Into that Darkness: an Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny
New York: Vintage Books, 1983 (Originally published 1974) ISBN 0394710355
I really don't know why it has taken me so long to get around to reading this book. I have read other books by Sereny, one of which I have reviewed here, and I have always admired her unflinching search for the truth, and her excellent style, given that English is her third or fourth language. Her life's quest was to try and understand the Third Reich, through talking to those that were involved - Franz Stangl being the first, along with others such as Albert Speer.
Into that Darkness grew from an article about Stangl, which originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph Magazine. Sereny spent over seventy hours interviewing Stangl, with the aim of trying to find out why - not why the Nazis eliminated the Jews, but why a seemingly normal middle-class man who, it seems, was liked by many he met, could continue to choose to work in unspeakable places and be in charge of unspeakable things.
With this goal in mind, Sereny probed Stangl about his work in the Euthanasia Centres, why he thought he'd been chosen for work in the extermination camps, what he did there, what he thought of it, how he interacted with his family during that time, what happened to him after the War. Sereny kept probing, trying to fight her way through the self-justifications that Stangl had wrapped around his life, trying to see if he could admit guilt. That he eventually did is a testament to both Sereny, and in some ways to Stangl, who fought hard against the moral judgement that he surely deserved, and which he finally began to understand.
In the book Sereny works hard to try and prove (or disprove) the many statements that Stangl made about his career, and his activities both in Sobibor and Treblinka. She also closely investigates the circumstances around his escape firstly to Syria and then Brazil, which cast a poor light on the activities on the Catholic Church in Rome. Sereny is scrupulously fair in her judgements, but often the facts speak for themselves.
The main part of this book is a very detailed look at how the death camps worked. Sereny builds this picture up not only through her discussions with Stangl but also with other SS and importantly the few Jewish survivors of the camps. For someone like me that didn't have a clear delineation in my mind between concentration camps and death camps, this history is eye-opening. The numbers are staggering, and sickening. At Treblinka, nearly a million people were murdered in less than eighteen months. Just as staggering is the fact that, in all the extermination camps, for the whole period of Aktion Reinhardt, there were only 96 SS personnel involved in running the death camps. That so few (assisted by Ukranian guards and Jews forced to work disposing of bodies and sorting through clothes and such) could unleash such horror...
Sereny describes how carefully the gassings were organised. For richer (Western) Jews, who arrived on seemingly normal passenger trains, the (fake) station, and "welcoming" troops who explained carefully that everyone needed to be disinfected before heading out to work meant that these victims moved in an orderly fashion to their deaths. For the poorer (mostly Polish) Jews, who arrived packed into cattle-cars, the guards whipped and beat them to instil terror, forcing them into the gas chambers with the butts of their rifles.
Confronting Stangl with these facts, Sereny watches and listens as he tries to justify why he didn't leave: she (and we) knew that quite a few soldiers did and could leave the extermination camps, but Stangl used as his justification the "fact" that he would have to go back to his normal police job and a boss who hated him, and that he was a soldier following orders. He also claimed that he tried to be as kind as he could to those going to their deaths. Sereny's clear and factual tone lays bare the torturous logic that Stangl had to use to try to forgive himself for the unforgiveable. He couldn't forget either, explaining that on seeing some cattle awaiting slaughter in Brazil, he could no longer eat meat. Sereny's interviews with Stangl's wife show us a man who was slowly falling apart, unable to control his emotions in the years before his arrest and deportation back to Germany.
Sereny has her own ideas why Stangl may have kept going - from the time he was recruited from the police to assist in the Euthanasia program at Hartheim, Stangl was ambitious, enjoying the increasing rank and privileges that came with his increasing responsibility. It was only as the War went on and defeat seemed likely that he suffered stress-based illness, and understood that he was one of the "war-criminals" that would have to face justice. He remarked to Sereny with some cynicism on his posting to battle partisans around Trieste after the dissolution of the camps that he "realized quite well...that we were an embarrassment to the brass:...[s]o we were assigned the most dangerous jobs".
Stangl escaped the prison-camp in which he was placed after the War, and quite openly moved to Damascus and Brazil, where he lived under his own name for nearly twenty years before being "discovered" and sent back to Germany for trial. This section of the book is also fascinating. Once again an author blows apart the credibility of Simon Weisenthal, and once again an author uncovers the uncomfortable history of the Vatican both during and after the War. Sereny, even though acknowledging the difficulties of finding the criminals who were mingling in the millions of displaced persons, shames the Church through rigorous use of documents and interviews. While she may forgive the fact that Stangl slipped through "un-noticed", she can't forget the appalling lack of moral fortitude from the Vatican throughout the War, when it came to telling the world what they knew of the Holocaust.
Eventually, at the end of their time together, Stangl faces the fact that, because he was there, because he facilitated the murder, he shared the guilt, even if he didn't actually murder anyone with his own hands. It is a dramatic moment, heightened by the fact that eighteen hours after he finally admitted that to himself, Stangl died of a heart attack.
As a journey through the most terrifying phase of World War Two, Into that Darkness is in turn fascinating, horrifying and above all, edifying. A must read of Holocaust history.
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