In addition to Stangl, Sereny interviewed his wife, sister in law, two of his three children, former SS men who had worked with Stangl, five of the small handful of Jews who managed to escape and survive Treblinka. These were separated by several months when she interviewed a variety of people to check facts and to try to better understand Stangl and the extraordinary events he participated in - a process that continued for several months after her last interview with Stangl and his apparently natural death by heart attack a day later.
Sereny interviewed him when he was held in remand pending an appeal against this life sentence.Sereny's book is based on 70 hours of interviews with Stangl in two week-long periods. Encouraged by the Nazi hunter Simon Wisenthal he was arrested by Brazilian Federal place in 1967 and sentenced in Austria to life imprisonment. Following the War he escaped detention to Italy and then migrated to Syria and then Brazil (apparently with help of the Catholic Church) where he lived openly under his own name. (The death count is based on numbers meticulously copied from train manifests by a station master at the Treblinka junction interviewed by Sereny who recorded train movements for the Polish Resistance.) Stangl was an Austrian policeman who joined the Nazi party in 1931 was recruited into the SS in 1938 where he worked in the Nazi program to euthanize all the mentally ill and retarded people held in German asylums, until he was promoted to the Sobibór death camp, and then to finish the construction, day-to-day operation, decommissioning and the physical erasure of the fact that the camp had ever existed. The subject matter is a person-to person exploration of the life and conscience of Nazi SS police officer Franz Stangl who between between 23 July 1942 and 19 October 1943 managed the highly efficient industrial slaughter and incineraion of one million two hundred thousand children, women and men in the German death "camp" near the Polish town of Treblinka. The title is Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. I have just finished reading one of the most profound (and profoundly disturbing) books I have encountered in my 75 years of life - originally published in 1974 by the journalist Gitta Sereny (who passed away at 91 in June 2012).
I much prefer Longerich, but your mileage may vary. You can read Longerich's books and forget that he even exists, as the focus is entirely on the river of facts he's sending your way. The contrast in style between Sereny's books and Longerich's books on the Holocaust and on Himmler could hardly be stronger. Since I knew little detail about Treblinka before reading this book, Sereny certainly did teach me some history, but always there was Sereny herself in the foreground. The Epilogue is her personal Declaration of Faith about freedom, individuality, and society.All this may be quite appealing to many readers, but I personally was hoping for a little more history and a little less Oprah. We are taken along on a 50-page digression in which Sereny sets Stangl to the side and recounts her attempts to get the Vatican to come clean about its relations with Nazis and ex-Nazis. We are informed about Sereny's interpretation of the looks in her interviewees' eyes, the reddening of their faces, their slowness to respond to a question. We read about her many travels to interview various people, and how they hosted her. I prefer LongerichIn this book on Stangl, as in her book on Speer, Sereny is not just the author but a prominent character herself.
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