Into the Darkness (Darkness #1)

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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. She returned to Paris four months after the war ended, to join the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working with orphans in a ravaged Europe. The framework of what was to be her life's work – the exploration of childhood trauma and the nature of evil – was in place. It was in postwar Paris, in 1948, that she met and married the photographer Don Honeyman, with whom she was to have a son and a daughter. Don, who died last year, was to prove a good humoured and profoundly supportive companion who accompanied Gitta through the long and painstaking research that became a hallmark of her work. The author directs her efforts at investigating the personality of Franz Stangl with whom she spoke in Düsseldorf prison where he was awaiting the result of his appeal against a life sentence.

Into The Darkness: A Mystery Thriller (Mitch Tanner Book 2)

Into The Dark is what I look for in any dark romance. Pushed my boundaries and delivered a phenomenal book. I highly recommend it to all my dark romance readers. After the war Stangl managed to escape to Brazil where he lived under his own name. He was found by Wiesenthal - the famous Nazi hunter - in 1967. He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face. THIS AUTHOR PLAGIARIZED A VICTIM OF SA's STORY AND GLAMOURIZED IT WHILE ALSO USING HIM AS THE NARRATOR OF SAID STORY 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.

Into the Darkness

Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. Hers was not a happy childhood. She was born in Vienna, the daughter of a beautiful Austrian actress, whom she later described as "without moral opinions", and a wealthy Hungarian landowner. Her father, Gyula, died when she was a child; her elder brother left home at 18 and disappeared from her life; Gitta herself was sent to Stonar House boarding school in Sandwich, Kent, an experience she remembered with some affection. All who lived within a few miles of the death camps knew what was going on. There were the trains and the smells. The people who worked the trains across Poland and throughout Europe, saw and heard the crowded and anguishing railroad cars filled with the starving and dying. 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 the Darkness | The Darkness Series | Author K.F. Breene Into the Darkness | The Darkness Series | Author K.F. Breene

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. A questo proposito, Sereny mette a confronto i racconti e i ricordi di Richard Glazer, ebreo cèco, sopravvissuto a Treblinka, proprio con quelli del personaggio principale del suo studio: i primi lucidi, dettagliati, privi di retorica, elaborati, pregnanti – l’altro, invece, si contraddice, cambia versione, indora la pillola, a se stesso e all’ascoltatrice. Perhaps the definition of a worthy book about the Holocaust is that it leaves you asking more questions than it answers. That, ultimately, it is unsatisfactory. Satisfaction, after all, allows one to move on.

Many of the people who went on to work in the death camps got their start in the euthanasia program. Psychologically, they were inured to the idea of murdering innocent people as being their job. Pressure was exerted from above to keep officers and guards in their places. Stangl was moved from Hartheim to Sobibor, where he made the leap from running a euthanasia clinic to a death camp. One of the most fascinating aspects to me was that there were certain moments when Stangl could have refused to cooperate without sacrificing himself or his family. He chose not to do that, but rather to go along with the program. She also reported on the trials in Germany of Third Reich functionaries, including concentration camp staff, such as Franz Stangl, the former commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka. . Her book on Stangl, Into That Darkness (1974), remains one of the best books on the Third Reich and established Gitta's reputation as an authority on the history of the period. How did Phoebe Handsjuk fall to her death? In Into the Darkness, Robin Bowles uses her formidable array of investigative and forensic skills to tell a tale that is stranger than fiction.

Into the Dark by Dana Isaly | Goodreads Into the Dark by Dana Isaly | Goodreads

When I started Into the Dark i was very aware of every triggers and I knew that there wouldn’t have been an HEA. Non conoscevo il caso Stangl in particolare - ha ovviamente qualcosa in comune col ben più famoso processo ad Eichmann - nè che effettivamente fosse stato l'unico comandante di campo di sterminio catturato vivo e processato. 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.I don't want to keep writing obituaries, but I have to say something here. Gitta Sereny died this week at the age of 91, she was another hero of mine. She was an intellectually tough woman who spent a good part of her long life staring evil right in the eyes - take a look at her main books : Thirteen years would pass before the outside world found out that Tazmamart existed. It would take another five years of international campaigning to shut it down. There were only 28 survivors. By 1991, most had lost up to a foot in height. Survivors were warned not to talk to the western press, but in Tahar Ben Jelloun the authorities have an enemy more formidable than 1,000 foreign journalists. Novelist, essayist, critic and poet, winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt and the 1994 Prix Maghreb, Jelloun was born in Fez in 1944 and emigrated to France in 1961. This Blinding Absence of Light, for which he and his excellent translator have won this year's Impac prize, is based on the testimony of a former inmate of Tazmamart, and it defies any expectations you might have built up from the story above. It refuses the well-meaning but tired and ultimately dehumanising conventions of human rights horror journalism; it is not a political tract. Sereny however, who was, after all, there in the room with Stangl, suggests that something had fundamentally changed in him during the course of the interviews: 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. This is a dark taboo story about a couple, not a romance because it doesn't have a HEA. Having read the author's disclaimer and trigger warning I was ready to feed off the toxicity of this couple and the author definitely delivered the toxicity. He stalks her with the intention of killing her but ends up obsessed with her and that's how their story begins. I like how he's not likeable at all and the author does not shy away from how ridiculous he is but rather leans on that and also how he's not redeemable at all! He isn't morally gray, he's downright evil! Also how she is very mentally ill and they're just trauma bonding and finding that something that makes them feel safe enough to share their true selves. While it's not a romance you can definitely see how their characters change due to their relationship and how they'll do literally anything just so they can be the center of each other's world. I could appreciate what was conveyed in the story which is why I gave it 2 stars but I really didn't care for them as individuals or as a couple.

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

This is the language of Islamic mysticism. Salim is not religious when he arrives in Tazmamart, but his situation is the real version of the spiritual hell that Islamic mystics describe in metaphor. He escapes from his torments by following in their footsteps, imagining his way as far into his mind as his slowly decaying body will allow. He knows his reverie is over when he can smell the stench. 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.

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. 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.” She does succeed in exposing some of his inner demons. She also spoke extensively to his wife who came to know through a third party (another SS man) what was really going on at Sobibor. His wife never went to the death camps, they would see each other at a villa, miles from the camps.