In spite of this, it was important for Sereny to separate her emotions, outrage, and disgust of the events, from her desire to obtain a clear view of Stangl’s motivations and justification for participating at that time (p. There are obvious moral difficulties in allowing any situation or external pressure to be used as sufficient justification for an individual to willingly participate in such a horrific genocide as the Holocaust. Throughout Into That Darkness, Gitta Sereny confronts Stangl’s work ethic, and justifications which eventually bring him face to face with his guilt, only days before his death. His justification: the perception that he would be punished for disobeying, and his self-imposed pressure to perform. What was Franz Stangl’s motivation? How could he justify such atrocities? Stangl’s motivation was not the complete genocide of the Jews, but that their murder was merely a task he was required to perform to the best of his ability. In interviewing Stangl, Sereny sought to understand not only why he participated, but what events, people, and conditions, surrounded Stangl which led him from a weavers shop in Austria to the gas chambers of Poland. As Sereny points out, the events of one’s life do not happen in a vacuum but are formed by the external elements which surround them (p. Questions will always remain about what brought about such horrific atrocities, and what prompted such seemingly normal people such as Stangl, to willingly participate. ![]() The Holocaust was a tragic reminder of the moral frailty of humanity when given the ideal opportunity to act out their innermost evil desires. Stangl’s roles at Treblinka and Sobibor make him one of the most deeply implicated figures of the Holocaust. As an extermination camp Kommandant, Stangl oversaw the murder of an estimated 850,000 people, approximately 800,000 of which were Jews. ![]() During his rise up the ranks of the SS, Stangl was involved in the T4 Euthanasia program, an aggressive effort to cleanse the Germanic population of undesirable hereditary traits and diseases. Prior to his posting at Treblinka he was the Kommandant of the extermination camp at Sobibor for a short period of time. ![]() Stangl was the Kommandant of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka from September 1942 until shortly after the camp was destroyed in a revolt, in the summer of 1943. In 1971, Gitta Sereny, a historian, successful journalist, and biographer interviewed Franz Stangl.
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