Justice Wins: A Post About Franz Stangl, Treblinka, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

 

     Last night I watched a documentary on the History channel. It was about Franz Stangl, the one time Kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. I won't go into the details of Treblinka's operation (you can read about that here) but I will say that over the course of it's operation, Treblinka is estimated to have seen anywhere from 700'000 to 1'400'000 Jews pass through it's fake train station and into its gas chambers.The camp was staffed byless than 150 people.

     One hundred fifty people were responsible for the deaths of up to one million four-hundred thousand people. Stangl himself was eventually tried and convicted of war crimes and the deaths of nine-hundred thousand people. The numbers are staggering alone, and all night I've been trying to imagine a just outcome to all this, on this world. The simple fact is that there isn't. What can we do? Line up the offenders and shoot them? Is that justice? Do we torture them, and then kill them? Is that Justice?

     There is nothing that we can do to mitigate the enormity of Treblinka. Nothing we can do for justice, to make any of this right.

     Franz Stangl died in Dusseldorf prison in Germany of heart failure in 1971. Is that Justice?

"Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn't have; it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo."

"My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty..."
                                                                                                 -Franz Stangl