Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The author does a great job of understanding the reasons which lead Frank Standl to become the Kommandant of Treblinka. Frank Standl allows her to enter his soul and help him understand how he could have committed these attocious things. Through this, she also takes a look at the human soul. Was Frankl that different from anyone of us. Had it been us, would we had done the same thing?

This "in depth" study of Nazi Germany extemination techniques has few equals- written with unrivalled compassion, it thorougly examines the political and moral aspects of mass murder. It openly exposes Hitler"s criminal programs, from Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Very importantly, it uncovers Vaticans role in helping smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe after the war's end. A real "must" for everyone involved in Holocaust studies.This book will give you nightmares on end.

The author interviewed Franz Stangl and other Nazis such as Franz Suchomel, Jewish escapees from Treblinka, and a member of the Polish Underground. There are many contradictions between different accounts, which Sereny explains as follows: "This is less the result of failing memories or deliberate manipulation, than because most people now represent these events and their part in them with a view to seeming--to themselves even more than to others--what they would have liked to have been, rather than what they were. And this applies to Germans as well as Poles, Christians as well as Jews, West as well as East Europeans." (p. 171).

Polish authors have commonly been criticized for not portraying Polish Jews as Poles. But the shoe is also on the other foot. Sereny comments: "Polish Jews always refer to non-Jewish Poles as `Poles' and to themselves as `we' or `Jews'." (p. 121; see also p. 199).

To her credit, Sereny recognizes the fact that Poles had nothing to do with the German death camps built on their soil (p. 100), and that Poles faced the death penalty for the slightest form of aid to Jews (p. 117).

There were no windows in the Sobibor-bound trains (p. 122). This helps refute the myth of doomed Jews looking out and beholding throngs of indifferent or hostile Polish onlookers. (However, from other sources, one learns that some of the trains did have windows. Still, they were too small and high to look out of. In any case, the Germans would've shot any Pole who got too close to a Jew-filled death train).

There is a fascinating interview (pp. 149-156) with Franciszek Zabecki, a member of the Polish Underground who was also the traffic superintendent at the Treblinka railroad station. He points out that there was limited Underground communication between different regions of German-occupied Poland (p. 151). Consequently, the events unfolding at Treblinka were not immediately related to those at Belzec and Sobibor. (This may address David Engel's accusation of the Polish Government in exile's "tardy" report on Jewish deaths). Zabecki kept a tally of all the trains arriving at Treblinka along with the numbers written on each train. From this, he arrived at a death toll of 1.2 million (p. 250) which, if correct, would cause Treblinka to surpass Auschwitz-Birkenau as the world's largest Jewish cemetery.

Ukrainian collaborators played a central role in the operation of Sobibor (p. 122, 124) and Treblinka (e. g., p. 148, 166; see especially p. 224). Lithuanians (p. 155) and Russians (p. 164) were also involved. So were Jewish Kapos (p. 123, 158-159)--the depravity of some of whom rivaled that of the Germans and Ukrainians (p. 188).

Treblinka-escapee Berek Rojzman commented: "We got to know from people around that the Germans were sending Ukrainians who pretended to be partisans, into the woods to look for Jews." (p. 243). How often was the "Polish" participation in German posses, "Polish" killings of fugitive Jews in forests, etc., actually the work of Polish-speaking Ukrainian collaborators (not only around Treblinka, but also elsewhere in otherwise Ukrainian-free regions of Poland)?

Stangl rebuts Holocaust-uniqueness arguments (that posit that ALL Jews were targeted for extermination) when he alludes to certain deliberately-protected Mischlinge and full-blooded German Jews: "That racial business," said Stangl, "was just secondary. Otherwise, how could they have had all those `honorary Aryans'? They used to say that General Milch was a Jew, you know." (p. 232).

To the extent that the Vatican had been "silent" on Jews, it had also been "ineffectual" in its occasional statements on murdered Poles (pp. 278-279).

Not content with maintaining an exclusively Judeocentric focus, Sereny examines the planned extermination of Slavs: "Historical records in the public domain prove beyond any doubt that the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and concurrently of large numbers of Gypsies, was intended as only the first step in a gigantic programme of genocide of all so-called `inferior races' of Europe. A beginning was made both in Russia...and in Poland..." (p. 93). Treblinka-escapee Richard Glazer adds: "This is something, you know, the world has never understood; how perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans' war requirements that prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers than they did; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the 6,000,000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could have killed all the Poles, Russians, and other East Europeans the Nazis planned eventually to kill." (p. 214).

Finally, Sereny discusses Stangl's flight to Brazil. She contends that few Nazis escaping from postwar Europe benefited from the aid of conspiratorial organizations such as Odessa, whose effectiveness had been greatly exaggerated to begin with (p. 276). And, against the blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church, Sereny shows that aid to fleeing Nazis was given almost exclusively by German and Austrian clergy (pp. 285-286).