Into That Darkness - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder

Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was one of them. Gitta Sereny's investigation of this man's mind, and of the influences which shaped him, has become a classic. Stangl commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900,000 people. Sereny, afer weeks of talk with him and many months of further research, shows us the man as he saw himself, and as he was seen by many others, including his wife. To horrify is not Sereny's aim, although horror is inevitable. She is seeking an answer to the question which beggars reason: How were human beings turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil? Gitta Sereny is of Hungarian-Austrian extraction and is trilingual in English, French and German. During the Second World War she became a social worker, caring for war-damaged children in France. She gave hundreds of lectures in schools and colleges in America and, when the war ended, she worked as a Child Welfare Officer in UNRRA displaced persons' camps in Germany. In 1949 she married the American Vogue photographer Don Honeyman and settled in London, where they brought up a son and a daughter and where she began her career as a journalist...