Quotes from Gitta Sereny

he had done nothing wrong; there had always been others above him; he had never done anything but obey orders; he had never hurt a single human being.

Except for a monster, no man who actually participated in such events (rather than "merely" organized from far away) can concede guilt and yet, as the young prison officer in Düsseldorf put it, "consent to remain alive".

What is the difference to you between hate, and a contempt which results in considering people as 'cargo'?" "It has nothing to do with hate. They were so weak; they allowed everything to happen – to be done to them. They were people with whom there was no common ground, no possibility of communication – that is how contempt is born.

I am responsible only to myself and my God. Only I know what I did of my own free will.

he had finally, however briefly, faced himself and told the truth; it was a monumental effort to reach that fleeting moment when he became the man he should have been.

no man's actions can be judged in isolation from the external elements that shape and influence his life.

What Hitler taught us–to an extent greater than anyone else in history, though we would become aware of it again in Vietnam–is that a licence to kill creates a momentum which defies moral sensibility and discernment and destroys the capacity of the individual to distinguish between good and evil or, and this is perhaps even worse, to act against a recognized wrong.

As possibly no other politician in our time, Hitler understood the art of public speaking, of pauses, of silence, of inducing, inciting and inflaming passion. "I am ashamed of it now," said Speer, "but at the time, I found him deeply exciting.

on the whole the US personnel soon felt considerably more sympathy for the Germans than for their victims.

To the demoralization of the displaced persons was added with the passing of time the "amoralization" of the occupation personnel, whose black-market activities in cigarettes, medical supplies, food and transport were soon nothing short of staggering

Intelligence, of course, is not necessarily equated to morality; indeed can become perilous if applied to nefarious purposes.

I have spent a great deal of time seeking documentary evidence which would support or contradict the Stangls' story of how they, and others like them, escaped from Europe; and the real facts, it turns out, are neither dramatic nor unequivocal; they are complex, ambiguous and merely prove again that in the final analysis, history is not made by organizations, but by individual men, with individual failings, and individual responsibilities

I heard of a Bishop Hulda at the Vatican in Rome who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that's where we went.

It cannot, however, be questioned that escapers such as Stangl (and for that matter Eichmann, certainly a "bigger fish" administratively if not morally) did in the final analysis receive important assistance from two organizations which – to put it very mildly – allowed themselves to be grievously misused in aiding the escapes of individuals so dreadfully implicated: the International Red Cross, and the Vatican.

Early in 1943, when the Germans had ordered that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia be deported to Poland, one man – Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Apostolic Delegate to Turkey, later Pope John xxiii – acted without thought of political expediency or of what the Nazis might do.

As we know from Richard Glazar's story, 24,000 Bulgarians – those who had been in Salonika – did die in Treblinka in the spring of 1943; but there can be little doubt that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia were saved by the intervention of the future Pope and the courage of a king.

If one wanted to gain real understanding of Speer, one had to realize first that almost everything he did–though, as shown by some of our talks, not quite everything–had a purpose, generally directed towards his own benefit.

Yes, I still love him – I suppose. I suppose loving one's father is like living – one just does. About what he has done Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I could not even tell you – I could not find the words to tell you how terrible, how beyond everything terrible I think it is. And that it should be my father.…

There were various things which were absolutely essential to survival: it was essential to fill oneself completely with a determination to survive; it was essential to create in oneself a capacity for dissociating oneself to some extent from Treblinka; it was important not to adapt completely to it. Complete adaptation, you see, meant acceptance. And the moment one accepted, one was morally and physically lost.

I'm not happy to face it," he added, "but in the context of my life then, these workers' only significance was what they could produce towards our war effort; I didn't see or think of them as human beings, as individuals.