Biographer explored the essence of evil
The writer Gitta Sereny’s great motivation, she once said, was ‘‘the search for what it is that leads human beings so often and so readily to embrace violence and amorality. For me, the answer to this fundamental question lies in a personal and human rather than a theoretical or intellectual realm.’’
She came to this conclusion by controversial means – close contact with individuals associated with some of the worst of crimes. She interviewed at length and researched intensively the lives of, among others, Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect, Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and Mary Bell, who had killed two small boys on Tyneside in the 1960s when herself only 11.
The technique of allowing such individuals to tell their own stories – albeit with Sereny’s running commentary on their statements – was felt by some to offer too sympathetic a tone. But there was no doubt of the intense interest such accounts generated as Sereny revisited some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history, and sought explanations for the worst of human behaviour.
At the same time, she sought to challenge what she saw as the easy and ignorant division of humans into either good or evil. ‘‘I want the readers to think: let us compare ourselves to the people who were in those situations. How would we have behaved?’’
Sereny was born in 1921 in Vienna to Hungarian parents.
Her father, an Anglophile, died when she was only two, but he had provided for her to go to boarding school in England. While returning to school from Vienna in 1934 her train broke down in Nuremberg and she was taken to one of the great Nazi rallies.
‘‘I was overcome by the symmetry of the marchers, many of them children like me, the joyful focus all around,’’ she recalled. ‘‘One moment Iwas enraptured, glued to my seat; the next, Iwas standing up, shouting with joy along with thousands of others.’’
It was only when she was back at school and described her experiences in an essay entitled ‘‘The Happiest Day of My Life’’ that a teacher gave her Hitler’s Mein Kampf to read: ‘‘I understood . . . that his vision of Germany, a new Europe, could not be realised without war.’’
When Hitler’s war finally broke out in 1939 Sereny was in Paris.
She escaped eventually to New York, and began to research and lecture on the fate of European children caught up in the war, which led to a job in 1945 back in Europe working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency as a child welfare officer.
She attempted initially to become a novelist, and married in 1948 the American photographer Don Honeyman before eventually settling in London.
Sereny began writing regular features as a journalist in the 1960s, covering the Mary Bell affair as a case study of how childhood experiences can lead to appalling misbehaviour in later life.
After Franz Stangl, the former commander of the Treblinka death camp, was found to be living in Brazil and brought back to West Germany for trial and sentenced to life imprisonment, Sereny was given the opportunity of interviewing him for a total of 70 hours. This material became the basis of a book, Into that Darkness, published in 1974. It also included material from extensive research and additional interviews with Stangl’s former colleagues, survivors of the death camps and members of Stangl’s family.
Sereny’s other important study of Nazism centred on Albert Speer, who became a confidant of Hitler and then played a leading role in the running of the Nazi economy. Speer had been spared execution after the Nuremberg trials and had served a long prison sentence in Spandau, Berlin.
He contacted Sereny in 1977 and they began to be in regular contact. Eventually he, like Stangl, agreed to an extended series of interviews, which Sereny turned into a book: Albert Speer: his Battle with Truth (1995).
In the 1990s Sereny persuaded Bell, by then an adult and released from custody, to cooperate in a second book, Cries Unheard (1998).
The accounts she recorded offer a fascinating if macabre insight into the ways some of the most appalling crimes of the last century were justified, and the life stories of notorious figures. It was always much harder for Sereny to sway the debate about how far such crimes were compelled simply by circumstances, and how far they were prompted by some kind of innately evil impulses in the lives she took such pains to try to comprehend.