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I have just finished reading the story in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet go hunting. It was therapy. Necessary. Because before that, I had read a book I had long been wanting to read and finally managed: Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny. [1]

The subject of Into That Darkness is Franz Stangl, the commandant of the infamous, incomprehensible, Nazi extermination camp, Treblinka. I entered the book because I share with Sereny a deep desire to understand the slide into evil in its worst human manifestations.

How does a man like Stangl take his briefcase to work, oversee the extermination of several thousand of his fellow human beings before lunch, do the necessary paperwork in the afternoon, then take his briefcase home and settle into the evenings? Is there something to learn from this?

The hapless Jews arrived on trains daily, and within two hours, the daily thousands would be dead — gassed — and their bodies stacked on pyres to be burned. The accepted total is around 900,000. According to the calculations of the stationmaster who logged each train, the number was closer to 1.2 million.

How does a genuinely loving husband and father work to organise the slaughter of his fellow humans by the trainload, day after day, and justify his actions? [2]

Sereny’s interviews spanned the globe from Brazil — Stangl’s wife and several former colleagues — to parts of Europe and the USA where survivors and lesser Nazi functionaries were to be found.

Stangl, then in prison, began the three-week series of interviews with the cliched responses of only doing his duty and obeying orders. He declared his conscience to be clear insofar as he personally never hurt anyone.

On one occasion in the camps, one of the few Jews recruited to help with the practical tasks of the camp came to Stangl to plead for his father who was to be gassed that day. It was his father’s birthday.

Stangl permitted the son to give his father a good meal and leave him alive for his birthday. The following morning, the father was gassed, and his body incinerated. Didn’t that demonstrate compassion?

Ablaze with Incongruities

It is a compelling written documentary of the descent of a man into the almost infinite darkness of the greatest mass murder event in history. Sereny compels us to consider the darkest incongruities between Stangl the mass murderer and Stangl the loving husband and father.

And of his wife, knowing but not wanting to know. After the family had escaped Germany at the end of the war and settled in Brazil, Frau Stangl said that she “knew all those people had died”, but she just wanted to get on with a normal life.

After decades of denials and the weaving in and out of some sort of responsibility throughout the interviews, the crunch time came. The final minutes of the interviews, having just claimed again that he hurt no one, Sereny sat in front of Stangl in absolute silence. At length, Stangl gripped the table in both hands, his whole body sagged, and he cried out, “My guilt… my guilt… I should have died.”

Nineteen hours after that final interview, he had died. His heart gave out. Was it finally that his eyes were opened, the walls of detachment he had built around himself collapsed, and a surge of true horror overwhelmed his physiology, making his heart give out?

Despite what might have taken place in his mind at the end, Stangl remains part of the larger question: how does a cultured society descend into such utterly incomprehensible brutality?

In a broader work, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote Hitler’s Willing Executioners,[3] in which he opened to view the horrors into which the land of Beethoven, Brahms, and Handel sank. Not just at the level of the Gestapo and the SS hotheads, but at the level of the fathers, grandfathers and uncles who were neither drafted nor army volunteers.

He describes their campaigns as civilian police battalions murdering their way through the towns and villages of Germany, entering homes, hospitals and synagogues slaughtering Jews in the hundreds of thousands, men, women, and children, the young and the aged. Perhaps totalling millions. Many shot, many beaten to death in the streets, all utterly without mercy. He describes the wives setting up refreshment tables for the men so they could have a break before getting back to their “work” of slaughter.

A Metaphor for Our Time?

No one can hold the current generation accountable for those atrocities. I assure you, I do not! Each person, each generation, is its own expression of its values and conscience.

But we can learn from Stangl as an individual, and from the German civilian police battalions as a mob. Hence the interest I share with Gitta Sereny.

We are right now facing a massive rise in antisemitism in the West. We have mobs in the streets currently shouting for the death of Jews and the utter destruction of the Jewish state.

And in other, non-Jewish arenas of society, we have the “murder” of reputations and careers as men and women with an opinion contrary to the newly minted social narratives are publicly brutalised in social and, at times, mainstream media. Parents arrested for shielding their children from militant gender ideology.

So, are we in danger of the slide we witnessed in Germany last century? Does what we saw of murder, looting and burning in the USA as the Black Lives Matter movement begin to replicate the brutality of Germany’s infamous Kristallnacht? Is a society-wide version of Lord of the Flies an emerging possibility?

Germany’s acceptance of wholesale murder as a political tool had its roots in antisemitism of the late 1800s, when it has been estimated there were at least 2000 antisemitic publications and journals doing the rounds. ‘The Jewish problem’ was a phrase taking root within society.

It took just a few decades before ‘the Jewish problem’ had to be solved, and the trains were rolling into Treblinka, where Franz Stangl would arrive at work, check that everything and everyone was working and in place, and then greet the arrival of the next few thousand men, women, and children.

Believing they were going to have a shower, they entered the extermination chambers. If reticent, having heard the rumours, they were brutally shoved in. By lunchtime, the screaming had stopped. They were piles of ash and billowing smoke.

If we can understand how German society got there, we might be able to understand if or where we are on that slippery slope.

Hidden Depths

Back to Winnie-the-Pooh. Having read several tomes on that dark and distressing subject, I found Winnie-the-Pooh to be restorative. Don’t think me flippant. It is a matter of recognising the existence of conflicting human capacities.

At one end are the horrors described above, at the other the love of a father, the beauty of language, the utter joy of childhood and the delight of finding humour in the ordinariness of a little boy and his fluffy toys.

Winnie-the-Pooh is just an example, but in the time between the two great wars, in the 1920s, humour and beauty ran side by side through humanity with the emerging, absolutely evil ideology and practices of the Third Reich. It is the coexistence of the remnant of the good things of the image of God and the distortion of the Fall.

The ancient Jewish poet wrote, “The inward mind and heart of a man are deep!” [4] One of their prophets wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” [5] Yes, there is good in society, a legacy of the image of God, creative and charitable as we were meant to be.

But, so too, is there evil and, as with Stangl, the good and the evil seem to be able to sit side by side. A family man, loving his wife and children, going on picnics and holidays and at the same time overseeing the gassing of a million fellow humans, using his management skills to make sure it was done efficiently.

If Stangl is in any way a symbolic representation of a conflicted society, then surely what is needed is not more law or better law, but transformation of what lies buried deep within the human heart. As those depths are becoming more evident in the West, the promise of God remains the only solution: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.” [6]

Yes, please!

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[1] Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. Gitta Sereny, New York, 1974.

[2] It must be said that a number of times in the interviews, Stangl described his earnest and even desperate desire to get out of the situation he was in. But it must also be said that there were no recriminations for Nazi men who said they could not perform the killing tasks. Nazi policy was that a man would be transferred without loss of position or fear of retribution. Sereny addresses this point several times in the interviews. Stangl’s responses vary.

[3] Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, pub Alfred A Knopf, Inc 1996.

[4] Psalm 64:6

[5] Jeremiah 17:9

[6] Ezekiel 36:26

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Image courtesy of Andrea Piacquadio.