In spite of this, it was important for Sereny to separate her emotions, outrage, and disgust of the events, from her desire to obtain a clear view of Stangl’s motivations and justification for participating at that time (p. There are obvious moral difficulties in allowing any situation or external pressure to be used as sufficient justification for an individual to willingly participate in such a horrific genocide as the Holocaust. Throughout Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny confronts Stangl’s work ethic, and justifications which eventually bring him face to face with his guilt, only days before his death. His justification: the perception that he would be punished for disobeying, and his self-imposed pressure to perform. What was Franz Stangl’s motivation? How could he justify such atrocities? Stangl’s motivation was not the complete genocide of the Jews, but that their murder was merely a task he was required to perform to the best of his ability. In interviewing Stangl, Sereny sought to understand not only why he participated, but what events, people, and conditions, surrounded Stangl which led him from a weavers shop in Austria to the gas chambers of Poland. As Sereny points out, the events of one’s life do not happen in a vacuum but are formed by the external elements which surround them (p. Questions will always remain about what brought about such horrific atrocities, and what prompted such seemingly normal people such as Stangl, to willingly participate. The Holocaust was a tragic reminder of the moral frailty of humanity when given the ideal opportunity to act out their innermost evil desires. Stangl’s roles at Treblinka and Sobibor make him one of the most deeply implicated figures of the Holocaust. As an extermination camp Kommandant, Stangl oversaw the murder of an estimated 850,000 people, approximately 800,000 of which were Jews. During his rise up the ranks of the SS, Stangl was involved in the T4 Euthanasia program, an aggressive effort to cleanse the Germanic population of undesirable hereditary traits and diseases. Prior to his posting at Treblinka he was the Kommandant of the extermination camp at Sobibor for a short period of time. Stangl was the Kommandant of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka from September 1942 until shortly after the camp was destroyed in a revolt, in the summer of 1943. Gitta Sereny died in June 2012.In 1971, Gitta Sereny, a historian, successful journalist, and biographer interviewed Franz Stangl. Her books include: The Medallion, a novel The Invisible Children, on child prostitution Into That Darkness and a biographical examination of Albert Speer. She also contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines around the world. She wrote mainly for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times, The Times, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday Review. Her journalistic work was of great variety but focussed particularly on the Third Reich and troubled children. 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. 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. During the Second World War she became a social worker, caring for war-damaged children in France. Gitta Sereny is of Hungarian-Austrian extraction and is trilingual in English, French and German. She is seeking an answer to the question which beggars reason: How were human beings turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil? To horrify is not Sereny's aim, though horror is inevitable. Sereny, after weeks of talk with him and months of further research, shows us this man as he saw himself, and 'as he was seen by many others, including his wife. Stangl commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900, 000 people. Gitta Sereny's investigation of this man's mind, and of the influences which shaped him, has become a classic. Only four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. The biography of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp - a classic and utterly compelling study of evil
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