Gitta Sereny, 1921–2012

Few people have delved deeper into the dark side of humanity than Gitta Sereny. In her decades-long effort to understand why some people commit horrific crimes, she spent hundreds of hours interviewing some of the 20th century’s most reviled figures, including death camp commanders and child murderers. What she heard during those probing hours led her to believe that monsters are made, not born, and that there is no such thing as absolute evil. “I am not a great believer in black and white,” she said.

Sereny’s own background helped her understand how easily an individual can be corrupted, said The New York Times. Born in Vienna to a Hungarian landowner and his actress wife, the young Sereny was mesmerized by Hitler. She later admitted screaming “Heil!” with the crowd at his 1934 Nuremberg rally. But she soon became aware of the depravity behind the pageantry, said the Financial Times. She helped the French Resistance in Paris during World War II, and after the war she worked with the United Nations to reunite child survivors of the Dachau concentration camp with their families.

After settling in London with her American husband, Sereny started working as a journalist. She came to prominence in 1968 when she covered the case of 11-year-old Mary Bell, who killed two younger boys and mutilated their bodies, and who, Sereny established, had been sexually tortured as a child. In 1970 Sereny spent 70 hours in a West German prison interviewing Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, where nearly 1 million people died, said The Washington Post. Her 1974 book Into That Darkness chronicled Stangl’s journey from abused child to mass murderer.

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The success of that book led her to profile Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect and a senior Nazi minister. In her 1995 book Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Sereny wrote that the former Nazi had been in love with Hitler, whom he saw as a father figure. The author acknowledged that she grew to like Speer, which led to accusations that she was overly sympathetic to her interviewees. “I do have to identify with my subjects,” she admitted. “I have to feel what they feel in order to understand. That does not mean I condone their actions.”