Franz Stangl was no sadistic brute screaming in rage or beating victims with his fists. He was worse. A cold, disciplined administrator who treated mass murder as an exercise in efficiency. After joining the SS, he became a key figure in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program before being appointed the first commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp and later taking over Treblinka—where up to 700,000 Jews were murdered. Known to prisoners as “White Death”, he personally oversaw industrialized killing while claiming he was simply "doing his duty." After the war he escaped justice through the Catholic ratlines to Syria and Brazil, before finally being hunted down by Simon Wiesenthal. Stangl was convicted in 1970 for his role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, yet he chillingly insisted: “My conscience is clear.” This is the story of one of the most deadly men of the Holocaust.
Up Next in Season 1
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Vengeance Rockets and Murder Camps: O...
As Allied forces stormed Normandy in June 1944, Nazi Germany unleashed a new horror on London – the V-1 flying bombs and later the V-2 rockets. These so-called "revenge weapons" were built using slave labor inside the hellish underground tunnels of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where tens of...
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Cold-Blooded: Max Koegel and the Camp...
After the German defeat at Stalingrad shattered Hitler’s dreams of conquest, the war turned into a brutal retreat—but the suffering in the Nazi camps only intensified. Max Koegel, an ambitious SS officer, rose from humble origins to command some of the deadliest camps in history, including Majdan...
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Commandant of Cruelty: Hermann Florst...
In the shadow of Nazi Germany’s collapse, the crimes of the concentration camp system come to light. Among the perpetrators stands Hermann Florstedt—SS officer, camp commandant, and one of the most feared figures in Majdanek. Once described as “tough and energetic” by his superiors, Florstedt’s a...
