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 deep good and profound evil. It is our work in this life to face up to this truth and do our best to work toward the former and away from the latter. This requires an understanding of how evil is allowed to persist. Gitta Sereny does a masterful job of cross-examining both her subject, Franz Stangl, and his friends and family members about their support for and participation in mass murder and torture, and the psychological mechanism of deep denial. For any student of human rights, the Holocaust, or genocide, this is difficult, but essential reading. ( )

I prefer Longerich

In this book on Stangl, as in her book on Speer, Sereny is not just the author but a prominent character herself. We read about her many travels to interview various people, and how they hosted her. 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 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. 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. 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 contrast in style between Sereny's books and Longerich's books on the Holocaust and on Himmler could hardly be stronger. 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. I much prefer Longerich, but your mileage may vary. ( )

Intense. Penetrates the mind of Stangl. Answers the question, "How could they do it?" Excellent read.
( )

I thought this would be a great read about Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka. However, most of the most is not about Stangl, but short snippets of "remembrances" were from various people. I started jotting down names/relationships, but it became tedious every other paragraph. I quit at page 175/306 and I still don't know much more about Stangl than when I started. Tediously boring. ( )

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). The title is Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. 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 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. 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. Encouraged by the Nazi hunter Simon Wisenthal he was arrested by Brazilian Federal place in 1967 and sentenced in Austria to life imprisonment. 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. 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. 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. Other witnesses speck of events connected with the Euthanasia Program, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In the last fifth of the book, Sereny explores how the Catholic Church helped Stangel survive in Rome and escape to Syria and then Brazil after the end of the War in Europe, and Pope Pius XII's knowledge of abd failure to criticize the genocide, and his and the Church's possible complicity in the escapes from justice of those directly guilty of exterminating millions of European Jews and hundreds of thousands of Polish Catholics. These questions were examined both in her discussions with Stangl himself, and interviews with a number of church and lay people who were involved with hosting Stangl in Rome and moving him and his family to Syria and Brazil. It is up to the reader to conclude how complicit the Church was. In any event, in retrospect, it is remarkable how easily Stangl "escaped" despite making no effort to hide his and his family's identies.

Sereny did not write a polemic, but rather she established extraordinary rapports with those she interviewed in order to probe in their own words their personal histories and innermost thoughts and and feelings about the events and historical processes they were involved in. She does not moralize but rather encourages people to expose their "souls" to scrutiny in an attempt to understand and reveal the banality and simple human weaknesses that underlie the most evil and horrific acts in history.

In sum, I regard this as an extraordinarily important demonstration as to how easily fairly ordinary people can become unspeakably evil and justify to themselves that they are still ordinary people responding to the circumstances they find themselves in. For this reason, and particularly because the teaching of history seems to be deteriorating, this book should be required reading for all final year secondary students and many other people as well. In the "developed" world, to say nothing of fundamentalist and autocratic countries, too many of our governments are tending to the kinds of reactionary authoritarianism that typified Germany in the 1930s. I fear we are breeding and training many potential Franz Stangl's today. The only real defense is to foster the development of individual consciences. ( )

This book is a difficult one to read, but it's worth the effort. The writing style flows very well, but the subject matter is incredibly disturbing.

The main focus of this book is Franz Stangl, who was a kommandant at a death camp during the Holocaust. The difference between a death camp and a concentration camp is a very distinct one, though the terms are sometimes used synonymously. A person sent to a concentration camp could be put to death, put on a work detail, or just warehoused. A death camp had only one purpose: death. Only a small contingent of prisoners were kept alive to keep the slaughterhouse going; everyone else who passed through the gates of a death camp was quickly executed. Stangl was a commander of the latter.

Sereny's premise was simple: what made a man such as Stangl - a normal guy with a relatively normal background and a normal family of his own - become so callused to his fellow humans? How could he become such a monster? And yet Sereny does nothing to paint him as a monster; to do so would, ultimately, be a disservice. Stangl, and the others like him, was not some strange robot who had something wrong with him. He was an ordinary man. He was polite, loving towards his children and wife, charming when the situation called for it, and unremarkable in most regards. If you saw him at the grocery store, you would smile at him. If you were at the park and saw him playing with his children, you'd think it was great that a father was so involved with his kids. He was not some cold, unfeeling sociopath. He was not separate or different. He was just like everyone else, and that is the scariest thing of all.

Reading this book is intended to be disturbing, and it is. It's Stangl's little asides that disturbed me the most, especially when he compared Jews to cows awaiting slaughter. I read this book nearly five years ago, and I still cannot eat hamburger without feeling ill because of that comment.

I'd recommend this book to anyone. I don't re-read many books, but this one has remained fascinating and I've read it several times. ( )

Mr. Stengl is one of the scariest people I've ever read about. What's so frightening about him is his banality. He wasn't a fervent follower of National Socialism. He claims he wasn't even an anti-Semite. Running Treblinka and supervising the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people was simply his job, and he thought little of it. Chilling. ( )

2867 Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder, by Gitta Sereny (read 12 May 1996) This is a British journalist's account of her extensive interview with Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. There were four such camps: Chelmno, Belsec, Sohibor, and Treblinka. At least 750,000 Jews were exterminated at Treblinka. This book tells the whole story of Stangl, who lived in Syria and Brazil after the war till he was extradited to Germany, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1971. This book was published in 1974. Every once in a while one must read about the Holocaust, the sheerest evil ever. ( )

The story, based on extensive interviews, of Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, the largest of the Nazi extermination camps set up during the war. This seems to serve as a precursor to Sereny's much more detailed book on Albert Speer which basically examined the same question: how did this man become involved in the horror of the Holocaust. Of course there are differences: Speer moved in the highest circles of Hitler's entourage and was a key minister in the war effort; it seems fairly certain that he never actually witnessed a murder; and he was a good deal more complex and intelligent that Stangl; but these are differences of degree. The basic guilt that binds the two of them together is found in this passage from Into That Darkness:

This may appear to be a marginal matter, but I believe it to be peculiarly significant 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. [Author's emphases]

[Recall, in a totally different context, Beryl Markham's observation that: "If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work".]

The concept noted above was the basis of Speer's recognition of his own guilt: he was able to escape the hangman at Nuremburg because he was able to show that there were no specific occasions that linked him to murder or complicity in the Holocaust, but as he admitted to Sereny, he knew enough not to enquire further and so his guilt on the higher moral plane was unquestioned.

Stangl rationalized his role (although he was the commandant!) on the basis that he did not actually murder anyone himself, he was only an administrator, it would still have happened even if he had removed himself personally. This compartmentalization was essential to his own self-image, and the concept of a broader moral responsibility never entered into his thoughts. Or if it did, he suppressed it with stories of how he was a victim of bureaucratic intrigue and hatred that would have been his downfall if he had tried to extricate himself from his job and his role in the Holocaust. Sereny shows, again, how an otherwise decent person who could have had an entirely unremarkable life as a competent policeman, finds himself, step by step, involved in something that then requires an enormous act of physical and moral courage to change, and Stangl was not such a man.

Recall a quote from Christobel Bielenberg:

...it became increasingly difficult for us to escape the occasional compromise. By compromising we could learn how each small demand for our outward acquiescence could lead to the next and with the gently persistence of an incoming tide could lap at the wall of just that integrity we were so anxious to preserve.

Bielenberg was speaking here of those who opposed Hitler and the Nazi regime; how much more difficult to preserve this wall of integrity if one did not start from a position of opposition.

Sereny also goes into considerable detail on the complicity of the Catholic Church in not speaking out against the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and other peoples of eastern Europe, plus the assistance given by a number of clergy after to war to help senior Nazis escape to South America or wherever. She gives the benefit of the doubt in some cases (it is not hard to believe that immediately after the war, in the turmoil and confusion of that time, Franz Stangl was not a household name for his role in the Holocaust). However, she is critical of the lack of critical judgement from the church and its refusal, with notable and courageous exceptions, to show the moral leadership that was so badly needed, and which could have an impact.

It is impossible to relate to the nameless, faceless millions in such a tragedy. Sereny does a good job of bringing it to an understandable level with her conversations with survivors who lived through Treblinka and knew Stengl there. And, according to one survivor of the outbreak at Treblinka: "One woman, Helen Sucha, hid a Jew: they took her up to the labour camp and she was never heard of again". In a sense I feel that reading this, having this recorded in this one reference to Helen Sucha lets me reach out across space and time to touch her memory for this brave act for which Helen Sucha paid with her life.

First published in 1974 and unavailable for several years, a biography of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, who was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900,000 people.

NO OF PAGES: 380 SUB CAT I: Holocaust SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: The scene is Treblinka; the character is Franz Stangl. The theme is the mass extermination of men, women and children. As Commandant of Treblinka, Stangl was imprisoned for life. Gitta Sereny covered the trial on behalf of a London newspaper. Fascinated by the prisoner, she decided to make an effort to get to know him better, to delineate him more deeply? For seventy hours he answered questions. A conscientious journalist, Sereny checked his answers and statements by extending the scope of her enquiry: she interrogated dozens of men and women from all over who had had the slightest contact with the man who had been monarch of the kingdom of the dead. She interviewed his wife, his children, his friends, his judges, his accomplices, his victims - that is, the rare victims who had survived. The result is a report - a portrait? - that from the first pages opens out onto an abyss in which one cannot breathe, or move. It is not the murderer in Stangl that terrifies us - it is the human being. For that matter 'terrify' may not be the right word. Most often one is sick to one's soul.NOTES: Donated by Pat Irwin from her personal collection. SUBTITLE: An Examination of Conscience