Into That Darkness

An Examination of Conscience

Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience is journalist Gitta Sereny’s 1974 biography of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka Nazi extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, who was convicted for the murders of 900,000 people.

The Austrian-born Sereny was both an investigative journalist and biographer who, after World War II, worked for the United Nations reuniting children who had been kidnapped by Nazi Germany with their families. The book revolves around Sereny’s extensive interviews with Stangl and a host of other people connected to Treblinka, including Stangl’s wife, Theresa, former SS guards, and survivors.

Sereny plumbs Stangl’s conscience in an attempt to understand how a courteous, intelligent man could have overseen so many deaths and, as one of his prison guards in Düsseldorf said, “consent to remain alive” (82). What emerges is a disturbingly human portrait of a man who sacrificed his morals for his ambition, and who only at the end of his life confronted his guilt.