
Nazi Hunters: The Hunt for Franz Stangl
Franz Stangl rose from Austrian career policeman to commandant of Sobibor and then Treblinka, the extermination camps where he oversaw the killing of roughly 800,000 people. This episode of the Nazi Hunters series traces how a bureaucrat with a talent for organizing mass murder escaped Europe on the postwar "ratline" network, resettling in Brazil, where he lived openly under his own name for nearly two decades, working ordinary jobs and raising a family in Sao Paulo. Archival photographs, wartime documents, and expert interviews reconstruct both the machinery of the camps under his command and the painstaking investigative work that eventually tracked him down, including the role of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in pressing for his extradition. The film follows the case through his 1967 arrest and the Dusseldorf trial that followed, using survivor testimony and camp records to lay out the scale of what he was convicted of. It is a straightforward procedural account of one of the war crimes era's most consequential manhunts.