![]() ![]() It is an astonishing tension to experience, rendered with literary skill equal to any writer of her time. As readers, we witness their friendship strengthening in the exact same rhythm as Speer’s last defenses regarding the depths of his guilt weaken and then crumble. While Speer’s moral resolve wins respect from his interlocutor, she does not abandon her hunger for deeper questions, as she constantly pushes him on critical weaknesses in his personal accounting, above all regarding his complicity in the Final Solution. Speer is painfully aware of his profound guilt from an early stage, and devotes the rest of his life to an examination of his own conscience hence Sereny’s title, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. Speer is certainly in a different category from the brutish provincial policeman Stangl. Her portrait of Albert Speer reaches the same depth, complicated by the eventuality of Sereny’s feelings of friendship and even admiration for Speer’s remarkable talents and personal qualities. By the end of her account, the reader (or certainly this reader) also experiences a sort of collapse, a collapse that creates the conditions for fresh insight, well beyond the history of the death camps. That is my guilt.” Nineteen hours later, he is found dead of heart failure. Sereny’s examination of Stangl is so cathartic for her subject that, at its conclusion, he at last acquires an understanding of his complicity and guilt: “My guilt is that I am still here. By cross-checking Stangl’s recollections with interviews of his wife, children and other key people in his life, she uncovers the emotional black hole at the core of his being, an emptiness which eventually expresses itself as a grotesquely distorted conception of “self-will”, an identity distortion that is absolutely critical to comprehending his obedience within the genocidal chain of command. In dialogue with Sereny, Stangl becomes human again for the reader, only for Sereny then to lay bare the fundamental corruption within his personality that permitted him to perform his role within the death machine with such cold efficiency. Rejecting the simplistic classification of Stangl as either a Nazi Monster or as a banal civil servant, Sereny reconstructs his social and private Lebenswelt with meticulous care, her spirit of empathy – even though she found him personally repellent – matched by an unsparing drive to excavate his deeply buried guilt. Her virtuoso “examination of conscience” in the case of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, sets a very high standard for the forensic examination of human behavior in extreme circumstances. Possessing an abundance of analytical intelligence and moral acuity, Sereny’s writings explore the interplay of history and human psychology with peerless subtlety and skill, conveyed for the reader in a style that is graceful, complex and lucid. Thought I would add this as it seems interesting in amongst stories of survivors.With much sadness, we note the death of Gitta Sereny at the age of 91. For him we sacrifice ourselves to do this – we obey his orders.” And then he said, too, “Can you imagine what would happen if the Jews ever got hold of us.” He went on about how awful it was and then he said, in that same maudlin way he had, “But we are doing it for our Fuhrer. Done away with I asked, How? What do you mean?” With gas, he said. What?” “The Jews are being done away with. “Don’t you know what is being done out there?” And then he suddenly said, “Fuchterlich, - dreadful, its just dreadful, you have no idea how dreadful it is.” I asked him, “What is dreadful?” “Don’t you know? he asked. I was pretty fed up, especially as he stank of alcohol and became more and more maudlin.īut I thought, here he is, so lonely – I must at least listen. Ludwig came up to me – I was in the garden too, with the children – and started to tell me about his wife and kids, he went on and on. They brought schnapps and sat in the garden drinking. No, while we were in Chelm, Paul was on leave, it was when we moved to the fish-hatchery that he had to go back to work.Īnd one day while he was at work – I still thought constructing, or working at an army supply base – Ludwig came with several other men, to buy fish or something. ![]() “But I was very glad when Paul told me he had arranged for us to move to the fish-hatchery – it would be better for all of us, and I was glad to get the children away from that house. Wife of Franz Paul Stangl – Commandant of Sobibor Death Camp
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