The woman who tried to humanise monsters: Gitta Sereny wrote brilliant books trying to explain the evil of murderers. She also helped create today's cult of victimhood
- Gitta Sereny tried to claim society was to blame for child murderer Mary Bell's crimes
- Credibility boosted by the fact she was brought up in Vienna and her heavily accented English
- Brave woman but denial of Jewish past put question mark over her career
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Controversial: Brilliant historian Gitta
Sereny's 1972 book tried to argue that society was to blame for Mary
Bell¿s crimes. In Sereny¿s opinion, the killer was simply the victim of
her childhood
She had been persuaded by writer Gitta Sereny to help promote her book about the killer schoolgirl which was called The Case Of Mary Bell.
In a hesitant performance, Bell’s mother admitted that, as a child, her daughter had witnessed her own sordid lifestyle, which included drug-taking.
Sereny believed that those awful experiences had contributed to Mary’s pathological behaviour.
Sereny, who has just died at the age of 91, was understandably pleased with her scoop.
The Mary Bell story had gripped Britain in 1968. During her trial, experts testified that she had shown no remorse or anxiety and shed no tears for her crimes.
Her lack of emotion and evidence of her previous violence towards babies and animals had staggered the court.
It was no surprise that people wanted an explanation as to why a young girl could behave in such a depraved way.
Step forward the brilliant historian Gitta Sereny, whose 1972 book tried to argue that society was to blame for Mary Bell’s crimes. In Sereny’s opinion, the killer was simply the victim of her childhood.
She recounted Bell’s uncorroborated claims that she had been sexually abused by her prostitute mother and her mother’s clients.
This led Sereny to contend this abuse was irrefutably the cause of Bell’s murderous behaviour.
Such analysis was typical of the growing cult of victimhood, which saw criminals as prisoners of their upbringing who were therefore incapable of making moral judgments.
The ‘unfortunate’ Mary Bell had become a monster because of her allegedly terrible childhood.
Mary Bell, pictured, was convicted of horrific
child murders. Bell's mother Betty admitted that, as a child, her
daughter had witnessed her own sordid lifestyle, which included
drug-taking
At the time, this view was embraced unquestionably by Britain’s increasingly liberal ruling elite. Sereny had managed to humanise a monster.
This was helped by the confessions of Mary Bell’s mother and Sereny’s description of a rigid legal system and an uncomprehending judge who — when sentencing Bell to ‘life in detention’ — said she was ‘dangerous and remained a grave risk to other children’.
Later, it was revealed Bell had been paid £50,000 for her collaboration — bringing a storm of new criticism down on Sereny’s head.
Undaunted, she remained in touch with Mary Bell throughout her 12 years in prison and at the secret address where — hiding behind a new identity — the killer subsequently enjoyed her freedom.
Sereny’s remarkable skills and her ‘pursuit of the truth’ led her to write several other studies of evil.
These included gripping biographies of two of Hitler’s henchmen, Albert Speer and Franz Stangl.
As with Mary Bell, she endeavoured to explain away their monstrous behaviour as the result of circumstances beyond their control.
New theory: Albert Speer, right, was convicted
at Nuremberg for war crimes. Sereny claimed in a novel that his
monstrous behaviour was a result of circumstances beyond his control
In 1938, soon after Hitler’s occupation of Austria, Sereny’s family fled to Paris.
Unlike most Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, she was fascinated by the perpetrators of mass murder.
One intriguing aspect of Sereny was the way she denied her Jewish roots.
When she returned to Europe from the U.S. after the war in 1945, she claimed she was a Catholic.
She angrily denied she was Jewish — a key reason why she had been forced to leave Vienna in the first place.
The truth is that on the morning of March 16, 1938 — alongside my own mother — she had been physically kicked out of Reinhardt’s school by fellow students wearing swastika armbands.
Sereny was a brave woman but the denial of her Jewish past put a question mark over her illustrious career as she sought to understand the state of the minds of the murderers who persecuted her people.
Similar: Sereny¿s credibility was boosted by the
fact she was brought up in Vienna and her heavily accented English
reminded many of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis
Like many Nazi murderers, Stangl escaped after the war to South America, where he lived until he was exposed. Extradited to Germany, he was jailed for life.
Sereny persuaded him to give her a series of interviews for a biography.
The fascinating result showed how an intelligent but unremarkable Austrian policeman had been inducted into the Nazi murder machine.
Stangl’s inhumanity was encapsulated in his admission that he regarded the hapless people who arrived daily at the death camps by train as ‘cargo’.
His horrifying insensitivity and lack of conscience was justified by a monstrous lie: ‘It was a matter of my survival.
'What I had to do to get out.’
Inspired by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann,
pictured, Sereny attended the trial in Dusseldorf of Franz Stangl, the
commander of two extermination camps
Murderers, she argued, were the products of their environment and therefore not totally responsible for their crimes.
Like Mary Bell, Stangl had lacked the ‘freedom to grow: within family, within human society as a whole.’
Stangl’s father was a ‘dragoner’ — one of the imperial elite regiments of the German army. He told Sereny: ‘Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him.’
To her credit, she recorded Stangl’s post-war confession: ‘Everything I did out of my own free will.’ But, then, she cast doubt on his self-awareness. She concluded that he was not a perpetrator of evil but a victim of his childhood.
‘A moral monster,’ she wrote, ‘is not born but is produced by interference with this growth.’
Both Mary Bell and Stangl were therefore victims of ‘a climate of life’.
This misguided obsession with the denial of personal responsibility reached a climax in her biography — critics would say hagiography — of Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer. It even led to accusations that she was a Nazi sympathiser.
Speer was the Nazi minister of armaments. It was he who presented the Fuhrer with a grandiose vision for rebuilding Berlin as a city befitting a conqueror’s Thousand Year Reich. He dramatically increased the manufacture of weapons.
This was achieved as a result of Speer’s use of prisoners of war and 7.5 million slave labourers.
Misguided: Sereny defended Hitler henchman Albert Speer. This even led to accusations that she was a Nazi sympathiser
Prosecuted at Nuremberg with other Nazi leaders, Speer brilliantly set himself apart by playing the middle-class apologist who was ignorant of Hitler’s genocide plans.
After 20 years in prison, Speer produced a manuscript — Inside The Third Reich — in which he outrageously painted himself as a conscious-stricken bystander to Nazi crimes unaware of the Final Solution.
Pandering to that cynical distortion of the truth, Sereny gained access to him and produced a biography sub-titled His Battle With Truth.
Shockingly, she depicted the thug as ‘unique among Hitler’s men in the integrity of his battle of conscience’.
Here was another killer whose crimes, for Sereny, could be explained and occasionally even excused.
Portraying him as a beguiled innocent, Sereny wrote about Speer’s ‘aesthetic perception’, ‘inner awareness’ and ‘moral guilt’ but never his calculated participation in killing.
In humanising monsters, Sereny was a major force in creating a very modern and corrosive ideology that architects of evil should not be punished but understood and even rewarded to help them atone for their sins.
Their victims are forgotten. Worse still, we are left with a society more likely — not less — to breed such monsters in the future.
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