Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-2

Part 1, Chapters 3-6

Part 2

Part 3, Chapters 1-3

Part 3, Chapters 4-8

Part 3, Chapters 9-17

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6-Epilogue

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Key Figures

Gitta Sereny

The author is an Austrian-British investigative journalist and biographer best known for her extensive interviews with Mary Bell, an adolescent who killed two children, and Franz Stangl. She fled to France when she was 17 after Germany annexed Austria. There, she worked with orphans during the German occupation until she fled the country because of her connection to the French Resistance. After the war, she worked with the United Nations to reunite children kidnapped by Nazi Germany with their families.

Sereny’s shared Austrian nationality with Stangl is crucial to her book. Not only did she speak German, allowing her to develop a greater rapport with Stangl than if she needed an interpreter, but she identified his telling habit of reverting to the Austrian vernacular of his childhood when answering difficult questions. Because she grew up in Austria like Stangl, she could compare his childhood experiences with her own. For example, when Stangl explains that he joined the police during the Great Depression because he saw security in a uniformed job, Sereny remembers also feeling that there was security in a uniform.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Sereny's goal in interviewing Stangl is to plumb the depths of his conscience and understand how he could oversee the murders of 1.3 million people. Her refusal to caricature Stangl as an evil man isn’t an attempt to minimize his monstrous crimes, but rather an attempt to show how disconcertingly normal Stangl could appear to be.

Franz Stangl

The subject of the book, Franz Stangl, was the commandant of the Treblinka Nazi extermination camp. Born in Altmünster, Austria in 1908, he suffered an abusive, lonely childhood. As an adolescent he was hardworking and headstrong, pursuing his dream of becoming a weaver despite his stepfather’s opposition. At 23, he became the youngest master weaver in Austria during the Great Depression, showing that he was ambitious from a young age. He left the textile mill because he saw that it affected the health of workers not much older than him and because he didn’t see room for advancement. He entered the Austrian police, where he quickly rose through the ranks. Following the Austrian Anschluss, Stangl’s department was absorbed by the Gestapo. This was the beginning of him sacrificing his values in fear and ambition, initiating a chain of moral corruption that culminated in his role at Treblinka.

Stangl’s organizational zeal and ambition allowed him to rationalize sacrificing his morals. In Treblinka, he developed an astounding ability to compartmentalize his mind, walling off his humanity from the camp’s horrors and creating a callous alternate personality to tolerate such horrors. Stangl used his well-founded fear for his and his family’s safety as an excuse to see himself as a passive instrument of powers greater than him. It was only after he had been tried and convicted that he recognized his fear as the excuse it was and saw that working at Treblinka ended up destroying his family rather than saving it. With this excuse dead, his conscience returned and sparked his need for confession.

Against his best efforts to separate Treblinka from his wife and children, Stangl ended up implicating them in his moral corruption. In this way, he doomed both himself and his wife not to the physical death he feared if he resisted, but to the spiritual death of collaboration and complicity. Using his love for his family, which was doubtlessly genuine, as an excuse for his crimes was a tragically, disturbingly human failing with unimaginably horrific consequences.

Theresa Stangl

Theresa Stangl was Stangl’s wife, and it was more important than anything for him to keep his wife’s approval and love. Theresa had serious qualms about Stangl’s work at Treblinka, but she also liked the status her husband’s position afforded them. According to Theresa’s sister, Helene Eidenböck, Theresa was status-hungry: “Resl [the family nickname for Theresa] always wanted to get to the top […] I suppose in a way she did get there” (990).

Theresa’s ambition was a product of the entitlement she developed under her mother’s doting attention. Theresa’s mother told her that she was special and raised her accordingly, first alienating her from her siblings, then making her act superior to them. She was enamored by wealth and worked as a governess to a wealthy aristocratic family for over two years prior to her marriage.

Theresa was conflicted between her and Stangl’s ambition and her morals. She framed Stangl’s progression up the police ranks as something they had to accept but had no choice in. Despite wanting him to leave the police after he had to renounce his religion (a personal humiliation for both of them), once the war started Stangl “was given an ‘indispensable’ rating and then, of course, he had to stay.…” (114). At the end of her talks with Sereny, Theresa admits that Stangl would have chosen her over his ambition (his position at Treblinka) if she’d asked him to; despite knowing what was happening there, she, like him, chose ambition over morals.