Josef Stangl (12 March 1907 – 8 April 1979) was a Roman Catholic Bishop of Würzburg, Germany.

Born in Kronach, Bavaria, Stangl became a priest on 16 March 1930, and he was appointed by Pope Pius XII as bishop of Würzburg on 27 June 1957.

He approved the exorcism on Anneliese Michel "after careful consideration and good information" by Father Arnold Renz. On 8 January 1979, Stangl withdrew as a bishop of Würzburg and died three months later in April 1979.

Stangl consecrated Father Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, as a Bishop on 28 May 1977.

He died in Schweinfurt two years later.

Anneliese Michel (21 September 1952 – 1 July 1976) was a German Catholic woman who was said to be possessed by demons and subsequently underwent an exorcism. The case has been labelled by some as a misidentification of mental illness, negligence, abuse, and religious hysteria.

Three motion pictures, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Requiem, and the Asylum film Anneliese Michel: The Exorcist Tapes, are loosely based on Michel's story.

Anneliese Michel was born on 21 September 1952 in Leiblfing, Bavaria, West Germany to a strict Catholic family. When she was sixteen, she suffered a severe convulsion and was diagnosed as having epilepsy. Soon, she began hallucinating while praying. In 1973, she suffered from depression and began to hear voices telling her that she was “damned” and would "rot in hell".

Her treatment in an unnamed psychiatric hospital did not improve Michel’s health. Moreover, her depression began to deepen. She grew increasingly frustrated with medical intervention as it did not help. Long-term medical treatment proved unsuccessful; her condition, including her depression, worsened with time. A devout Catholic, Michel began to attribute her condition to demonic possession. Michel became intolerant of sacred places and objects, such as the crucifix, which she attributed to her own demonic possession. Throughout the course of the religious rites Michel underwent, she was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs, which she may not have taken.

Franz Paul Stangl (26 March 1908 — 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Stangl was born on 26 March 1908 in Altmünster, located in the Salzkammergut region of Austria. The son of a nightwatchman, his relationship with his natural father was emotionally distressing. He was so deeply frightened of him that Stangl developed a hatred for his Habsburg Dragoons uniform. Stangl claimed that his father died of malnutrition in 1916. To help support his family Franz learned to play the zither and earned money giving zither lessons. Stangl completed his public schooling in 1923.

In his teens he secured an apprenticeship as a weaver, qualifying as a master weaver in 1927. Concerned that this trade offered few opportunities for advancement – and having observed the poor health of his co-workers – Stangl sought a new career. He moved to Innsbruck in 1930 and applied for an appointment in the Austrian federal police. Stangl later suggested that he liked the security and cleanliness that the police uniforms represented to him. He was accepted in early 1931 and trained for two years at the federal police academy in Linz.

Gustav Franz Wagner (18 July 1911 — 3 October 1980) was an SS-Oberscharführer (Staff Sergeant) from Vienna, Austria. Wagner was a starter deputy commander of the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, where more than 200,000 Jews were gassed during Operation Reinhard. Due to his brutality, he was known as "The Beast" and "Wolf" (Yiddish: Welfel).

While living in Austria, Wagner joined the Nazi Party in 1931 as member number 443,217. After being arrested for proscribed National Socialist agitation, he fled to Germany, where he joined the SA and later the SS in the late 1930s.

In May 1940, Wagner first participated in killing during the Action T4 euthanasia program at Hadamar and Hartheim. Due to his killing experience in T-4, Wagner was assigned to help establish the Sobibor extermination camp in March 1942. Once the gassing installations were completed, Wagner became deputy commandant of the camp under Commandant Franz Stangl. His official title was quartermaster-sergeant of the camp.