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Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Gitta Sereny

4.26 · Rating details · 2,116 ratings · 150 reviews

Based on seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the Nazi extermination camps), Sereny's book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final solution.

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Paperback, 400 pages

Published January 12th 1983 by Vintage (first published 1974)

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Oct 26, 2007 Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing

Shelves: holocaust-literature

I don't want to keep writing obituaries, but I have to say something here. Gitta Sereny died this week at the age of 91, she was another hero of mine. She was an intellectually tough woman who spent a good part of her long life staring evil right in the eyes - take a look at her main books :

Into That Darkness - an account of the life of Fritz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, who escaped after the war and was arrested in Brazil in 1967, and became the only commandant of a death camp ever to have been I don't want to keep writing obituaries, but I have to say something here. Gitta Sereny died this week at the age of 91, she was another hero of mine. She was an intellectually tough woman who spent a good part of her long life staring evil right in the eyes - take a look at her main books :

Into That Darkness - an account of the life of Fritz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, who escaped after the war and was arrested in Brazil in 1967, and became the only commandant of a death camp ever to have been interviewed by a journalist. Stangl died in 1971 of a heart attack, the day after Gitta Sereny had done her final interview, in which he had for the first time admitted some measure of guilt about his actions.

Albert Speer - His Battle with the Truth. Again based on hours of interviews.

The Case of Mary Bell. Mary was an eleven year old girl in northern England who in 1968 strangled two little boys to death (aged 3 and 4). It was, as you imagine, a huge case in Britain.

Cries Unheard. The follow-up to the previous one. After Mary was released Gitta was able to (again) do some very extensive interviews with her - she was 40 by then. So this is at once an examination of how children become violent, how society (the judicial system, the public, the press) reacts to such extreme cases, and how a human being grows up with the notion that they are evil.

The German Trauma. Essays and autobiography about Germany. Gitta was Hungarian and grew up in Vienna saw Hitler at a Nuremberg rally in 1938 at the age of 11. So that was when she began looking evil in the face.

A very remarkable series of books. She got some stick for being perceived to be "sympathetic" to her subjects, especially Mary Bell. She paid Mary for her time spent being interviewed in the 1990s and when that fact became public the press, as you may imagine, began frothing at the mouth. The government also began frothing, and tried to get a law cobbled together to "prevent murderers from being able to profit financially from their crimes". It got nowhere.

Into That Darkness is an essential read for those interested in the Holocaust, but I think all the rest of Gitta Sereney's books are pretty essential too.

...more

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Oct 29, 2018 Violet wells rated it really liked it

Shelves: world-war-two, holocaust

Perhaps the definition of a worthy book about the Holocaust is that it leaves you asking more questions than it answers. That, ultimately, it is unsatisfactory. Satisfaction, after all, allows one to move on.

The author of Into the Darkness conducts a series of interviews with Franz Stangl, the kommandant of Treblinka and various people who knew him, including one Jewish man who survived the death camp. Before the Anschluss Stangl was a policeman in Austria. When the Germans arrived he was on a Perhaps the definition of a worthy book about the Holocaust is that it leaves you asking more questions than it answers. That, ultimately, it is unsatisfactory. Satisfaction, after all, allows one to move on.

The author of Into the Darkness conducts a series of interviews with Franz Stangl, the kommandant of Treblinka and various people who knew him, including one Jewish man who survived the death camp. Before the Anschluss Stangl was a policeman in Austria. When the Germans arrived he was on a Gestapo hitlist for his part in the arrest of an influential Austrian Nazi. Unlike a couple of his fellow policemen on the list who were murdered he escaped by dubiously being backdated as a Nazi member. His wife, when she found out he had joined the Nazi party, didn't talk to him for weeks. Hardly the most suitable CV for a death camp commandant. It remains a mystery why he was chosen for the post. How he managed to escape trial until 1967 Is another mystery. He was living in Brazil, registered under his real name with the Austrian embassy and the Brazilian authorities. Anyone could have found him in twenty four hours. From 1945 to 1961 he enjoyed what his wife called the best years of his life.

As the book progressed I found I was becoming much more interested in what Stangl's wife was saying than Stangl himself who on the whole was resorting to the usual smokescreening tactics of a guilty conscience under attack. She, though patently an ambitious woman, was less of a Nazi than most of her neighbours and her sister married a Jew after the war. She was also more honest in her answers to the author's questions than her husband. There's an especially moving moment when the author asks her if she believes her husband would have quit his job had she had made a moral stand.

Both husband and wife attributed the establishment of the state of Israel to the Holocaust. Of course, there's some truth in this notion, the most tragically extreme exoneration of the old adage that every cloud has a silver lining, but it was perhaps the voicing of this idea as a kind of fabric softener which brought home how easily both husband and wife were able to take shelter in insensitivity. You could imagine the husband coming up with similar outrageously callow justifications as he watched the trains arrive at Treblinka.

The book also studies the role the Vatican played in helping former Nazis to escape. Mostly German priests. This is how Stangl escaped.

By all accounts (few survive) including his own, Stangl never once physically harmed a Jew; he doesn't appear to even have abused or raised his voice. It's as if he was at Treblinka to provide an aesthetic, like the painted clock on the film set station. His conscience thus had two get out clauses - that he never physically harmed anyone (perhaps true) and that there was nothing he could do to escape his fate without putting at risk the lives of his family (probably untrue: there's no evidence Nazis were ever killed for requesting a transfer).

What's riveting about this book is that Stangl is an everyman. He hasn't been brainwashed by Nazi bile, he's irritable rather than evil; he's essentially a man of modest ambition who respects (or is cowed by) authority. Perhaps the most horrifying conclusion one draws from reading this is that, yes, the Holocaust could happen again because fundamentally decent people in normal times can be persuaded to do unthinkably grotesque things in times of madness. I've just watched a documentary about Assad and his wife which contains further evidence of this disturbing phenomenon. A mild mannered eye surgeon and his sophisticated British wife with Princess Diana aspirations become under stress a mass murderer and his supportive female consort. ...more

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Mar 22, 2019 Beverly rated it it was amazing

I didn't realize there were 4 "extermination" camps set up solely for murder, Chelmno, Belsec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. All of them in Poland and all of which lasted for under 2 years and then were shut down when their work was complete. Only 87 people survived the four, no children. The killing process also included torture before their speedy deaths, I had heard or seen in movies or videos all of the indignities they were subjected to, but I hadn't known of the internal searches for hidden valu I didn't realize there were 4 "extermination" camps set up solely for murder, Chelmno, Belsec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. All of them in Poland and all of which lasted for under 2 years and then were shut down when their work was complete. Only 87 people survived the four, no children. The killing process also included torture before their speedy deaths, I had heard or seen in movies or videos all of the indignities they were subjected to, but I hadn't known of the internal searches for hidden valuables.

I also hadn't realized that there was a revolt and escape from Treblinka, just as from Sobibor. Treblinka's revolt happened in August of 1943; Sobibor's was in October of the same year. As the Nazis were done with their killing and were closing Sobibor, about 500 people, men and women escaped, but only 32 survived.

Sereny also brings out information about how all the major countries knew about the murder camps, but chose to do nothing. The allies focused on ending the war as soon as possible, but at the same time cutting back on letting Jews and other displaced persons enter the country.

Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka and Sobibor and also Police Superintendent of the Euthanasia Institute, Scloss Hartheim, is the focus of Sereny's study. He agreed to be interviewed by her while awaiting the result of an appeal against a life sentence. In the 70 hours of interviews, he revealed how his earlier euthanasia killings of the insane, handicapped and physically sick Germans (including children, but not where Stangl was) at Schloss Hartheim, made him a top pick for the head job at Sobibor and Treblinka, as he was already used to murdering the innocent. He doesn't admit this, but the author places the facts before us, many of the same men in charge at Hartheim, ended up at Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl says it was all happenstance.

Sereny also interviews Frau Stangl in Brazil where they ran to and stayed after the war, with a short stay in Syria. Frau Stangl's pride in her husband's swift ascent is still in her voice when she recalls how fast he moved up. Ambition is not seen, even in the 1970s when the Stangls were interviewed, as a failing in 1930s Berlin.

The most nauseating stories that Franz Stangl and his wife tell is how "they" suffered after the war when they were on the run and he was imprisoned. He describes how he didn't have a bunk or a blanket and wasn't allowed packages. Oh that poor man, my heart bleeds for him. She too suffered with her children; they were hungry and had little money. The nerve of these people astounds me. They had their lives. He gave no thought to those who were cold, starved, tortured and murdered under his watch.

The final sickening part that I want to mention here is that Sereny discusses the failure of Pope Plus XII speaking out against the destruction of the Jews. She believes that his failure to do this conditioned Catholics like the Stangls to accept what was happening to an easier degree than they already did. As Sereny so aptly states, "The very first failure to say 'No" was fatal, each succeeding step merely confirming the original and basic moral flaw. " ...more

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Feb 21, 2018 Dimitri rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: holocaust

How do you examine the conscience of an ordinary man who doesn't really want to be examined? For beneath the Austrian courtesies Franz Stangl suffers from a wir haben's nicht gewusst type of selective amnesia, until he dies of heart failure a few days after Sereny makes her farewell. You cast the net wider, over his wife in Brazil and smaller fish such as former camp guards, either pensioned off into respectable anonymity or presently incarcerated.

Together with a handful of former inmates this How do you examine the conscience of an ordinary man who doesn't really want to be examined? For beneath the Austrian courtesies Franz Stangl suffers from a wir haben's nicht gewusst type of selective amnesia, until he dies of heart failure a few days after Sereny makes her farewell. You cast the net wider, over his wife in Brazil and smaller fish such as former camp guards, either pensioned off into respectable anonymity or presently incarcerated.

Together with a handful of former inmates this book offers a reconstruction of life and death in the Treblinka camp, which in four phases becomes 'more manageable' as some SS saw the tide turn in the East and realized the possible post-war dividends of small leniency. It sits uncomfortably with the total eradication of the camp's physical remains after the uprising, complete with a Ukrainian farmer housed in the Gas chambers ("I've lived in this brick farm for many years ! Look at all the adult trees planted around it !").

Sereny does not stop there. Extermination camp, uprising. Inevitably she adds interviews with survivors of Sobibor. Add to that the fact that Stangl worked for the T4 program and that he made it to Brazil thanks to some help of a certain Roman cardinal and the whole book evolves into a razor-sharp mythbuster of the entire Holocaust and the adjunct "Odessa" escape network. Spoiler alert: you had to make your own Odessa, mostly. And apparently you can be recruited into T4 without the slightest inkling of what it entails.

Plus, pride comes before the fall (p. 30) :
"This is something, you know, the world has never understood. How perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans' war requirements that prevented them from dealing with vaster numbers than they did. Treblinka alone could've dealt with the 6.000.000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could've killed all the Poles, Russians and other East Europeans the Nazis eventually planned to kill. ...more

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Oct 07, 2013 Mara rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, 2013-reads, criminal-minds, wwii, psychology, history

This is one of the most incredible Holocaust books I have come across to date. It is about so much more than author Gitta Sereny's conversations with Franz Stangl ( Commandant of Treblinka ). These conversations (conducted while Stangl was in Düsseldorf prison) give us a narrative around which Sereny integrates her exceptional research, outside interviews and experiences. Sereny manages to be both our guide and an appropriately impartial observer of the events described (and is open in describing what could and cou( ...more

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Feb 23, 2012 Richard Burger rated it really liked it

Gitta Sereny is perhaps the most thorough, meticulous interviewer I've ever read. As if she's unpeeling an onion layer by layer, she leads us into the life and mind of her subject, the former Kommandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, and makes us feel, whether we want to or not, as if we know him and understand him. And that is a huge accomplishment, because it isn't easy to understand what motivated a man like Stangl, what kept him loyal to and even proud of his "work," and how he (and his family) Gitta Sereny is perhaps the most thorough, meticulous interviewer I've ever read. As if she's unpeeling an onion layer by layer, she leads us into the life and mind of her subject, the former Kommandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, and makes us feel, whether we want to or not, as if we know him and understand him. And that is a huge accomplishment, because it isn't easy to understand what motivated a man like Stangl, what kept him loyal to and even proud of his "work," and how he (and his family) lived with the knowledge of what he was part of.

With infinite patience, Sereny investigates everything he says, cross-checking each assertion with other witnesses and/or family members, determined to arrive at the truth. And by telling Stangl's story, she sheds new light on what the Holocaust was and how it was carried out by "ordinary men." It is to her credit that after countless hours of interviewing she finally got Stangl, at the very end, to acknowledge his guilt. It is no surprise that 19 hours after his admission to Sereny, Stangl feel dead of heart failure.

In what readers will probably find the most controversial aspect of the book Sereny makes quite clear that she believes Pope Pius XXII knew about what was going on in Poland and did next to nothing to help. The Vatican is part of the story, as it was the Vatican that helped Stangl (and many other Nazis) to flee Germany and settle in Brazil. While the section on the Vatican is long, it's also intriguing. I'll leave it to others to decide what the Pope could or should have done. It's clear, however, that Sereny believes he failed humanity.

My only issue with the book is that Sereny tries a bit too hard to footnote and (over)explain every detail that arises. Some of her sentences are so thick with parenthetical phrases they're hard to read, and she sometimes dwells on small things. But that is a tiny criticism. This is absolutely required reading for anyone interested in the Holocaust in general and Treblinka in particular. Her profiles of the death camp's survivors such as Richard Glazar are especially vivid and unforgettable. A superb, important book. ...more

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Mar 30, 2019 Mikey B. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: germany, holocaust, journalism, world-war-ii, biography

These interviews by Gitta Sereny with Franz Stangl took place in April and June of 1971. She spoke with him for some 70 hours. Franz Stangl was the commandant of two Nazi death camps – Sobibor, and then Treblinka. To be explicit in these camps thousands of mostly Jewish people (man, women and their children) would arrive by train from across Europe, ordered to undress, herded into a gas chamber, and then their bodies burnt in a pit.

The purpose of Gitta Sereny was to investigate, to p ...more

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Aug 19, 2009 Maureen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: holocaust, history, psychology, nazism

When confronted with the idea of the Holocaust, I find the scope of the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals,and others whom the Reich considered as "undesirables" is inconceivable. At Treblinka, where Fritz Stangl was Kommandant, one million and two hundred thousand people were put to death. Once the trains reached the pretty little fake railway station, with its flower-filled window boxes and faux clock tower, the passengers in the cattle cars had approximately one hour to When confronted with the idea of the Holocaust, I find the scope of the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals,and others whom the Reich considered as "undesirables" is inconceivable. At Treblinka, where Fritz Stangl was Kommandant, one million and two hundred thousand people were put to death. Once the trains reached the pretty little fake railway station, with its flower-filled window boxes and faux clock tower, the passengers in the cattle cars had approximately one hour to live. The trains arrived in the morning, and the killing was finished by noon. The rest of the day was spent disposing of the bodies - first in lime pits, then in great metal racks called "the roasts" where the bodies were burned.

Sixty five Jews survived Treblinka. Some because they had skills that were useful to the Nazis; a very few others escaped in the revolt of August 1943 when the camp was set on fire. Transports to Treblinka were beginning to wind down by that time anyway, because the Nazis were running out of people to kill.
The final tally of one million two hundred thousand deaths comes from the stationmaster, Franciszek Zabecki, who was also a member of the Resistance. He kept a tally of every train and the number of people in every boxcar from the day of the arrival of the first Jews until August 18, 1943, when the final transports pulled into the station.

Fritz Stangl presided over this whole operation from the construction of the camp buildings and charnel houses to the final dismantling the gas chambers and dispersal of the troops to other sites. Stangl started out his career as an Austrian police officer who loved his wife and family. He was also ambitious. His first step down the slippery slope was transferring to the political division of the CID in Wels, which was a hotbed of of illegal political activities by Communists, Socialists, and Nazis in 1935. During this period, Stangl may have become an "llegal" Nazi, as did many others in his unit.

After the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938), Stangl eventually became an SS man in December of 1942. He was handpicked to work in the Tiergartenstrasse 4 division. T4 was in charge of the Euthanasia Programme and the extermination camps. Through a combination of intimidation, opportunity for advancement and assurances that his only job was to keep law and order, Stangl agreed to go to Schloss Hartheim, one of the Euthanasia Institutes, where people with mental and physical infirmities were put to death. From the outside, it looked like a hospital. On the inside, the "patients" were being either gassed or dying by lethal injection. The bodies were cremated, and the ashes given to their relations.

Many of the people who went on to work in the death camps got their start in the euthanasia program. Psychologically, they were inured to the idea of murdering innocent people as being their job. Pressure was exerted from above to keep officers and guards in their places. Stangl was moved from Hartheim to Sobibor, where he made the leap from running a euthanasia clinic to a death camp. One of the most fascinating aspects to me was that there were certain moments when Stangl could have refused to cooperate without sacrificing himself or his family. He chose not to do that, but rather to go along with the program.

In over seventy hours of interviews with Stangl, as well as in interviews with death camp survivors, guards, officers, priests, and with Stangl's family, Gitta Sereny manages to hang on to her objectivity. Until her very last interview with Stangl, he admitted to his guilt on only one occasion. The last day, he finally broke down for a few seconds and allowed himself, as Sereny put it, "to become the man he could have been."

This is a book of psychology - not Holocaust vignettes. Still, with only a few graphic examples, images are seared into my brain that I will never forget. Stangl considered the people he was killing to be "cargo" - so much baggage to be processed through the system. In his evasion of responsibility and unwillingness to stand up and be counted, he has unwittingly given the rest of us a paradigm of how NOT to act, and underlined the critical role we all play in the lives of others. We are responsible for the welfare of our fellow human beings. Each and every one of us. Every One. ...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Linda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, favorites, non-fiction, true-crime, journalism, world-war-2

For a swedish review, look further down!

This is about a man who became a monster. A wife that refused to acknowledge the truth. About certain people that became victims. Others who lost their loved ones. And those who became determined to escape and to spread the truth. This story is terrible as well as incredibly fascinating. Gitta Sereny was a truly magnificent author that revealed man's inner core. The soul.

I felt so sick when reading this book that I sometimes had to For a swedish review, look further down!

This is about a man who became a monster. A wife that refused to acknowledge the truth. About certain people that became victims. Others who lost their loved ones. And those who became determined to escape and to spread the truth. This story is terrible as well as incredibly fascinating. Gitta Sereny was a truly magnificent author that revealed man's inner core. The soul.

I felt so sick when reading this book that I sometimes had to put it away for a while. The fact that people treated other people this way is difficult to understand. It is interesting that Stangl was a respectable, polite, good husband and father, and at the same time the commendant of Treblinka. His moral was slowly dissolving and neglect and indifference took its place, and grew inside him from his work in the T4 program in Hartheim, followed by Sobibor, and continued to form the monster within him when he was transferred to Treblinka.

Another theme throughout the book is the Vatican's part in the holocaust. If it weren't for the church's cold-hearted passivity, perhaps Hitler would have ended the concentration-camps. It is a small possibility, but one never-the-less. I understand that the church was afraid to lose power and perhaps be doomed as well, but it comes down to a matter of faith, something the church is very good at practicing otherwise.

This book is an invaluable source of information. Witnesses tell a horrible story of human nature and what can happen if we forget who we are and what we are capable of. We had better read stories like this one, to be reminded of what might happen if we're not very critical, well-read and insightful.

Recension

Bland flyktingarna i den mörkaste av världar fanns en ung Gitta Sereny. På grund av sina kontakter med den franska motståndsrörelsen lämnade hon det ockuperade Frankrike och har ägnat en stor del av sitt liv åt att söka ondskans kärna. Sereny avled sommaren 2012 och lämnar i "Vid avgrunden" efter sig ett omfattande grävande efter orsaksmekanismer som föder ett monster.

En kärleksfull småbarnspappa lämnade hemmet för att bakom "den slutgiltiga lösningens" ridåer bli en hänsynslös kommendant. Förintelsens maskineri drevs av mänskliga kuggar. Franz Stangl var en dem. Samtidigt som 900 000 människors liv släcktes iklädde han sig emellanåt rollen som god make och familjefar.

Sereny inleder elegant med att beskriva första samtalet med den livstidsdömde Stangl, hans bakgrund och klättrande yrkeskarriär. Läsaren förflyttas bakåt i tiden och anländer till Treblinka tillsammans med den rekryterade kommendanten. När tågen rullade in mottogs de av en idylliskt grönskande miljö, en tågstation med stor klocka och tidtabeller. Ingen tittade lite extra och lade märke att visarna inte rörde sig. I Treblinka stannade tiden för alltid. När maskineriet fungerade optimalt slukade lägret 20 000 människor varje dag. Från sin plats på en höjd såg en propert klädd Stangl hur människorna reducerades till ”en naken massa av kött” - vid det stadiet var familjefadern som bortblåst och kommendanten stod rak i ryggen på dagen och dövade den moraliska kollapsen på natten. Likgiltigt iakttog han den långsamma kön till gaskammaren. Under vintern fick mödrar slita loss sina fastfrusna barn från marken. En liten stund senare spreds de med vinden i form av svarta snöflingor som färgade världen. Himmelsfärdsvägen är fortfarande smärtsamt svart av minnen, trettio år senare, när Gitta Sereny vandrar längs den.

Sereny fördjupar sig i Stangls snedvridna verklighetsuppfattning, förnekande attityd och uppbyggda fasad och skalar av lager efter lager för att slutligen avslöja den innersta kärnan. Var i processen han slutligen tappade fotfästet om verkligheten och sin egen moral. Var i processen han upphörde att vara människa. Hon kartlägger och ställer olika vittnesskildringar mot varandra. Likt ett fotografi i mörkrummet framträder de skuggor av minnen som utgör en bild av vad som en gång var. Små småningom blir skuggorna allt djupare, konturerna allt tydligare, kontrasterna allt skarpare och den gåtfulla mannen i centrum allt mer levande. Gestalten formas snart till en mänsklig varelse. Eller till ett monster. Stangl jämför Treblinka med Dantes inferno, som ”att stiga ner i en avgrund där orden förlorar sin mening”. Inte förrän det sista samtalet bryter sanningen igenom den före detta kommendantens illusion och han inser vem han var i helvetets avgrund. Sereny fångar bilden och med den fångar hon läsaren.

Språket är rått och naket och når ända fram, likgiltigt inför det känslosvall som sköljer över läsaren, som droppar på blad efter blad. Den frustration och förtvivlan som fräter som saltsyra i magen komprimeras gradvis till en hårdnande, molande metallklump som lämnar ett ärr. Ett ärr som värker när Stangl, i kapitlet som rörde tiden efter kriget, helt enkelt promenerade ut från fängelset i Linz. Den hjälpande hand som räcktes ut tillhörde Vatikanen. Sereny försöker förhålla sig objektiv när hon beskriver Vatikanstatens utdelning av Röda korset-pass till förklädda nazister.

Vid avgrunden är en ovärderlig källa av sammanvävda minnen som snart saknar vittnen.
Många år av research lägger en stabil grund till reportaget och Gitta bygger mästerligt upp levande scener. Man förskräcks och förfäras samtidigt som man fascineras och förundras. När läsaren sluter sina ögon har bilder etsat sig fast. Bilden av den fläckfritt vitklädda gestalten som överblickade Treblinkas övre läger. De dödsdömda själarna som vandrade mot den tysta evigheten. Den lilla judiska pojken som tack vare sitt medtagna dragspel drog vinsten i livslotteriet. Pappan som upprepade gånger försökte rädda sina döttrar, men misslyckades. Och till sist, den svarta vägen av aska som Sereny själv beträder, och som än idag vittnar om att mardrömmen, hur ofattbar den än förefaller, en gång var verklig. ...more

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Nov 29, 2013 Ruby Tuesday rated it it was amazing

Shelves: holocaust-wwii

I've read countless books about the Holocaust and recently I started to question what my fascination is with the subject. I came to the conclusion that it's the psychology of what leads a country towards genocide and the mentality that enables individuals to carry out such terrible crimes against humanity. Whilst undoubtedly some individuals were sadistic what is apparent in so many books that I've read is how un extraordinary most of the perpetrators were, it's this aspect that I find the most I've read countless books about the Holocaust and recently I started to question what my fascination is with the subject. I came to the conclusion that it's the psychology of what leads a country towards genocide and the mentality that enables individuals to carry out such terrible crimes against humanity. Whilst undoubtedly some individuals were sadistic what is apparent in so many books that I've read is how un extraordinary most of the perpetrators were, it's this aspect that I find the most disturbing.

This book is based on a series of interviews carried out by Gitta Sereny with Franz Stangl who was the Kommandant of Treblinka one of the most notorious death camps of which there were only a handful of survivors. I found it chilling when he described his normal working day at Treblinka, the paperwork that he completed in his office while a few metres away Men, women and children from all over Europe were being gassed in the gas chambers. The author also interviewed his wife and what was apparent is how both she and her husband mentally glossed over his work .The author asked him how he felt when he saw for example a beautiful child being sent to the gas chambers to which he responded that he never thought about it. This total lack of empathy and lack of thinking really conveys the "banality of evil". How could he not have thought about it? When I read any books on this subject I am always thinking, what would I have done if I was one of those mothers being led to the gas chambers with my children? What would I have done if I was put in a position where I was playing a part in the mass murder of millions? It's chilling to think that this never crossed his mind. Or probably it did, but the reality of his guilt was too horrible to bare.

In any other period in time ,it's clear to me that Franz Stangl would have been a very average individual and quite unremarkable. That is the most frightening thing of all. When bigotry and scapegoating take hold and the moral veneer of society is chipped away evil takes over. ...more

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Jul 12, 2012 John Woltjer rated it really liked it

This book reminded me of Hannah Ahrendt's phrase about "the banality of evil." it is chilling to read the story of a man, in normal times just like any other average man, whose life leads him inexorably and incrementally into a situation in service of pure evil. it is also an example of how individuals can train their vision to ignore horrific events at their doorstep while practicing the little niceties and carrying out the routine tasks of a normal day. It is not hard to understand how this ca ...more

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Mar 30, 2012 Jennifer Mencarini rated it it was amazing

It is really difficult to give this book five stars because its content is so repugnant and disturbing. A quote from a review by Elie Wiesel on the rear cover perfectly sums it up - "Most often one is sick to one's soul. Yes, that is the word that is needed ... one is gripped by a profound existential nausea." And I did feel sick to my stomach while reading much of this book - but it is important precisely because it serves as a most necessary reminder that each and every one of us is capable of ...more

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Jun 03, 2011 Steven Waters rated it really liked it

After reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, I got into a bit of a WWII reading binge. First I read, Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas and then I launched into The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. I read Into That Darkness contemporaneously with Shirer's book. I don't doubt that my reading of this book was colored by these other Summer readings.

Into That Darkness is written by Gitta Sereny who interviewed Franz Stangl (the commandant of Treblinka) while he was in prison. Stangl had escaped Germany at the end of WWI ...more

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May 22, 2012 Gail rated it it was amazing

In interviewing Franz Stangl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 people while Kommandent of the Treblinka death camp, Gitta Sereny asked him about his signing a paper certifying that he was prepared to give up his religion. The paper signified that he was a believer in God but agreed to break his affiliation tho the (Catholic) Church. Stangl acknowledged that he was not a 'regular' church goer but always went on Easter and Christmas. He said ...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Elliot Ratzman rated it really liked it

Gitta Sereny, who recently died, was a writer who did extensive interviews with former Nazi officials. This is her classic account of the Commandant of the death camp Treblinka, Franz Stangl, who oversaw nearly a million deaths. Sereny wins his trust, and the portrait is fascinating. Not particularly anti-Semitic, not the cruelest SS officer around, the Austrian Stangl finds himself through sheer ambition and cowardice rising through the ranks, first in the Euthanasia program “T4”, then coordina ...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Izzy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

If you have ever asked yourself "How did the people of Germany allow the holocaust to happen," this book explains a lot. I learned that many of the perpetrators like Stengl, the subject of this book, were average citizens who did not appear to be born with "devil horns." But the most enlightening lesson I gained from reading this is that anyone could find themselves in these circumstances and we will never know how we would react until we do find ourselves in such circumstances. And that violenc ...more

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Mar 01, 2018 M.J. Johnson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The facts about what the Nazis did, all of which can be obtained elsewhere, are not what makes reading this book so essential, nor is it some kind of horrific fascination in learning of the psychological profile of a man who oversaw the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,200,000 almost exclusively Jewish people (chilling when you think the estimated death toll - horrific whichever number is correct - might be out by nearly half a million!). Sereny doesn’t seem to be solely interested in S The facts about what the Nazis did, all of which can be obtained elsewhere, are not what makes reading this book so essential, nor is it some kind of horrific fascination in learning of the psychological profile of a man who oversaw the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,200,000 almost exclusively Jewish people (chilling when you think the estimated death toll - horrific whichever number is correct - might be out by nearly half a million!). Sereny doesn’t seem to be solely interested in Stangl’s psychology; I believe she was actually attempting to give us a glimpse, some insight, into the man’s soul. He initially trained as a weaver before joining the police force in his native Austria. There is some argument about whether as a policeman, Stangl was an ‘illegal Nazi’ - he himself always denied it, but his wife and colleagues seem to believe he was very likely a Nazi member before the Anschluss. There seems to have existed a powerful drive in Stangl, not only to be good and efficient at his job, but also to ‘be someone’. Were these the character traits the Nazis looked for when they sought to enlist the ‘right’ man, at first to be an administrator at Hartheim where the Nazis began killing those who were physically and mentally impaired, then Sobibor extermination camp, and finally to run what was essentially a human abbatoir at Treblinka? There is nothing to suggest that Stangl was a sadistic monster; there were a number of such types at Treblinka, as testified to by the very few slave prisoners who survived the camp, but there is no evidence to implicate Stangl in personal acts of cruelty; he was it seems a loyal husband and loving father. Yet, he was also the man in charge of this highly-efficient conveyor-belt that delivered death on a previously unprecedented scale.

It is hard to imagine the efficiency of the extermination programme. Every morning trains would roll into Treblinka station, which had been mocked-up to look like a real train station with flower boxes and a fake painted station clock with hands that never moved (Stangl’s idea) to lull the new arrivals into a sense of calm - they probably imagined upon seeing it, that nothing bad was going to happen to them, that they were simply going to be processed and then assigned some work. They were divided according to gender, asked to strip naked but told to keep their valuables and papers with them (again creating a false sense of security), they were then led into the ‘shower block’, where they were subsequently gassed with monoxide provided by diesel engines. The elderly and infirm were taken to the hospital - an entirely fake building complete with a red cross. Here they were ordered to strip, told to sit on a wall above a constantly burning pit, and shot. Two hours, and every single human being who had arrived on the morning transports was dead. Generally, by midday, all the killing was done, the remainder of the day was then dedicated to the disposal of corpses in open-air crematoria known as ‘roasts’. At least, this was the scenario for days delivering only western Jews to Treblinka; those arriving from the east in cattle trucks were herded viciously by sadistic guards who beat and whipped them into hysteria and ferociously drove them like animals through their final terror-stricken hours. One can only assume this difference in treatment was part of some sick Nazi ideology, whereby German Jews had, at the very least, been subjected to the improving influence of western civilisation, and were therefore far superior to those from the uncivilised east.

Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka, was, I believe, the only Nazi in charge of such an institution to be interviewed in this way. It therefore stands as a unique record. Sereny interviewed him for a total of seventy hours between April 2 and June 27, 1971, in Dusseldorf prison. He died only nineteen hours after her final interview. To the very last Stangl maintained, “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself ... I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself.”

Sereny however, who was, after all, there in the room with Stangl, suggests that something had fundamentally changed in him during the course of the interviews:

For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “In reality I share the guilt ... my guilt ... only now in these talks ... now that I have talked about it all for the first time ...” he stopped.

He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.

After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”
...more

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Jan 23, 2015 Joe rated it it was amazing

Franz Stangl was commandant at the Treblinka extermination camp during world war 2 and during his tenure he oversaw the murder of over 700,000 people. After the war, Stangl escaped justice for over a decade, though he made little effort to hide himself; he settled in Brazil with his family and never took an assumed name.

When Stangl was finally caught and brought to trial, he accepted no guilt, stubbornly insisting that he was just a man who had done his duty. The court convicted Stan Franz Stangl was commandant at the Treblinka extermination camp during world war 2 and during his tenure he oversaw the murder of over 700,000 people. After the war, Stangl escaped justice for over a decade, though he made little effort to hide himself; he settled in Brazil with his family and never took an assumed name.

When Stangl was finally caught and brought to trial, he accepted no guilt, stubbornly insisting that he was just a man who had done his duty. The court convicted Stangl of war crimes and sentenced him to life in prison.

While incarcerated, Stangl was interviewed by noted biographer Gitta Sereny. Over the course of 60 hours spanning several sessions, the previously resolute Stangl finally broke down. The strain of describing the horrors he contributed to proved too much for him. 'In reality I share the guilt' he finally admitted. 'Because my guilt... my guilt... only now in these talks... now that I have talked about it all for the first time.' He even went so far as to say 'I should have died, that was my guilt.'

Within hours of this last interview, Stangl was dead. Suicide was initially suspected, but there was no evidence to support this and the postmortem pointed to heart-failure. The implication was clear; Stangl had been crushed by the culpability he denied for so many years.

But what is so scary about Stangl's story is that he was clearly no monster. In the interviews, Stangl comes across as polite, sensitive and intelligent. He never indicates hatred or antisemitism and appears sincere in his affection for the camp victims he remembers. The guards at his prison describe Stangl as 'one of the good ones' and even camp survivors (few as they are) claim Stangl never showed a cruel side and was 'no sadist, unlike some of the others.' Stangl's defense that he performed his assigned duties out of fear for himself and his family is eminently plausible.

Stangl's ability to contribute to such mass-inhumanity was fueled not by sadism but by self-deception. Stangl never attended the murders and never even visited the gas-chambers even as he oversaw the construction and day-to-day running of the camp. He showed small kindnesses to many prisoners even as he knew the machine he ran doomed them all.

And this need to distance himself from the horror showed during the interviews. Stangl would slip into 'the popular vernacular of his childhood whenever he had to deal with questions he found difficult to answer' a habit Sereny attributes to Stangl subconsciously seeking refuge in more comfortable language. When asked about the ultimate fate of prisoners whom he's spoken about with affection, Stangl's answer was always the same; 'I don't know,' though he surely could have guessed.

Stangl lived with what he'd done for decades. The walls he built within himself were strong enough to withstand years of facilitating mass-murder, decades of living free as a war-criminal, damning attacks from prosecutors during the trial and a guilty verdict imposed by a judge. What ultimately brought Stangl's psychological fortress down was simply being asked to tell his life story in his own words. ...more

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Jul 09, 2014 Bri rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nazi-trauma

I sat in the bathtub for a good twenty minutes after I finished this just thinking. It's limited in scope - conversations with Stangl, the Kommandant of Treblinka, after his capture and shortly before his death - but nevertheless manages to go wide as well as deep. This is both a wonderful and terrible mediation on humanity, the slippage that leads from normality to atrocity, the hard truths and willing self-delusions of those participants.

I read Goldensohn's Nuremberg interviews and I sat in the bathtub for a good twenty minutes after I finished this just thinking. It's limited in scope - conversations with Stangl, the Kommandant of Treblinka, after his capture and shortly before his death - but nevertheless manages to go wide as well as deep. This is both a wonderful and terrible mediation on humanity, the slippage that leads from normality to atrocity, the hard truths and willing self-delusions of those participants.

I read Goldensohn's Nuremberg interviews and felt sicker and sicker as they progressed. So many of his interviewees accepted no guilt at all, they denied and denied and clung to 'just following orders' and 'what could I have done?' It got monotonous, if never less than appalling - the 'banality of evil', q. Hannah Arendt. His method was to get them to talk, not to guide their conversation: he slipped a few times and called them on their bullshit, but largely just recorded it as it was.

Sereny does something very different. This is such a clear, thoughtful, balanced work. She has conversations with Stangl: he seems largely to be trying to be as honest as he can be, and she manages to find a human empathy and connection with him, but pushes hard: she asks the tough questions, the real questions, and by and large he tries to answer. She goes further: what he says is cross-checked against the historical record, eyewitness accounts from survivors, and fellow SS, and she makes careful textual note of every inaccuracy or falsehood. Large potions of the text belong to the survivors of Treblinka, and this is a counterbalance to Stangl; the horror of life there is thoroughly represented, but how he lied to himself and managed to function as Kommandant is clear too; then a third weight - historical record - is set against them both. This could have swayed too far in favour of its subject, or read as an excoriation of him from a pulpit, but what Sereny manages is much finer and more difficult and exquisitely balanced.

I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. ...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Patrick Belair rated it really liked it

Shelves: european-history, religon, autobiography, holocaust, ww2, military-history, political

This was a very interesting look at Franz Stangl,Interviewed when serving life sentence for war crimes.Many think that 800.000 thousand to 1.2 million dead should have been death for him self ( I do not believe that Germany has the death sentence)Moving along it was interesting to read interviews with him and also Frau Stangl,about this time,Including Vatican involvement, and the fact that he never was hiding always in open .for all to see and find.A very complex man and very good book,consideri ...more

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Nov 27, 2016 Linda rated it really liked it

It seems like everytime you turn around there is another book out about the Holocaust. Not that this is necessarily bad, but after a while you run into the fatigue syndrome. So I try to cull the number of books that I read on the subject.

This one I could not turn away. It's not "the banality of evil," it's not "evil incarnate," it's the life of a man who knew he was guilty but managed to persuade himself he was not.

Franz Stangl was the commandant of Treblinka, one of the ...more

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Apr 15, 2014 John Kammeyer-mueller rated it it was amazing

The most fascinating account of a twisted conscience I've ever read. Gitta Sereny is an excellent interviewer, and her probing of the mental state of Sobibor and Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl is thorough and unflinching. If the book were simply a review of rationalizations for past horrific actions, it would be part of a story that's often been told. However, here we read commentary from direct conversation with Stangl, his very devoted wife, and several survivors that is unique. The extreme The most fascinating account of a twisted conscience I've ever read. Gitta Sereny is an excellent interviewer, and her probing of the mental state of Sobibor and Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl is thorough and unflinching. If the book were simply a review of rationalizations for past horrific actions, it would be part of a story that's often been told. However, here we read commentary from direct conversation with Stangl, his very devoted wife, and several survivors that is unique. The extreme care with which Stangl conducted his life, setting himself apart from what he saw as the crude behavior of other Nazis, while participating in running two of the most heinous extermination camps makes the mind reel. The bottom line in everything he did seems to have been respectability and interpersonal acceptance from others. He goes to great lengths to indicate that he personally had no animus towards Jews or any other victims of his camps, and this seems borne out in statements from others who observed him.

Even more amazing, to me, was the testimony of some camp survivors who condemned Stangl as horrible for his role as commandant over the camps, but as an interpersonally polite person, being nowhere near as vile in his conduct as Christian Wirth or Odilo Globocnik. Comparatively, people like Wirth, Globocnik, or Mengele are straightforward cases of sadism and viciousness, completely unrelateable at any level. Stangl, on the other hand, seems like a much more broken psyche perpetually at war with what he did; this makes him all the more frightening, because he's far closer in mentality to people who were "just carrying out orders." It's hard to even fathom the degree of inconsistency in Stangl's person, and how his own resolution of his atrocities next to his sense of propriety functioned.

To compare to a related work, it's hard not to see some of "Eichmann in Jerusalem" in this book, but there are differences. First, this is a personal account, so the depth of emotion from all participants is much more palpable. Second, it rings somewhat truer because of these details. Arendt portrayed Eichmann as something of a pure "desk murderer" based on his testimony, who was able to facilitate actions he probably couldn't have carried out on his own volition. Other accounts of Eichmann don't bear this character portrait as accurate. He was indeed an amazingly cruel person, quite capable of acts of barbarism and driven by hate. Stangl does appear to be the truer embodiment of the Simon Wiesenthal observation that "one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty." ...more

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Jun 29, 2014 David Willem rated it it was amazing

This is one of the most significant books I have ever read. It is the biography of Franz Stangl, an intelligent family man and gifted administrator who became the Commandant of Treblinka. I don't think this is the right forum to talk about Treblinka, but the book is a superb example of journalism.

The first thing the author, Gitta Sereny, achieves is to gain Stangl's trust. (The book is based on seventy hours of interviews she did with him while he was in prison in Austria in 1971.) For me, jour This is one of the most significant books I have ever read. It is the biography of Franz Stangl, an intelligent family man and gifted administrator who became the Commandant of Treblinka. I don't think this is the right forum to talk about Treblinka, but the book is a superb example of journalism.

The first thing the author, Gitta Sereny, achieves is to gain Stangl's trust. (The book is based on seventy hours of interviews she did with him while he was in prison in Austria in 1971.) For me, journalism is all about the ability to gain an interviewee's trust while withholding one's own. It is always a difficult, asymmetrical relationship, particularly in this case, as Stangl's secrets are so morally and spiritually destructive of his sense of self.

The second great journalistic trait is the tenacity of her cross checking. She attempts to interview everyone who can corroborate what Stangl is telling her.

Thirdly, she amasses enough material and understanding of his story to be able to judge him. This may seem ridiculous given that she is considering the commandant of a death camp, but it was this aspect of the book (as separate to the subject of Treblinka) that I found most telling. She judges Stangl. Or, more correctly, she does not allow him to dissemble. She asks him constantly what he could have done and when to avoid taking on his managerial role in the industrialised murder of hundreds of thousands, until, finally, he reaches the point where he judges himself, and, instead of the formula he had worked out - “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself” - he gives a last, stuttering admission of guilt. He died the following day.

Sereny's intellectual and moral certainty is compelling and, for a modern reader, extraordinary. Today, our reaction to evil is either a synthetic tabloid fury or a post-modern discomfort with the idea of judgement itself. Like Louis Theroux or Jon Ronson, we can only approach evil as if it were a kind of intellectual comedy. This book has shown me something: it has made me see how, in the racism of its instigators and the culpability of everyone who allowed it to happen, the holocaust led to post-modernism in that we can no longer say what it is to be a good man.

...more

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Oct 25, 2013 Tejas Janet rated it really liked it

Gitta Sereny's book is a thoughtful, scrupulously researched look into the heart of darkness, providing a psychological portrait of Franz Stangl, a man responsible for managing the business of running various of Hitler's death "camps," as the Nazis perversely called their death factories, where the business of killing on a massive scale was carried out routinely with deliberate, carefully designed intent.

I struggled throughout with what time of day to read this material. Like better served over ...more

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Mar 04, 2017 Mark Lisac rated it it was amazing

An extraordinary and shattering book — a study of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Nazis' Treblinka death camp, and inevitably a storehouse of glimpses of life and death, and of shocking callousness and surprising bravery inside that camp.
Sereny took criticism in some early reviews for getting too close to some of her subjects. Perhaps or perhaps not. A more on-point observation is probably that she was prone to making psychological assessments that may have been accurate in some cases and An extraordinary and shattering book — a study of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Nazis' Treblinka death camp, and inevitably a storehouse of glimpses of life and death, and of shocking callousness and surprising bravery inside that camp.
Sereny took criticism in some early reviews for getting too close to some of her subjects. Perhaps or perhaps not. A more on-point observation is probably that she was prone to making psychological assessments that may have been accurate in some cases and inaccurate in others. The book also reaches a dramatically satisfying climax and real life is rarely so well constructed. Some critics thought Stangl gave her the admission she wanted in the end. However, in a conference to mark the 30th anniversary of the book's publication, she said her final interviews with him showed him trying to put responsibility for the million-plus deaths at Treblinka onto God; she saw that as a way of continuing to evade his own responsibility. (At the same conference she made a point of saying she never used the word "Holocaust" because it was the product of an American lobby group and one that subtly trivialized the Nazis' genocidal and political murders; I think that was well judged.)
Interestingly, Stangl himself apparently believed that the industrial-scale murders, including the more than one million he supervised, were not the result of madness or racial hatred. He said simply that the Nazis wanted the victims' money.
Balanced against any weaknesses of the book is the ample evidence that Sereny went to great efforts to verify things she was told by Stangl and by others. In some cases, what emerged was more accurate facts; in others, what emerged was the slipperiness of memory and examples of how things look different to different people viewing from different vantage points.
The main disappointment is the feeling that even this intensive examination has somehow not quite revealed what was in Stangl's heart and mind, although it must have got close. The case study thus may not fully reveal how the whole horrific cascade of events became possible. But surely the book constitutes yet more evidence that humans are not to be trusted with any more than the minimally necessary authority over other humans in any circumstances.
Other illumination may come from great fiction.
There is, of course, "Heart of Darkness." Conrad knew of mass murders already occurring in the world. And he had the imagination to realize how difficult it was to get to the bottom of why they happened. Toward the end of that book his narrator talks about "some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets." That seems to apply to Stangl, as well as probably to others such as the commandant of Auschwitz.
Then there is the antidote, found appropriately enough in a book about soldiers in the American army. In "From Here to Eternity," James Jones pictured a flawed organization that in occasionally featured the same brutal instincts as the ones allowed full play in Nazi Germany. He has senior officers with a sense of duty eventually getting them under control. And he has a character articulating what can stop the moral failures at their root. Robert E. Lee Prewitt: "If a man don't go his own way, he's nothing." That principle has its practical limits, too. And Prewitt ended up suffering the fate that Stangl deliberately sought to avoid. But Prewitt was the heroic character and real-life Stangl was not.
Oddly, both Stangl and his wife managed to build successful careers in Syria in the late 1940s and in Brazil in the late 1950s — and to raise children in a more or less normal family life. Yet their very talents and ambitions make his complicity in the war's horrors all the more inexplicable, just as their postwar attempts to rebuild their lives seem somewhat hollow. Then there is an odd fact that Stangl never wanted to explore, even in 70 hours of interviews with Sereny. He evinced all along an extreme discomfort with what he was doing. His claims that he wanted from the start to get out seem genuine. Yet during his time at Treblinka and after the war in Brazil, he maintained a friendship with a Gustav Wagner, one of the camp's officers who had a much worse reputation with the survivors. ...more

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Sep 21, 2018 Campbell rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, history, wwii

A remarkable and chilling deep dive into the life and relationships of a seemingly ordinary man who nevertheless lived a life both monstrous and banal. It explores the lies we tell others and more importantly the lies we tell ourselves.

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Feb 19, 2017 Blakely rated it it was amazing

Shelves: top-non-fiction

I have read a significant number of books on the Holocaust. This was the first book I have read that explored what those who actually ran the Concentration Camps themselves thought during World War II. Into That Darkness is based on over 70 hours of interviews between the author and Franz Stangl - Commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps that combined to kill over 1,000,000 people, primarily Jews from Poland and Eastern Europe.

I added this book to my to-read list about a year ago but delayed ...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Betty rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: revolutionary-reading, 2013, non-fiction, women-authors

The content is certainly compelling, but the structure of the book had me slogging through it at times. So much momentum is lost during her digressions on the role of the Catholic Church in helping SS war criminals escape to South America, that even though that is interesting and obviously important, I found myself itching to get back to Stangl's interviews. Maybe it should have been delineated more clearly? She kept things largely chronological, which was good, but the church stuff is so impers ...more

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Sep 06, 2007 Stacey PL rated it it was amazing

Shelves: readagain

this is NOT a light or quick read. but this is the true story of Franz Stangl - commandant of one of the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust. it is based on extensive interviews with Franz, his family, "coworkers", survivors and those who guarded him during his own time in prison.

this provides insight into how one man changed/evolved from a "normal" man to a man responsible for the mass murdering of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people. it is one man's descent down the slippery ...more

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Oct 22, 2014 Kelsang rated it it was amazing

A beautifully written and humane book, as much about Ms Sereny's reaction to meeting a man capable of such hideous crimes. It is a testement to Ms Sereny's humanity that she could meet a man (whose idea of humane treatment was to provide the women standing in line, going to their death with a single bcket to use when their terror overcame the control of their bowels) and still manage to find a human beneath this.

It is an utterly horrific book, but one which reminds us of how easily o ...more

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About Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny

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Gitta Sereny was an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. She passed away in England aged 91, following a long illness.

Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. Hers was not a happy childhood. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful Austrian actress, whom she later described as "wit Gitta Sereny was an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. She passed away in England aged 91, following a long illness.

Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. Hers was not a happy childhood. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful Austrian actress, whom she later described as "without moral opinions", and a wealthy Hungarian landowner. Her father, Gyula, died when she was a child; her elder brother left home at 18 and disappeared from her life; Gitta herself was sent to Stonar House boarding school in Sandwich, Kent, an experience she remembered with some affection.

In 1934, while changing trains in Nuremberg on a journey home from school, she witnessed the Nuremberg Rally and was profoundly moved by the beauty of the spectacle, joining in the crowd's ecstatic cheering. These favourable impressions of the Nazis survived both a reading of Mein Kampf and the 1938 Anschluss, when Hitler annexed a quiescent Austria. The grim realities of Nazism, however, soon began to affect her life in Vienna where she was, by then, a drama student.

She later described seeing a Jewish doctor she knew well being forced to clean pavements with a toothbrush; the terror became more personal after her mother, Margit, with whom Gitta had a poor relationship, became engaged to Ludwig von Mises, the Jewish economist. Von Mises had left Austria for Switzerland, but a German friend tipped Margit off that the authorities planned to arrest her to oblige him to return. Margit promptly fled to Switzerland with her daughter.

In Switzerland, Gitta was sent to a finishing school. Never accommodating to her mother's plans, she promptly absconded, first to London then to Paris. Margit and von Mises moved to the US. Gitta, eventually, was also obliged to flee, first across the Pyrenees to Spain, then to the US.

She returned to Paris four months after the war ended, to join the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working with orphans in a ravaged Europe. The framework of what was to be her life's work – the exploration of childhood trauma and the nature of evil – was in place. It was in postwar Paris, in 1948, that she met and married the photographer Don Honeyman, with whom she was to have a son and a daughter. Don, who died last year, was to prove a good humoured and profoundly supportive companion who accompanied Gitta through the long and painstaking research that became a hallmark of her work.

She also reported on the trials in Germany of Third Reich functionaries, including concentration camp staff, such as Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. . Her book on Stangl, Into That Darkness (1974), remains one of the best books on the Third Reich and established Gitta's reputation as an authority on the history of the period.

Furthermore, her book ‘Albert Speer, His Battle With Truth’ (1995), later dramatised by David Edgar at the National Theatre, repeatedly challenges Speer's contention that he too was ignorant of the fate of the Jews under the regime he had served so faithfully.

Gitta was frequently embattled, but rarely daunted. She fought a 20-year battle with the historian David Irving and was often targeted with fascist hate mail. Despite the grim nature of her subjects, Gitta was a warm and generous friend with a ready sense of humour, and she and Honeyman entertained frequently at their home in Chelsea, London. Despite her relentless psychological exploration of her subjects, she resisted all invitations to write her own autobiography, but in her late 70s she published a partial memoir in The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001 (2001). She was appointed honorary CBE in 2003, for services to journalism.
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Books by Gitta Sereny

Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell

The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered

The German Trauma: Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001

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“This may appear to be a marginal matter, but I believe it to be peculiarly significant in representing a profoundly mistaken emphasis accepted – perhaps of necessity – by the courts, and also by the public and by the individuals involved: a concept whereby responsibility has been limited to momentary and often isolated actions, and to a few individuals. It is, I think, because of this universal acceptance of a false concept of responsibility that Stangl himself (until just before he died), his family and – in a wider but equally, if not even more, important sense – countless other people in Germany and outside it, have felt for years that what is decisive in law, and therefore in the whole conduct of human affairs, is what a man does on isolated occasions rather than what he is.” — 4 likes

“But what is important is that it is hard to see in this instance what they have to gain by denying that they had been “schooled” for murder at the euthanasia institutes, if that in fact was what happened. They would surely appear in a slightly less terrible light if they could claim that they had been scientifically conditioned – brainwashed – to death-camp work, rather than assigned to it because their natures seemed particularly suited to such activity.” — 4 likes

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