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Gitta Sereny, the veteran journalist whose unflinching studies of some of modern history's most reviled figures attempted to make sense of their crimes, has died. She was 91.
Sereny attracted praise and criticism for her profiles of senior Nazis and child murderers but was universally acknowledged as among the most tenacious interrogators of her generation.
"She was an enormously spirited person, extraordinarily brave and very, very determined," said Stuart Proffitt, her publisher at Penguin Press.
"She wasn't afraid to ask questions that took her to places other people didn't want to go, and wasn't afraid either if the answers were unfashionable or shocking. In the two main areas of her interest – Nazi Germany and the lives of children in extreme situations – she was able to go further than almost everyone else in her psychological penetration."
Sereny's in-depth explorations included studies of the Nazi architect Albert Speer and the boys convicted for the murder of James Bulger. Her relationships with her subjects, built up over scores of hours of interviews, often proved controversial. She was criticised for her decision to pay the child killer Mary Bell for her co-operation in producing a book about her crimes, and faced accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser after publication of her work on Speer.
Born in Vienna to Hungarian aristocracy, Sereny came to journalism after serving as a nurse in France during the second world war and working with survivors of the Holocaust in its aftermath.
She earned a reputation for doggedness while undertaking assignments for newspapers and magazines, but rose to prominence after covering the 1960s and 70s trials of Nazi concentration camp personnel.
Sereny was drawn to her subject partly because of her experiences in pre-war Vienna. As an adolescent she had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and attended a speech by Adolf Hitler.
In 1974 she won praise for Into That Darkness, a book that used extensive interviews with concentration camp commander Franz Stangl, blamed for the deaths of 900,000 people, to explain the thinking behind Nazi atrocities.
Though it attracted controversy because of the payments to Bell, her second book, Cries Unheard, published in 1994, was later acclaimed for its insight into problem children.
In 1995 she was accused of losing objectivity after befriending Speer to study him. Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth was, however, notable for eliciting confessions about the architect's early support for Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews.
In 1996, Sereny's determination to forensically examine the Nazis' legacy provoked David Irving, the British historian and Holocaust denier, to bring a libel case against Sereny and the Observer over an article that accused him of falsifying historical records. The case was eventually dropped.
While she was said to have been emotionally affected by her subject matter, Sereny was able to distance herself from the dark corners of humanity she explored, according to Proffitt.
"For someone who spent a long time staring at evil in various manifestations, she had a great capacity to enjoy life and live it to the full," he said.
Proffitt said Sereny, who died last week at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge after a long illness, had been working on new material prior to her death. He said what was intended to have been a history of Vienna had become an autobiography of the writer, but the book was too incomplete to be published.
Sereny's death comes a year after that of her husband, the photographer Don Honeyman.
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Comments
19 June 2012 10:06AM
RIP Gitta. And thank you.
19 June 2012 10:12AM
RIP
19 June 2012 10:29AM
'Into That Darkness' made a very deep impression on me - I remember her asking Franz Stangl "Did you believe God was in Treblinka?"
19 June 2012 10:34AM
A brave, brave writer. I don't think that she in any way, shape or form was "seduced" by Speer. She concludes her biography of him by stating that she believed Speer did know about the destruction of the Jews, the central question of her book. The fact that Speer himself was upset by her conclusion should say something about her objectivity. A quite remarkable woman. RIP.
19 June 2012 10:41AM
I work in the child protection field and her work into exploring the background of Mary Bell was impressive. I also read her other books Speer etc and they were equally insightful and thorough. She made a massive contribution to our understanding of human nature (the dark side)
19 June 2012 11:04AM
Reading Cries unheard changed the way i think about how we look at crime how we punish crime and how redemption can be achieved
19 June 2012 11:12AM
I've read her books on Speer and Stangl: I don't belileve anyone who has done likewise could reasonably conclude she was a "Nazi sympathiser". She recognised that Speer was a complex person, and she chose to explore that complexity, but her portrait of him is a damning one.
An outstanding investigator and writer. I hope her work inspires others; we need people prepared to ask tough questions but also ready to think carefully about what the responses mean.
19 June 2012 11:23AM
agree. a stunning piece of writing.
rip miss sereny.
x
19 June 2012 11:31AM
I read The Case of Mary Bell a long time ago, a very brave book. A very brave woman. http://www.webofstories.com/play/18012 Found this an absorbing interview. RIP.
19 June 2012 11:33AM
http://www.webofstories.com/play/18012
19 June 2012 11:47AM
RIP Gitta. There's no need for the fools to rush in.
19 June 2012 11:50AM
RIP. A great and courageous writer. I would recommend Albert Speer - His Battle With Truth very highly indeed. The most interesting book I have ever read about the Second World War and the Nazi phenomenon. Anyone who thinks that it lets Speer off lightly has not read it to the end! Not least, Sereny's writing reminded us unflinchingly of the brutal realities of living in a totalitarian state.
19 June 2012 11:52AM
I’ve only ever read Into That Darkness but it had as profound an impact on me as any book I’ve ever read. I came across it almost by accident when I was at school (I think parts of it were originally serialized in the Telegraph colour supplement). It completely transformed my idea of evil from being some outside, abstract and incomprehensible force to something everyone (including me) was capable of.
I also remember mealy-mouthed politicians queuing up to trash her on Question Time for her second book on Mary Bell (Paddy Ashdown was particularly nauseating). An extraordinary woman, whose work was of far more value than that of practically any politician.
19 June 2012 12:16PM
Her book on Albert Speer was one on the most remarkable books I've ever read.
19 June 2012 1:07PM
I often felt her nuanced deciphering of the refined Speer differed greatly from her, at times, near mocking of the lower class Nazis like Stangl.
However her books are eminently readable accounts of some of the darkest moments of human history.
19 June 2012 1:26PM
Well said. His Battle With Truth is a curious book, full of beautiful people oblivious to the ugliness around them, and at times she comes across as one of those people. But her conclusion, and the decisiveness with which she delivers her conclusion, makes it all worthwhile. RIP
19 June 2012 1:34PM
A tragic loss to the world of reasonable and unemotional (century 2000 style) historical and psychological insight. Not frightened to tackle the things and dark places that other people shunned. So important, not least because, in many years to come the analysis of the whys and wherefores of the 2nd WW will be gone forever and the opportunity to understand what went wrong will be lost.
I used to get very angry when I read about some of the criticisms she received, because she was just a brave and very intelligent woman who tackled subjects that most wouldn't touch.
I hope that others are waiting in the wings.
19 June 2012 1:37PM
A great talent. The Case of Mary Bell was the first book I read after my finals, when I found myself staring at a bewildering mass of reading with no more suggested reading lists to guide me. It proved to be a great choice.
19 June 2012 2:32PM
RIP. Great writer, great books. In the case of Albert Speer, the book that had the most impact on me: so necessary to realise that the people who knew of and committed Nazi atrocities, or ignored them through self-interest, were what could be called sane, conscious, intelligent, cultured human beings. Terrifying.
19 June 2012 3:29PM
Comment of the year
19 June 2012 4:15PM
I've just today picked up a copy of "The Case of Mary Bell" from a charity shop. I shall look forward to reading it.
19 June 2012 4:32PM
Gitty Serena was certainly one of the greatest, possibly the greatet, writer i have ever read. Both Into that Darkness and Albert Speer: His battle with truth are stunning works of history and journalism, deeply unsettling for those who want bland explanations of good and evil.
Rest in Peace.
19 June 2012 5:44PM
"Albert Speer his battle with truth" one of the key books that everyone should read.
19 June 2012 6:03PM
RIP Gitta Sereny, very sad to hear this news.
'Into that Darkness' is an impressive work and her interviews with Stangl have stayed with me. In particular a chilling remark about the people sent to their deaths in Treblinka 'So you didn't feel they were human beings?' 'Cargo, ' he said tonelessly, 'they were cargo'.
In her book 'The German Trauma' she describes her feelings about Speer in more depth: "Speer had given me the gift of himself, against whom I could place, consider, deplore and mourn all those events, and all those human beings who had lived and died in my time'.
20 June 2012 1:30PM
Am very glad to see I'm not the only person on whom Gitta Sereny had a profound impact. I can't begin to describe how impressive her biography of Albert Speer is: you have to read it.
21 June 2012 12:58PM
RIP.
I saw the National Theatre's adaptation of her work on Speer, with Alex Jennings extremely powerful as the clever but ultimately terrible Nazi architect. I have since visited Camp Dora in the Hertz mountains where his V2 rockets were built (he was Minister of Armaments at the end of the war) and it is as horrific a place as any death camp was.
Her collection of essays, published in the UK as The German Trauma, is a stunning and sympathetic book that should be required reading for anyone with a residual distrust of modern Germans based on the country's Nazi period. When I saw the movie Downfall I wept at the end that an entire nation had managed to go so far down the path of evil. Sereny was the master chronicler of that psychopathology.