Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Content Warning: This Chapter Summary and Analysis section references acts of genocide, racial violence, and murder that were perpetrated under the Nazi regime and that are discussed in Into That Darkness.

On April 2, 1971, Gitta Sereny meets Franz Stangl for the first time in the Düsseldorf prison where he is in solitary confinement serving a life sentence for his complicity in the murder of 900,000 people at the Treblinka extermination camp. At 63 years old, Stangl’s imposing, distinguished appearance is at odds with the small, evil man Sereny was told to expect. He talks to the warden as though they are equals, and the guards respect him for his civility which stands in stark contrast to the other prisoners. He is a chain smoker and fastidious about his appearance.

In their first session that day, Stangl dodges responsibility for his crimes with the same rationalizations he gave at his trial: He was just following orders and had never hurt anyone himself. Sereny suspects that because his case is up for appeal, Stangl is using the interview to seed doubts about the nature of his guilt. Sereny tells Stangl she didn’t come to rehear his explanations but to listen to him tell his life story, to better understand how he ended up doing what he did in Sobibor and Treblinka. After breaking for lunch so he can think, he agrees to Sereny’s proposal and begins to tell his story.

Stangl was born in Altmünster, a small town in Austria, in 1908. His father, a former military man, ruled the house in an authoritarian manner and beat Stangl, who he thought wasn’t his real son. His father died of malnutrition when he was eight and his mother remarried. Stangl’s stepfather urged him to leave school at 14 to work in a steel mill and earn money for the family; Stangl refused and stayed in school another year so he could then work at a textile factory, which was his dream.

He begins to cry when talking about these self-described happiest years of his life. He tells Sereny that only three years later, he became the youngest master weaver in Austria, learned and then taught the zither, and built a sailboat, all while giving most of his factory salary to his parents.

At 23, he quit his weaving job to escape the hazardous working conditions and lack of advancement opportunities and became a policeman. He cries with regret, sharing how he learned the owner of the textile mill planned to send him to college in Vienna, but he did not change his plans and entered the police academy instead. The instructors were sadists who drilled into the recruits their belief that everyone was a criminal.

After graduating from the academy, Stangl quickly distinguished himself. After Austrian Nazis assassinated the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934, Stangl won a commendation—the Austrian Eagle—and an assignment to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for discovering a Nazi arms cache. Stangl was transferred to Wels—“a hotbed of illegal Nazi activities” (64)—to combat illegal, anti-government activity from the Nazis, Communists, and Social Democrats.

Stangl claimed that before the Austrian Anschluss—the German annexation of Austria in March 1938—he was apolitical, preferring to spend time with his bride, Theresa. However, after the Anschluss politics became inescapable. Stangl feared for his safety after the Nazis arrested three of the five Austrians who’d also won the Eagle and executed two chiefs from Stangl’s department. To avoid a similar fate, Stangl claims he fabricated records to show that he’d been an illegal Party member since 1936.

Neither Sereny nor the Düsseldorf court can verify Stangl’s claim that he fabricated his 1936-38 Nazi membership. However, Sereny establishes that in 1938, both Stangl’s family and colleagues believed he was a voluntary, not conscripted, Nazi. This gave him higher standing under the new Nazi regime. Theresa saw his Nazi membership as a betrayal of their Catholicism, as joining the Nazi party entailed renouncing his Catholicism. Theresa does not believe that Stangl fabricated his documents and that he truly was a party member from 1936-38.

Sereny notes some psychologically telling features in Stangl’s diction. He uses the police jargon, “der war ein Strolch” (he was a villain), when referring to a whole range of groups he encountered in the police and later in the SS, including Germans, Poles, Christians, and finally, Jews (63). When answering difficult questions, Stangl reverts from his semi-formal German to the Austrian vernacular of his childhood. Sereny believes this is an unconscious move to take refuge in the comfort of childhood.

After the Anschluss, Stangl was assigned to facilitate the forced emigration of Jews. This entailed working with a Jewish man named Hirschfeld who was in charge of helping poor Jews find the money to pay the fee for their exit permits; the Nazis not only stole the property of emigrating Jews but charged an exit fee. In his own interview, Hirschfeld recalls to Sereny that Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, referred to Hirschfeld as “Jew,” but Stangl always addressed him respectfully.

In 1939, the Gestapo brought Stangl’s police division under their control, requiring Stangl and Theresa to move to Linz, Austria. Stangl hated the new chief, Georg Prohaska, a German reactionary. Stangl fought the demotion he received as a result of this transfer and secured a promotion from the higher-ups in Berlin, earning him Prohaska’s hatred. Prohaska ordered Stangl to sign an official document stating that while he was a Gottgläubiger (the Nazi term for a believer in God), he renounced the Catholic Church. Stangl claims he signed the document to protect his job and life: He was on a list of officials to be executed after the Anschluss and faced punishment for arresting a poacher who turned out to be a high-ranking Nazi Party member.

Stangl was appalled by the change in tone at the Linz police station. In Wels, the Austrian police officers “spoke like civilized people. Now, with the arrival of all these Piefkes (Austrian slang equivalent of Krauts) all one heard was the gutter language of the barracks” (80). The German officers talked with glee about torturing men Stangl had respected, such as a doctor who had been one of the police chiefs before the Anschluss. At this point in the interview, Stangl bursts out to Sereny: “I hate…I hate the Germans […] for what they pulled me into. I should have killed myself in 1938 […] That’s when it started for me. I must acknowledge my guilt” (85).