Into the Darkness (Darkness #1)

Product Information

I also hadn't realized that there was a revolt and escape from Treblinka, just as from Sobibor. Treblinka's revolt happened in August of 1943; Sobibor's was in October of the same year. As the Nazis were done with their killing and were closing Sobibor, about 500 people, men and women escaped, but only 32 survived. I liked it, a lot, even if it's not as dark as I thought it would have been ( at least for me, guess my mind is kinda deviated at this point LOL). Sereny wrote Into That Darkness some years before her other great book of the psychology of significant WWII actors, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. I found it didn't have quite the polish and journalistic flair of that later work, but it is still an amazing insight into the mind of a man who did terrible things in the name of Nazism, in this case Franzl Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.

Darkness Series by K.F. Breene - Goodreads

Gitta Sereny interviewed the perpetrators, witnesses, and survivors of gruesome events connected with Sobibor and Treblinka. She calls them the people who speak. In Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, author Paul Bloom describes: ...this is because the thought of touching the man, of laying your hands on him and shoving, gives rise to a powerful emotional response, much more than the thought of just throwing a switch, and this is why most people see this act as morally wrong (p.169). This concept is illustrated time and again in Stangl's perception of his actions at Treblinka. Stangl's wife, Therese, recounts a conversation with her husband she had after he received his appointment at the Sobibor extermination camp: I said, 'I know what you are doing in Sobibor?...What are you doing in this?'...he said...'I have nothing to do with any of this...My work is purely administrative...Oh yes, I see it. But I don't do anything to anybody.'(p.136) This theme plays again when Stangl vehemently denies having ever fired a gun into a group of people who were, hours later, gassed en mass in an operation he was overseeing.I've read countless books about the Holocaust and recently I started to question what my fascination is with the subject. I came to the conclusion that it's the psychology of what leads a country towards genocide and the mentality that enables individuals to carry out such terrible crimes against humanity. Whilst undoubtedly some individuals were sadistic what is apparent in so many books that I've read is how un extraordinary most of the perpetrators were, it's this aspect that I find the most disturbing. This need to distance himself from the horror showed during the interviews. Stangl would slip into "the popular vernacular of his childhood whenever he had to deal with questions he found difficult to answer", a habit Sereny attributes to Stangl subconsciously seeking refuge in more comfortable language. Sereny asked Stangl several times about the fate of prisoners whom he'd spoken about with affection. His response each time: "I don't know," though he surely could have guessed. Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka, was, I believe, the only Nazi in charge of such an institution to be interviewed in this way. It therefore stands as a unique record. Sereny interviewed him for a total of seventy hours between April 2 and June 27, 1971, in Dusseldorf prison. He died only nineteen hours after her final interview. To the very last Stangl maintained, “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself ... I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself.” Lyra y nuestro protagonista se obsesionan el uno con el otro y viven una historia de amor complicada, turbia, muy emocional, pasional y cruda! Recordemos que en sus cabezas, eso es amor/lo que creen que es amor! Him is a serial killer with his demon by his side hunting his next victim which is always a woman. When he sees a woman named Lyra he is highly intrigued by her, Him needs to know more about her.

Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience - Goodreads Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience - Goodreads

Another theme throughout the book is the Vatican's part in the holocaust. If it weren't for the church's cold-hearted passivity, perhaps Hitler would have ended the concentration-camps. It is a small possibility, but one never-the-less. I understand that the church was afraid to lose power and perhaps be doomed as well, but it comes down to a matter of faith, something the church is very good at practicing otherwise. Gitta Sereny is perhaps the most thorough, meticulous interviewer I've ever read. As if she's unpeeling an onion layer by layer, she leads us into the life and mind of her subject, the former Kommandant of Treblinka, Franz Stangl, and makes us feel, whether we want to or not, as if we know him and understand him. And that is a huge accomplishment, because it isn't easy to understand what motivated a man like Stangl, what kept him loyal to and even proud of his "work," and how he (and his family) lived with the knowledge of what he was part of. However, Stangl was not a fanatic. He sought, according to his own confessions, to do his job as it should be done. Stangl wants to convince the author that he did not have another choice. The former commandant attempts to shift the blame onto Globocnik, who was his superior and had been responsible for the murder of around three million men, women, and children. Stangl seems to have thought that Globocnik would not allow him to get out. If he had rejected his appointment as commandant of the extermination camps he would have been arrested or even killed. But the truth is no one can say what could have happened to Franz Stangl had he firmly refused to do what he did. The facts about what the Nazis did, all of which can be obtained elsewhere, are not what makes reading this book so essential, nor is it some kind of horrific fascination in learning of the psychological profile of a man who oversaw the deaths of somewhere between 750,000 and 1,200,000 almost exclusively Jewish people (chilling when you think the estimated death toll - horrific whichever number is correct - might be out by nearly half a million!). Sereny doesn’t seem to be solely interested in Stangl’s psychology; I believe she was actually attempting to give us a glimpse, some insight, into the man’s soul. He initially trained as a weaver before joining the police force in his native Austria. There is some argument about whether as a policeman, Stangl was an ‘illegal Nazi’ - he himself always denied it, but his wife and colleagues seem to believe he was very likely a Nazi member before the Anschluss. There seems to have existed a powerful drive in Stangl, not only to be good and efficient at his job, but also to ‘be someone’. Were these the character traits the Nazis looked for when they sought to enlist the ‘right’ man, at first to be an administrator at Hartheim where the Nazis began killing those who were physically and mentally impaired, then Sobibor extermination camp, and finally to run what was essentially a human abbatoir at Treblinka? There is nothing to suggest that Stangl was a sadistic monster; there were a number of such types at Treblinka, as testified to by the very few slave prisoners who survived the camp, but there is no evidence to implicate Stangl in personal acts of cruelty; he was it seems a loyal husband and loving father. Yet, he was also the man in charge of this highly-efficient conveyor-belt that delivered death on a previously unprecedented scale.Franz Stangl attempts to find different rational explanations to brush off the feeling of guilt. He talks about some of the ways he devised to take his mind off and keep the reality at bay. A glass of brandy before going to sleep helped to avoid thinking of all that happened during the day.

Into the darkness | Books | The Guardian

It became clear that what he was most concerned about were what one might call the lesser manifestations of moral corruption in himself; what he did rather than what he was. It was his “deeds” – his relatively mild deeds – he was at great pains to deny or rationalize rather than his total personality change. Barbara Michaels was a pen name of Barbara Mertz. She also wrote as Elizabeth Peters, as well as under her own name. Det framstår som banalt när jag gör jämförelserna, men det finns en poäng i det. Stangl utsattes för just samma allmänmänskliga dilemman som du och jag, liksom han drevs av samma psykologiska drivkrafter. Han råkade bara befinna sig i en väldigt annorlunda situation med väldigt mer allvarliga konsekvenser. I love it when the heroine is equally obsessed as the hero is with her or more so I loved this one!! It doesn’t end in a hea but for this couple it was a hea for them in their own way!

Sereny fördjupar sig i Stangls snedvridna verklighetsuppfattning, förnekande attityd och uppbyggda fasad och skalar av lager efter lager för att slutligen avslöja den innersta kärnan. Var i processen han slutligen tappade fotfästet om verkligheten och sin egen moral. Var i processen han upphörde att vara människa. Hon kartlägger och ställer olika vittnesskildringar mot varandra. Likt ett fotografi i mörkrummet framträder de skuggor av minnen som utgör en bild av vad som en gång var. Små småningom blir skuggorna allt djupare, konturerna allt tydligare, kontrasterna allt skarpare och den gåtfulla mannen i centrum allt mer levande. Gestalten formas snart till en mänsklig varelse. Eller till ett monster. Stangl jämför Treblinka med Dantes inferno, som ”att stiga ner i en avgrund där orden förlorar sin mening”. Inte förrän det sista samtalet bryter sanningen igenom den före detta kommendantens illusion och han inser vem han var i helvetets avgrund. Sereny fångar bilden och med den fångar hon läsaren. I love Sereny as an interviewer - she is smart in how she goes about interviewing people, and insightful during the conversation itself. She's trying to figure out how Stangl could live with himself as the commandant of an extermination camp, and continue to live with himself after the fact. There are no clear answers, but any attempt at wrapping things up in a bow would come across as false. Too much is going on for that.

Into the Darkness | Book | Scribe US Into the Darkness | Book | Scribe US

Poi verifica le sue risposte incontrando la moglie di Stangl in Brasile, altri testimoni in parti diverse dell’Europa, consultando documenti e fonti. Una ricerca durata anni. She later described seeing a Jewish doctor she knew well being forced to clean pavements with a toothbrush; the terror became more personal after her mother, Margit, with whom Gitta had a poor relationship, became engaged to Ludwig von Mises, the Jewish economist. Von Mises had left Austria for Switzerland, but a German friend tipped Margit off that the authorities planned to arrest her to oblige him to return. Margit promptly fled to Switzerland with her daughter.After reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, I got into a bit of a WWII reading binge. First I read, Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas and then I launched into The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. I read Into That Darkness contemporaneously with Shirer's book. I don't doubt that my reading of this book was colored by these other Summer readings. Her yellow raincoat flapped in the cool breeze when she walked by, that blonde hair making her look like a drowned rat as she stopped to taste the rain. Into That Darkness is written by Gitta Sereny who interviewed Franz Stangl (the commandant of Treblinka) while he was in prison. Stangl had escaped Germany at the end of WWII and was living in Brazil in 1967 when he was arrested outside his home, extradited to West Germany, and sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the deaths of 900,000 people.