Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

“‘They laughed and said, ‘He pissed all over himself.’’ He turned back to me. ‘Imagine, Dr Berlinger. I hate…I hate the Germans,’ he suddenly burst out with passion, ‘for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938.’ There was nothing maudlin about the way this was said; he was merely stating a fact. ‘That’s when it started for me. I must acknowledge my guilt.’”

In this early stage of their talks, this is one of only two times Stangl mentions his guilt. He views his corruption as an incremental process beginning there in 1938, when he didn’t stand up to the Gestapo men for torturing the former chief of his Austrian police department. In Stangl’s mind, this was the first time he betrayed his values. Even when talking of his guilt here, Stangl still blames something else (“the Germans”) for his corruption.

“Can any man—or his deeds—be understood in isolation from his childhood, his youth and manhood, from the people who loved or didn’t love him, and from the people he loved or needed?”

This is Sereny’s mission statement for Into That Darkness: She is interested in all of Stangl, not just his crimes. This mission statement is an important counterbalance to her emphasis on the primacy of the individual and individual responsibility. A monster is not born; a monster is formed.

“‘You betrayed me with these swine, these gangsters,’ I told him. ‘You who I thought an honourable man, working for his country.’”

Theresa Stangl’s response to discovering her husband had been a secret Nazi member for years (though he maintains that he fabricated that record) is important in the history of their relationship because it informed Stangl how she would react to the increasing immorality of his work. Subsequently, Stangl kept his work as secret as possible from Theresa, anticipating her condemnation should she learn about anything he did.

“Here was a Catholic nun, a Mother Superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then, to doubt what was being done?”

Sereny is unable to verify Stangl’s story about visiting a Catholic institution for the disabled during his time at Hartheim, so this story about three clergy members approving of euthanasia might be a fabrication or manipulation of Stangl’s. Regardless, the story expresses the moral environment Stangl found himself in at Hartheim. He was surrounded by doctors and nurses who were supposedly there to ensure that only incurable people were euthanize, and euthanized people themselves. This lent a veneer of credibility to the operation, making it easier for Stangl to convince himself of its morality.

“‘Well of course terrible, awful,’ she said. ‘We had nothing against Jews. I used to go to school with Jews.’

Frau Allers, the wife of Dieter Allers—a lawyer who helped to conceal the true nature of the T4 euthanasia program, expresses an oft-heard phrase among Germans Sereny interviewed: that the Holocaust was “of course, terrible.” Like many of the other Germans with Nazi pasts, Frau Allers is anxious to show that she isn’t antisemitic. By decrying the hate that drove the Holocaust, Frau Allers tries to distance herself from it. Her perfunctory statement, almost comic in its understatement and insincerity about the Holocaust, belies her self-proclaimed tolerance of Jews.

“To achieve the extermination of these millions of men, women and children, the Nazis committed not only physical but spiritual murder: on those they killed, on those who did the killing, on those who knew the killing was being done, and also, to some extent, for evermore, on all of us, who were alive and thinking beings at that time.”

The Holocaust was an assault on humanity. It wasn’t just the murder of countless Jews, but the systematic, industrial way in which the Nazis murdered was an assault on humanity. Sereny’s interviews with both guards and survivors of Treblinka reveal that the camps dehumanized those who weren’t immediately killed and those who did the killing.

“‘He said that any Jews who didn’t work properly here would be ‘eliminated.’ ‘If any of you don’t like that,’ he said to us, ‘you can leave. But under the earth,’—that was his idea of being humorous—‘not over it.’”

Christian Wirth, speaking here to the SS men at Sobibor during its construction, was by all accounts a hateful sadist. While other Nazis heading Aktion Reinhardt used subtler psychological methods to ensure compliance, Wirth relied on terror. Wirth’s comment here shows the role of fear in enforcing compliance among the SS officers who staffed the camps.

“I said [to Wirth] I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I simply wasn’t up to such an assignment.”

Stangl claims that Wirth summoned him to Belzec, which was already functioning as an extermination camp, to inform him of the true nature of Sobibor. Wirth told him this in front of a pit full of thousands of decomposing corpses. This is an example of the shock tactic the Holocaust’s architects used to force compliance in the men who would carry out these horrors. While Stangl claims that he initially refused the assignment, he continued construction when he returned to Sobibor. This indicates either that Stangl lied about his refusal to Sereny, or that he just needed time to convince himself as Wirth and Globocnik may have suspected.

“He is fine; don’t worry about him: just do your work.”

Stangl’s friendly relationship with Stanislaw Szmajzner, a 14-year-old whose gold-smithing ability he admired, reveals the double consciousness he maintained to separate himself from the camp’s horrors. In the back of his mind, he doubtlessly knew Szmajzner’s father’s fate, but it was crucial to his wellbeing and his sense of morality that he pretend both to himself and Szmajzner that his father was alive.

“No, he had me flat: I was a prisoner.”

Stangl’s fabricated story about Globocnik threatening his family to force him to accept his assignment to Treblinka shows how it’s important to Stangl to see himself as a victim who had no choice but to act as he did. His belief that others forced him into his crimes is crucial in his avoidance of guilt. He is loath to admit he let fear overtake his ability to choose.

“All the time—after the very first days—this odour, this dark foggy cloud that hung over us, that covered the sky in that hot and beautiful summer, even on the most brilliant days—not a rain-cloud promising relief from the heat, but an almost sulphuric darkness bringing with it this pestilential smell.”

Franciszek Zabecki, a Polish partisan who worked undercover at the Treblinka village railway station, recounts the way the camp poisoned its surroundings. His description indicates the psychological toll the camp’s atmosphere had on those around it, supporting Sereny’s argument that the camp inflicted a sort of spiritual death; its hellish atmosphere smothered life.

“There were what looked like hundreds of them—just lying there—they’d obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive…that too, looked as if it had been there for days.”

Stangl’s account of his arrival to the then-disorganized Treblinka shows the complete lack of dignity afforded to the Jews even after death. Leaving bodies to rot in the sun and leaving people crammed into cattle cars for days were two of many examples of the Nazis’ limitless cruelty and disregard for human dignity. It’s telling that this sight affected even Stangl, who had by then already seen the horrors of Belzec.

“He was telling the truth as he had seen it twenty-nine years ago and still saw it in 1971, and in so doing he voluntarily but unwittingly told more than the truth: he revealed the two men he had become in order to survive.”

Stangl describes his time at Treblinka with detached callousness. This is the second self needed to survive the camp that Sereny references earlier. This capacity to become inured to worst suffering imaginable is one of the most disturbing aspects of her portrait of Stangl because it shows how far someone can be corrupted, and corrupt themselves, from their original morality.

“Most of them seemed to hate and despise each other and do anything—almost anything—to ‘get at’ each other.”

Richard Glazar illuminates the antagonism between the SS men. The men likely saw in the others the cruel, callous men they themselves had become. In clashing, they lashed out at their self-image. Glazar’s account again supports Sereny’s idea that Nazi death camps dehumanized even those working them, injecting them with a hatred and cruelty antithetical to life.

“Secrecy? Good heavens, there was no secrecy about Treblinka.”

The Nazis tried to make the extermination camps in Poland secret: they located them in remote areas and camouflaged their fences with pine boughs to hide what was inside. These efforts failed: Not only was it impossible to mask the smell, which could travel for dozens of miles, but people wanted to trade for plundered valuables. There was almost no need for secrecy: fear and the enticing prospect of trading food for valuables with prisoners or guards was enough to keep the Polish population silent.

“The work-Jew slaves hated their jailer-masters from the depth of their souls. And yet—and this is probably the most complex aspect of these awful events—as time went on, a terrifying kind of link developed between them.”

The Holocaust’s architects acutely understood the psychology of imprisoned people and of the cultural differences between Eastern and Western European Jews. They exploited this understanding to manufacture compliance in those Jews they spared for work. The Western European Jews forced to work Treblinka spent more time with the German and Austrian SS than the Eastern European Jews arriving on the transports. The familiarity between prisoner and guard that developed as a result, coupled with the lack of connection between Eastern and Western European Jewry, amplified the psychological distance between the work-Jews and those on the incoming transports.

“…I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes…which looked at me…not knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.”

In Brazil, the sight of penned cattle reminded Stangl of the prisoners in Treblinka. Ironically, it was the sight of animals, not people, that shocked him into realizing the reality of Treblinka. His reaction to this sight—becoming a vegetarian—indicates a suppressed disgust with the treatment of prisoners in Treblinka.

“‘Cargo,’ he said tonelessly. ‘They were cargo.’ He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair.”

The two poles of Stangl’s personality collide in his description and reflection of how he saw prisoners in Treblinka. His toneless response indicates the degree of dissociation necessary to seeing people as “cargo.” Directly after this description, his gesture of despair reveals that he didn’t truly think that the prisoners were cargo, but only convinced himself that they were.

“We aren’t human beings any more.… It was something we had ceased to—or never did—think about.”

After the lead organizer of the prisoner revolt was sent to work in the extermination section of Treblinka, Glazar and the others planning the revolt experienced a crisis. Without the hope of a revolt, there was nothing to insulate them against the harsh reality of their situation. Not only was the camp dehumanizing, its ceaseless pace exhausted the ability to even recognize, and mourn, this dehumanization.

“It has nothing to do with hate. They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen—to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication—that is how contempt is born. I could never understand how they could just give in as they did. Quite recently I read a book about lemmings, who every five or six years just wander into the sea and die; that made me think of Treblinka.”

In Stangl, contempt functions in the same way as hate in that it makes him blame the prisoners for their deaths. Extermination camps were the result of Holocaust architects’ virulent antisemitism; however, this hatred wasn’t necessary to the camps’ function. Instead, the conditions designed to dehumanize and pacify the prisoners manufactured contempt in the guards, who came to resent the weakness their actions and the setup of the camp had been carefully designed to inflict.

“No money came from the Vatican. The Vatican has no money for such purposes. You have no idea how limited the Vatican’s resources really are.”

None of the clergy members’ excuses are as absurd as this one offered by Father Schneider. In response to Sereny’s questions and accusations about the Vatican funding Nazi escapes from Europe after World War II. Schneider hews to the tactic of “lying big” and sticking to that lie, no matter how ridiculous it becomes. This tactic hedges on the goodwill of the person being lied to: “Surely,” that person thinks, “no one could lie in such a ridiculous a way.” Common sense and historical record reveal this as the audacious lie that it is.

“‘If my thinking—as I know now,’ she said, ‘was illogical, then it was because that was how I wanted, how I needed, how I had to think in order to maintain our life as a family and, if you like—for I know this also now—my sanity.’”

In her final talks with Sereny, Theresa reveals that beneath of her evasions and rationalizations, she is capable of adept self-reflection. She understands her reason for rationalizing Stangl’s role at Treblinka: she depended on the love of the man co-responsible for murdering 900,000 people. This reason is tragic in its humanity and terrifying in its depravity. 

“For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. ‘But I was there,’ he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. ‘So yes,’ he said finally, very quietly, ‘in reality I share the guilt.’

Stangl’s conversations with Sereny often resemble an internal monologue between his rationalizations and his suppressed conscience (brought out by Sereny). For Stangl, talking with Sereny is a process of unburying his conscience, where she functions more as therapist than interrogator or judge. This process culminates in this moment at the end of their more than 70 hours of conversation: The first and only time that Stangl admits his guilt over his role at Treblinka.