Gitta Sereny – författare

Vem var Albert Speer? Trots hans memoarer, dagböcker, intervjuer och vittnesmål har åsikterna gått isär. Han var en av få högutbildade i kretsen kring Hitler, ofta utpekad som führerns särskilda favorit. Mot slutet av kriget var han Tysklands näst mäktigaste man och bidrog till att förlänga plågorna genom att in i det sista pumpa in resurser i krigsekonomin. Som en av få dömda i Nürnberg tycktes han visa ånger över kriget och förintelsen, och för somliga blev han ”den gode nazisten” som efterkrigstidens Tyskland så innerligt behövde för sitt samvetes skull.

Ingen har trängt djupare in i gåtan Albert Speer än Gitta Sereny. Hennes mästerverk Albert Speer och sanningen är resultatet av tolv års research, inte minst intervjuer med Speer själv. Boken är på samma gång en välberättad historik över Tredje rikets uppgång och fall, en biografi med psykologisk fingerspetskänsla och ett mästerprov i historieforskning.

Denna nyutgåva har kompletterats med ett nyskrivet förord av historikern och författaren Tobias Berglund.

”Ett mästarprov i historisk och inkvisitorisk teknik” Telegraph

”En omistlig upplevelse, som bättre än någon annan bok visar hur nazisteliten fungerade … De personer som vi föredragit betrakta som själlösa maskiner återbördas sina känsloliv.” Financial Times

Renowned journalist and biographer Gitta Sereny covered the Mary Bell case in the 1960s and wrote about it at the time. Mary, then eleven, was charged and subsequently convicted of the manslaughter of two younger boys. Following Mary's release on licence, and in collaboration with her, Sereny provides a thought-provoking biography of someone who was considered to have committed an evil crime of unparalleled horror. She brilliantly delves into the mind of this complex and damaged human being and reveals how little was done to investigate Mary's own troubled circumstances. A powerfully disturbing book, it will resonate with all who read it.

Gitta Sereny is one of the world's most respected journalists and historians. This book gathers together the best of her writing on Germany from over sixty years. It amounts to an extraordinary portrait of the country and its people, how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectively and in specific instances - and how the burden of their guilt has altered the national identity. She writes about key individuals - Stangl, Speer - and the questions which their lives raise. Thepenetration and conviction of her writing throughout is startling and she constantly reminds us why it is important to consider the questions she addresses - war guilt, holocaust denial and the temptations of obedience.

‘A masterpiece . . . a contribution to the effort of recuperation of human dignity at the end of this atrocious century . . . This is the account Joan of Arc would have given if she had been charged with interrogating Faust’ John Banville, Observer‘A remarkable new biography – arguably the most important and certainly the most fascinating book about the Nazi era published in the last ten years . . . Gitta Sereny has written a masterpiece’ Robert Harris, Sunday Times‘An essential experience that conveys like no other book the qualities of the Nazi elite . . . restoring emotion to people we would prefer to regard as soulless machines’ David Cesarini, Financial Times ‘A masterpiece of historical and inquisitorial technique, enables us to understand the ablest, most articulate, and most ambiguous of Hitler’s ministers’ Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

One of the most vivid explorations ever of the legacy of Nazism in Germany. No person has examined the lingering evil of Nazism more deeply than Gitta Sereny. As much a work of autobiography as a work of journalism, The Healing Wound spans over sixty years of Sereny's investigations into the darker side of history, from her first encounter with the Nazis at a Nuremberg rally in 1934 at age eleven to her chilling interviews with the highest Nazi officials. The Healing Wound combines political statement with the haunting personal memories of one of the twentieth century's most relentless witnesses.

In December 1968 two girls who lived next door to each other - Mary, aged eleven, and Norma, thirteen - stood before a criminal court in Newcastle, accused of strangling two little boys; Martin Brown, four years old, and Brian Howe, three. Norma was acquitted. Mary Bell, the younger but infinitely more sophisticated and cooler of the two, was found guilty of manslaughter. She evaded being branded as a murderer due to what the court ruled as 'diminished responsibility', but she was sentenced to 'detention' for life. Step by step, Gitta Sereny pieces together a gripping and rare study of a horrifying crime; the murders, the events surrounding them, the alternately bizzare and nonchalant behaviour of the two girls, their brazen offers to help the distraught families of the dead boys, the police work that led to their apprehension, and finally the trial itself. What emerges from this extraorindary case is the inability of society to anticipate such events and to take adequate steps once disaster has struck.

The biography of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp - a classic and utterly compelling study of evilOnly four men commanded Nazi extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps. Franz Stangl was one of the. Gitta Sereny's investigation of this man's mind, and of the influences which shaped him, has become a classic. Stangl commanded Treblinka and was found guilty of co-responsibility for the slaughter there of at least 900, 000 people. Sereny, after weeks of talk with him and months of further research, shows us this man as he saw himself, and 'as he was seen by many others, including his wife. To horrify is not Sereny's aim, though horror is inevitable. She is seeking an answer to the question which beggars reason: How were human beings turned into instruments of such overwhelming evil?Gitta Sereny is of Hungarian-Austrian extraction and is trilingual in English, French and German. During the Second World War she became a social worker, caring for war-damaged children in France. She gave hundreds of lectures in schools and colleges in America and, when the war ended, she worked as a Child Welfare Officer in UNRRA displaced persons' camps in Germany. In 1949 she married the American Vogue photographer Don Honeyman and settled in London, where they brought up a son and a daughter and where she began her career as a journalist.Her journalistic work was of great variety but focussed particularly on the Third Reich and troubled children. She wrote mainly for the Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times, The Times, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday Review. She also contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines around the world. Her books include: The Medallion, a novel; The Invisible Children, on child prostitution; Into That Darkness; and a biographical examination of Albert Speer. Gitta Sereny died in June 2012