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. ( )