him escaping he felt i'm untouchable and they literally bundle stangle into the back of the car while the daughter is screaming it's a pretty gut-wrenching thing to watch happening to your father [Music] police take stangle to prison to await extradition five thousand miles away in vienna what simon wiesenthal doesn't know is that stangle's capture will eventually put him on the trail of another major war criminal when questioned the former death camp commandant insists his job was simply to record the victims names before they were gassed one of those banal excuses these nazi war criminals always gave us i was just obeying orders i'm not going to bow admit that i did something wrong because i didn't do anything wrong he lacked the absolute moral bravery to have to say look i think that's a bad thing to do and i want no part of it stangle was one of those people without whom nazism could not have functioned days later wiesenthal hears from the mysterious informant as promised he honors their agreement [Music] but he never reveals the man's identity some people have suggested that in fact it was stangle's former son-in-law who had actually shot stangle 2 wiesenthal [Music] the reason why he was suspected they had rather spectacularly fallen out he divorced dangle's daughter [Music] and he thought well i'm going to get my revenge i'll tell you what i'll do i'll ring simon wiesenthal the stangle family to this day are convinced it is that man [Music] in june 1967 franz stangle arrives in germany to face charges of genocide he was an enormous fish for the germans to bring back the stangle trial was another one of those key moments in holocaust history fundamentally because people hadn't quite realized what had been going on in these camps and the fact that people like stangler were still alive and they had been working anonymous boring quiet lives on the other side of the world for so many years [Music] they don't come with big horns blood dripping off their fangs they look like your local cab driver the local grocer [Music] on december 22 1970 simon wiesenthal watches from the gallery as the court's verdict comes down guilty for his role in the murder of nine hundred thousand people france stangle is sentenced to life in prison it takes three years according to wiesental for stangle eventually to be brought to justice and of course his family were maintained that he was an innocent man but of course stangle was not an innocent man finally 25 years after the fall of the nazi regime simon wiesenthal closes the file on franz stengel four months later stangle agrees to a prison interview with celebrated journalist gita cerani in the interview he drops a bombshell one that will put simon wiesenthal back in the hunt for another major nazi criminal when he sat down in the prison and uh was interviewed he revealed the secret about his past he quite happily to shocked his old friend gustav wagner and revealed that he too was living over there in sao paulo you know such is the ss motto you know my honor is loyalty when these guys are caught and the chips are down they'll shop each other at hartheim castle killing center stangle's special skills had made him an excellent teacher he had trainees one of whom was gustav wagner and gradually the people like wagner who were introduced into this murder machine were tested wagner passed the test he was a good student he enjoyed killing one day after giving up his fellow ss officer franz stengel dies of a heart attack he lived a good life until he was 63 the guy only spent one year in a nice prison in dusseldorf after it's revealed that wagner is actually in brazil wiesenthal starts getting on his case gustav wagner was one of the most vindictive sadistic mass murderers in the world who just glorified in playing god [Music] after their posting at heartheim both men reported to sobibor death camp stangle was the new commandant wagner his deputy when stangle was transferred to treblinka sobibor needed a new boss and stangle as for wagner every camp has this one person that everyone is afraid of and it was wagner he was called the beast because the moment he was seen you knew that someone was going to die june 1971 simon wiesenthal's new mission is tracking down nazi war criminal gustav wagner in sao paulo brazil bison tell knows that wagner is there but doesn't know the name under which he's living [Music] and wiesentar didn't know where he's living his contacts in brazil find a copy of wagner's first brazilian passport but the address listed is long out of date new leads proved scarce but the memory of the nazi and his crimes never fade for sobibor survivor thomas blatt wagner was a very tall guy he was huge he was strong seeing him 200 meters away i was shaking he was the biggest cure in sauvignon he was terrible very sadistic i was beaten so many times for him his greatest trick was to be able to shoot a father and son with one bully force the father and son to lean their heads together he found a woman who smuggled her baby into a knapsack into the camp he brought the baby and mother outside made the mother kneel and he shot the baby first i'm sorry i'm sorry and then he shot her he had successfully murdered over 200 000 people like his mentor franz stangle wagner eluded the allies after the war he returned home to austria he was still there when stangle came looking for the rat line stangle was walking through there suddenly there's a kind of a wolf whistle or a whistle from a building site and it's hi france and who is it it's his old friend gustav wagner and they decided they're going to try and find a new life overseas both stengel and wagner ended up in brazil they started off together they ended up together they lived about 30 miles apart it's almost chilling to reflect upon the fact that when these nazis were on the run or in their new lives a lot of them used to be very friendly with each other eichmann and mengele would meet sometimes in the abc cafe in buenos aires and with stangle and wagner it was just the same once in a while they would meet up for some drinks something to eat one would shudder to think of what they actually discussed he just becomes part of the german community in the hills outside sao paulo he marries a local woman who's got children till the woman dies and he is then left to them [Music] after stangle had been arrested and extradited wagner even tried to make a move on mrs stangle but he failed to win her over all she offered him was money in return for a promise to leave her alone simon wiesenthal still does not know where gustav wagner is hiding the trail goes cold and stays cold for seven years finally wiesenthal stumbles upon a potential new lead a newspaper article describing a strange celebration at a hotel in brazil a birthday party for hitler [Music] might a loyal nazi like gustav wagner have been on the guest list wiesenthal tracks down the journalists behind the story [Music] by that time i was a staff photographer from journal of brazil and my boss said well we have an assignment somebody sent to the newspaper anonymous invitation this is like a nazi meeting to celebrate hitler's birthday but it was all in code so i said well okay let's go hunt nazi [Music] brito teams up with a reporter from the paper the reporter's husband offers to drive and we drove hours and hours and hours and we couldn't find a thing a person not even a cow [Music] i say well let's stop and eat something so we stop on the till hotel we all look very german so nobody would say oh they are brazilian they are journalists we went to the restaurant there was like those knickknacks and i started looking and i said oh my gosh not possible there was tiny little porcelains cups and things and all of them they had a little swastika i said oh my gosh we're here [Music] and we looked by the window there was a group of german people dressed in folklore clothes [Music] we went to this scenario on the back where they were i tried to put the writer and the husband in an angle that i would look like i was taking their picture but actually i was focusing the group [Music] when the german group start realizing that we were talking pictures is when we decided to go to the police it was a scary moment by the time the police arrive the celebration is over only a few of the partygoers remain i remember the police asking this nazi for the passport to see if he got in legally it starts an argument between the police and the owner of the hotel [Music] the angry hotel guest is defiant police decide to search his room and i remember the police in his room and opened a bedside table and there was a gun there fully loaded plus a box of munitions so he was not here for fun when the police found the gun the man was out of his mind the owner of the hotel was screaming he started running after us we had that sense that we had a really good story but we had no idea of the significance of what we were doing brazilian journalists have stumbled upon a bizarre birthday party for hitler the extraordinary pictures are shown around the world [Music] wiesenthal contacts the journal doe brazil and asks for all of brito's photos but while he searches through them gustav wagner's face is absent but wiesenthal determined as ever devises a new plan [Music] he was afraid that wagner would get whiff of this thing and run so he played a game a kind of game that wagner himself would play he sent one of the pictures back to the journalist and he put wagner's name under it and wagner's ss number and said print it the brazilian paper runs a story detailing wagner's war crimes wiesenthal makes an announcement to the world that one particular man in that photograph is gustav wagner the wanted murderer from saudi poor and he should be arrested [Music] when visanthal made that statement he knew it wasn't partner but his plan was to smoke him out for wagner the article is both worrying and perplexing his record of war crimes has now been exposed to the world but the face in the photograph is not his there is some discussion among scholars and a few days later this german that was identified as wagner was murdered nobody knows by whom one theory is that actually the nazis turned upon themselves and knowing that wagner was likely to be brought to justice um he would probably spill the beans on some of them as well so perhaps it was his fellow nazis who did him in [Music] so wagner got nervous figured if they got this guy better to be protected by the police than to be killed so he turned himself into the police the nazi hunter's ploy has worked perfectly in police custody wagner admits to being at sobermore although he denies any involvement in the atrocities police can see he's not the nazi in the pictures if they can't prove he's a war criminal he'll walk free in 48 hours but then a remarkable coincidence changes everything a coincidence involving one of the few survivors of sobibor [ __ ] smashner who was living in brazil was watching evening television the set flashed a figure of gustav wagner slomo exploded he couldn't believe that he and wagner were breathing the same air so he jumped on a plane and he went down at sao paulo and he went to the police station authorities now have the perfect opportunity to nail wagner police chief tuma arranges a face-to-face meeting between the former victim and his tormentor is foreign he doesn't dream that in that situation one of the very few people to survive zombie ball should be in the same city and come up to him you should be grateful to me i let you live i mean that is just the most astonishing admission of guilt his identity confirmed wagner is now held pending extradition everybody wanted wagner poland wanted him because so be bore west germany wanted him for major war crimes israel wanted to hang him he knew that he was on a conveyor belt to stand trial and spend the rest of his life in prison just like shtangle and others had he was terrified with that prospect while he's in custody wagner goes seriously over the edge brazilian prisons are not very pleasant places two weeks into his incarceration wagner attempts suicide by smashing his reading glasses and eating the broken glass the man was never stable to begin with frankly and with this enormous pressure he grows increasingly suicidal he threatens to do himself in and he's locked up in a prison hospital in brasilia [Music] he attempts suicide twice more slitting his wrists in a bathtub and bashing his head against a wall wagner's fate now rests with the brazilian supreme court his life would never be the same again it's been 35 years since gustav wagner's brutal reign of terror at the soberboard death camp the decision to put him on trial for his crimes now rests with brazilian judges the supreme court of brazil for some technical reason decided that it would not allow the extradition of gustav wagner and the brazilians released wagner to go back home [Music] the shocking decision is condemned around the world there was no legal reason why they shouldn't extradite wagner the evidence against wagner was just as overwhelming as against stronghold but there was no real future for him anymore in brazil he knew that what would ever happen now that he had been exposed people would hunt him down whether it was wiesental or the survivors and the next thing we know he's dead he's found with supposedly self-inflicted knife wounds his family said he was stabbed in the chest and it was suicide [Music] now there are a lot of people think that actually he was the victim of a murder it's pretty hard to sort of stab yourself to death in the way he had done one theory about how wagner was killed was that maybe it had been a vengeful survivor who had done so maybe someone who had survived sobibor tracked him down and actually murdered him and i interviewed [ __ ] and i asked him about wagner and he looked at me with his sly smile and he said he committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest and he laughed i would like to kill him but i wouldn't do it because i would go to jail first of all my family would be ruined so different things of consideration if i would be alone probably i would [Music] valder escaped justice he should have suffered the trial and suffered long imprisonment he'd enjoyed many years of happy life in brazil which he shouldn't have been allowed to enjoy it's a mystery even to this day quite how wagner met his end but it was certainly a violent end and uh if one believes in a certain sense of biblical poetic justice he certainly met it simon wiesenthal history's most famous nazi hunter claims responsibility for bringing hundreds of nazis to justice none are more important than franz stengel and gustav wagner stangle and wagner between them have a million lives on their conscience it was thanks to him and the pressure that he bought to bear that men like stangel and wagner met their fates he did come to symbolize the hunt for the nazi war criminals when everyone else had forgotten it in 2004 britain awards wiesenthal an honorary knighthood for his extraordinary achievements dying in 2005 at the age of 96 he outlived most of the nazi criminals he hunted the satisfaction came from the world now knows you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 430,909

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, franz stegl, nazi hunters, nuremburg, ww2 germany, ww2 documentary, nazi justice, gestapo, police chife, austrian police, ww2 france, nazis after the war, nuremberg trials, world war ii

Id: GuCn9VqS154

Length: 41min 56sec (2516 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021

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