"I feel," he says, "like an ordinary man, no different from others." In the evenings we never discussed our work, but just drank and played cards." When pressed as to how one could daily kill thousands and just not talk about it, Wagner's reply is simple: "We had a feeling that if we lost the war we would be saddled with the consequences." But even if Wagner is aware of his wrong doings, he doesn't see himself as a criminal. More alarming is how Wagner describes his lack of feelings at the end of a day's work: "I had no feelings, although at the beginning I did. We were under oath, involved in top secret Reich work." In fact, many investigations have shown that the few SS men who did refuse to continue were merely transferred to other work. Wagner insists that it was not possible to resign. The maxim was: the fuehrer's orders must be carried out." One saw these people exterminated who were really innocent, but there was nothing I could do. Today, Wagner says he was depressed seeing people going to be gassed, but there was nothing he could do to help any of them: "I didn't think it was right. Sometimes he selected a few to work on camp maintenance in Camp One and sent the rest to Camp Three, ostensibly for a shower, in fact to be gassed. Wagner watched as thousands of people jumped and fell out of cattle trucks and were often whipped on to the parade ground. It was their accessibility to the rail network, yet their remoteness from populations, which made them ideal for the architects of the Final Solution. The other were Chlemno, Belzec and Treblinka. Sobibor was one of four locations chosen under "Operation Reinhardt" to overcome the inefficiency of mass shootings. Handpicked for the task, his initial job was to build the camp - to erect the buildings and the wire fences, which were later electrified, dig the anti-escape trenches, lay the minefields, construct the gas chambers and organize the laying of a small railway siding so that the trains could pull off the main line and discharge their cargoes. Wagner's role in that assembly line was crucial. Of the quarter of a million who came, just 34 survived. The victims were gassed by the carbon monoxide fumes of a captured Russian tank. By then their luggage had been sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. In just 15 months, 250,000 men, women and children stepped off the train in the morning, were gassed by lunchtime and their corpses burnt before dawn the next day. Its production line was as sophisticated as a complex modern factory. It was not a conventional concentration camp, because there was no work for those who arrived. Gustav Franz Wagner was the deputy commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland. But late in June, the court denied petitions from West Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland seeking his extradition. For a year, he lay on a bed in a cell in a psychiatric hospital near Brasilia, guarded round the clock, awaiting a decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court. Not gassing Szmajzner cost Wagner some of his freedom and satisfied some of those who survived his daily tortures that, at long last, their tormentor should feel some suffering. Wagner was momentarily caught unaware, then smiled: "You should be grateful to me. The younger, Stanislaw Szmajzner, slight and balding, was born in Poland. The elderly one, Gustav Wagner, a former Austrian, was tall, gray-haired but very fit. It was a staged confrontation.īoth were postwar refugees from Europe. On the top floor of the Brazilian federal police headquarters in Sao Paulo, two men who had last seen each other 35 years previously in war-ravaged eastern Poland were brought in from opposite sides of the room. FOR 34 PEOPLE scattered around the world, May 30, 1978, was a dramatic and even emotional day.
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