A commandant's view

I think that it depends on the person in history that you are specifically looking at that determines whether they were inhuman and evil. There were some people in history like Stangl who felt like they were forced to do this to the targeted population, while there are other people who thoroughly enjoyed making being in a position where they could directly hurt the Jews and other groups. It is hard to pin down specific people who were to blame for the awful death camps because there were just so many people involved. People in power at the death camps were not always the bad guys the way that we look back at them today. Stangl’s responses do change the way that I view the Nazi officers because although I have always been told by history teachers that not all Nazis were in their positions willingly, I felt like I could not fully believe that people who were doing such bad things to an entire population could do it “without thinking.” Hearing Stangl’s individual story about basically tuning the world around him out makes it easier for me to understand how this could have happened with so many people claiming they knew nothing about it.
It was hard for Stangl to cope with the mass murder of so many people at once at first. He said that it took him months to even be able to look a prisoner in the eyes, knowing their fate. After a while he started seeing them only as cargo which made it easier to think of them as inhuman. He forced himself to evade the subject in his thoughts by thinking of other things or just flat out drinking until he forgot. I think that this was a good tactic at first, but that it did not work out in the long run because by the tone of his voice in the article the reader can tell that a lot of damage was done by working there still.
Based on Stangl’s responses I think that he regrets what he did. He got very upset at one point in the interview when the interviewer describes it as, “made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy.” This shows that even though he made attempts in the past to block out any grief or feeling about what he was doing, that it still came through because he was very guilty about what he had done. Another example of his remorse is when Stangl talks about how seeing the cows at the slaughterhouse years after the war still made him sick because it reminded him of the camps in Poland. It made him so sick in fact, that he could not eat tinned meat.