19 Jun 2012 22:59:37
Gitta Sereny, the veteran journalist whose unflinching studies of some of modern history's most reviled figures attempted to make sense of their crimes, has died. She was 91.
Sereny attracted praise and criticism for her profiles of senior Nazis and child murderers but was universally acknowledged as among the most tenacious interrogators of her generation.
"She was an enormously spirited person, extraordinarily brave and very, very determined," said Stuart Proffitt, her publisher at Penguin Press.
"She wasn't afraid to ask questions that took her to places other people didn't want to go, and wasn't afraid either if the answers were unfashionable or shocking. In the two main areas of her interest – Nazi Germany and the lives of children in extreme situations – she was able to go further than almost everyone else in her psychological penetration."
Sereny's in-depth explorations included studies of the Nazi architect Albert Speer and the boys convicted for the murder of James Bulger. Her relationships with her subjects, built up over scores of hours of interviews, often proved controversial. She was criticised for her decision to pay the child killer Mary Bell for her co-operation in producing a book about her crimes, and faced accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser after publication of her work on Speer.
Born in Vienna to Hungarian aristocracy, Sereny came to journalism after serving as a nurse in France during the second world war and working with survivors of the Holocaust in its aftermath.
She earned a reputation for doggedness while undertaking assignments for newspapers and magazines, but rose to prominence after covering the 1960s and 70s trials of Nazi concentration camp personnel.
Sereny was drawn to her subject partly because of her experiences in pre-war Vienna. As an adolescent she had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and attended a speech by Adolf Hitler.
In 1974 she won praise for Into That Darkness, a book that used extensive interviews with concentration camp commander Franz Stangl, blamed for the deaths of 900,000 people, to explain the thinking behind Nazi atrocities.
Though it attracted controversy because of the payments to Bell, her second book, Cries Unheard, published in 1994, was later acclaimed for its insight into problem children.
In 1995 she was accused of losing objectivity after befriending Speer to study him. Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth was, however, notable for eliciting confessions about the architect's early support for Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews.
In 1996, Sereny's determination to forensically examine the Nazis' legacy provoked David Irving, the British historian and Holocaust denier, to bring a libel case against Sereny and the Observer over an article that accused him of falsifying historical records. The case was eventually dropped.
While she was said to have been emotionally affected by her subject matter, Sereny was able to distance herself from the dark corners of humanity she explored, according to Proffitt.
"For someone who spent a long time staring at evil in various manifestations, she had a great capacity to enjoy life and live it to the full," he said.
Proffitt said Sereny, who died last week at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge after a long illness, had been working on new material prior to her death. He said what was intended to have been a history of Vienna had become an autobiography of the writer, but the book was too incomplete to be published.
Sereny's death comes a year after that of her husband, the photographer Don Honeyman.
