These elements drove the author to investigate what she describes as the serious interdependence of every action of humans. She takes it to another level as the title suggests, by examining the “darkness” of “human conscience” that becomes exposed from the event. The uniqueness of Sereney’s work derives from the fact that she does not merely focus her theme on the genocide or the cruelty meted out to the Jewish in the concentration camps, like other works of the same genre. Stangl, the perpetrator of such violence, however, realizes his guilt and expresses his repentance to the author towards the end of the interview and subsequently dies of heart failure a few hours later. The author describes the derivation of evil as a greatest mystery that can happen to the human kind and expresses her frustration about the use of religion to gain political mileage. Thus, the theme of the work transcends past the mere concept of covering the genocide and spreads on to encompass the evilness in humans which wreaks havoc on a particular race of the same species. The case of Franz is a real life example of how an ordinary, simple man can become an extraordinary evil. Subsequent to the first interview, he shows his willingness to provide personal interview that the author really desires to elicit relevant information for her work. The first interview discloses that Stangl has carried out the tortures and executions under instructions when he operated the death camp. During the interviews he develops emotional depression as he has been kept isolated, having been relegated to solitary confinement for about three years. The three introductory documents elucidate the sense of guilt that Stangl feels regarding the war crimes. The author, being a journalist, has conducted extensive and systematic research into the work, which deals with the theme of mass murder or rather “ethnic cleansing’ of the Jews during Hitler’s regime, which is otherwise known as the Holocaust. The non-fiction work titled, “Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience,” written by Gitta Sereny is based on over 70 hours of interviews relating Franz Stangl a German soldier, who participated in World War II and commanded the Sobibor and Treblinka camps.
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