All language subtitles for Nazi Hunters - Season 1, Episode 8 - Gustav WagnerFranz Strangl

franz stengel was in charge of a massive

killing machine

he was responsible for the deaths of

eight hundred thousand people

wiesental 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

[Music]

a drunken man turns up at his office

and tells him if you give me

seven thousand dollars i will tell you

where to find france dangle

stengel was in charge of a massive

killing machine responsible for the

death of 800

000 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

stangle was a monster but wiesenthal

wanted to make sure that he had a man

that he could trust

[Music]

wiesenthal does a deal with a stranger

but it will only be sealed with stango's

capture

[Music]

he does find out from the man where he's

working and his address

[Music]

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 nazism he joined

the nazi party and he also became a

member of the ss

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 unto mention 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 tango

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 30 000 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

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

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

wiesenthal went through it

and he had to keep the cause 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

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

[Music]

from his vienna headquarters

simon wiesenthal works to set a trap for

nazi war criminal franz stengel

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 byzantine was that man

[Music]

twenty 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

hartime

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

belsek sobibor

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 exposed

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

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 10-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

wiesental 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

wiesenthal assists prosecutors by

assembling a detailed dossier of stangos

crimes

in brazil

sao paulo police chief romeo tuma lays

the groundwork for the nazi's 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

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

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 alice

hudal

hudal is at the heart

of this nazi escape network and who dao

welcomes them and says i've been

expecting you

who down 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

sixteen years later

stangle's world is about to crumble

this man is 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

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

[Music]

5000 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 narcissism 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

[Music]

some people have suggested that in fact

it was stangle's former son-in-law who

had actually shot stangle 2 wiesenthal

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

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

they don't come with big horns

blood dripping off their fangs they look

like your local cab driver the local

grocer

on december 22nd 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

franz stengel 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 would maintain

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 took shocked his old

friend gustav wagner

[Music]

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 stangle 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

[Music]

gustaf wagner was one of the most

vindictive sadistic mass murderers in

the world

who just glorified in playing god

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

asks 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

bisontol knows that wagner is there but

doesn't know the name under which he's

living

and wiesenthal 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 prove scarce but the memory of

the nazi and his crimes never fade for

sobabor 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 savvy world

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 decide that 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

until the woman dies and he is then

after them

dr stengel 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

[Music]

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

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 tornado brazil

and my boss say well we have an

assignment somebody sent to the

newspaper anonymous invitation

this is like a nazi

meeting to celebrate hitler's birthday

but what's all in code so i said well

okay let's go hunt nazi

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

i say well let's stop and eat something

so we stop under 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

[Music]

i said oh my gosh we're here

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

when the german group start realizing

that we

were talking pictures is when we decide

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

[Music]

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

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 shall be

arrested

when byzantine made that statement he

knew it wasn't partner but his plan was

to smoke him out

[Music]

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

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 sobibor 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 [ __ ]

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

peace

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

you should be grateful to me i let you

live

i mean that is just the most astonishing

admission of guilt

[Music]

his identity confirmed wagner is now

held pending

extradition everybody wanted wagner

poland wanted him because sobe bore

west germany wanted him for major war

crimes

[Music]

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

[Music]

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

the shocking decision is condemned

around the world

there is no legal reason why they

shouldn't extradite wagner

the evidence against wagner was just as

overwhelming as against stengel

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

[Music]

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 a 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]

ivanka 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 stangle 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

[Music]

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you